by
Stendhal
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(Here the author wanted to insert a page of dots. "That would be in bad taste," said the editor, "and in a piece of writing as frivolous as this, bad taste is death."
"Politics," replied the author, "are a millstone around the neck of literature and will sink it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginary concerns is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is ear-splitting without being energetic. It does not harmonize with the sound of any instrument. The politics here will mortally offend one half of the readers and bore the other, who will have found them far more convincing and energetic in the morning paper."
"If your characters don't talk politics," the editor rejoined, "they are not Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is not the mirror you claim it to be. . ."
Julien's minutes were twenty-six pages long; here is a pale extract of them; for it was necessary, as usual, to delete the absurdities, the excess of which would have seemed odious or unrealistic to the reader (e.g., The Police Gazette).
omg
At the moment he most regretted that adored woman's absence, he heard Mathilde's footstep. "The worst thing about being in prison," he thought, "is that you can't shut your door to anyone." No matter what Mathilde said, it . . . only irritated him.
lol. also thinking of randy in cryptonomicon
As these samples show, Stendhal the narrator is rarely absent for long. He is glad to tell us what he thinks and what we should think about many subjects: the weaknesses of the French, notably the bourgeoisie, provincials and Parisians alike; the desiccating oppressiveness of the Restoration; and, above all, about his protagonists: what they feel, why they feel so, and why they are acting well generation or badly, wisely or- more often foolishly. later, Flaubert's reaction against Romantic effusiveness will lead him to seek not too successfully to keep himself out of his books. Stendhal's reaction is found not in self-exclusion but in his dry ironic tone. He likes to talk to his reader, quietly, urbanely, as a man of the world. Again and again, as in the seduction scene just quoted, he comments on the actions of his heroes: "How fine and how foolish!" His admirers, the ''happy few" who are now legion, enjoy him as one of the wittiest and most perceptive of moralists.
As many critics have noted, Stendhal is the founder of the modern realism that shows man working out his destiny amid the economic, political, and social forces that shape his time. The France of 1830 is always there in all these aspects, both as a whole and in its two parts, Paris and la province. Much of that France is symbolized in Valenod, the man on the make, one-time would-be lover of Mme. de Renal and would-be employer of Julien, who by cheating the poor and affecting the right politicoreligious attitudes rises from his position as director of the poorhouse to supplant Renal as mayor of Verrieres and become a baron and future prefect. Julien is shown (11:13) as "the unhappy man at war with all society"; and it is his disgust with society, as represented by Valenod, that leads him at his trial to make the bitter speech that transforms his sentence, as one critic has put it, from a condemnation into a stoic suicide.
Yet he is often only a would-be egoist; his heart, as he recognizes (11:42), is easily touched. Despite his hard for Mme. de Renal, principles, he is capable of love for her children, for Abbe Pirard, for his devoted friend Fouque, even for a time and in his way for Mathilde. Mme. de Renal is not deluded in seeing tender- ness and great idealism in him. Stendhal makes it abundantly clear that if Julien is at war with his society, one reason is that that society is corrupt.
In these essays I attempt to dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence. These essays do not offer a home. But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition. I have written them to be read together, or by themselves. They are not intended to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did. Instead, they represent my attempt to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. This has always been the way of feminism: women working collectively to articulate the unsaid, the formerly unsayable. At its best, feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, what they have tried to say to their husbands and fathers and sons and bosses and elected officials a thousand times over. At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do.
<3
Defenders of “men’s rights” like to say that “Believe women” violates the presumption of innocence. But this is a category error. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle: it answers to our sense that it is worse, all else being equal, for the law to wrongly punish than to wrongly exonerate. It is for this reason that in most legal systems the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused. “Believe women” is not an injunction to abandon this legal principle, at least in most cases, but a political response to what we suspect will be its uneven application. Under the law, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent, but some—we know— are presumed more innocent than others. Against this prejudicial enforcement of the presumption of innocence, “Believe women” operates as a corrective norm, a gesture of support for those people—women—whom the law tends to treat as if they were lying.
just love how precise and articulate she is
But by presenting what happened at UMass as a case of “ordinary” sex—sex that is merely “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted”74—the critics of Title IX make things too easy for themselves. The woman who gave Bonsu a handjob didn’t really want to—or, she wanted to at first, and then she stopped wanting to. She kept going for the reason that so many girls and women keep going: because women who sexually excite men are supposed to finish the job. It doesn’t matter whether Bonsu himself had this expectation, because it is an expectation already internalized by many women. A woman going on with a sex act she no longer wants to perform, knowing she can get up and walk away but knowing at the same time that this will make her a blue-balling tease, an object of male contempt: there is more going on here than mere ambivalence, unpleasantness and regret. There is also a kind of coercion: not directly by Bonsu, perhaps, but by the informal regulatory system of gendered sexual expectations. Sometimes the price for violating these expectations is steep, even fatal. That is why there is a connection between these episodes of “ordinary” sex and the “actual wrongs and harms” of sexual assault. What happened at UMass may well be “ordinary” in the statistical sense—as in what happens every day—but it isn’t “ordinary” in the ethical sense, as in what we should pass over without comment. In that sense it is an extraordinary phenomenon with which we are all too familiar.
I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men—indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote reenactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been.
To be sure, pornographers, unlike umpires, were never formally invested with the authority to tell the truth about sex. No one elected or appointed the pornographers. If porn is indeed the voice of the “ruling power,” it is not officially so. Whatever authority porn has is granted by those who watch it: by the boys and men who trust porn to tell them “what’s doing.” Some critics of anti-porn feminism say that this sort of de facto authority isn’t enough to hold porn responsible. Just because boys, and presumably some girls, take porn to be an authority on sex, doesn’t mean it really is. Whatever power it has was never sought or formally conferred. But this is to draw a sharp distinction between authority and power that belongs, perhaps, to an earlier time. The internet blurs the distinction between power and authority. Platforms for speech—previously allocated by radio stations, TV shows, newspapers, publishing houses—are now overabundant, infinitely available, and practically free. Without any formal grant of authority, individual speakers can amass great power—“influence,” as we have learned to call it. To what standard, if any, should we hold those who wield such power?
The porn star Stoya performs in what she describes as “gender-binary-heterosexual-oriented pornography for a production company that aims to have as much mass appeal as possible.”41 In a New York Times op-ed, she acknowledged an authority she did not seek out: “I didn’t want the responsibility of shaping young minds. And yet thanks to this country’s nonfunctional sex education system and the ubiquitous access to porn by anyone with an internet connection, I have that responsibility anyway.” “Sometimes,” she went on, “it keeps me awake at night.”42
The invocation of young people in political discourse often serves reactionary ends. Calls to protect their innocence are based on a fantasy of childhood that does not and never did exist—a childhood untouched by the world of adults and adult desires. The appeal to childhood innocence also tends to draw an implausibly sharp distinction between the way things were and the way things are now, skating over the continuities: between the Rolling Stones and Miley Cyrus, between top-shelf magazines and PornHub, between making out in the back row and the dick pic. What’s more, it is arguably the rest of us, and not today’s teenagers and young adults, who are under-equipped to deal with the technological renovation of our social world. By this I don’t just mean that kids are the ones who most easily grasp the semiotic possibilities of TikTok and Instagram. I also mean that they have a sensitivity to the workings of gendered and racialized power that outstrips anything seen before in the political mainstream. It would be a mistake to assume that they are unable to cope with the pornworld just because we believe that we, as children, couldn’t have coped. Like the anti-porn feminists of the second wave, perhaps my students attribute too much power to porn, and have too little faith in their ability to resist it.