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Friday, June 02, 2006

Arbitrary but fun Friday:  Nancy Fraser edition!

We open this Arbitrary but Fun Friday with a federal report and a beer ad.

First, the report:

Women Gaining on Men in Advanced Fields

By BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP)—Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate—from biology to business—and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine and other advanced degrees.

Even with such enormous gains over the past 25 years, women are paid less than men in comparable jobs and lag in landing top positions on college campuses.

Well, this is certainly a mystery, and it looks like we have two possible avenues of research into it—once we correct for the liberal bias of academe, of course.  The first would involve a study of the evolutionary psychology of women, to try to determine the biological mechanisms they have developed, over millions of years, that lead them to forego power and money in exchange for intellectual achievement.  The second would involve interviewing a handful of undergraduate women at Yale, to find out if they plan to have babies and raise families, thereby accounting for the “lag” in the power-and-money department.

OK, now for that beer ad.  Readers will surely recall Amanda Marcotte’s recent guest post on the new “man law” announced by Miller Lite—you poke it, you own it—and the explosion of antifeminist (and/or pro-ad) bloggolalia that followed her original post on the subject. 

There’s no correlation between the two, of course—it’s not as if stupid beer commercials are responsible for salary disparities between men and women, or the strange scarcity of female administrators on American campuses.  And it would take a virtuoso form of patriarchy-blaming to see these two things as part of a seamless garment.  Besides (to save the most obvious point for last), the federal study is “important,” and the beer ad is not.

But there’s a critical principle at stake here, and that’s why I want to follow up on one or two of Amanda’s guest posts.  It’s not just that I agree with her that (a) Go Fug Yourself is scathingly funny in a not-antifeminist way and that (b) “you poke it, you own it” is a gratuitous, smirking, juvenile piece of work.  With regard to (a), when Amanda writes, “I’m going to weigh in on this debate on the side of ruthless mockery,” she is both politically and theoretically correct, for as Karl Marx famously put it in an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, “it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless mockery of all that exists, including celebrities with unfortunate dress sense.” And with regard to (b), it’s worth keeping in mind that at the Budweiser-Miller level, beer advertising is not supposed to sell beer.  It’s not even supposed to raid a few beer drinkers from the other guy’s camp.  It’s almost purely about brand image, which is why Miller Lite’s self-parodic “Dick” ads of the late 1990s caused such a shitstorm in the advertising industry (as James Poniewozik pointed out at the time, while describing the ads like so: “This 1997-98 campaign, presented as the work of ‘Dick,’ an advertising ‘genius’ shown in a thick-sideburned yearbook photo, played off stereotypical beer-ad promises of sex and charisma, associating Lite with ugly, Dadaist images: fat, sloppy drinkers, a pitchman licking a Lite bottle in gruesome close-up”).  While it’s true that approximately 95 percent of beer ads are stupid (according to an independent study conducted by me during last night’s Sabres-Hurricanes game), there really is a world of difference between the stupid of the “Dick” ads and the stupid of the “Man Law” ads, and it’s perfectly legitimate for any cultural critic—even the Sacred Order of the Shrill feminist kind!—to say so.

But, again, my agreement with Ms. Marcotte is not the point.  The point is that the federal report seems to speak to “real” politics, the kind that involve money and power, and the beer ad seems to speak to merely “cultural” politics, the kind that involve offended sensibilities and deliberate or unintended slights to large or small fractions of the general human population.  And whenever someone unloads (what Amanda calls) the “I’ll give you something to cry about” counterargument in response to a critique of something like the Man Law ad, they’re basically trying to trump someone’s “merely cultural” concerns with something more real, more substantial, more about power and money (or health care, or abortion rights in South Dakota, or women in Afghanistan).  That is, if they’re being the least bit serious, as opposed to merely trollish.

Well, on my end of the campus quad, we spent most of the 1990s trying to hash these things out.  (Those of you who’d like to take this opportunity to use the Internets to read Judith Butler’s 1997 essay, “Merely Cultural,” can do so right here.  Not that she’s the last word on the subject, but she’s responding to a whole array of mid-1990s complaints that the American left had given in to identity politics and forgotten its, er, “common dreams.”) Some of you may remember those innocent days, when we campus humanists were merely Stalinist PC clones rather than objectively pro-Islamofascisterrorist dangeral types.  Depending on where you got your news, cultural politics were a distraction from the country’s massive shift rightward—or cultural politics held the key to understanding that shift and how to reverse it.  Cultural politics were the legacy of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from race and gender to sexuality and disability, and they represented either a challenge to or a fulfillment of the (long-betrayed) universalist promises of the Enlightenment; or cultural politics were the dirty-bongwater residue of 1960s counterculture delusions, in which merely money/power politics were rejected in favor of focusing on the deeper, more psychosociostructural foundations of social inequities. 

Late in the 1990s, Nancy Fraser attempted to referee the proceedings by jettisoning the rhetoric of “cultural” versus “real” politics and proposing, instead, the terms “politics of recognition” and “politics of redistribution.” Recognition harms, Fraser argued, could have redistributive effects, but they were not to be reduced to their redistributive effects; they were to be understood as recognition harms on their own terms, whether they consisted of ethnic slurs, jokes about the short bus, or nasty remarks about someone’s appearance.  At the same time, however, Fraser insisted that priority be given to recognition harms that do have redistributive effects, because hey (and I think I’m quoting here), there just isn’t world enough and time, everybody.

OK, so you can see where that last move just might set the cat among the pigeons.  As I put it in a 1999 review essay on Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country,

the cultural conditions in which gays and lesbians, or people with disabilities, or ethnic minorities live in the United States can be dehumanizing in ways that have nothing to do with taxation, federal spending, private investment, and the minimum wage, even though strategies of dehumanization may have broad implications for the distribution of goods; and surely any left worthy of the name should mount opposition to strategies of dehumanization without regard to their economic implications.

My point, obviously, was that people of good conscience shouldn’t have to consult the Power/ Money Chart, or wait around for some measurable economic or political fallout, before objecting to ethnic slurs, jokes about the short bus, or nasty remarks about someone’s appearance.  (Or stupid beer ads.) On the other hand (for we are nothing if not fair and balanced on this Libran blog), Fraser was merely trying to establish a “relevance” criterion for recognition harms, and though she doesn’t nearly have Amanda Marcotte’s sense of humor, I like to believe that she’d be OK with some ruthless mockery here and there, too.  After all, a left that goes around objecting to every single possible recognition harm in this sublunary sphere will quickly find itself way too busy with things that really are trivial in the grand scheme of things (and I should know, because I have the Grand Scheme of Things Chart on my wall right next to the Power/ Money Chart)—and it might find itself becoming kind of dour and humorless, too.

For example.  I happen to think that the “you poke it, you own it” ad is qualitatively different from, say, the Axe body spray ads, which are positively cringe-inducing, far beyond any hope of being read as hyperbolic self-parody.  (Perhaps Spin magazine could say to the Axers’ media buyers someday, “you know, we’re running a serious pop-music magazine here, and unlike some other pop-music magazines, we have almost no covers that feature scantily clad women.  We don’t see why we should be insulting our male readers by running ads about how your smelly product will induce five women to take showers with them.”) Part of the smirkiness of the “Man Law” ad lies in the fact that it’s not explicit, and that it scores relatively low on the dehumanization scale: it is, for one thing, completely bikini-babe-free.  But I was a 13-year-old boy once, and I can tell you precisely what’s going on here: part of the juvenile-giggling “fun,” in designing the ad, involved waiting for women to respond with outrage.  It’s as if you managed to get away with saying “who’s Dick Hertz?” on national TV, dude!  Even better, the women who object to the “you poke it” bit get cast as the Schoolteachers with the Terminal Hairbuns, rapping their rulers on the desk and saying, “Dick Hertz?  ‘You poke it you own it?’ If that’s your idea of humor, young man, you can explain it to the principal,” and off we go down the hall to the principal’s office, laughing all the way.  Get it?  The secondary “humor” is our mockery of the “humorlessness” of the women who picked up on “poke it”!  Good one, dudes!

So yes, even as beer ads go, this one’s deliberately annoying.  But I have my recognition-politics limits too, and I’ll close with a counterexample or two.  Here in my wing of the disability community, we’re acutely aware that no one knows what to call anything (remember “physically challenged” and “differently abled”?), and we’re especially wary of being casually stigmatized and dehumanized.  There are people who object strenuously to the term “Down’s syndrome,” preferring “Down syndrome” on the grounds that the possessive “s” makes it appear as if J. Langdon Down owns a segment of the population, sort of like “Jerry’s Kids.” (And I’ll assume you know how much the disability community hates the telethon phenomenon and the locution “Jerry’s Kids.") Personally, I could not care less about Down and Down’s.  As I said in Life As We Know It back when Jamie was five, I cared more about whether Jamie could say and understand a possessive “s” than about whether he was marked by one.  Likewise, every few years someone tries to recalibrate the official terminology across the board.  Most of us go by “people first” language, in which we say “a child with Down [or Down’s!] syndrome” rather than “a Down syndrome child.” (And both are better than “a mongoloid idiot,” which, back in the day, was entirely common parlance.) The rationale is that a person is a person first, and not a syndrome or a disease.  But recently, I’ve heard people argue that phrases like “a person with autism” regrettably suggest that autism is all a person “has,” and that “an autistic person” is more indicative of the adjectival nature of the autism and its relation to the human being it modifies.  The first (and second and third) time I heard this argument, I wondered just how many ways the deck chairs on the Titanic could be arranged—and in writing this, I do not mean to demean the people making those arguments, or, indeed, to demean any Titanic-Americans reading this blog.  I’m merely saying, in a merely cultural kind of way, that we all have different (and sometimes conflicted or internally contradictory) standards for what kind of recognition harms we consider significant, and what kind we consider trivial—regardless of whether those recognition harms conceivably have any redistributive effects.

So this Friday’s arbitrary but fun challenge, Nancy Fraser edition, is this: how or where do you distinguish between trivial and nontrivial slights to our common humanity?  And how or where do you allow for the ruthless mockery of everything existing?

Posted by Michael on 06/02 at 09:47 AM
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