The week's best in the Fray.

The Fray had an active week, sustained by a slew of History Book Blitz articles that launched dozens of busy threads. Meanwhile, BOTF redefines feminism and, hitting its stride following an election hiatus, DP Fray fave My Two Cents lauds the wonders of Internet dating:

…Particularly interesting to me was a phrase MaryAnn coined: "Androgynous middle ground." This, to me, implies that feminism has already died and, with the advent of the Metrosexual, both sexes will meld into a collective who recognizes each's defined and subtle differences. Is this where we're heading? If so, is that where feminism is heading, i.e., humanism? And, even humanism may be a misnomer, considering the Bright Movement's recognition of a "naturalistic worldview."

Literally speaking, implants and sprays are not natural. Neither is giving into corporate messages fed to us daily and with such increasing sophistication that our minds have ceased rebelling. A quick search on "feminism" brought up this site, which is a little Stepford right down to white dresses. How is this image any less radical than conspiracy lore fanatics or survivalists?

"Is feminism dead" wasn't really the question I was after, because, I suspect, that what we collectively define as feminism was a historical movement. As such, it needs to be redefined, especially if some house frau's maintaining a blog against it between such activities as keeping a home free of dirt and evolutionary science, teaching her daughter abstinence, and discreetly taking it from behind by her husband while scrubbing that stubborn mildew stain. Oops, I guess I've compromised my objectivity again.

I want to know: Who still considers herself a feminist? And why? And what is the goal of feminism if we are on the verge of becoming – Lady Lydias, et al aside – an androgynous nation, an amorphous entity of men and women whose differences are miniscule, if still biologically elemental?...

—Splendid_IREny, here, building off this exchange with MaryAnn.

…If there is one force on earth capable of helping humans achieve universal contentment and happiness, it is internet generated dating. Before internet dating, most people just made do—made do with whomever they met at their local meat market, workplace, laundry room, school, church or recovery group.

That's a mighty narrow range of selection, more or less randomly thrown together, to hope to find a truly compatible and fun mate. Usually, Old Man Time and the clutter of failed relationships turns the hunt desperate and we end up latching on to someone out of little more than despair, really. Oh sure, you convince yourself that it's love, but that delusion comes apart when you wake up, look over at the snoring, farting man you "fell for" because he could knock down seven gin and tonics and still ride that bull with one hand for 37 seconds, and say, "My God, what have I done!"

Internet dating restores rationalism into mate selection-- just like arranged marriages used to. Except instead of the family patriarch determining whether to trade your pretty little butt in exchange for a few goats and a salt block to an eighty year old pervert, you get to choose your own pervert.

And the selection! Why, you can now troll virtually the entire earth to find that special someone that shares your passion for psychic surgery and auto-erotic asphyxiation. If internet dating (which, naturally, leads to internet mating) lasts for a few more generations, we just might finally achieve that great, utopian vision of the Prophet Gene Roddenberry. You know—to explore space in a ship full of sexy, long legged mini-skirt wearing chicks…

—doodahman, here, hijacking Prudence and pitching in his two cents on Internet dating. 

Oh shit, Metcalf, put the cultural critics down and just read the damn book!

It doesn't really matter how "good" Uncle Tom's Cabin is, because we will never be able to ignore it. There are some books that may not be all that wonderful in themselves, but are still indispensible for getting the feel of a time and place. The Song of Roland is a ridiculous piece of shit, but if you want to get some idea of the Middle Ages you'd better read it. Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? is not exactly scintillating reading, but if you ignore it you're flying blind on Dostoevsky and his period. So it is with Uncle Tom's Cabin. I defy anyone to get close to the feelings of that era, which were soon to produce America's most destructive war, without forming a personal acquaintance with Stowe's novel.

But, as it happens, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a well-told tale. No, it isn't Emerson or Melville; Stowe never compared herself to them. But her book richly repays the reading. Sentimental? Yes; have you read Little Dorrit lately? Melodramatic? Yes; have you read Les Miserables? Embarrassingly condescending to one group? Yes; have you read Ivanhoe? The book's faults were those of its period. Doubtless James Baldwin, and even--dare we think it?--the incomparable Ann Douglas, will doubtless someday be seen to have had their own limitations…

—Fritz_Gerlich, here, begging Stephen Metcalf to grasp the larger purpose of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

…Why write this? The unexamined experience is not worth sharing. I learned nothing. The average raw newbie to this debate (white American female taking a 'World Religions' seminar, say) would be dangerously misguided by this series. This series, for all the obvious effort that went into it, belongs in letters home from a study-abroad student or in a campus newspaper perhaps. Not on Slate.

…the choice of the English phrase 'Monkey God' as a translation for 'Hanuman' is rather unfortunate. Hanuman in India is a heroic figure. Americans think 'Curious George' when they hear 'Monkey'. I remember, growing up, being scared of the dark and being told by my dad to think of Hanuman. It used to work: there is a gentleness, protectiveness and strength in the mythos of Hanuman that is rather like Santa Claus and Batman rolled into one, for Indian kids. While the naughty, comical and mildly ridiculous aspects of the monkey as a symbol in human culture do exist in India, they are relatively minor and never attach to Hanuman. Hanuman is never the joke that the Western 'monkey' invariably is. Sticking to the name itself, "Hanuman," would have helped. The repeated use of the phrase 'Monkey God' only distracts Indian readers from whatever substance there is in the narrative and gives non-Indians the wrong idea of what he means in Indian culture…

Again, I am not being sensitive; you are entirely free to reconstruct Hanuman in English as you please. I love America primarily because Jesus, Krishna and Buddha, among others, can be lampooned on South Park and struggle against David Blaine, who I revere rather more than these hand-me-down Gods. But if it is NOT your intent to exoticize, set up a revered figure for ridicule, attract straw-man attacks, or do PR for southern baptists, a more thoughtful translation of a difficult mythological character is in order…

—vdr, here, giving Eliza Griswold a tutorial in Hinduism.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Slate's History Book Blitz feature has been a boon to the Fray this week. Bookish fraysters have crowded into HBB Fray to comment on the likes of David Greenberg, Diane Ravitch, and Jon Weiner.

Striking a Balance: On matters pedagogical, a host of Fray educators piped in on the Ravitch-Weiner dialogue. MatthewGarth asserts that teachers need to approach each issue situationally—whether you're teaching secondary school or at a schamntzy liberal arts college:

I have found that there no single way of approaching an issue is definitive--sometimes immersive debate-based study makes the most sense, sometimes they need to hear the story of a concept, sometimes an account of the limits of a vision from the inside out. This is at the university level.

Earlier on, a similar toolkit approach also works better than a dogmatic line. Teaching a kid to read--whole language or phonics? Well, I don't know, what mistake did she just make? Is the kid good with letters but bad with words or does she have a great story sense? Mixing it up is essential to good teaching.

In answering Ravitch's concern that "students don't have a basic grasp of the events and ideas, the scaffolding of American history"—the "central narrative," as it were—MG turns to Fernand Braudel:

The point of the Annales school was to get us to rethink the notion of the event, to break us from a single scale of chronology (election by election) and push us into longer terms (the subjugation of the West, the transformation of the prairie or the inland waterways). At a certain point--eighth grade?--we don't need A Central Narrative, we need the complex of stories. And we'll need great teachers to get those stories to mesh.

Above all, MG maintains that

to imagine the solution is a product of a choice we make once and forever is to imagine that, well, history has stopped. In place of a single model, I'd have a group of questions: How did we do last time? What can we do better this time? How does the process cumulate? When can students best learn certain kinds of things? (Dates are easy in your twenties, causal chains first emerge in your teens.) It's in questions like these--questions Jon and Gerald ask, that Diane avoids--that we see good faith efforts to do something very difficult.

PMooney replies to MG in Ravtich's defense: