Mars and Venus are planets

The intimacy of a reviewer’s divulgences often distract from the objectivity of his or her analyses. Laura Kipnis and Roxane Gay both challenge my faith in this conviction. Kipnis’ Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation and Gay’s Bad Feminist are representative of a new order. These collections of essays make it clear that there is no running away from a little navel-gazing when examining gender. The personal always gets meshed with the political. The private is implicated in a public narrative. A confession makes for a good start.

Twelve years ago, I happened to share my college boarding with four British women. They were all white. Inviting me to watch reruns of Sex and the City was undoubtedly their gesture of inclusion. But two seasons and a hundred kitchen conversations later, I couldn’t shake off my scepticism. If Carrie Bradshaw and her confidants were so invested in placing their suitors at the centre of an off-kilter universe, why did they then deride them so perniciously? More than a decade later, Kipnis helps with an explanation — “Scorn for men has become the postfeminist fallback position... Nevertheless, men remain conduits to things a lot of women still deeply want: sex, love, babies, commitments.” I can make my peace with contradictions. I’m no stranger to them. For all my academic suspicions, I had secretly rooted for Carrie all the way.

Kipnis and Gay are persuasive in their deconstruction of masculinity and its articulations, but they are never intimidating. It is hard for me to deny the instances of identification that amused me while reading Gay’s Bad Feminist . We both picked up our first Sweet Valley High when we were nine. (My sister’s library proved a lot more attractive than the monotonous blue spines of my Hardy Boys .) Gay cites theorist Judith Butler to prove that gender is, in the end, simply a performance. I had quoted the exact passage in an essay for a course on feminism. My education taught me patriarchy was insidious. I could never call myself a feminist. Gay’s reasons for calling herself a ‘bad feminist’ are far more subtle.

Unlike militant feminists, who are “perfect in their politics and person, man-hating, humourless,” Gay espouses a more conciliatory feminism that seeks to belie an oft-cited assumption. Men, she says, are not Martians and women do not belong to a distant Venus. “The way we talk about gender makes it easy to forget Mars and Venus are part of the same solar system, divided by only one planet, held in the thrall of the same sun.” Commonalities apart, a steady rise in the number of women joining the global workforce doesn’t seem to have shifted the gendered benchmark of success. Archetypes of masculinity continue to be the yardsticks by which women often get judged. Kipnis doesn’t discount the perils of this new ‘equality’, but she overturns the sides of this artificial comparison — “It turns out that women have no monopoly on even classically ‘female’ ailments: men have eating disorders too, men have trouble ‘down there’, and now comes news that men too get sexually harassed, sometimes for years on end.”

Kipnis is steadfastly tenacious in her investigation of men. She overcomes her inherent repulsion and reads all the back issues of Hustler she can find. Her interactions with the pornographic magazine’s publisher Larry Flynt challenge her at her “corked-up core”. She pulls through. Interestingly, her scrutiny of the promiscuous Tiger Woods and former US representative Anthony Wiener (known best for that ‘sexting’ scandal) is more perceptive than accusatory. It is unarguably refreshing to hear that “no one should be humiliated for sex, not even sexual hypocrites.” When the moderator of a sexual harassment seminar in her university brings up ‘unwanted sexual advances’ towards students, Kipnis interrupts, “But how do you know they are unwanted until you try?” Her mirth, however, never interferes with her politics.

The essayist comes down heavily on a conservative author who has the temerity to suggest that female modesty is a protection against rape. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s “boys will be boys” remark doesn’t seem all that provincial when placed alongside former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard’s callous affront. Some girls, he’d once said, “they rape so easy.” Drawing our attention to this crudity, Gay argues that the societies we live in make rape “overly permissive”. The excesses of a ‘rape culture’, which Gay convincingly dissects, seem largely perpetuated by an invented entitlement that a majority of men have deluded themselves into possessing. The examination of masculinities would perhaps feel less threatening if all men felt more implicated by the horrors of sexual violence. Eventually, we might have fewer trespasses to apologise for.

Eavesdropping in an elevator is a vicarious and guilty pleasure. A few days ago, a carefully dressed woman informed her male relative that she was heading to the opening of an art gallery. “It will be followed by this wine-and-cheese party.” The man smirked. “You should be wary of those forward-thinking types,” he warned. Inexplicably, laughter ensued. He had more to add. “I am so impressed by my wife. She is mod [sic] with modern people; a behenji with behenjis ; the perfect bahu at home. She is like a chameleon.” I instantly recalled Gay’s takedown of the Fifty Shades trilogy — “ Fifty Shades is about a man finding peace and happiness because he finally finds a woman willing to tolerate his bullshit for long enough.” The man in the elevator, though, had stirred in me a hidden shame. I needed Kipnis for comfort. “The inevitability of an ongoing mismatch between the sexes is apparently our little tragicomedy to endure, though on the plus side, it makes the other sex so much more alluring.” I can only say an ‘Ah-men!’ to that.

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