Intolerance, savage attacks, and argument incapacity

I am often concerned about the rarely acknowledged classism embedded in many people's behavior and in some aspects of the political parties and that seems reinforced by two recent articles and a recent event.

A Case Study in Lifting College Attendance by David Leonhardt highlights an innovative approach in Delaware to ensure that those with the ability and desire to attend competitive universities do in fact attend such universities.

Leslie Carlson, a guidance counselor at Mount Pleasant High School, asked Ms. Nye where she would go if money were no object. She replied that money was an object. Mrs. Carlson said: Yes, but what if it weren’t? Ms. Nye eventually named Stanford, before adding that the application fee of $90 was more than she could afford. The counselor then told her about the fee waivers she would soon receive.

This report is an encouraging example of what might make things work better but it is also a reminder of how often factors that seem trivial to more affluent families can keep low-income students from college. Before that conversation, the only college to which Ms. Nye had applied was the Colorado School of Mines, because the application was free. Ultimately, Ms. Nye received a scholarship to Stanford that requires no payment from her parents and no loans for either her or her parents. Her contribution consists of $5,000 a year she is supposed to earn through a campus job.

No matter how well intentioned we are, it is challenging to understand the reality that others face who lead lives substantially different from our own. A $90 application fee is the difference between attending Stanford and not? Inconceivable. And yet for some, that is a reality.

Well intentioned gentry are prone to designing elaborate programs to make better the lives of those less fortunate. Most often these programs fail because they are based on gentry assumptions and are not grounded in the experienced reality of the truly poor. Classism that is blind to its own privileges and that is also willing to ignore the negative consequences arising from such blindness (most people are satisfied by measuring success against the goodness of intentions rather than achieved outcomes) is hidden in plain sight.

And then there is this study, Slut-shaming has little to do with sex, study finds: Sociologists say affluent university women use slut-shaming to show poorer women they are ‘trashy’ and don’t belong by Marisa Taylor.

A new study of college women and their attitudes about so-called sluttiness found that slut-shaming — calling out a woman for her supposedly promiscuous sexual behavior — actually had more to do with a woman’s social class than it did with sexual activity.

Sociologists from the University of Michigan and the University of California at Merced occupied a dorm room in a large Midwestern university, regularly interacting with and interviewing 53 women about their attitudes on school, friends, partying and sexuality from the time they moved in as freshman and following up for the next five years.

The researchers discovered that definitions of "slutty" behavior and the act of slut-shaming was largely determined along class lines rather than based on actual sexual behavior. What's more, they found the more affluent women were able to engage in more sexual experimentation without being slut-shamed, while the less-affluent women were ridiculed as sluts for being “trashy” or “not classy,” even though they engaged in less sexual behavior.

Again, the usually unacknowledged role of class. And while the blame for many social ills is set at the feet of the patriarchy, there is a lot of evidence that many of the social ills arise from both intended and unintended exclusionary actions undertaken by women.

The following article highlights the extraordinary complexity of some of these issues. Yes we want people to enjoy maximum freedom. But that is set against the reality that freedom to make choices means some people will make bad choices and that those with the least resources are least able to cope with the consequences of those bad choices. The unpleasant trade-offs implied are captured in this article, One way to end violence against women? Married dads. by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson in which they observe the correlation between marriage and desirable life outcomes for women.

Marriage is not actually the answer. It is the values and behaviors that permit a marriage to succeed that are the real determinants. Everyone getting married won't, per se, solve any problems. Coaching and equipping people with the values and behaviors that might make them eligible for marriage probably would.

But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.

[snip]

Marriage is no panacea when it comes to male violence. But married fathers are much less likely to resort to violence than men who are not tied by marriage or biology to a female. And, most fundamentally, for the girls and women in their lives, married fathers provide direct protection by watching out for the physical welfare of their wives and daughters, and indirect protection by increasing the odds they live in safe homes and are not exposed to men likely to pose a threat.

The classism here is that of various segments of the feminist movement who want to argue that women can make any lifestyle choice they want (which they should be able to) without any trade-offs or consequences (which is obviously not true.) Marriage may be an undue constriction on women of a privileged background and resources but it is a more than rational choice for other women. The issue is that those movements (dominated by the privileged) are trying to advocate policies that can be made to work for them (because of their income, or education or familial resources) but which are dangerous for those without the resources of their class.

Finally there is this spat that occurred in the past week. Ruth Graham published an opinion piece in The Slate, Against YA subtitled "Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children." Her argument is that Young Adult (YA) literary fiction is written for an immature audience that lacks mature judgment and that that lack of maturity is reflected in the simplicity of the YA stories. Graham's position is only a variant of the age old view that there is a hierarchy of bad, better and good literature and that one should aspire to reading good literature. Graham acknowledges the value of YA for its intended audience, i.e. she is not condemning the genre per se. And while her argument is aimed at YA, her underlying model of good literature versus everything else is not restricted to YA. She alludes to the same issue with mystery writing. She believes that once you acquire the cognitive capacity for more complex, nuanced, and ambiguous literature, you should not sully yourself with simpler, clearer and more didactic books.

But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults. When chapter after chapter in Eleanor & Park ends with some version of “He’d never get enough of her,” the reader seems to be expected to swoon. But how can a grown-up, even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with “likable” protagonists.

Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this. I know, I know: Live and let read. Far be it from me to disrupt the “everyone should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like” ethos of our era. There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. And if people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.

This old gradgrindian, puritanical model of ratcheted reading (you can read up but you shouldn't read down) is a normative position on the part of Graham. She doesn't attempt to compare the advantages and costs of complex reading with the advantages and costs of simple reading. She merely asserts that the former is better than the latter.

So an opinion piece with a reasonable and by no means uncommon argument. For those wanting to reject the argument, that path is reasonably clear; either refute her details (not particularly productive to drag the reading audience into minutia of definitions, details and nuance) or demonstrate why the gradgrindian model of reading (purposeful reading for cognitive improvement) is neither how people actually do read nor is it associated with superior reading outcomes. People actually take a portfolio approach of reading: some simple stuff, some complex; some purposeful, some random; some reading for pleasure, some for achievement; some reading because it is required, some because it is elected; some contemporary, some some classic; some fiction, some nonfiction. Not only is there a portfolio of reading attributes but that portfolio and the balance of elements is constantly shifting and changing over time. The normative argument that people OUGHT to read the most complex nuanced works they can at all times is refuted by how people actually do read and by the fact that the most successful people in any field all similarly demonstrate the portfolio affect.

A straightforward normative argument is the instigating event and there is a straightforward counterargument available.

But how did the clerisy actually respond on reading-related list_servs, blogs, twitter, and comments? The response tended to affirm Graham's argument that YA literature appeals to immature minds. The response might harshly, but not particularly inaccurately, be characterized as classic middle school mean girl. Who is this person, Graham,? Why did she say mean things about YA? Doesn't she know there is some good YA? What are her credentials? How can we punish her (let's write to the editor)? The overwhelming majority of responses were classic Us/Them ostracism. She is not one of us and therefore we can launch unconstrained ad hominem attacks on her credentials, intelligence, ignorance, motives, create strawman arguments that were not part of her opinion piece and savagely knock down those strawmen arguments, derision, mockery and even satire. What was largely missing was anyone actually civilly engaging with Graham's argument and making an affirmative case for the value of YA literary fiction.

Part of the issue was undoubtedly that YA is an ambiguous category. It is of recent vintage and was initially essentially a publisher marketing ploy for increased market segmentation. One that has been largely successful it should be added. There are three challenges. 1) Is YA literary fiction that which is written by the author with a 12-18 year old audience in mind? OR 2) Is YA a style of writing characterized by emotion, dysfunction, relationships, OR 3) Is YA what 12-17 year olds actually read? According to publisher surveys, between 55-80% of readers are older than 18. The median reader is a 40 year old woman. Basically, most published YA literature is not read by young adults AND most of what young adults read is not YA.

Finally, publisher surveys seem also to indicate that the bulk of literary reader fiction books are middle and up in terms of income and to be predominantly college educated.

Whether intentionally or not, Graham skates very close to a stereotype of YA readers as being 40 year old college educated privileged women reading simplistic, predictable, and emotionally incontinent YA "literary" fiction. Graham finds that unseemly. While that is not directly the argument that Graham made, I think that is the implication to which most commenters and bloggers are responding.

But it is the response that is interesting. These blogs and list_servs are overwhelmingly of the clerisy. Urban, educated, well-off professionals, creatives (authors), ostensibly liberal, firmly committed to multiculturalism, inclusion, respect, etc. And yet, when something near and dear is challenged, their response is like everyone elses, primal tribalism - destroy the evil intruder. Like William Golding's Lord of the Flies (often characterized as YA though written for adults decades before the marketing push for a YA category), the mask is slipped.

But it is not so much about the hypocrisy. We are all more or less hypocritical; there is always a gap between how we aspire to behave and how we actually behave. What strikes me is the blindness to the classism. These are by and large very privileged people by income, by education, by status. Their intolerance of anyone else having a different opinion is troubling, the savagery of their attacks disconcerting, and their incapacity to respond to an argument in dispassionate terms (even when they have the better argument) is striking.