So I suppose I need to talk about this Susan Faludi “Electra” crap

I mean, just in case this whole Terminator 2 phase of my feminist blogging “career” is later described in children’s textbooks as merely “those months Antonova aired out her grievances regarding the writing of Camille Paglia – and posted funny pictures of cats”.

Here’s a funny picture of a cat:

Anyway, the points is, this month’s issue of Harper’s magazine features a piece by feminist author Susan Faludi, called “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide”. You pretty much know where this one’s going the minute you read the title. Granted, even an unrepentant sterva like me, upon reading the full article, had to admit that Faludi, at the very least, tried to be as fair as she could to the subject matter and to the younger and older feminists she writes about.

“Tried” is the key word here.

I’m not a huge fan of Faludi’s writing, if only because I find her to be a bit of a dead-endist. To put it into actual English, Faludi doesn’t strike me as exceptionally constructive. The extent of my engagement with Faludi’s writing can be summed up like this: “Here are the things you should be pissed off about!” “I am indeed pissed off! What do I do now?” *crickets, etc.*

This isn’t to say that other people don’t get anything constructive out of Faludi’s writing. They do. I don’t happen to be one of them, though, which is why reading Faludi’s latest article felt a bit like having the same argument I always wind up having with those one drunk who hangs out by the kiosk where I buy beer after work: “Spare some change?” “Dude, you’re just getting enough so you can go get wasted.” “At least I’m honest!” “Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it when I walk by here again half an hour later, and you’re puking on the sidewalk!” *etc.*

Faludi’s article starts out sensibly enough – by describing the break that young American women of the 1920’s experienced with the older feminists who spearheaded the movement for women’s suffrage. I use the word “sensibly” loosely. Faludi’s sees 1920’s womanhood in starkly one-dimensional terms. Granted, she was writing an article for Harper’s, not a 400-page historical thesis, but all I could think about when I read this part of her piece was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy saying she wished that her daughter would become a “beautiful little fool” – and the tragedy buried underneath that statement. You don’t need to write a 400-page thesis in order to have perspective.

Today’s young feminists ultimately fare no better in Faludi’s piece. The author actually goes as far as to note the actual stilettos of some young feminist speaker she listened to this one time. I waited for a punchline, but it never materialized. Of course, it is a well-known fact that a woman must look a certain way in order to be taken seriously – though the look itself is never clearly defined (that would allow an individual woman an out of some sort, and we can’t have that). In this context, a description of a woman wearing stilettos has the same undertone as a description of a man having “the smile of a pedophile” or whatever, coding for Suspicious Character. Of course, all of those women in their 50’s and beyond whom I know, who happen to also wear stilettos sometimes are… wait, nevermind, that would probably just introduce too much complexity into the problem of inter-generational conflict within American feminism. Let’s talk about fishnets instead – fishnets being those other things that young feminists sometimes wear. Because Faludi actual does bring them up. She also talks about Lady Gaga, of course – and talks about people who talk about Lady Gaga, and destroy the future of feminism in the process. Oh and the phrase “Barbie doll” is in there too.

We almost have bingo – almost, I say, because Faludi doesn’t bring up blow-jobs (does she? I’m not going to go back and read that article again. I’ve read it twice already, and have a perfectly good afternoon to wile away watching ships pass by the window outside, before the Moskva freezes).

Faludi’s main beef with younger feminists is that they, apparently, are not interested in activism, preferring consumerist gratification instead. Um. OK. It’s funny to me, because most young feminists I know are activists. Someone like Sarah Jaffe, whom I work with? Activist. Political organizer. Head Bitch In Charge. Etc. I bring up Sarah in particular, because it is the Sarahs of the world that Faludi appears to have a huge problem with. They’re level-headed, hard-working and intellectually curious – but they are also public about such things as emotion and desire. They don’t believe that a hint of glamour ought to ruin their public image, because they recognize the fact that there’s a purpose to every season – including being young. They want to have their cake and eat it too, clearly, and are obviously selfish. And they probably hate their mothers. Which is what this entire thing goes back to. Kids these days don’t listen to their moms. The Four Horsepeople of the Equal Opportunity Feminist Apocalypse are a-comin’.

If I could be serious for a moment – it almost seems to me that Faludi believes that weird co-dependency between moms and daughters is somehow a good thing, if this piece is anything to go by. She admiringly speaks of an old school feminist from way before the gullible sluts of the 1920’s era ruined things for everyone, who lived with her mother her entire life – as if it’s an example today’s feminists can learn from. My own strange real estate situation at the moment makes sure that I have to live with my mother for half the time, which isn’t a Horrible Tragedy, but it has it’s major downsides both for her and for me. More often than not, generations share living spaces because they have to – not because they have a terrific time doing it.

Inter-generational conflict always exists, and it affects way more than simply mainstream American feminism. Faludi’s assertion though that there is a “nightmare of dysfunction” within American feminism is, well… funny. For me, “nightmare” relates more to systemic exclusion of trans people. Or, say, how the concerns of those who are not middle-class and don’t get invited to sit on panels can easily get lost in the shuffle. Is that too much theory, perhaps? Theory, of course, is another thing that Faludi says that younger feminists are too preoccupied with. In principle, I’m not a big fan of theory either. My attitude toward it is summed up by the following joke:

Two middle-aged Jewish men, lifetime residents of Odessa, are walking across town and and pass by a newly-opened sex shop. “Abram!” One man says to another, “What does THAT make you think about?” “Nothing,” replies the other drily. “What? It doesn’t make you think about sex?” “Listen, Monya, I have six children – I have no time for theory.”

Seriously speaking, theory does help us identify patterns – such as several patterns I mentioned above: mainstream feminism’s problem with trans folk, mainstream feminism’s problem with sufficiently addressing class issues, etc. I don’t know if grooming practices and stuff I adorn myself with cancel out my critical thinking on these issues, but they’re still ultimately more important to me than squabbles with some invisible parent-type figure – squabbles that, incidentally, jar horribly with my concept of the Divine Feminine.

So in the end, I’d just like to point out that Holly, who is this chick on “True Blood” who channels the Great Mother in order to help Arlene possibly get an abortion, is way more compelling from a feminist perspective than this “ritual-matricide-Becky-look-at-her-stilettos-they-are-SO-big” stuff that gets published in Big Important Magazines and has nothing to do with my life.

How many deaths will it take?

So, if you read the news coming out of this part of the world, you probably know that a horrible tragedy occurred in Marganets, Eastern Ukraine.

I follow RIA Novosti on Twitter, and one of the first things I saw in my Twitter feed when I logged in yesterday was a link to a photo stream directly from the scene from the crash. Even though the photographers kept some manner of a distance, the one thing that immediately jumped out at me was the blood on the face of one of the as-of-yet uncovered crash victims. It struck me not because the image was gruesome (we’ve all seen worse), but because I realized that this is the price we are all collectively paying for disregarding safety on the roads.

President Yanukovich has ordered a check of all private transport carriers following this disaster. It’s a good move, but what freaks me out is that it took a horrific event of this magnitude for this to finally happen. Anyone who has lived in Ukraine for a reasonable period of time knows that all manner of private transport is not safe or reliable. You wind up joking about it all the time. “Death on wheels.” Ha ha ha. Yet these businesses have blithely carried on, and millions of people have had no choice when it comes to being their passengers (I mean, don’t get me started on public transport in Ukraine following the murder – not “suicide” –  of transport minister Georgy Kirpa. You know, I think a whole lot of people miss Kirpa. I’m glad that in my parents’ neighbourhood in Kiev, there’s a street named after him – so that people remember. I love it how the press chides him for having been a supporter of Yanukovich. Oh noes. Oh dear. Oh my. There have been dark times in Ukraine, and these dark times continue, but Kirpa had done some genuine good in this world and I bet that someone Up There has taken note of that).

I’m not one of those people who thinks that every tragedy that happens everywhere is wholly preventable. I’m one of those irrational religious chicks, after all. But when it comes to what happened in broad daylight in Marganets, I just don’t know.

Every once in a while, the people you love manifest themselves to you

Maybe it will be a girl who steps into the subway car on Zamoskvoretskaya line – still a good number of stops before you have to change onto the red line at Okhotny Ryad, so you have enough time to study her face.

She’ll have Yaroslava’s dark-blonde hair, and her eyebrows will arch at similar angles. There will be nothing tragic, though, about the way she purses her lips – the lower one slightly plumper than the upper, also familiar.

You’ll think to yourself that Yaroslava completed her education in Moscow. She’s a classically trained pianist, just as it was planned all along. She supplements her income with lessons – no more than twice a week, though, she told you recently that she’s getting a little tired of the fact that half the kids have such bad manners. They’re not interested in music, she says. It’s the parents who would like their daughter to come out during a lull at the dinner party, and play the freaking Moonlight Sonata as if no one in that gathering hasn’t heard it a hundred thousand times before.

Yaroslava married a fellow musician. He comes from outside Lviv and teaches full time – it makes financial sense. They’ve been renting a one-bedroom flat near Aeroport metro since before you came to Moscow. Like her sister Solomia and like your father, her uncle, Yaroslava collects fridge magnets from different cities and countries. It annoys her husband a little, and he always makes a show of this annoyance every time you come over after you have traveled, saying that he’d hoped that this stupid plastic thing with a beer mug stamped with the word “Bavaria” would have fallen out of your pocket just this one time. “But it’s wooden! Hand-carved!” Yaroslava will protest as she takes your coat.

Your boyfriend thinks that Yaroslava is beautiful. He takes pictures of the two of you – at the kitchen, below the one lightbulb that’s always going out, on the couch – the one that Solomia sleeps on when she flies in. Yaroslava has gotten more beautiful with age, and she’s grown her hair out too. Now, as before, in a village by Uzhgorod, it very nearly reaches her trim waist. “Mermaids,” your boyfriend will say over the click of the camera. You laugh. Yaroslava doesn’t. She knows she really is a mermaid. It’s one of her secrets.

On the weekends, when it’s colder, you offer to make mulled wine. You stir in a shot and a half of cognac. You peel oranges and eat them and throw the skins in. Yaroslava makes her chocolate walnut cake. Her husband will come in and kiss the top of her head while she’s in the middle of her undertaking and this will make her spill the sugar. Dakhabrakha will play on the stereo. There will be snow falling soundlessly outside.

After a few glasses of mulled wine, Yaroslava’s husband will be ready to argue about Stepan Bandera and Viktor Yuschenko. You’ll make a big deal out of covering your ears and escaping to the landing.

After Yaroslava drags you back, her husband would have taken out the violin. Your boyfriend will pretend as though he doesn’t want to hear you sing.

In order to get you to stop pouting, she’ll agree to sing something that would appeal to your mother’s side of the family.

“He is killed, he’s lying unburied,
In a foreign country.

Here comes, here comes with a spade
A merciful man.

He has buried, buried into one grave
Two-hundred and forty people.

He has put a cross, an oaken cross
And has written on it:

Here lie, lie heroes from the Don;
Glory to the Don Cossacks.”

You’ll look into each others eyes as you sing. Like you’re used to doing. You’ll remember that winter long ago, in Ukraine, when an actor you had been seeing raised his eyebrows in surprise as he heard your voice come out of your chest and join the other voices, as if it had always been this way intertwined with them.

***

The girl you don’t know will come out at the next station, and you’ll breathe a sign of relief, because she hadn’t noticed you staring. Maybe she really is a musician. Or an actress. Maybe she works at the bank. She might have two children, or none at all.

By the time you’ve walked down the corridor and made the switch to the red line, you’re once again mostly reconciled to the fact that your cousin is gone.

I’d like to say something completely unironic about Yury Luzhkov and Iosif Kobzon

I admire Kobzon’s loyalty to his friend – ousted mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Leaving aside all aspects of Luzhkov’s political career – and all aspects of Kobzon’s political career as well – I have to say that such loyalty is very rare. It was rare in the Byzantine Empire, it’s rare in modern Moscow. Rats jump from sinking ships – I think these days we have proof that Iosif Kobzon is not a rat. I’m happy every time I encounter his attitude, even among people I do not understand – people I have nothing to do with.

I think someone Up There, who is keeping score, needs to put a gold star next to Kobzon’s name.

From the deranged fan-mail bin: Russia is “the path of least resistance”? Um. Ok.

Hokay, so my new blogging policy generally involves Not Encouraging The Weirdos.

I think it’s a good blogging policy. Certainly, it is sane. Some might even use the word “mature” in describing it.

However, every once in a while, I get so irked by particular commentary sent my way (usually from some bizarre e-mail address, most likely set up solely for the purposes of harassing bloggers), that if I DON’T scream about it up and down the internet, steam will come out of my ears and cover my colleagues in third-degree burns. Or something.

Anyway, this troll emerged from underneath some particularly rusty and Gothic-looking bridge, to inform me that “it’s no wonder why [I] moved to Russia. For “writers” like [me], Russia is the path of least resistance.”

The troll went on to say that “much like the sex-tourists [I] lampoon, [I am] someone who couldn’t be successful while living in Western civilization.”

“Good luck with your little life,” the troll concluded, possibly to the sound of dramatic organ music playing in the background.

You know, the paper celebrated its 80th anniversary this week – while acknowledging its checkered, Stalinist past – and I also had two freaking teeth taken out this morning (my teeth need to become stars in their own graphic, horrifying essay – and one of these days, they will), so I am very tired, and am in no mood for this. Like, I can’t even make a joke that is suitably caustic and, at the same time, self-deprecating enough – because too many of my brain cells are engaged elsewhere, with more noble tasks, such composing and deleting angry e-mails to people who decided that they were too busy and important to come to our anniversary debate on media freedom in Russia (which turned out to be quite good) and succouring my vast armies of honey bees.

So I’ll just roll my eyes. Somewhere in Moscow, as the day winds down, as the metro begins to fill up again with innumerable amounts of people, as people continue posting photoshopped images of Luzhkov in their LiveJournal blog, as cars honk all around Sadovoye Koltso and people laugh about this bullshit in bars, I am rolling my eyes.

I’m also thinking that the troll has some experience in sex tourism, judging by the rest of his magnum opus. I do naturally apologize for hurting the delicate fee-fees of sex tourists everywhere.