meditation
I wrote this a couple of days ago, and Jane said she would be interested to read it, so I felt encouraged to post. There will be more coming; I just spent a good hour writing a second part. :P
It all started with ballet.
I began taking ballet lessons when I was four years old, and I loved it. In fact, I’ve never quit, and this January I was able to say that I’ve been taking ballet for twenty years. That’s more time than I’ve even spent in school.
But I knew from a young age that ballet didn’t get respect from all my peers. Especially from boys. Many people, and boys in particular, thought that ballet was pretty and fluffy and easy. I knew very well that they were wrong-ballet is very hard work, and the further along you get in it, the harder it becomes. But I couldn’t make them listen. I could argue until I was blue in the face and I couldn’t get them to accept that ballet was just as hard as the sports they played. The only technique I managed to develop was to fix their form when they started imitating ballet. You know the routine:
“Oh, ballet!” someone would say scornfully, and putting his finger on the top of his head, he would tiptoe around in a circle with his shoulders hunched up.
“You never put your finger on your head in ballet,” I would try to counter, adopting a scornful tone. “You need to stand up straight. Drop your shoulders. Tuck in your stomach and your derriere. Turn your legs out-from the hip, not the knee. Like this.” I would begin to demonstrate a proper bourrée.
“Aw, whatever.” And he would walk away. But I felt like I won at least half a victory.
Winning that victory seemed very important to me, especially because I wasn’t any good at sports. My hand-eye coordination was terrible. My father finally let me in on the secret when I was in college: my awful eyesight, particularly my extreme astigmatism, is probably the cause of my poor depth perception. I was terribly relieved to finally have an excuse. For years, I felt terrible every time we had to play some sort of sport in gym class, because I was always awful at it. Practically the only things I was good at were sprints (I could beat one of the fastest boys in the class at short footraces when we were kids; I was weirdly angry in high school when I realized I couldn’t beat him anymore), stilts (which I only recall doing twice), and floor hockey. Sports were the physical activity that my peers, boys in particular, valued. Ballet was not, but it was just as physically challenging as hitting any old ball with a wooden stick. If you could shine in gym class, people knew you were athletic and thus deserved respect. If all your athleticism was in the ballet studio after hours, you got no respect in the gym.
In third grade I discovered the joys of writing fiction. We had creative writing lessons from the writing specialist of the school, and I gobbled every one of them up. I remember fondly many of the stories I wrote at that time, and I remember reading them to my classmates. One in particular that I enjoyed writing was about how girls rule. I don’t remember the title; “Girls Rule” might actually have been it. It’s about a group of children who are sitting at a campfire one night when a gigantic green blob appears out of the darkness and attacks them. The boys cower in fear, but the girls, led by one charismatic blonde, hold their ground and pelt the blob with corncobs, which quickly dissolve the monster. The girls rejoice in their triumph. When the boys attempt to state once more that boys are superior to girls, the lead blonde challenges the boys to take a ballet class. The boys are completely knackered by the end of it, and concede both that ballet is difficult and that girls rule.
I remember that my beloved teacher seemed rather disapproving of the whole story. I suppose she was vaguely horrified by implied (and explicit!) misandry of my narrative. She suggested that I write a sequel, in which the boys beat the girls at basketball.
Even today I remember my emotions at this suggestion. (The fact that I remember the conversation at all rather says something about how much it affected me, considering how minor a discussion it was and how long ago it happened.) I was completely resistant. There was NO WAY I was going to write that sequel. I didn’t have the understanding at the time to explain why, but I can now: I had spent all my years in school being beaten at basketball by the boys and being teased about ballet by them; while being told by adults that boys and girls were equal and being told by boys that boys were superior. This story had been my extravagant resistance, my declaration that girls COULD be superior to boys in the manly areas of courage and athleticism; that ballet WAS a difficult and athletic activity; that everything I stood for deserved respect.
I don’t remember my classmates’ reactions to the story. It may be that the power I wielded as the teller of the story, my authority as the author of the text, silenced their objections. Or maybe they objected and I had expected it, so I didn’t pay any attention. Anyway, what I remembered with real emotion was my teacher’s suggestion.
I hadn’t really thought about this third grade experience for years until a similar occurrence in my first year of graduate school. Once again, I was writing something I was excited about for a teacher I really liked. This time it was an analysis of some of the popular criticisms of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741) and the Twilight novels (which I myself enjoyed). I was discussing how these criticisms were based on the idea that when readers inserted themselves into the main character (as I often did when pleasure-reading) that they lost all sense of reality-all sense at all, really. I was at the point in composition where I was still trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say about these criticisms. My professor had pointed me toward an eighteenth-century play called “Polly Honeycombe”. The play makes fun of the eponymous heroine because she confuses the many romantic novels she has read with real life, and consequently screws herself over. The play touched on a lot of the issues I was struggling with in the paper. I sent a rough draft to my prof to check over, and he made some suggestions in the margins. One of them was that I discuss how, as in Polly Honeycombe, readers of Twilight who insert themselves into the heroine end up like Polly, confusing romantic fiction with reality and screwing up their lives.
I didn’t know what I wanted to write in the paper yet-but I knew for sure that I didn’t want to write THAT. It took awhile for me to figure out how I could revise the paper so it said something I could really get behind, and I found it at last: those arguments against women’s absorbed readings of Twilight were based on misogyny. They were based on old assumptions that mentally weak and passive women got too caught up in their reading and it screwed with their heads. I put it in more academic terms, of course, but that was the basic message.
It was when I was confronted with the (to me, surprising and appalling) Polly Honeycombe suggestion that I could begin to see what I really wanted to say-that I actually wanted to combat the Honeycombe Assertion. It was then that I remembered that story about the big green blob back in third grade and the infamous Basketball Suggestion, and things began to click in my brain.
This isn’t a story about teachers taking “ownership” of student texts through suggestions contrary to the students’ intentions (my writing center tutor training wasn’t for nothing!). It’s a story about the angry helplessness I felt every time I realized that I couldn’t combat the boys’ assertion that “boys rule; girls drool”, because I sucked at sports and was only good at ballet: they valued sports and not ballet, and so I reinforced their argument by sucking at the “important” things and only being good at the “easy”, “uber-girly” things. I realize now that the problem was not that I sucked at the thing they valued. The problem was that they valued it and not the thing I was good at. Their value system put sports at the top and ballet at the bottom, and the academics I was trying so hard to fit in with were putting their kinds of literary judgment at the top and “feminine” absorbed reading at the bottom, just like the uneducated popular critics they seemed to esteem so little. Once again, I was left feeling like I had no literary taste because I had a taste for Pamela instead of Tom Jones. My classmates were shocked that I enjoyed Pamela-and just a couple of weeks ago I had a professor ask, in tones of genuine curiosity and amazement, “So you actually like the Twilight novels?” (The exclamation point is implied.) I was amused, but it just proved to me once again that my favored reading was at the bottom of a scale of value shared amongst my colleagues, and that according to the rules of literary taste that they accepted, I had no way to defend myself.
Just as I did as a child, I want again to prove to the world that what I do for fun is worth just as much as what they do for fun. Ballet is hard work for both body and mind-just as hard as basketball, if not harder. “Escapist” literature and fantasy and good fan fiction are just as worthy to be read and appreciated (and in some cases, I think, more so) than the ever-evolving “canon” of “works that academics think worth their time” (but that in some cases, non-academics never ever read). Writings on the internet about “Mary-Sues” (that cliché, that bane of the green-horn fan fiction writer) warn that even if 50 people like your story, it could still be a Mary-Sue (and therefore, total crap), particularly if those 50 people are all thirteen-year-old girls. But if 50 thirteen-year-old girls are reading your story and inserting themselves into your heroine and getting absorbed in your ideas and weaving them subtly back into their own lives, isn’t that significant? Isn’t that good? It’s true: the Twilight novels were mostly adored by young women (and their mothers). But it really had an effect on them. And doesn’t that make them worth study? And worth more than the study they’re getting, which mostly seems to imply, “Wow, how did such a piece of ridiculous crap become significant? How will it screw up people’s ideas of good literature? WHY CAN’T WE UNDERSTAND THE APPEAL OF THIS BOOK?!”
I can tell you why you can’t understand the appeal. Because your value system of literature puts it at the bottom, and you’ve just realized that a whoooole lotta people are loving the stuff at the bottom, and because you’re politically correct academics, you can’t come out and write (you can come out and say, but not write) that a whooooole lotta people have no literary taste.
If my tone seems to have turned sardonic and angry, there’s a reason for that. I’m finally saying some of the things that have been lurking in the back of my mind, screaming into the silence, for years. Things that I had never managed to see clearly enough, had never managed to put into coherent sentences, so I couldn’t express, or even fully recognize, my anger and my frustration. But now I look back and can see a part of me banging my fists against the walls and screaming for someone to just LISTEN for once, and never getting anybody’s attention. Well, I’m starting to get it into words, now. And I will MAKE people listen. Even if I have to write in their academic jargon, even if I have to use the very system that’s oppressing me, kow-tow to the very conventions that are silencing my message. If I have to infiltrate literary studies, I will do it. Because it’s better than nothing, and maybe if can get some people to listen, I won’t have to write like an academic anymore. Maybe I’ll be able to publish an essay like this one.
It all started with ballet.
I began taking ballet lessons when I was four years old, and I loved it. In fact, I’ve never quit, and this January I was able to say that I’ve been taking ballet for twenty years. That’s more time than I’ve even spent in school.
But I knew from a young age that ballet didn’t get respect from all my peers. Especially from boys. Many people, and boys in particular, thought that ballet was pretty and fluffy and easy. I knew very well that they were wrong-ballet is very hard work, and the further along you get in it, the harder it becomes. But I couldn’t make them listen. I could argue until I was blue in the face and I couldn’t get them to accept that ballet was just as hard as the sports they played. The only technique I managed to develop was to fix their form when they started imitating ballet. You know the routine:
“Oh, ballet!” someone would say scornfully, and putting his finger on the top of his head, he would tiptoe around in a circle with his shoulders hunched up.
“You never put your finger on your head in ballet,” I would try to counter, adopting a scornful tone. “You need to stand up straight. Drop your shoulders. Tuck in your stomach and your derriere. Turn your legs out-from the hip, not the knee. Like this.” I would begin to demonstrate a proper bourrée.
“Aw, whatever.” And he would walk away. But I felt like I won at least half a victory.
Winning that victory seemed very important to me, especially because I wasn’t any good at sports. My hand-eye coordination was terrible. My father finally let me in on the secret when I was in college: my awful eyesight, particularly my extreme astigmatism, is probably the cause of my poor depth perception. I was terribly relieved to finally have an excuse. For years, I felt terrible every time we had to play some sort of sport in gym class, because I was always awful at it. Practically the only things I was good at were sprints (I could beat one of the fastest boys in the class at short footraces when we were kids; I was weirdly angry in high school when I realized I couldn’t beat him anymore), stilts (which I only recall doing twice), and floor hockey. Sports were the physical activity that my peers, boys in particular, valued. Ballet was not, but it was just as physically challenging as hitting any old ball with a wooden stick. If you could shine in gym class, people knew you were athletic and thus deserved respect. If all your athleticism was in the ballet studio after hours, you got no respect in the gym.
In third grade I discovered the joys of writing fiction. We had creative writing lessons from the writing specialist of the school, and I gobbled every one of them up. I remember fondly many of the stories I wrote at that time, and I remember reading them to my classmates. One in particular that I enjoyed writing was about how girls rule. I don’t remember the title; “Girls Rule” might actually have been it. It’s about a group of children who are sitting at a campfire one night when a gigantic green blob appears out of the darkness and attacks them. The boys cower in fear, but the girls, led by one charismatic blonde, hold their ground and pelt the blob with corncobs, which quickly dissolve the monster. The girls rejoice in their triumph. When the boys attempt to state once more that boys are superior to girls, the lead blonde challenges the boys to take a ballet class. The boys are completely knackered by the end of it, and concede both that ballet is difficult and that girls rule.
I remember that my beloved teacher seemed rather disapproving of the whole story. I suppose she was vaguely horrified by implied (and explicit!) misandry of my narrative. She suggested that I write a sequel, in which the boys beat the girls at basketball.
Even today I remember my emotions at this suggestion. (The fact that I remember the conversation at all rather says something about how much it affected me, considering how minor a discussion it was and how long ago it happened.) I was completely resistant. There was NO WAY I was going to write that sequel. I didn’t have the understanding at the time to explain why, but I can now: I had spent all my years in school being beaten at basketball by the boys and being teased about ballet by them; while being told by adults that boys and girls were equal and being told by boys that boys were superior. This story had been my extravagant resistance, my declaration that girls COULD be superior to boys in the manly areas of courage and athleticism; that ballet WAS a difficult and athletic activity; that everything I stood for deserved respect.
I don’t remember my classmates’ reactions to the story. It may be that the power I wielded as the teller of the story, my authority as the author of the text, silenced their objections. Or maybe they objected and I had expected it, so I didn’t pay any attention. Anyway, what I remembered with real emotion was my teacher’s suggestion.
I hadn’t really thought about this third grade experience for years until a similar occurrence in my first year of graduate school. Once again, I was writing something I was excited about for a teacher I really liked. This time it was an analysis of some of the popular criticisms of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741) and the Twilight novels (which I myself enjoyed). I was discussing how these criticisms were based on the idea that when readers inserted themselves into the main character (as I often did when pleasure-reading) that they lost all sense of reality-all sense at all, really. I was at the point in composition where I was still trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say about these criticisms. My professor had pointed me toward an eighteenth-century play called “Polly Honeycombe”. The play makes fun of the eponymous heroine because she confuses the many romantic novels she has read with real life, and consequently screws herself over. The play touched on a lot of the issues I was struggling with in the paper. I sent a rough draft to my prof to check over, and he made some suggestions in the margins. One of them was that I discuss how, as in Polly Honeycombe, readers of Twilight who insert themselves into the heroine end up like Polly, confusing romantic fiction with reality and screwing up their lives.
I didn’t know what I wanted to write in the paper yet-but I knew for sure that I didn’t want to write THAT. It took awhile for me to figure out how I could revise the paper so it said something I could really get behind, and I found it at last: those arguments against women’s absorbed readings of Twilight were based on misogyny. They were based on old assumptions that mentally weak and passive women got too caught up in their reading and it screwed with their heads. I put it in more academic terms, of course, but that was the basic message.
It was when I was confronted with the (to me, surprising and appalling) Polly Honeycombe suggestion that I could begin to see what I really wanted to say-that I actually wanted to combat the Honeycombe Assertion. It was then that I remembered that story about the big green blob back in third grade and the infamous Basketball Suggestion, and things began to click in my brain.
This isn’t a story about teachers taking “ownership” of student texts through suggestions contrary to the students’ intentions (my writing center tutor training wasn’t for nothing!). It’s a story about the angry helplessness I felt every time I realized that I couldn’t combat the boys’ assertion that “boys rule; girls drool”, because I sucked at sports and was only good at ballet: they valued sports and not ballet, and so I reinforced their argument by sucking at the “important” things and only being good at the “easy”, “uber-girly” things. I realize now that the problem was not that I sucked at the thing they valued. The problem was that they valued it and not the thing I was good at. Their value system put sports at the top and ballet at the bottom, and the academics I was trying so hard to fit in with were putting their kinds of literary judgment at the top and “feminine” absorbed reading at the bottom, just like the uneducated popular critics they seemed to esteem so little. Once again, I was left feeling like I had no literary taste because I had a taste for Pamela instead of Tom Jones. My classmates were shocked that I enjoyed Pamela-and just a couple of weeks ago I had a professor ask, in tones of genuine curiosity and amazement, “So you actually like the Twilight novels?” (The exclamation point is implied.) I was amused, but it just proved to me once again that my favored reading was at the bottom of a scale of value shared amongst my colleagues, and that according to the rules of literary taste that they accepted, I had no way to defend myself.
Just as I did as a child, I want again to prove to the world that what I do for fun is worth just as much as what they do for fun. Ballet is hard work for both body and mind-just as hard as basketball, if not harder. “Escapist” literature and fantasy and good fan fiction are just as worthy to be read and appreciated (and in some cases, I think, more so) than the ever-evolving “canon” of “works that academics think worth their time” (but that in some cases, non-academics never ever read). Writings on the internet about “Mary-Sues” (that cliché, that bane of the green-horn fan fiction writer) warn that even if 50 people like your story, it could still be a Mary-Sue (and therefore, total crap), particularly if those 50 people are all thirteen-year-old girls. But if 50 thirteen-year-old girls are reading your story and inserting themselves into your heroine and getting absorbed in your ideas and weaving them subtly back into their own lives, isn’t that significant? Isn’t that good? It’s true: the Twilight novels were mostly adored by young women (and their mothers). But it really had an effect on them. And doesn’t that make them worth study? And worth more than the study they’re getting, which mostly seems to imply, “Wow, how did such a piece of ridiculous crap become significant? How will it screw up people’s ideas of good literature? WHY CAN’T WE UNDERSTAND THE APPEAL OF THIS BOOK?!”
I can tell you why you can’t understand the appeal. Because your value system of literature puts it at the bottom, and you’ve just realized that a whoooole lotta people are loving the stuff at the bottom, and because you’re politically correct academics, you can’t come out and write (you can come out and say, but not write) that a whooooole lotta people have no literary taste.
If my tone seems to have turned sardonic and angry, there’s a reason for that. I’m finally saying some of the things that have been lurking in the back of my mind, screaming into the silence, for years. Things that I had never managed to see clearly enough, had never managed to put into coherent sentences, so I couldn’t express, or even fully recognize, my anger and my frustration. But now I look back and can see a part of me banging my fists against the walls and screaming for someone to just LISTEN for once, and never getting anybody’s attention. Well, I’m starting to get it into words, now. And I will MAKE people listen. Even if I have to write in their academic jargon, even if I have to use the very system that’s oppressing me, kow-tow to the very conventions that are silencing my message. If I have to infiltrate literary studies, I will do it. Because it’s better than nothing, and maybe if can get some people to listen, I won’t have to write like an academic anymore. Maybe I’ll be able to publish an essay like this one.