for nate
the following is an original work of Mr Steve Kolock, SF08. everything [sic].
"Sing to me, O muse, of the rage of the Womenfolk"
Somewhere between being picketed by angry women, shunned by angry women, and waiting for the bomb squad to arrive and defuse letter bombs sent to me by angry women, I had an epiphany: parts of my articles might somehow be making women angry. But why this was so I simply could not understand, however hard I tried; and I tried everything.
For weeks on end I stayed up late meditating on this anger whilst absorbed in hookers and booze -- yet to no avail. I reread my articles shod in women's lingerie trying to get into their minds through their pants -- and I was left even more confused than before.
No matter how revealing that teddy might be I simply couldn't see through to the body of this female anger. And I know it wasn't because the teddy didn't work on me. It looked sexy as hell against my ample bosom and supple skin, but there was just something essential lacking... it didn't quite bring out my eyes the way I'd expected.
After finally accepting (after much crying, weeping, sobbing, and questioning the existence of God in a world so cruel) that I would never find any lingerie that brought out my eyes properly, I decided I needed to take some 'me time' in order to recover. Usually this would have resulted in me watching a Gossip Girls marathon, but today was different. Today I was on a mission to discover the origin of this mysterious emotional response sent to me by women.
By the time I'd taken off the push up bra, wig, fishnet stockings, six inch heels, and crotchless panties (the sense of freedom you get in those is amazing), I'd begun to feel calmer and more in control of myself. I knew exactly what would help me understand this confounding isse of female anger; a nice walk in the plaza amidst the tourists I so dearly love.
As I neared the plaza, I could clearly see that the hustle and bustle of Santa Fe life before 5 pm was in full swing. Cars were driving poorly and threatening the safety of all; people were walking in the middle of the street oblivious to my car (aptly named Natural Selection) bearing down on them rapidly; and I was singing along to my favorite song: all was right in the world. "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me..." I bellowed to the scattering pedestrians in a bass voice that could only find its genesis in the depths of my soul. Already, in the midst of driving to my walk, I could feel insight pouring over me like that tender smell of chamisa on a sultry spring day.
Believing the drive to my walk to be exactly what I wished, I almost decided to turn around and go home to treat myself to a nice, hot bath surrounded by candles, enveloped in the harmony of Destiny's Child, and immersed in dark chocolate as God intended me. But alas, although this was a 'me day', it was a me day on a deeper level and I knew that deep inside my soul (in roughly the same area from which it sings bass) I needed to resolve this concern that plagued me so. So I told my shallow self, "I can't always cater to you," and soon sought a parking spot amidst the throngs of appalled witnesses to the process of evolution which Natural Selection and I had just affected.
Hearing the sirens swiftly weaving through traffic, I thought to start my walk with a brisk jog away from "the crime scene" (as the evening news that night so unfeelingly proclaimed it). Finally reaching the main plaza area I felt safe from the crazy drunk bastard we call Justice.
At this point all would have been exactly as I'd hoped had not intervention far from divine occurred. It was but a few minutes that I'd been walking along the plaza before I heard the familiar catcalls... cries of, "Hey cowboy, lookin' for a ride?" and "Is that a massive, Florida-shaped lump of steel in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" filled the air around me. "Damn this cowboy hat, these cowboy jeans, and this sweet Polish ass!" I thought to myself, "Will I never be able to walk in public without feeling I need to hide my precisely hourglass shaped figure from the world?" Those women were looking at me like I was just some sexually gifted manwhore and I knew it. And sure, they were completely and absolutely right; of course my sweet Polish ass is irresistible; of course I have a come-hither stare that can cause seizures in those uninitiated into the Mysteries of Steve; and of course in bed I have perfectly combined the tenderness of a dove and the raw power of a full grown T-Rex on PCP, but damnit if I didn't for once just want a little peace instead of a little piece.
...As I walked back to my car I hung my head, tears streaming down my face. I wasn't sad. I was angry. Angry at those pedestrians for not getting out of my way in time and angry at those women for not viewing me in any other light than that which provided the best illumination of my award winning ass. "How could they be so hurtfully blind," I asked myself, "as to not even have thought about exploring my mind before my body, and to not even have looked in my eyes before undressing me with theirs?"
For just a moment I wondered if I'd come upon an answer to the question that drove me. Were the women who were threatening my life angry because they thought I'd been lacking the requisite respect for them? This realization hit me like Natural Selection.
Perhaps I'd been selling women short; perhaps I'd been treating them as a nameless, faceless people without a rational faculty or even a soul. But to those who would say this I ask; isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery? And don't I look damn good in that teddy? I leave it to you to decide....
[there were three cheesecake shots of a mincing Kolock clad in the aforementioned teddy and a cowboy hat. i'm not scanning them.]
posted by anne @ 3:16 PM
17 Comments:
Wow. Just. Wow.
Your tutor thought this was good?
Well, be fair. If it weren't so bad, it might have been mediocre.
julia: the tutor said this without having read the article. he's the kid's senior paper advisor, and may have had him in class. it's possible kolock won the sophomore essay prize; the tutor, as well as several members of the class, spoke of it glowingly. i don't know how they'd be familiar with it, had someone not given it to them as something worth emulating. i haven't read it.
So, wait. You're offended that the tutor and other students spoke glowingly of another piece this student has written? You're mortified that they're not all willing to utterly write him off because of this piece of writing that at least the tutor had not even read? I really hope I'm misunderstanding you.
I find this piece more confusing than anything else. I see how a person could find it offensive, though it seems to me to be so thickly mired in an indeterminate number of layers of irony that it's somewhat difficult to construe the piece's real intent. It does strike me as exactly the sort of thing that fills college papers everywhere, which is to say that the writer seemed so delighted with himself that it was difficult to finish.
The real problem with this is that it could have been in any college paper in the country. This is itself a twofold problem. First, a humor column that could have been in the NCSU Technician or (god help us all) the Duke Chronicle has no place in a St. John's paper. That's not snobbery, that's just saying that our campus culture should be so different that similar humor should not work.
Second, the appearance of these things in college papers all over the country seems to be on the rise. I'm assuming it is a generational thing, and that these kids really think that they're all going to grow up to be writers for Howard Stern or Southpark. As Mike was saying on his blog, there's something they never learned about common decency or how to act like a human being that is just stunning.
"That's not snobbery, that's just saying that our campus culture should be so different that similar humor should not work."
Our reasons might be slightly different (might), but I really, really agree with that statement. I remember being a bit mystified by the presence of much humor that seemed juvenile and in poor taste at things like Prank and Reality. Weren't Johnnies, umm... smarter than that?
Also, 'South Park' is probably the best way to describe that column, Liz. Bad South Park.
nate: the students spoke glowingly of both. the tutor said at the beginning of the conversation that he had not read the piece in The Moon.
kolock's enabling essay was brought up when i complained that the article was poorly written -- logic being, i suppose, that if one paper he wrote was good, everything he wrote must be. i have serious questions about the likelihood of that, given the sorts of flaws to be found in the article. this is not the first article he's written for The Moon, and the others articles he has written have had the same problems in their structure and in their execution.
i was despairing because both the students and the tutor evidently lack knowledge of the mechanics of writing. the students, additionally, lack the insight to understand how this piece was offensive, and aren't curious enough to want to examine the thought that it might be. the tutor didn't really seem interested in that question one way or another, but did try to defend the piece without having read it by claiming that kolock was "very thoughtful, very smart" -- again, implication being that what i said just couldn't be true. since kolock had some brilliant insights during the reading of The New Testament, he could not have possibly written a piece that was both incomprehensible *and* offensive. i didn't see how such a claim followed, and the tutor was unwilling to back it up.
If that was the argument that you made to them at the time, then I fully applaud you: that's an excellent way to try to bring out the truth in a situation like this.
And, yeah, it did seem like Kolock was referring to a larger context in his piece. I'm curious: why are you particularly struck by the mechanical failures of the column?
By the way, am I correctly reading the article in inferring that the joke is that his attempt to understand things from "the other side" runs the gamut of all the sexist stereotypes he knows? Did the other students find it funny because of that self-consciousness?
If your worry is that such humor can be used as an excuse to say or do bad things ("Don't you see, though? I winked!"), I think I probably agree: that's my predominant reaction. (My second one is just to roll my eyes at the unsophistication of it.)
i tried to make the argument at the time, but only the tutor and one other student stuck around to have that conversation with me. everyone else left.
it's not clear why the students found it funny, because they weren't interested in having a conversation. i did ask, but people just said, when asked, "well, i thought it was hilarious!" it wasn't clear to me what level students were reading it on, and given that many other columns in the paper were written with an absolute lack of self-consiousness, it didn't play well. in his response to me through Facebook, he indicated that the joke is the one you outline, but other things he's written and pranks he's played make it really hard for me to
a) take that claim of his at face-value -- he's very non-self-consciously engaged in gay-bashing
b) think he can use that sort of humour appropriately, because, overfond as he is of his own cleverness, any points he meant to make got lost in all the stereotype retreads
because his writing is unclear, it fails as satire. he might laugh at the people who read it and think he takes what he says seriously, but all that does is shore up the stereotypes in those who read it. he doesn't have to suffer any fallout from that, but women on campus do, and there are a lot fewer of us -- the gender split at SJC is currently something like 60-40. i had a few female freshmen come up to me later and agree with me that the article was in poor taste, but they felt uncomfortable speaking up in class, with all the boys praising it so exuberantly. that's not a healthy situation.
i'm particularly sensitive to the problems in his writing because the ability of students to express themselves in writing is so very poor. kolock is better at it than the average student, which wins him much praise, but it's only valid praise in context; he's better than everyone else, but everyone else is terrible. by holding him up as an example, when his writing is decent but not great, the students steer themselves wrong.
kolock, by having such a high opinion of his work (something i confirmed in correspondence with him), cripples himself. if you refuse to accept useful criticism of your work, you're never going to improve -- and writers can always improve. a friend of mine who writes for The Moon confirmed that kolock gets whatever he wants printed, over as many pages as he wants, without any edits, because he's so respected as an awesome writer. the kid doesn't know how to use a freakin' semicolon properly. this brings out my angry inner copyeditor.
The Moon has also, in the past, made certain editorial choices designed to undercut the points of people who do submit pieces that are not in this South Park style.
because the article was poorly structured and parts of it poorly written, the understanding that it's parody has to be teased out. that the reader is left unclear does not seem to be an intentional effect, but rather a failure on the part of the writer. the article, if it was worth running at all, should have been heavily revised first. otherwise, the majority of readers are just going to read it as a general high-fiving of those ugly attitudes it purports to mock.
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Just dropping in to say: thanks for posting this, Anne. It was the indirect cause of a good bit of thought and a post over on my blog. I'd repost it here (it was first intended as a comment here) but it's long enough and tangential enough that that'd be threadjacking.
(You are welcome to read the blog - I've passworded it just to keep the tone set to 'dinner party', rather than 'public performance.' But it's just another personal blog among millions.)
Anne: what you wrote seems to me like a very good draft for a letter to the editor.
you are a huge cunt & need to get a life; hope you enjoy this semicolon.
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You post my article on the internet without my permission, you wrongly assert that it was I who was dressed in tights, when in fact it was Eddie Letterman, and you post nothing (as far as I can see) of our actual conversation and meeting that I invited...yet you claim to have lost your faith in others?
Did you know that I received no angry letters? Of course not, you took everything in my writing at face value. You can criticize it as much as you like, but you colored it yourself because of what you assumed about it. Following our meeting you never submitted an article opening up the discussion about sexism - an idea I openly encouraged. Your self-righteous bashing is half-hearted and vain. Before you criticize the greater humanity and those who do, do something yourself and listen to what is being said. No, I do not consider myself exempt from this advice. I just know that you've wronged me in this and your fierceness in blogging did not carry over to the conversation we had where you freely admitted you had misunderstood my intent and projected what you were feeling onto my article (the one that apparently did not cause you the most distress...yet the only one I see mentioned here.
I had a bit of respect for you for coming to me to discuss the problem until my sister stumbled upon this page through a google search (she was bored and searched my name - it happens). Now I can give you no excuse for neither submitting an article to the Moon to help your cause, nor coming to me first instead of after having bashed me to your friends. Think what you will of me and what I write, but then look in the mirror and ask yourself what your rageful blogging has done to improve anything.
Sorry to respond so late, but as this post is still online I can see no reason for you not to be open to comments.
-Steve Kolock
EDIT: I had given you permission to leave this article up but am now rescinding that permission. Obviously I want this taken care of ASAP but understand it is probably not your first priority. I will leave a comment on your more recent post to be assured you get this message. I apologize in advance for doing so. I'll do my best not to hijack your thread.
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