[READ: March 10, 2021] Things Are Against Us
I loved Ellmann’s book Ducks, Newburyport so much that I had intended to read all of her books.
So I’ve gone back and read some of her previous novels. Which I found to be…okay. They were mildly amusing with some very personal diatribes thrown in to put some passion into these otherwise comic novels.
Then I saw that she had a recent collection of essays, which I thought might be really interesting.
I agree about 95% with everything Ellmann says in this book. And yet I hated this book more than almost anything I’ve read recently. And I think I’m not going to bother reading the other novels that I haven’t read yet, since the other two weren’t that great anyhow.
Ellmann’s style in these essays is so unpleasant, so superior and self-righteous, so… (and I hate to use this word because of the anti-feminist implications of it but it is definitionally accurate) strident, that I almost didn’t finish most of the essays (I forced my way through to the end of all of them). Strident, btw: “presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively and unpleasantly forceful way. I mean, that is this book to a T.”
In the past, strident women have been very important to many movements. But hen your arguments are so scattershot, it’s hard for your stridency to be a positive force.
“Things Are Against Us”
In this essay Ellmann all caps the word THINGS every time she writes it. On the first page (which is half a page not including the title), THINGS appears over 30 times. The tone is kind of amusing–about how things get in our way and cause us trouble: Things slip out of your hand; things trip you, things break. Then each following paragraph gets more specific. Clothes tear, socks don’t stay up. Matches won’t light, water bottles spill. Then she gets into the body. In her novel Doctors & Nurses she lists 12 pages of bodily ailments. So there’s not much new here. And there’s no real point. It doesn’t end with any grand idea. It just stops.
“The Underground Bunker”
This is an essay about the January 6th insurrection. She hates Trump as much as I do. So of course I would love this essay. And yet, she turns the essay onto Americans. And again, I agree with a lot of what she says about many American being painfully ignorant. But lines like this don’t really enhance your argument, they just make you sound ignorant:
Americans are acutely unaware of the past and the future. Also, the present. History is infinitely malleable for them. So is reality. Are they just undereducated, indoctrinated, chronically indifferent, hypnotized or too damn busy makin’ a buck?
And on it goes, this kind of abuse for three paragraphs. Which then suddenly turns against men. And once again, I agree 100% with her position that women have had a totally shit time of it. A simple statement like this should be very powerful and make people take notice
Fifty women a day are shot dead in America by so-called partners. How can women thrive in such a society?
Right? I mean, that’s a devastating statement. It’s also false, and it’s a shame she had to lie because the truth is almost as bad and just as powerful:
Every month, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner (according to https://everytownresearch.org/)
Turning it back on America, she concludes
The United States of America has now reached a whole new level of patriarchal absurdity. You mean they massacred the Indians, enslaved the African, cut down all the trees, poisoned all the rivers, and extinguished or imprisoned all the animals for THIS. this hellhole of bombast and hamburgers and opioid addictions and cardboard-box houses and pretend ideas?
I mean, that’s not a very valid statement. Yes, there is much truth in it, but as a statement, it doesn’t really convey any actual understanding of anything and sounds more like a Twitter comment.
“Trapped Family Fingers”
This one continues the America bashing asking when Americans gave up on “love of life.” Now I’m 100% behind her for this essay.
Every child in America has now been drilled in how to climb under the desk when a shooting spree is going on.
It’s insane that this is a true statement. Also insane are other gun “solutions” like using dogs to sniff out guns, arming teachers, bulletproof backpacks.
So, yea, I’m all for her proposal: How about NO GUNS.
So it’s weird how the essay goes in a different direction.
Even the niceness of many Americans seems suspect, because you never know if it’s just a precautionary kindness
Because Americans are powerless–but that leaves more time for ME stuff like pop music, cosmetics and “foreign slave-labour jeans.”
Then there’s a squiggly line indicating a pause, where suddenly we get this
Patriotism, charity and heroism have been replaced by one essential task: the moral duty to go to the gym.
I mean, this is just an essay from someone ranting about whatever comes to mind at this point.
What’s such a shame about these wild rants is that she can succinctly state a problem perfectly
Just as Brexit is the apotheosis of age-old British self-hatred, America embarked in 2016 on its own act of self-immolation. The nation mulled things over, Stan Laurel-style, blinked its eyes, scratched its head and decided to go for more corporate criminality, more exploitation, more inequity, more poverty, more sickness, more indifference, more conformism, more conservatism, more waste, more plastic, more violence. And astonishing levels of sadness.
This’s pretty spot on (although it could do with a fewer “mores”).
“Three Strikes”
This essay is a kind of tribute and follow up to Virginia Woolf’s essay “Three Guineas.” It contains lots of footnotes. Normally I love this kind of thing. And I like the idea she proposes (that she actually proposed before and is reiterating now). Give women all the money. It’s the basis of a good idea. Especially now that yet another American bank has collapsed.
But how does an essay that seems to be seriously proposing this transfer of all wealth to women, also have a line like this
Why do men like pizza so much? I think it’s because the boxes look official, as if the guy has just come from some important meeting and he’s got really important documents in there or something.
What a weird diversion (there’s another anti-pizza bit later too) and it’s not even a funny observation.
Especially when she has such great things to say about real subjects
The media’s harsh treatment of Mary Beard, Greta Thunberg and others shows the high level of hostility directed at women whose achievments single them out from the crowd.
She eventually gets to the point. Again, a good one:
We’ve tried equality and it doesn’t work. Equality within a society concocted by and for men? Phooey! What we need [skip over seven lines of a list of who this “we” is] is female supremacy.
She proposes that women go on strike. 1) a housework strike 2) a labour strike 3) a sex strike.
If women could really coordinate themselves into these strikes, it could certainly have an impact. I’m glad she references the excellent Greek place Lysistrata. But really, you could read that play, which is a lot more fun than this essay is.
“A Spell of Patriarchy”
Speaking about the Hitchcock movie Spellbound (which I have not seen), she says the movie is (despite Hitchcock’s delight in harming women) really about sexual harassment. This essay was short and rather amusing.
“Third-Rate Zeros”
Now that trump (including four lines of insulting adjectives) is gone, we must repair the neurological damage. And yet, the next paragraph tells how we must stop belittling people the way trump does. Somehow, this essay segues into a criticism of how fictional depictions of women are offensive.
Again, she is 100% correct. But it’s weird to jump from trump to this valid lit-crit.
Physical depictions can be ponderous, clumsy, insulting and inert … Jane Austen never wasted much space on people’ looks: all you need to know is one sister or other was generally considered the prettier.
Then she talks of the very real problem of male authors sexualizing their characters.
Some can’t introduce a new female character without jumping to pinpoint … exactly what her breasts are like [although] the breasts of unsexy female characters are rarely mentioned.
She gives many examples of terrible descriptions from male writers like E.L. Doctorow. After describing a female character’s physical attributes in great detail. She says he describes the male character but there is
no mention of the teasing glow of Martin’s trouser buttons twinkling like stars, under pressure from his jutting crotch. Nothing like that. Is he even “handsome?” We don’t need to know. Men don’t have to be good-looking; they do the looking.
All valid. And once its pointed out to you, you’ll never not see it. It’s like the Bechdel test.
Although the most interesting thing in this essay is that Ellmann’s mother Mary Ellmann wrote a book called Thinking About Women which I’d like to check out.
“Consider Pistons and Pumps”
This essay is about the body and, for instance, how so many of our metaphors or even adjectives are bodily-related: “shitty, nail-biting, a pain in the neck” etc. And then there are tools that are male and female (sockets and plugs) and we like to press buttons.
The essay then turns to how the “inferior” genitals of women are rarely displayed while the “superior” genitals of men are proudly displayed in towers, turrets, plinths, etc.
It’s an old argument and one that doesn’t hold a lot of reality (you can’t fit buildings into a space if the buildings are short and squat). But I do love the idea of changing the names of places to celebrate women more:
Womanhattan, Wombburrow, Wombledon, Breastworthy, Tittsburg, Clitoropolis, Fallopidelphia.
“The Woman of the House”
This essay looks at length at Laura Ingalls Wilder and how much feminism is on display in the Little House books. Yes, there are lots of problematic parts in the books (any dealing with Native Americans), but for the most part they are surprisingly forward thinking. This was my favorite essay in the book. I really enjoy her when she likes something.
“The Lost Art of Staying Put”
I imagined that this essay would be an appreciation of how the COVID lockdown made things more calming and how we could luxuriate in ourselves. But instead it turns into lengthy vitriolic rant about anyone who wants to travel anywhere for fun.
She rants against everything in air travel (again, all spot on), including all of the horrible things that happen to people on airplanes these days. Then she wonders why anyone would put up with it just to go somewhere foreign and complain that its’ not like home. Despite the fact that she talks about herself travelling by plane.
But she’s not unreasonable, oh no, not at all
I have no objection here to purposeful uses of travel, of course, as in the case of emergency workers, international election monitors, refugees or political, economic, or environmental migrants. …. It’s leisure travel … that I really abhor.
How generous of her. She’s not done.
Travel is colonialism. Travel is WAR. … After all, the only really interesting thing about travel is seeing new flora and fauna, and we’ve killed off most of that.
Good lord. By the point in the book, I just wanted it over
“Bras : A Life Sentence”
This is an essay about bras. It’s short and mildly funny.
“Morning Routine Girls”
This essay criticizes (and sort of sympathizes) with the girls who do their morning makeup routines on YouTube (or TikTok). It’s far more critical than sympathetic, unsurprisingly. I don’t think she has anything to say about these videos that other people haven’t already complained about.
“Sing the Unelectric!”
Earlier she complained about travelling. Now she’s complaining about electricity.
I’m tired of electricity, coal, gas, petrol, and especially nuclear power. I now only like the kind of energy that plants and animals naturally expend going about their daily business.
Again, good lord. Now, yes, ruining the planet to create power is terrible, especially when there are so many natural methods to harness power. But a sentence like this is just too much:
Electricity is a kind of ethereal rapist, interfering with everyone.
All along, the essays have had an “I’m so much better than you” tone, but it all comes to the fore at the end of this essay
All I’m saying is that when the primordial shit hits the electric fan and all current sources of energy are gone, I will have books, pencils, paper, index cards, a hole puncher, candles, matches, needles and thread, soap, socks, sweaters, long johns, a working loo (I hope), quite an assortment of ink stamps, some paintings I really like, old photos, a plain old manual toothbrush, a typewriter and a wind-up torch. What’ll you have?
I mean, fuck you. I think 95% of the people in the world will have these same things (barring a typewriter). I mean, what a smug irritating git.
“Ah, Men”
This is a similar essay to the earlier one about men abusing women. This one takes on slightly different topics–like how women feel the need to shave everything because the world has seen too many pornos.
Lots of things that men have done that are wrong (again, she is totally right about this).
Men delight in unauthorized violence, but glory in legalized murder too. And then there is a full page list (she does love lists) of all the bad men there have been in the world (not names, but types: fraudsters, pickpockets, shoplifters, etc).
But as with many of these essays, she is utterly sidetracked into a massive section about how much she hates crime fiction.
Here she just obliterates all kinds of fiction writers.
Writing genre fiction of any kind is a cop-out… But of all the genres [long list of genres skipped], nothing sinks lower in celebration of human lousiness than crime fiction. She says Chandler is okay. But Agatha Christie’s atrocious, only suitable for people with colds. And old Sherlock Holmes is barely a notch above Poirot and Miss Marple. What hacks these writers are.
And why do men read crime fiction?
They cherish it like their prosthetic sex-arse equipment [she is quite taken with men and their plastic sex-arses, which appear more than once in these essays]. They want it because it does them no good at all, but it does violate women.
I’m not even a fan of crime fiction, but Jesus Christ.
“Take the Money, Honey”
This essay reiterates her premise that men have ruined everything. And once again, I can’t argue with her main point. Indeed, after several pages of ranting, she gets a sentence that really could have summed up everything without all the rest.
[Men] have proven themselves apocalyptically unfit to govern. Women would do a better job with their hands tied behind their backs (which of course, they often are).
But that’s not the end of the essay. No. So I’ll just type the lines that she has in all caps for the rest of the essay
EQUALITY DOESN’T WORK
SEX IS FOR WOMEN
TAKE THE MONEY HONEY.
By all means, does what she says. It’s a great idea that I’m 100% behind.
But she really doesn’t give specifics for how women are supposed to do this. It sounds more like just yelling at women for not managing to do what she wants.
~~~~~
It’s very disappointing to have an author who I liked so much, who really made my days when I was reading her massive book, come across as such a poor non-fiction writer. She just feels so all over the place with so much anger.
Her level of ranting reminds me so much of a scene from Absolutely Fabulous
Eddie : Right – I, the proposed accused, think that, well, I mean, you know, well the day in question was not a good day for me, all right? But I put it to you that I don’t see how any day could have been good the way this bloody country’s run. Well, you know, I was just trying to do my best, trying to get from A to B, do a little shopping. I was trying to take control of my life, you know, only to find that it’s actually controlled for me by petty bureaucracy and bits of bloody paper – ignorant bloody petty rules and laws that just obstruct every tiny little action until you’ve committed a crime without even knowing it! I mean, you know, why can’t life just be made a little easier for everybody, eh? Why can’t it be more like the Continent, and then run down the street in front of charging bulls whilst letting fireworks off out of his bloody nostrils without anyone blinking an eye? Uh? Because it’s probably a local holiday and nobody’s at work because they all want to have just a little bit of fun and they’re not intimidated by some outdated work ethic. I mean, there has to be more to life than just being safe…
Judge : Is there a point to all of this?
Eddie : [explaining to the judge her problems with the law] Yes, Yes!… Why, oh why, do we pay taxes, hmmm? I mean, just to have bloody parking restrictions- and BUGGERY-UGLY traffic wardens, and BOLLOCKY-pedestrian-BLOODY-crossings?… and those BASTARD railings outside shops windows, making it so difficult, so you can’t even get in them! I mean, I know they’re there to stop stupid people running into the street and killing themselves! But we’re not all stupid! We don’t all need nurse-maiding. I mean, why not just have a Stupidity Tax? Just tax the stupid people!
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