Who’s Afraid Of Pop Culture?

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There seems to be a pop culture-bashing trend at work among the high echelons of literary America. From Jonathan Franzen’s infamous remarks about Twitter and eBooks to this recent NYT op-ed belittling adults who read YA fiction (and/or play video games), it’s clear that high-culturalists are feeling some hostility toward new media and entertainment. Even critics whose job is ostensibly to elevate and defend pop culture seem to be a little bit picky about what is worth defending, and what isn’t. (I’m thinking in particular of Roger Ebert, who will valiantly sit through nightmarish, CGI-laden franchise films and critique them with an intelligence they may not deserve, but whose vehement disdain for video-games is well-documented.)

I am perplexed by this. On one level it seems like a basic fear of the unknown, since Franzen doesn’t use Twitter or read eBooks, the NYT columnist professes never to have read a YA novel, and Roger Ebert has never played a video game. But that seems somewhat hypocritical–after all, aren’t the guardians of high culture and high school English constantly telling us, with heaving bosoms and glassy eyes, that Good Art Pushes Boundaries And Changes People? Thus, wouldn’t shutting oneself off from a new form of entertainment or communication deliberately thwart what art is meant to do? I can’t help but observe that the only mind you can reliably change is your own. When an artist or a writer dismisses an entire medium of entertainment or communication offhand, without first having explored it himself, I am less apt to be persuaded by whatever else he has to say. The conversation should go both ways. If the artist expects to change his audience, he must also be open to being changed by that audience.

And a significant proportion of that audience buys eBooks, uses Twitter and plays video games.

So what is there to be afraid of? The undercurrent of all these complaints seems to be that the new will undermine the old. Because people play video games, they will watch fewer movies and read fewer books. Because people use Twitter, they will stop having conversations of greater than haiku-length. Because people read eBooks, they will begin to see all books as theoretical, editable and disposable.

Confronted with this kind of fear, I feel compelled to remind people that at one point, novels (which are still, historically speaking, a young art form) were considered a scandalously degenerate form of entertainment. In 19th century literature, the way to cast a woman as a dangerous liberal was to say she read French novels. Even Jane Austen, herself a novelist, chastised her readers for indulging in the gothic romances that were popular during her time. Two hundred years later, there is clearly no harm done. Novels have not destroyed society. Nor has the waltz, which was once considered shocking. (Men and women facing each other when they danced!) Mozart, in his day, was a rockstar. (Women fainted!) The Impressionists were bearded hippies who would destroy figurative art. (Van Gogh never sold a single painting while he was alive!) All high art starts out as pop culture. Maligned, dangerous pop culture.

The same is true of the modern media that inspires so much apocalyptic grumbling today. Twitter, video games and eBooks are not going to destroy western civilization, any more than the novel or the waltz or the Impressionists did. The amazing inventiveness of the human mind means that our thoughts shape themselves to whatever outlet is available. No doubt many Twitter conversations are profoundly stupid, but so are many conversations in real life. Yet I have had long back-and-forths on Twitter about politics, religion and art, all chopped up into 140-character chunks. Saying that it’s impossible to have a real conversation on Twitter because of length restrictions is like saying it’s impossible to express a real idea through poetry because the lines are too short. (Poor ee cummings–if only he had used prose, he might have made something of himself.)

This also applies to video games. Some are indeed Not Art. Most of those that are not art never set out to be art, so making the accusation is a little silly to begin with. On the other hand, some are real art. Good art. Groundbreaking art. Until a couple of years ago, I’d never played a video game in my life, and cultivated the same fashionable dislike for them that Ebert does. (This impulse to condemn a leisure activity you haven’t tried is a distant cousin of the impulse to burn a book you haven’t read, so beware of ethical sloppiness.) Then, on a whim, in order to research a column I was writing, I signed up for a free trial of World of Warcraft. Within an hour, I had repented of my slander, and instead of writing an essay mocking gamer culture, I became a gamer. I was blown away by the level of detail in open-world gaming environments, the immense technical skill that goes into creating them, the hundreds of intersecting story lines, the spontaneous creation of complex economies and cultural norms in the MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) world. Taken all together, a popular MMO like Warcraft transcends art and becomes something more like religion. Games like this require an incredible amount of skill and forethought. I challenge anybody who thinks video games are “brainless” to play one for ten minutes. Just ten minutes. The accusation that these games require no thought is so absurd that it can only come from a place of ignorance.

I guarantee that in fifty years, the cultural, technical and artistic implications of Skyrim will be debated with as much gravity as beat poetics. Phone me at the old folks’ home with your Google smartglasses if I’m wrong.

I don’t say any of this to pick on people. The older generation’s suspicion of the younger generation is a time-honored tradition that probably serves some kind of essential culturo-evolutionary function. I love Jonathan Franzen’s books, I am profoundly irritated by those lesser minds who whine about his success, and I think The Corrections stands up to the work of Marquez and Bellow and McCarthy as one of the best novels of the past 50 years. Roger Ebert is one of our last great cultural critics at a time when the role of the public intellectual is swiftly and tragically dying away. And Joel Stein, author of the NYT op-ed disparaging young adult fiction, is, I believe, pulling our collective leg. His avowal (“I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. [...] Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud.”) is so precisely what The Hunger Games is actually about that I have trouble believing he hasn’t read it, and isn’t writing with his tongue firmly in his cheek. After all, somebody had to play devil’s advocate. The rest of the columnists were pro-YA.

So this is not about calling anybody out. This is about retiring that flyblown old cliche, ‘the medium is the message’. The medium is not the message. The medium is the mechanism. It can deliver art or it can deliver smut. It is value-neutral. This is as true of Twitter and video games as is of any other medium that was supposed to bring down the world as we know it, and didn’t. Video games pose no more danger to society than did the movies a hundred years ago, or novels a hundred years before that. Email didn’t destroy human communication, and neither will Twitter. Repeat after me: It Will All Be Okay.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Feminists

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I used to think feminists were annoying. There, I said it. Once upon a time, as a blissful innocent, I thought gender issues were sufficiently managed, on the right track, and generally last-century, and that we were ready to move into a broader -ism. Humanism, for example. Part of this arose from being thoroughly spoiled–I was never told, growing up, that there were professions or activities I couldn’t participate in because I was a girl, and I never felt like I had fewer opportunities than the boys I knew. Another part was a cultural hangover from second-wave feminism, which seemed to suggest that in order to be equal to men, women had to be like men, something I found inherently contradictory. If women and men were equal, why did a woman have to stop being a woman in order to prove it? It seemed almost like an admission of inferiority.

As a result of all this, I became one of those people who, when listening to a feminist complaint about something relatively first-world (like whether or not a male boss patting a female subordinate on the shoulder constitutes sexual harassment in a corporate environment) would think “Jeez, enough already.” Were we really so helpless that we needed explicit rules for absolutely every interaction between between men and women everywhere at all times? That just seemed so Saudi Arabia.

Needless to say, there was a lot I was missing. (Both about feminism, and about Saudi Arabia.) As I grew older, two things happened: I started paying more attention to what was going on in the world, and I met a lot of different kinds of feminists. In the Middle East, I met feminists who wore headscarves and abayas and hated stiletto heels for the same reason the buzz-cut-sporting older feminists I’d met in the US hated stiletto heels. I met younger third-wave feminists who loved stiletto heels for totally opposite reasons. I realized that feminism is actually a fairly elusive idea, one that often takes women in opposite directions in pursuit of the same goal.

I also began to see, with frightening clarity, the malice. It would be too broad to say that men hate women, men are afraid of women, men desire power over women–though there are certainly men of whom all these things are true, there are many more men of whom none of these things are true. Yet there’s the malice. Creeping and ugly and everywhere, as though it has a life of its own. In the developing world it tends to take a very frank, graphic form: acid attacks, rape as a tool of war, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, chronic neglect of girls. (The latter three are becoming so prevalent that they have skewed the global gender balance. By a slim margin, despite the natural tendency of women to outlive men, there are now more men in the world than women.)

Yet the malice in the developed world is no less ominous for being rationalized and rich and dressed-up. Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan. Those are scary numbers.

But it’s the subtle stuff that really gets to me, because it’s the subtle stuff that gets passed off as normalcy. Last year there was a brouhaha in the comics world due to the lack of female writers and artists included in the DC reboot. This became a conversation about the gender-inclusivity of the comics industry as a whole. It rapidly became clear that the guys in charge, many of whom I’ve met and all of whom are very nice, simply had not noticed the imbalance. They looked around the room and never thought it odd that all the people in it were men. They blamed women for failing to submit their work for consideration. Never mind that neither DC nor Marvel has had an open submissions policy for years. (I have written for the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, the latter of which has some of the most intellectually rigorous standards in the periodical news industry, and I am here to tell you that that was easier than breaking into the comics industry. Easier by far.) It reminded me of nothing so much as certain all-male mosque boards who come up with arcane regulations to exclude women from community life and then blame women for their lack of interest.

Then, at around the same time, the sexual counter-revolution began in grand old halls of American conservatism. A woman who wanted her insurance company to cover birth control was suddenly a slut and a prostitute, whether she was single or married or religious or not. Not only was she a slut and a prostitute, but all three men running for president on the conservative ticket refused to denounce the windbag who called her a slut and a prostitute. (This is the rise of Christianism, by the way. What do you think the rise of Islamism looked like? I watched it happen, so I will tell you. It looked exactly like this.)*

In other words, white or black, eastern or western, Muslim or Christian or Jew or atheist, and yes, conservative or liberal, it all started to look the same: the slow, cheerful, firm, for-your-own-good, pseudo-rational eliding of space for women and rights for women.

It hasn’t affected me personally all that much. I’ve slipped the net. I’ve been lucky enough to work as a woman in the comics industry, write as a woman in a conservative religious community, and I’ve loved both experiences. For a long time my attitude was “if I can do, it, any woman can do it” but the fact of the matter is that’s not true. The world my daughter grows up in will be tougher for girls than the world I grew up in. We are going backwards. And that is what makes me livid.

So I learned to stop worrying and love feminists. Because you know what? Apparently, people need angry women shouting in their ears. Being nice hasn’t worked. Now when I read the feminist blogs dissecting and re-dissecting every little thing that’s wrong with primetime television or advertising or heck, the way groceries are bagged at the supermarket, I will bite my tongue. They are doing a public service. You need people on the periphery to show the middle where it’s headed. You need people to pay attention. And that’s what they’re doing.

* Someday soon I will write a post about why I think the rise of both Islamism and Christianism are probably not the end of the world, for the following reason: when extreme ideologies are forced to justify themselves in the marketplace of ideas, in a democratic setting, they are often compelled to become more moderate and tolerant in order to survive.

FYI

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I’ve turned off comment moderation, so your posts should start showing up right away. I’ll turn it back on if we end up with a lot of trolling or sp@m b0ts, but so far so good…

New Digs. New Book.

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So about two years ago, having just completed The Butterfly Mosque, I sat down to write a novel. I was deep into a wonderfully clarifying kind of rage.

The rage had been a long time coming. By this point, I’d spent years being frustrated by two things: one, the fact that I was so often forced to speak to my three primary audiences (comic book geeks, literary NPR types, and Muslims) separately. There were things I could talk about to Muslims that most non-Muslims wouldn’t understand; things I could say to fellow geeks that many of my coreligionists would find shocking; and sociopolitical shop talk in which I take a perverse delight, but which people who don’t consume the Sunday edition of the New York Times on a weekly basis would probably be bored to death by. Yes, I just ended a sentence in a preposition, and I am too lazy to fix it. Anyway.

The second thing was the mainstream media’s insistence that blogging and social media were no big deal and politically would amount to nothing, especially in the developing world. The global Gen Why was made up of texting slackers with no social consciousness, or so the official story went. By 2010, anybody who spent time on the internet knew that this was, if you will pardon me, total bullshit, and that Facebook, WordPress and Blackberry had provided a petri dish for a seething new epidemic of social change, particularly in the Middle East. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime was already wise to this, and had been in the business of arresting hacktivists for several years. But here in the US, I couldn’t get anybody to listen. Anybody. When I tried to explain to one very bright individual in the publishing industry why the internet was such a unique medium for conversation, his response was “I don’t understand why they can’t just pick up the phone and call each other.”

And so was born the rage. Anger is not always bad. Hatred and malice are always bad, but sometimes anger is the pure and determined light that shows you the way forward–not unlike joy. At least, this is what I think I learned from Les Miserables.

Out of the rage tumbled a story. If I couldn’t talk about the amazing things that were happening online in nonfiction, I would do it in fiction. And I wouldn’t stop there. I would draw in the pop culture I loved and the politics I found interesting and the literary influences that are part of who I am as a writer. I would write in my own inner voice, which does not distinguish between audiences, and hope that when those audiences finally got their hands on the finished product, they would see pieces of themselves in characters and situations they did not expect.

The result was Alif the Unseen. The titular character is a hacktivist in an unnamed emirate who battles shadowy, oppressive state security forces using methods both digital and arcane. (There are jinn involved, and ancient texts that are supposed to be hoaxes but aren’t. And at least one car chase.) While I was writing, even I thought I was maybe overdoing it just a little, and assigning too much importance to hackers and internet junkies in the Middle East. But I was fresh off a visit to Cairo, where a group of guys I’d met through Twitter organized a signing for me at a bookstore that was packed to the gills. We talked about comics and politics and the media, and I walked away with my heart pounding, thinking “this is really going to work.” I wasn’t even sure what “this” was.

Five months later, those same kids were overthrowing the government. I finished Alif the Unseen just as Mubarak left office, Tunisia was under new management, and uprisings had begun in Libya and Syria, in what would come to be called the Arab Spring.

Alif is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It comes out on July 3 from Grove/Atlantic Press. I encourage you to pre-order it from Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore (call and ask them to reserve your copy). Tell your friends. Tell your friends’ friends. Know that with each person you tell about Alif, I am sending you silent but fervent thanks.

I thought the new book deserved a freshly freshed-up website. Hence the new digs. I’ve slacked off on the blogging in the last couple of years, but I plan to be back a lot more now, so watch this space. We will talk more anon.