The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott, author of “The Politics of Abortion” (Encounter, 2006). Focusing on such details, she said, is how so-called “incrementalists” are trying to chip away at the availability of abortion. These opponents try to make women, doctors and other health professionals talk more, in some cases a lot more, about the actual consequences and mechanics of abortion. With the court’s ruling and the new fuel it gives to the strategy of encouraging those discussions, Professor Hendershott said, the incrementalists have won the debate — if not over abortion, then at least over how to fight it. “This case changes the conversation,” she said. “The battle between the incrementalists and those who wanted a constitutional amendment was won by the incrementalists.”

That sounds right to me, up to a point. In this case, pro-lifers managed to snag a pretty broad ruling from a procedure that is extremely uncommon: Dilation and Extraction (D&X) is only used in about 1% of abortions in the US. But the moral indignation of breaking the holy line of parturition, killing an organism that has passed out of the womb, and so is no longer completely an embryo in many eyes, has overridden both the safety of mothers, the restrictions of viability, and the arguments for privacy rights. The strategy is ingenious, but as I’ve been arguing for some time now, it will backfire.

First, the pro-life movement has lost its poster-child case, the weird liminal moment when a baby is partially delivered and then destroyed. All their allies in that case will be a lot more wary when it comes to Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) or Dilation and Curettage (D&C), both of which don’t suffer from D&X’s tendency to break the traditional barrier between fetus and baby. Those procedures account for the vast majority of abortions, and I don’t really believe that the legislatures or the courts will support their banning.

More importantly, every woman I know is outraged. Maybe they don’t like D&X, but they also don’t like the overt paternalism of Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision: ‘mere preference’ is going to get him into a lot of trouble. Nor do they like the loss of the ‘life of the mother’ exception. These are women who have mostly ignored the question of abortion since they settled their opinions in their late teens, and yet now they’re up in arms, militant. It seems sad that the peace and quiet of the last few decades, the partial gag rules we’ve had on abortion talk in polite society, have been torn asunder: it is now a proper topic of discussion in legislatures and will undoubtedly be an election issue. But previously the only militants were on the right: most women could afford not to care about the issue, since their rights were apparently secure. Groups like the National Organization of Women, NARAL Pro-Choice, Emily’s List, and Planned Parenthood were bearing the brunt of the attacks by pro-lifers, and they bore them well. The average female college student could afford to be indifferent, disgusted by the title ‘Feminist,’ bored by the debates over women’s treatment in the workplace or the risks of sexual assault.

Now? Not so much. Now, they’ve got something to lose. And they won’t accept incremental gains; they’ll go for the jugular. So… which do you like better: another pass at the Equal Rights Amendment, a Privacy Amendment, or maybe just an Women’s Right to Choose Amendment?

It looks like:

1. “The median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men. It is even higher for those with graduate degrees. In Massachusetts, the median age at first marriage is 27.2 for women and 29.2 for men.”
2. “In a historic reversal of past trends – one that is good news for young girls who like to use big words – college graduates and high-earning women are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings, although they are older when they do so. Even women with PhDs no longer face a “success penalty” in their nuptial prospects.”
3. “[T]here is now a “success premium” for highly educated black women, who are more likely to get married and also more likely to stay married than other black women. Fewer than 50 percent of African-American women with a high school education are married, compared with more than 55 percent of African-American women with 19 years of school.”
4. “The 2001 Journal of Marriage and Family paper found that in mate-preference surveys taken in 1985 and 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to number 5 on men’s list of desirable qualities in a mate in both surveys, ahead of good looks. Meanwhile, the desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place in both surveys, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. And in choosing a spouse, males with a college degree rate good looks much lower in importance than do high school graduates.”
5. “[C]ollege-educated couples have lower divorce rates than any other educational group. And in the last 30 years, while the marriages of less-educated women became less stable, the marriages of college-educated women became more stable. College graduates are more likely to have egalitarian ideas about sharing housework and breadwinning, and recent research shows that egalitarian ideas and behaviors improve marital satisfaction for both men and women.”
6. “They have better sex lives, too. According to sociologist Virginia Rutter of Framingham State College, surveys show that educated couples engage in more variety in their sex lives…. Educated husbands are also more likely to help with housework, which turns out to be a potent aphrodisiac.”
7. “In fact, Barnett’s new study of dual-earner couples, based on data from the 1990s, found that as the wife worked more, the husband’s view of the quality of his marriage actually improved. Surveys also show that the longer a woman holds a job, the more child care and housework her husband is likely to do, and that well-educated men have increased their housework more than less-educated ones.”
8. “[O]ne of the biggest predictors that a marriage will be stable and happy, according to Gottman, the psychologist, is if a husband responds positively when his wife expresses a desire for change. It helps if she asks nicely. But it doesn’t help if she avoids the issue and lets her discontent simmer.”

“If I go back to the beginning. I could start it over again. Here. I could go line by line. Try and find a shorter way. I could try to make it… better.”

These lines are the overture of both the play and the film. Robert, the crazy mathematician dad, continually exhorts his daughter Catherine to work through his proof in this way, to take the results of his addled mind and improve upon it. Catherine resists this all through the film, because of course the proof her father has written is garbage… or poetry, at least. It’s not mathematics. But at the end, when she sits down with her new lover, Hal, she quotes these lines to the audience, ostensibly because they are about to work through her great invention together.

In truth, she has come to terms with her own inheritance; not the proof itself, which she is now confident is her own, but her brain, which preserves her father’s insight and brilliance but is not quite so prone to insanity. She takes her life and her psyche as an extraordinary result of her father’s inventiveness, left to her to work through again, from the beginning. She is his daughter, and in the way of children she supplies a proof that he existed even after he died, and that he existed long after he stopped publishing prize-winning mathematics. At the same time, she has the opportunity to work through the life of a brilliant, potentially schizophrenic mathematician ‘again’, to improve on the version of that life that her father led. So when she finds the shorter way in Hal, when she agrees to work at “it” (life, math, love, etc.) rather than waste away in bed or in an institution, she’s improving on the model her father gave her.

This emphasis on the novelty that children introduce, rather than the therapeutic obsession with nature/nurture, is something that scientific minds share with political minds. The notion that we’re not stuck doing the same math, living in the same polis, forever, but rather that we can innovate and achieve better results, learn from our heritage and improve upon it… that’s the essence of the revolutionary spirit. I love the spaces and disciplines that look at the world through this perspective. In math, sadly, there’s a tendency to subsume the singular insight of this or that genius into the ‘machinery of the mind,’ which operates in such a way as allow someone to briefly see farther than his (and it’s always his) fellows by dint of youth and some barely-contained psychosis.

I like Catherine’s model better, the feminine model of genius and innovation; over-old, constantly struggling with the conflicting imperatives of care and creation, with the low expectations of sexism and the automatic arrogance of paternalistic professors and experts, she still manages to accomplish a great thing. Yet of course her achievement is so far outside the expectations of the establishment that even her new boyfriend suspects that her crazy old man must have produced it in a lucid moment. Worse, she worries that she should allow him the credit for it, as if to make another stereotypically feminine sacrifice to care and concern.

This is the problem with all making, whether it’s knowledge-work or carpentry; even one’s signiature easily fades into the woodwork, even the marks of mind and intellect that we leave in the phantom ‘voice’ of the written word or the signal turns of a mathematical argument are easily missed. And this is a problem too for political innovation, which so often requires both a courageous act and the willingness to recede from the spotlight so that the peace brokered or the nation founded can flourish on its own.

I’m thinking a little of Solon here, who wrote the constitution of Athens and brokered a peace instead of civil war. He was so concerned to avoid the fate of a tyrant that he retired from public life after that act. This was the temptation that Catherine faces in the film; to achieve something groundbreaking but avoid the attention, the credit, and the expectations for future work. To keep working, to remain a source of novelty… these are the challenges that every daughter and every son faces. The alternative to is to become another kind of source, to give birth to a revolutionary, a doctor, or a novelist. The challenge is to act and to make in such a way that what one has done or produced doesn’t weigh you down. At the same time, all action worthy of the name threatens just this weightiness; any journal article or blog post could turn out to be the one thing that you will always be remembered by and judged against. I like the riskiness of that proposition: I think that’s the courage of Proof.

Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it’s this sort of infighting that makes the Left so weak. The women and men who are peeved at him think they should be able to expect that the leaders of the progressive internet movements would share their values and their taste. They don’t like it that Aravosis doesn’t understand, as one commentator wrote: “[the female] half of the population resents being the default insult.” I’ve already said what I think of those with whom we don’t share a common sense of humour and disparagement here: we live in different worlds.

The short of Eribon’s argument (forgoing the Foucault exegesis) is that the culture of witty arguments and putdowns that erupted after Oscar Wilde is gay, even when the participants were straight. He argues “that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves.” How do we do this? By beating our detractors to the punch, and by literally outwitting our opponents. I like this argument, especially for what it says about gay snobbery and gossip: give gay men a break for being so catty, because they’ve earned it.

The funny thing about Eribon’s argument is the history: wars of wit were going on in salons and coffee shops long before anglophone homosexuals started making their way out of the closet. Perhaps many of the contributors were a bit effiminate, concerned as they were with letters and language rather than business and war, but their sex life wasn’t the issue. These witty dialogues lead to the revolutions in the Americas and in France. Just think of the exchanges of letters between the Loyalists and the Patriots in the late eighteenth century that sparked the American Revolution. Alternatively, take Rousseau and his participation in War of the Buffonists, which eventually lead him to write the inspiring documents of the French Revolution: he went from unnatural music to anti-aristocratic philosophy. They rode the Enlightenment horse until it collapsed, gasping, to the ground.

What really drove the bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas tells it between the lines of his Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, were the nasty, gossipy, wonderful women of the day. Here was a space in which women and men could interact and test their intelligence against each other. This is what I love about the Habermasian view: for him, wit and wisdom are inseparable. Deliberative democracy will always entail incivility, as we sharpen our minds by sharpening our tongues. It’s not a structural argument so much as it is genealogical: that’s just how it happened, and probably we should struggle for civility when we can.

As Chris Clarke puts it (I’m stealing a connection from Sentiments of Rationality here):

My point: it is not civil to discuss things quietly and collegially while people are dying because they can’t afford medicine. It is not civil to speak in even, chuckling sardonicism as one beleaguered wild place after another is paved for profit. It is not civil to calmly raise logical arguments against torture, against kidnapping, against using nuclear weapons on civilians to show our resolve.

Without the current context, the broader point stands. Politics is, and should be, about passionate convictions. While we don’t want every debate about highway funding to end in civil war, we can also recognize that the regular flaring of passions and subsequent linguistic creativity is an important part of the legitimacy-formation of a government. People need the outlet of incivility if they are to avoid insurrection while making concrete steps towards their goals. Meanwhile, all this cussing and insult-slinging leads to a creative, wise class of people who can wield language to propogate policies, propagandize, and polemicize effectively. It’s a good thing.

So:
1. Civility is bad.
2. Gays and women were responsible for the first strains of incivility in the contemporary democratic era. Yay!
3. Women and gays are now at each other’s throats, at least a little bit, about an insult.

Aravosis should apologize, but he can’t. He can’t admit that effeminizing terms slung at a male (Senator Pat Robert, the real bad guy) are actually nothing to do with him, but rather aimed at women. To do so would be to deny his own experience, an experience of trauma that he and gay culture deal with by turning those terms right back at their oppressors. For Aravosis, the sting has been taken out of “big girl” by a practiced repetition amongst his friends, and the pleasure of that witty repartee is that he can now make Republican Senators squirm.

But what about all those women? They’re justifiably angry to be represented by terms which the rest of us throw around as derogations. I’ve done it myself, and I know many women who do it, too. The idea, as for gay men, is to beat the oppressor at his own game. (I’ll never forget the first time my boss, a tough lesbian ex-prosecutor, told a burly male investigator not to be “such a girl about things.”) And that, I think, is the key: not to save “girlhood” from its wimpy connotations, but for women to distance themselves from it as well. Most of the professional women I know take exception to ‘girliness’ already; they’re “women” and refuse any other appelation. Why should all the women who jumped at Aravosis’ comment choose to re-associate themselves with pre-pubescent females? The picture of a Republican Senator as a small, long-haired child lacking pubes or external genitalia seems pretty funny to me. Would ‘boy’ have worked as well? Maybe. But, especially for a gay man, it’s hard to turn that word into a meaningful insult.

I must speak from my own experience here, because that’s all I have. When the real boys and girls fought it out on the playground, the girls always won. Before puberty, girls had the physical advantage over boys, and any attempt to denigrate the giggling gaggle would likely earn a young man a kick in the ‘nads. So why don’t we let girls fight their own battles? From what I’ve seen, they seem to do fine on their own.

In On The Trinity, things become more complicated. Augustine begins by supplying a hierarchy that places the contemplative faculty above the will, and argues that the faculty “to judge of these corporeal things according to incorporeal and eternal reasons” such as ratio and shape, is “part of the higher reason.” Judgment, subsumed under contemplation, nonetheless provides the bridge by which contemplation accesses the corporeal. Augustine takes up this bridging through a sexual metaphor, identifying men and women with the faculties of contemplation and will, and noting that they “embrace” and become “one flesh” in the fashion of marriage and intercourse. Yet this sexing of the spirit’s relationship to the corporeal and the problem of action raises the problem of evil and temptation. Sex is supposed to be bad, right?

Augustine embraces this problem, and supplies a typology whereby all temptation can be read allegorically in the story of Eve’s temptation of Adam with the fruit of knowledge. While earlier in the text he appeared to assign the will the role of fulfilling contemplation’s commands, in order to mirror patriarchal dominance, this story forces him to rearticulate the relationship. So while it seems to his fellow Christians that contemplation and judgment are uniquely or archetypically masculine, he refuses to relegate men to passivity when their role in society shows that they should be assigned to an active principle.

This results in a then-progressive assignment of rational capacity to women. Augustine denies that contemplation and prayer are impossible for women, which will trouble the Catholic Church for centuries before it decides on the priest/nun distinction. In order to supply the requisite inadequacy in women, (for no progressive egalitarian can really stomach a loss of his own cherished superiority) Augustine charges them with a lack of moral turpitude. Females, he suggests, lack sufficient willfulness to resist temptation.

Yet what women might lack in will and power is offset by a corresponding lack of judgment and reasonableness in men. The will may command as a man would have commanded a woman, but the will can only command actions based on the options supplied by contemplation. In the household metaphor, the man stays comfortably ensconced within the home, while the woman goes out into the world and gathers provisions (sense data and perceptions). After her return, the feminine contemplation supplies a choice to the masculine will. However, this choice is something like a menu of options: “Potato chips or a salad?” Yet there remains the problem that some part of the mind must correctly discern that this is a decision that has a correct answer. The question is really: “Junk food or a healthy meal?” But is this capacity for discernment a feminine or a masculine trait? Who best understands the choice: “Sin or virtue?”

In responding to the claim that it is the senses that tempt the mind, and that therefore women are wholly corporeal and spiritually inadequate to salvation, Augustine invokes a trinity, assigning the senses the role of the serpent that tempted Eve. Here, the woman (reason) receives a tempting offer for an extra-marital affair (pleasure), and must decide to stay true to her husband (the will) or to revel in temptation (the senses). Every sin and every act of faith follows this model. In this formulation, again, the contemplative faculty is cast as Eve, in that the received sensory impressions that provide the serpent’s temptations are mediated by contemplation (in the form of judgment) before they proceed to tempt the will to act or remain chaste.

Augustine reaches the conclusion that there is and must be a “rational wedlock of contemplation and action,” which opposes the “hidden wedlock” (adultery) of sin. (OT, XII, 12) But how is the woman to decide between her secret lover and her lawful partner? Augustine calls the answer knowledge, “scientia,” which for Augustine is the practical side of wisdom, “sapientia.” If wisdom discerns the eternal law, than knowledge tells us what it means. Sapience gives us access to the rule, while science is the application of those rules to cases. This will come to be called judgment.

The result is a series of trinities, wherein the second term mediates between the first and third, and seems always to be feminine: perception-reason-will becomes reason-judgment-will. In the first case, the sexual binary makes woman the mediator: the judge who tempts the will. But in the second case, it is still the woman who chooses the lover over the husband or vice versa. Augustine gives up on the sexuation of the mind at this point, refusing to sex knowledge and wisdom, though he might easily have assigned men a superior cacacity for intellection of the divine here by supplying women with mere cleverness for worldly matters.

As the sexual metaphors breaks down, Augustine also points up the inevitable problem of subsuming judgment wholly under the mind’s other faculties. He had begun with identifying judgment with contemplation as such, but he runs into the problem of expansion: contemplation must contemplate itself at times. We must occasionally take our thoughts and think about them. Without a separate capacity, this seems likely to result in a sort of infinite undecidability. Judgment and contemplation cannot be simply utilized by the will, nor discerned by reason, but must actually act distinct from them, based both on experience and the courage of character or moral luck that allows a person to found her judgments of those experiences correctly.

What I mean is this: we don’t know how to be victims. We’re not even sure what it looks like, except when we see it happen to someone else. I worked two blocks from the World Trade Center, I’ve had my car radio stolen, I’ve been punched in the face by a number of strangers, and I’ve never felt like a victim. It’s not Stockholm syndrome, exactly, although that’s the card that conservatives play. It’s not that we side with the terrorists or the criminals: pasty boys like myself are more than happy to spit in the eye of the thief, trade jabs, and cry at the atrocities committed against our friends and colleagues.

We’re not siding with the bad guys when we ask questions about causes and effects, or use our loss as an excuse to buy a really nice new stereo. It’s just that we’re imaginatively-impaired: we simply can’t imagine that the experiences we’ve undergone are truly victimizing. Poverty, brutality, disease: when they happen to other people, they’re the effect of social and economic conditions, tragic and unfair and inexcusably our fault. When they happen to us, they’re still our own fault, the combination of failed ingenuity and lack of manly action. Why didn’t I park closer to a doorman? Why did I support a government with such stupidly cruel mid-East policies? Why didn’t I punch him first?

From this recognition, there are a number of different judgments available to white men and the theorists of race and gender. Many identify this sense of agency as an enviable characteristic that, like other social goods, should be shared more equitably throughout the population. They prescribe the arrogant presumption of us pale-skinned poppas to all the non-white, non-masculine, non-affluent, non-hetero victims. A world full of people who don’t experience victimhood, they argue, is a world without victims. Those with the mentality of victimhood are thus to blame for their lack of agency, which is a particularly disturbing account of the problem of politics, and one that I often associate with Hannah Arendt, who I otherwise respect. The fault is not in our stars, this line of reasoning goes, but in our selves.

The other possibility is to take very seriously a structural notion of the constitution of subjectivity, such that action and passion, agents and victims, require each other, and support each other. On this model, in-groups require an Other in order to sustain their own solidarity, and cream-colored cocksmen need someone to dominate and victimize in order to realize their own potency. The family unit becomes a microcosm of power and passivity, and produces both strength and weakness.
As such, the world is constructed from these interlinked pairs: the heteronormative couple, the parent-child relation, bosses and their subordinates. These have macroscopic effects as well, based in larger social concatenations: the imperial hegemon and its provincial periphery, the developed and underdeveloped world, or the Global North and South.

If anything, the so-called ‘plight’ I described is simply a refusal of these relations without a coinciding sacrifice of the subject position of invulnerability. Neither stoically self-mastered, nor accepting of one’s lot in the global hierarchy, today’s bougeoius Caucasian male is caught between rejecting the racial/sexual contract and giving up the spoils of racist patriarchy completely. It’s a tough situation, if you’re moved by the tragic flaws of our Oedipal heroes (and probably you aren’t). But since it’s my blog, and “my” problem, I’ll continue to work on it.

The solution may lie in the one possibility I ignored: what happens when dudes like me come to understand our own position as something for which we are not responsible? What happens when we take ourselves as victims, as passively undergoing the imprint of social and cultural forces beyond our control? When we take it as given that we are not the agents of our destiny, but rather the product of the work and efforts of others? To understand the victimhood suffered even by the top dog in a hierarchical society, we would have to sacrifice just that invulnerability that seemed most central to the masculine identity. In its place, however, it seems as if we might gain a responsiveness, a passivity on the other side of quiescent inertia that acts not of its own will, but at the nexus of social forces and as the plurality of calls of conscience.

What that means for the impassive non-victim is that we can imagine a type of subjectivity that is neither dominating nor submissive. It would replace the mythical invulnerability with which I began with something a bit more reasonable: a vulnerability which is neither frail nor weak. No longer committing gravitational absurdities like ‘lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps,’ we would have to acknowledge those who help us up, and what sorts of duties those helping hands engaged for us. I should like to think that this newly vulnerable character would still be animated, moved and moving, a vital part of the exchange of goods and ideas. Nor is it a matter of ceding the spotlight to women and minories, but of widening the spotlight until being enlightened ceases to be special. But the key to this vulnerable virility is to fundamentally alter our views of acting and undergoing: we have to change the way it feels to be ourselves, to perform our identities and undergo out educations. It’s a phenomenological project, a matter of reforming the horizons of our worldliness.

Sadly, I’m concluding on something of an abstract note. But this third-way masculinity has always struck me as importantly inspirational, a principle waiting to be put into practice. Like most novel ideas, it is not my own: I’m actually cribbing from a half-dozen of Jacques Derrida’s essays, and especially his book Aporias. Derrida himself is hardly an originator: his most important works were always readings, deconstructions, of the work of others. But if the idea is right, that imprint undergoes alterations to fit, and its transmission is never an exact repetition. It bears his patronym, but also my own signiature. The more of us who take up this style, write these ideas in our own voice and in our hand, the better off we’ll all be.

Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from expert witness John M. Opitz, MD:

Sandel: “…[W]hat percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost?”
Opitz: “Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost.“

Hmmm…. so, in 2003, there were about 4 million babies born in the United States. Given the most conservative estimate of 60% lost before parturition, that means that 6 million embryos were destroyed by natural causes. This is convenient, as it is the most popular estimate for Jewish deaths during the Shoah (Holocaust). Since I’ve previously railed against the equation of abortion with genocide, this seems apropos.

If I can find some global population statistics that chart total human population throughout history, I’m thinking of putting up a running total: Abortions: God v. Man. This would be especially interesting given plague and disaster death rates, plus historical v. current infant mortality rates. Sadly, I’m not a statistician, I’m a philosopher, so I’ll continue to depend on the experts. The CDC recorded 857,000 abortions in 2000, so, to keep the numbers round, let’s say 1 million.

For 2003:
Humans: 1 million
God: 6 million

I would argue that any God worthy of invocation (i.e., an intelligent designer, deist or participatory) would not design a system with such a lousy success rate if this deity were concerned primarily with the survival of all embryos. Thus, God is objectively not pro-life. If you believe in predestination or election, then all conceivable omnipotent and omniscient creator-Gods must be understood as pro-choice (not ours, though) and pro-death.

As much as I like the notion of the holiday, the festive or serious commemoration of a struggle or a cause, I can’t help wondering what we’ve got to celebrate. If you can’t take a vacation day to go march in protest, why bring it up at all? And has anyone noticed that Women’s History is playing second fiddle to the Red Cross, Irish Americans, Peanuts, Frozen Foods, Crafts, and Music in Our Schools, all of which also celebrate the month of March?