The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements have found me a woke old white privileged guy who is wondering how to resolve these injustices and my own complicity for what is now clearing like a gauzy AQI 500 fog in front of me. It is a shocking revelation to find the walls of institutional prejudice and racism standing before me and I am on the wrong side. For example, on our first Lifedeathscifi podcast we reviewed the book Strangers in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. It was my recommendation that we start off our official podcast with this book. I had read it years before and remember it to be a wonderful and fascinating “first contact” story about a boy who grows up on Mars with no human contact, raised by Martians. He is returned to Earth as a young adult more Martian than human. Adventures ensue.
Fifty years later I read it again, we read it. I wanted a discussion based on a memory. All that fun and fascination of my first read fell away to a mountain of misogyny. That’s all we could really talk about. My recommendation was steeped in anger and frustration. How could I have loved this book? How could I have not seen the subtle and not so subtle intimidation and harassment threaded through this story? “If God didn’t want women to be looked at, he would have made them ugly”; “you’re acting like a brooding hen”; “women should not be muscular”; “quiet girl or I’ll paddle you”; and many, many, more comments like these. Should I hate the characters who brought these unnecessary ideas into the story, or should I hate the “dean of American science fiction writers” who created and perpetuates these ideas into the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review best-seller list, how could he win the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel? I am more than conflicted. I love the sci-fi aspects of this book but hate the blatant misogyny. Is it just a snapshot of the Mad Men era of white privilege that we should just understand that was what it was?
Recently, I read the amazing New York Times article by Holland Cotter “Can we Ever Look at Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again?” He reviews Titian’s 1550 painting “The Rape of Europa”. Here is a little of what he has to say, “a young woman, a Phoenician princess, is abducted and forcibly impregnated by a god in disguise — can’t help but put us on red alerts today, when accusations and verified reports of sexual assault on women appear almost daily in the news. In fact, the whole cycle, with its repeated images of gender-based power plays and exposed female flesh, invites #MeToo evaluation, and raises doubts about whether any art, however “great,” can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.”
Now that I am awake, the fog is clearing. Walls are crumbling. I cannot let that fog excuse my looking away.
Image:from Berkley Medallion Book cover, image taken by Eric Bueschlen
