Author: Andrew Sullivan

Husband Beaters, Ctd

A reader sharpens the discussion over female domestic violence, which the Dish broached back in June:

I think both readers you recently quoted regarding Janay Rice hitting Ray Rice have valid points. What bothers me is that it seems to be treated as a zero sum game when we talk about reciprocity in domestic violence. Do women have it worse than men? Of course! Does that mean that violence against men shouldn’t be mentioned? I don’t think so. If anything, I think it would help the conversation if men understood how universal it is. Not talking about it seems like it only encourages men to accept abuse until they snap back. That by no means justifies when they snap, but it does contribute to it. And just making that point clear definitely doesn’t mean men have it anywhere near as bad as women in domestic violence.

This should not be a contest of who is more oppressed. Everyone suffers from toxic or outdated expectations about gender. The more open and nuanced the conversation, the better.

Two male readers share their stories of abuse:

Never thought I’d be writing to someone about this, but your discussion is prompting me to write. I suffered a severe beating at the hands of a former girlfriend – broken nose, splinters (from a 2×4) in and around the eyes.

The incident, for lack of a better word, went on much longer than it should have simply because for me to defend myself would have involved my committing violence against a woman – such an ultimate “no no” that it’s practically etched on most (stressing “most”) men’s DNA.  I have sisters.  If I had touched my sisters in ANY WAY, my dad would’ve killed me.

I finally realized that if I didn’t do something, the woman in question might literally not stop, and I was somewhat disoriented as a result of the nose-breaking shot to the face with the 2×4, with which I was still getting hit.  I finally took her down to the floor as gently as I could and – I can hardly believe I’m writing this – put a hand around her neck, just enough to let her know it was there – and said “Stop.”   This served to make her snap out of the rage she was in.  It was like a light switched off, and then it was over.

I woke up the next morning and didn’t even recognize myself.  I have a driver’s license photo taken seven weeks after the event in which a black-and-blue shadow can still be seen along one side of my face.  It took two years for a splinter lodged near my temple to finally dislodge itself, and I have some scarring around one eye.  This was almost 30 years ago.

For a long time I thought I must have brought this on myself.  I mean, isn’t this kind of thing unheard of?  All I can say is that I found out years later that she got physical with her next boyfriend, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that a great burden was lifted from me upon hearing that news.

I’m not saying in any way that Ray Rice was justified in hitting his fiancee/wife.  But sometimes – stress “sometimes” – these things are more complicated than they appear.

Another quotes a reader from another post:

Men are far, far more likely to injure, abuse and murder their partner than women are; it’s not a remotely equal situation, and treating it as such undermines the very real danger millions of American women are facing every single day.

What an absurd argument for the second writer to make regarding the need to crack down on female abusers.  This is not a zero sum game. Abuse is abuse, and the message can be universal without detracting from the fact that women are the more likely victims.

And quite frankly, speaking from experience, when you are on the receiving end, even as a man, it is your own personal hell and statistics go right out the window.  My partner liked to attack me while I was sleeping.  I would wake up in total confusion and then immediately try to restrain her.  I outweighed her by 80 pounds, but to hold a physically fit person by her wrists in the hope she will calm down when she is amped on adrenaline is an exhausting test of stamina.  Trust me: the person’s legs are free to kick out and a determined person can reach a neck with her teeth.

Even in a progressive city like Seattle, she counted on the expectation that she could shame and endanger me by calling out loudly for help as I held her back.  When the neighbors knocked on the door, you can bet your life I opened it as fast as I could, brought them inside and explained exactly what was going on (she often had been drinking and was still “ornery”). I consider it a modern miracle the police never came.

But that is the problem. Neighbors and society, in general, still shrug off the acts of female abusers.  It can’t be that bad, or “legitimate,” if the bad guy is a “bad gal” who is cute as a button and a hundred ten pounds in her stocking feet.  It even worked on me. The aftermath would be tears and apologies that left me feeling sorry for her and guilty about not doing a “better job” to avoid bruising her wrists in the act of holding her down.

Gender-Bending Kids In Afghanistan

In an essay adapted from her forthcoming book, Jenny Nordberg explains why some Afghan families raise their daughters as boys:

Officially, girls like Mehran do not exist in Afghanistan, where the system of gender segregation is among the strictest in the world. But many other Afghans, too, can recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague, or someone in their extended family raising a daughter as a son. These children even have their own colloquialism, bacha posh, which literally translates from Dari to “dressed like a boy.”

Midwives, doctors, and nurses I’ve met from all over the provinces are more familiar with the practice than most; they have all known bacha posh to appear at clinics, escorting a mother or a sister, or as a patient who has proven to be of another birth sex than first presumed.

The health workers say that families who disguise their daughters in this way can be rich, poor, educated, or uneducated, or belong to any of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups. The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village. Often, as in Kabul, it is a combination of factors. A poor family may need a son for different reasons than a rich family, but no ethnic or geographical reasons set them apart.

Have We Outgrown Growing Up? Ctd

In response to A.O. Scott’s essay on the death of adulthood in popular culture, Freddie sighs, “To believe that different types of cultural products should exist, and that some of these should create artistic pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty, is to be immediately and permanently labeled a snob”:

If you like any kind of artwork that does not leave its pleasures totally and utterly accessible at all times and to all people with no expectation that consuming art should involve effort, you will be lectured to by the aggrieved. You will get yelled at by the AV Club and Vulture and Slate, by Steve Hyden and Andy Greenwald and the rest of the crew at Bill Simmons’s Geographical Center of the American Middlebrow, in the New York Times and the New Yorker and every other sundry magazine, blog, site, app, Tumblr, Twittr, Tindr, Grindr, newsletter, listerv, forum, message board, image board, room & board, surfboard and broadsheet that humanity produces. …

The only part of adulthood that really matters is the part where when you finally grow up, if you ever really do, it’s because you recognize that there’s other people in the world and that they matter and their needs matter and you need to set aside your self-obsession for long enough to recognize that other people’s needs are often more pressing or important than yours and to act accordingly. Every frame of Guardians of the Galaxy exists to tell you that you are the only human being in the universe.

Alexandra Petri, who is much less perturbed by the shift, attributes it to the rise of the Internet, “where the primary mode of communication is the confessional”:

We know better, now, than to think anyone has anything under control. Too many people have admitted — in GIFs or paragraphs or videos — what a frantic scramble things really are (even and especially for those people, like celebrities, whose job is to appear to be have things effortlessly together). So much for the facade. The celebrities everyone clutches most fervently to their bosoms now are not the ones you aspire to be, but the ones you feel like you already are, the ones who wear their mess on the outside. We don’t want to look up to people. We want something different: to look out from their eyes. Online, currency is identification and sympathy. Competence is admirable, but it isn’t inherently relatable. If anything, the tendency is to play up the bumbling. If you can convincingly pretend to be a polished, collected socialite who is not, in essence, a frantic 12-year-old on stilts who doesn’t know whom to call about the plumbing — what can we possibly have in common with you?

Tom Hawking nods:

It’s not so much that culture is abandoning adulthood; it’s more that culture is deconstructing it. It’s fascinating to watch old American TV shows and think about how much they reinforced the idea of traditional patriarchy, where women deferred to men and children to adults. (I mean, Christ, we’re talking about a TV industry that literally produced a show called Father Knows Best.)  …

Clearly, there’s a mental and emotional difference between childhood and adulthood, and clearly experience does lend some surety and confidence — I’m not A.O. Scott’s age, but at 36 I certainly feel I have something of a firmer grasp on my life than I did at 26, or 16. I suppose I’m technically a grown-up. But you never really lose that feeling of being alone and wondering what the hell you’re supposed to be doing — indeed, I’d argue that’s at the core of human experience. You just learn to mask it better. And I’m sure that hasn’t changed in millennia. If anything, the difference between adulthood as it’s presented in contemporary culture and how it’s been depicted in the past is that today’s writers depict this idea with gusto. The difference between, say, Don Draper and the patriarchs of the past is not that Don doesn’t know what to do, but that he is depicted as confused and increasingly impotent. It’s not that such characters haven’t existed before — but their bewilderment has usually manifested as the result of some sort of crisis, not as an inherent aspect of their character.

Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hehir points a finger at the economy:

[S]ometimes economic forces really do shape the cultural zone. Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood. We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.

Lastly, a reader writes:

Your post brought to mind what C.S. Lewis said about growing up and childishness in his 1952 essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children”:

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was 10, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The Senate Is A Coin Flip

The NYT’s Senate forecast is trending towards Democrats:

NYT Senate

Nate Silver’s calculations have also become more Democrat-friendly:

When we officially launched our forecast model two weeks ago, it had Republicans with a 64 percent chance of taking over the Senate after this fall’s elections. Now Republican chances are about 55 percent instead.

Why the change? He sees money as a big factor:

Consider the states with the largest polling movement: In North Carolina, Hagan had $8.7 million in cash on hand as of June 30 as compared with just $1.5 million for her Republican opponent, Thom Tillis. In Colorado, Udall had $5.7 million as compared with $3.4 million for Republican Cory Gardner. These totals do not account for outside spending. But in stark contrast to 2010, liberal and Democratic “super PACs” have spent slightly more money so far than conservative and Republican ones, according to the the Center for Responsive Politics.

Nate Cohn agrees that the Democrats’ chances have improved:

Over all, the Republicans are still the slightest favorites to retake the chamber. For Democrats to retain their majority, they will have to win at least two states that voted against President Obama in 2008 and 2012. It is possible that this will prove untenable over the final few months of the race, and that Republicans will gradually gain as undecided voters who disapprove of the president’s performance and voted for Mitt Romney make up their minds. But the Democrats now have a lead in enough races to get to 49 seats — and have a few options to reach 50.

Sam Wang, who has always given Democrats a good chance of keeping the Senate, pats himself on the back:

[A]s the election approaches, other sites are decreasing the bias that they add by using fundamentals. This will inevitably make them approach the [Princeton Election Consortium (PEC)] snapshot, day by day. If everything converges on the PEC Election Day prediction, I would score that as an argument in favor of using polls only – or at least letting readers see the difference added by the use of fundamentals.

Asylum Roulette

To qualify for asylum in the US, immigrants have to prove not only that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries but also that they belong to a particular social group and are being persecuted because they belong to that group. Not all victims of violence qualify. That burden of proof, as Emily Bazelon points out, leaves many asylum seekers in the lurch, including victims of domestic abuse and gang violence:

In 1996, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which functions as the country’s central immigration court (with review by the federal appeals courts) “broke new ground” on gender-related claims by “granting asylum to a Togolese woman who fled her country to escape female genital cutting,” as Blaine Bookey, a staff attorney for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, explains in this 2012 article. The idea was that the risk of cutting both depended on gender and was widespread in some African countries.

Domestic violence, however, didn’t easily get the same kind of recognition as a basis for persecution worthy of asylum. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected the asylum claim of Rody Alvarado Peña, a Guatemalan woman whose husband, she testified, treated her “as something that belonged to him and he could do anything he wanted.” Alvarado said she spent 10 years suffering frequent abuse, including the dislocation of her jawbone and a kick in the spine when she was pregnant. She was dragged by the hair, pistol-whipped, and raped. When she tried to run away, the Guatemalan police and the courts did not protect her. The BIA accepted that Alvarado had been abused but ruled that she was not part of a recognized social group—“Guatemalan women subjugated by their husbands” didn’t make the list—and that she had not shown she was abused because she was a Guatemalan woman living under male domination.

Cosmopolitan-ism

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/509027983357915136

Elizabeth Nolan Brown praises Cosmopolitan for addressing the midterm elections, but wishes they’d take a less partisan approach:

There’s nothing wrong with publications leaning one way or the other politically, or taking an institutionally centrist position while hiring individual writers that slant left or right. Yet Cosmo is trying to portray itself as a friendly, impartial arbiter of “what’s at stake” for women in this election while explicitly pushing the DNC’s wish list. This is not service journalism, nor opinion journalism; it is advocacy. And the magazine’s refusal to acknowledge that leaves me cold.

This wouldn’t be the first time Cosmo has served as a mouthpiece for Democrat policies. Throughout the past year or so, the magazine has run numerous pieces on how the Affordable Care Act is good for women and frequently devoted social media posts to urging young women to sign up with the health insurance exchanges. “The White House says it has no formal publicity agreement with Cosmopolitan,” noted Reuters in June 2013. “But [Editor-in-Chief Joanna] Coles met with senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett last week at the White House, which is in discussions with potential Obamacare promoters including the National Football League, as it prepares for a full-scale public education campaign this fall.” And Coles was back for a personal meeting with President Obama in May 2014.

Finding The Spirit Of Science

While positing that “only matter exists,” Marcelo Gleiser also contends “that we know precious little, that we are surrounded by questions of such forbidding complexity that our knowledge will always be limited even if ever growing.” Why he finds this a reason to embrace science:

But forbidding complexity does not need to mean divine, or supernatural. Unknowns are invitations, challenges to our creativity. Obstacles are triggers, not stoppers. We go after them using the tools of science and reason with a fervor that, as Einstein remarked, has all the dressings of spiritual devotion.

So, we must rid spirituality from its supernatural prison, make it secular. Spirituality is a connection with something bigger than we are, seducing our imagination, creating an urge to know, to embrace the mystery that surrounds us and the mystery that we are.

This natural spirituality is not a form of mysticism. Mysticism presupposes that knowledge that is inaccessible to the intellect can be apprehended by contemplation or by a union with the divine. Science, at least to me, starts with a spiritual — even contemplative — connection with nature. But then it uses the intellect as the bridge between this connection and the pursuit of knowledge. As it brings together this very human spiritual attraction to the unknown (merely calling it “curiosity” sounds very impoverishing to me) and our reasoning powers, science is a unique expression of our wonderment with reality, of our awe with nature’s grandeur.

Getting Intimate With The Roosevelts

Ken Burns’s multipart documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, premiered last night. Damon Root reviews it:

[W]hile the film is clearly pro-Roosevelt in its leanings, it does make room for certain contrarian views. Among The Roosevelts‘ stable of talking heads, for example, is none other than conservative writer George Will, who pops up from time to time to remind viewers that the family’s impact was not always a benevolent one. “Building on the work of the first Roosevelt, the second Roosevelt gave us the idea, the shimmering, glittering idea of the heroic presidency. And with it the hope that complex problems would yield to charisma. This,” Will declares during one episode, “sets the country up for perpetual disappointment.”

But The Roosevelts is by no means a flawless film. For one thing, it sometimes fails to present an accurate picture of the family’s political opponents. Indeed, the film leaves the distinct impression that only reactionaries and fringe loonies ever dissented from the New Deal.

Harvey J. Kaye lodges other criticisms:

[Filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward] ignore the ways in which working people and the labor movement shaped their “heroes’” thinking and propelled their action. They note TR’s presidential intervention in the 1902 coal strike, but fail to speak of labor’s role in the Socialist and Progressive parties’ prewar battles against Gilded Age capital (labor unionist and Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs is never named).

They emphasize Eleanor’s involvement with the League of Women Voters in the ’20s and her relationship with independent reform-minded women of the day, but barely mention her work with the Women’s Trade Union League. As a consequence, they ignore how her encounters and friendships with East European Jewish women labor organizers of Manhattan’s Lower East Side not only led her to shed the anti-Semitism and racism of her youth (attitudes that are never discussed), but also enabled her to educate FDR to the needs of working families and the politics of industrial and social democracy by bringing those women to Hyde Park to spend time with him.

James Wolcott anticipates later installments:

Compelling as the Teddy Roosevelt saga is, it is for me the set-up, the prolonged prologue, to the true heart of this series, the improbable life and transformative reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I will write about the FDR and Eleanor installments as they approach airdate–though I will advise for now that the episode four, “The Storm,” devoted to his crippling attack of polio and his founding of Warm Springs, is the one you should circle most urgently on your calendar–but let me make a prejudice plain: for me, FDR is the greatest man of the twentieth century. Our twin savior, along with Lincoln. You may respectfully or disrespectfully disagree with that. That’s fine. You’re wrong.

And I feel even more convinced, having spent time reading Nigel Hamilton’s The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 and David Kaiser’s No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War, both of which I recommend as fireside reading, even if you lack a fireplace and have to make do with the theatrical illusion of a fan blowing some red strips of paper.

Jeremy Berlin interviews Burns:

[Q.] You call this film “an intimate history,” and it does seem more personal than your previous works. It also gets at a number of still-relevant issues—some of which you alluded to earlier—in an implicit way. Was it hard to reconcile the tone with the topic, or the scale with the scope?

[A.] Not at all. This is the first time we’ve done a long-form, major-length series about individuals, not about things like baseball or jazz or the Civil War. It’s sort of like a Russian novel—taking one family and understanding their interrelationships.

But this isn’t psychobabble or tabloid history. Nor does it neglect the outer events—the Gilded Age, the World War I era, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

They’re all there. But you see them from a less familiar, more interesting perspective than you’re used to.

John Dickerson also speaks with Burns:

Burns is in a great hurry to get people to slow down. He would like them to watch 14-hour documentaries, of course, but also to understand the complexity and tensions at the heart of history. It makes for more meaningful lives, he believes, and a better understanding of events, including the ones unfolding before us in the present.

“We are in a media culture where we are buried in information but we know nothing,” said Burns. “Because of that superficiality, we expect heroes to be perfect, but they’re not. They are a strange combination of strengths and weaknesses.” He points to two of his main characters as examples. “Franklin and Theodore couldn’t get out of the Iowa caucuses [today]. Franklin is too infirm. CNN and Fox would be vying for the worst images of him unlocking the braces, the sweat pouring off his brow, the obvious pain and that kind of pity that it would engender would be political poison. And Theodore is just too hot for the new medium of television. There would be 10 ‘Howard Dean’ moments a day.”

Alyssa Rosenberg agrees that the Roosevelts likely wouldn’t survive modern-day politics:

It is one thing to decry a newly invasive media culture, or the fact that we still demand female politicians meet standards of attractiveness that have nothing to do with the functioning their jobs. But “The Roosevelts” ought to encourage us to think more broadly about what we deny ourselves when we narrow the path that can lead people to public office at any level.

Her bottom line:

In refusing to let politicians be human, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to be seen and to be treated the same way.

The Art Of The Personal Essay

Richard Rodriguez names the writers who influenced his approach to the form:

There was Joan Didion—the Didion of those glorious California essays of the sixties. Because she was from Sacramento and writing about the Central Valley when I first read her, it was she who taught me to imagine my own Sacramento as a literary landscape. About that same time, there was William Saroyan. There were voices in Saroyan, particularly the wondering boy in Fresno and the hungry writer’s voice in San Francisco, I have never forgotten. For all of the passion and energy in Saroyan, however, there was something sexless about him—the son of a Presbyterian minister.

He adds two more:

James Baldwin, the great Jimmy Baldwin. I began with Nobody Knows My Name and I never let go of him—through the years of the Negro Civil Rights movement on our small black-and-white TV, then the many decades after. What impressed me about Baldwin was his literary elegance, despite all. He was never more resolutely in control than when he was describing Jim Crow America. The hideousness of anti-black racism could not undermine the clean line of his prose. And Orwell! I learned from George Orwell that narrative was compatible with the essay, that it was possible to write what I call the “biography of an idea”—and trace the way an idea makes its way through a life. Beginning with my first book and in all the books after, I employed the fictional devices of the short-story writer in writing my essays. My best essays, I think, are unafraid to be stories. That’s Orwell’s influence.

Fear And Loathing In Lebanon

Sulome Anderson checks in from Tripoli, the northern Lebanese town that has become a microcosm of the Syrian civil war and which today “seems to lie in ISIS’s shadow”:

Although the extremist and ultraviolent Sunni group has few open supporters here, the appearance of pro-ISIS paraphernalia and graffiti, the clash last month in the Bekaa, and the fact that Tripoli’s Sunni-majority population has a historical tendency toward radicalism, have raised worries that the group might gain a foothold here and send the city into a spiral of deepening violence.

Local tensions in Tripoli follow essentially the same ethnic lines as those in Syria’s war:

Sunni citizens largely support the increasingly fundamentalist Syrian opposition — ISIS being the most notoriously brutal of the groups fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad; meanwhile, the Alawites of the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood are overwhelmingly sympathetic to Assad’s regime (the Syrian leader is Alawite) and its Hezbollah allies. There are frequent and bloody gunfights between Jabal Mohsen and the Sunni district of Bab el-Tabbeneh, which border each other. Fearing violence would engulf Tripoli and potentially spread to other regions in Lebanon, the army moved in, establishing a security zone within the city limits last year. That hasn’t stopped the bloodshed, though, and the situation in Arsal triggered fresh clashes at the end of August, in which an 8-year-old girl was killed.

Also, the local Christian community is feeling threatened in a way it never has before:

Tripoli’s Christian population has been a bit skittish lately. Several churches were vandalized at the beginning of September, their walls spray-painted with ominous threats including “The Islamic State is coming” and “We come to slaughter you, you worshippers of the cross.” Crosses were allegedly burned in retaliation for the #BurnISISFlag social media movement, Lebanon’s version of the Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people have been posting videos and pictures of themselves setting fire to the group’s banner.

Father Samir Hajjar sits in the priest’s quarters of the city’s Syriac Orthodox Church, one of the buildings that was vandalized. He is measured about the incident, but admits it was worrying. “At first, we thought this could just be ordinary vandals, or the work of children,” he says. “I’ve been here 17 years, and no one bothers us. We respect our neighbors and they respect us. But this graffiti on the walls of all the churches, that’s not children’s work. They used stencils. It’s a serious matter.”