So. You know how sometimes you can separate a book from an author, and sometimes you can’t? Sometimes you feel like there’s a disconnect between the book you are reading and what you know about the person who wrote it?
Your Humble Blogger was reading Turning on the Girls and finding it oddly unsettling. It’s a bizarre novel, a comic take on the whole sub-sub-genre where women rule the world. It racked up some author points at the beginning with some funny meta-stuff, where the Authorial Voice challenges the reader, saying (and I’m paraphrasing, not having the book in front of me) that you don’t find this whole Revolution of the Women thing very plausible, and you want to go back and have the whole sequence of events filled in, but that’s not what this book is about, and furthermore, all she’s asking for is the sort of break you probably gave Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. I mean, it’s not like she’s putting talking horses in charge, OK?
Anyway, the women are in charge, and have accessorized and aromatheraputified everything and instituted study groups and social credits and so on, and there’s a lot of stuff that is just mercilessly making fun of feminism, particularly academic feminism. Our Heroine has a job with the Ministry of Reeducation trying to come up with erotica that is appropriate for the post-patriarchal world, or rather, studying the old erotica for its flaws and social regressiveness with an eye toward replacing it. This leads to further making fun of erotica of various kinds, which is fun in itself, but also is done with (it seems to me) a substantial amount of sympathy for the principles of academic feminism and the actual damage done by the patriarchy to women’s self-esteem and capabilities. It was a bit awkward, to me, a bit like having it both ways, embracing feminism while mocking the feminists.
There was a brilliant moment, though, that I have to pass along, because nobody else seems to have highlighted this bit in their reviews (and there were a lot of reviews, about which more later), and it seems to me the essence, really, of the book. OK, so we have a young male lead, who is nearly through the re-education program that will ultimately grant him a badge of civilization and let him out of the special dorms for men and into the proper social world. And as a sort of test of empathy, caring and responsibility, the women on the committee assign him a pet. It’s an ugly dog, to which our Male Juvenile has no attraction whatsoever; his request for some other pet is not only denied but seen as, in itself, a mark of insufficient socialization.
And the Authorial Voice comes in and says, you know, y’all are probably thinking what horrible people these feminist revolutionaries are. Terrible. Imagine. You can just see their smug faces as they impose their self-righteous ideas about civilization and empathy and society on this poor guy. But you know what? (says the Authorial Voice) You know what most successful revolutionary governments do to the people they perceive as having oppressing them? They line them up and shoot them. Or they use a guillotine. Or they burn them in their houses. Pretty much every revolution led by men winds up with the slaughter of the deposed, and not only the deposed but everybody who looks kinda like the deposed, and the official sanction of violent retribution is absolutely commonplace. And you are getting worked up over these women for giving a guy a puppy?
And I started thinking that was in large part where the book was going. I mean, aside from the plot (which I enjoyed despite it not making much sense and requiring nearly everybody to be in on one or another secret plan), this is the sort of book that seems to be making a political point of some kind and another, and it irritates me when I can’t figure out what it is.
Now, I was enjoying the book enough to be curious about (a) whether it was even a Moderate Big Deal in feminist specfic circles at the time it came out or whether this was yet another case of a specfic book never coming into the discussion because it is marketed outside the specfic genre expectations, or (2) whether the writer had written many other books before or since. So I did a quick search, and it turns out that the author, Cheryl Benard, is a Serious Person who has written Serious Non-Fiction Books about, among other things, the treatment of women in the Middle East. That information made me rethink some of what she was on about, as well as making me even more perplexed by her choice to make all the characters Generic White People.
Digression: No, they aren’t all totally Generic White People; one important characters is German (sort of) and one minor character is Italian, but the impression I got of the society of the book is of a lot of Generic White People and a total absence of people who are dark-skinned or have any background in the developing world, or who have specific cultural inheritances of any kind other than generic Western. Now, I should point out that I cannot remember any information at all about what any of the characters looked like, and it is possible that some of them had a physical appearance that was described that is at odds with my impression of Generic White People. In which case, that’s my problem for being a lousy reader, but still. End Digression.
But the other thing that I discovered about Ms. Benard is that she is married to Zalmay Khalilzad. Ambassador Khalilzad, for those of you who didn’t bother to click the link and weren’t hipped to the whole PNAC thing at the time, was a major neo-con crazy who became Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and then the UN. He’s probably one of the half-dozen or so top enablers of the Fubiraq policy; top ten anyway. Not to mention the situation in Afghanistan, which was really his baby; if you think that’s not going well, talk to Ambassador Khalilzad, who drew up what you might call the blueprint if blueprint didn’t have any connotations of anything better than Nigel Tufnel drawing Stonehenge on a napkin.
Now, logically speaking, the connection between the book and the quality thereof and the author’s husband and the quality thereof is slender indeed. Logically. But connotationally, well, finding that out in the middle of the book made a big difference in my experience of the thing, I tell you what.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.