1.
It’s been fifteen years since I’ve been able to stomach John Irving’s novels, and yet I keep buying his new books. His most recent novel, In One Person, sat on my nightstand for six months before I finally cleared it off in a fit of New Year’s resolutions. I felt guilty as I placed it on my bookshelf near Last Night In Twisted River, Irving’s previous novel, also abandoned. I had gotten both in hardcover, unable to wait for the paperback editions — unable to wait even as I knew I would be unlikely to finish them. The last Irving novel I finished (and enjoyed) was 1998’s A Widow For One Year.
My reading of In One Person followed a typical pattern. First, there was a period of comfort as I settled into Irving’s slightly askew fictional world, happily noting familiar milieus (New England, private boarding schools, wrestling teams), and subjects (sexual outsiders, small town politics, literary awakening). But boredom crept in as the plot began to take shape. It wasn’t so much that I could predict what was going to happen. (Even a mediocre Irving novel delivers when it comes to plot twists and secret revelations.) It was more that I felt trapped, as if I were seated next to a dinner party bore, the kind who has to tell his anecdotes just so, and won’t stand for questions or interruptions. In One Person is told in the first person, a point of view that allows for ambiguity, but Irving doesn’t like to leave anything open to interpretation. From the beginning of In One Person it’s clear who is good and who is hiding something; who is going to meet a bad end and who is going to be saved. Irving even alerts readers to his jokes, using italics and exclamation points on every page. Much of In One Person concerns the theater, and as I read Irving’s highly punctuated dialogue, I began to think of him as a director who gives line readings.
As I put In One Person aside, I wondered if I was just too old for John Irving. Maybe his books had always been this didactic, but when I was younger, I didn’t mind as much. Or maybe I had outgrown Irving’s old-fashioned storytelling techniques; maybe, as the author David Shields has suggested, we’re all getting sick of the narrative grunt work that fills the traditional novel, the acres of backstory and scene-setting that authors like Irving must deploy at the beginning of their epics — what Shields calls “the furniture-moving, the table-setting.” Or maybe my boredom with Irving had to do with television: maybe I’d been getting my nineteenth-century novel fix from soapy serials like Mad Men and Downton Abbey.
Or maybe John Irving’s books just weren’t as good as they used to be.
I decided to find out, taking all my Irving novels down from my shelves and getting the rest from the library — an errand that required a special trip to my library’s Central Branch. As I carried my Irving novels home, I felt the glimmer of the anticipation I used get as a teenager, when I checked out one of his books. I could see those old Irving covers in my mind’s eye, the ones with just his name and the title in a large font, because that was all you needed to know; there was no need for cover art, hinting at what the novel was “about.” Irving would let you know what it was about in due time. All you had to do was read.
2.
I started reading John Irving when I was thirteen. My mother recommended The World According to Garp in a moment of exasperation. I was at a difficult age, reading-wise — too old for children’s books, but too unseasoned a reader to navigate the adult section of the library. My mother gave me novels from her own library, classics she thought appropriate for a young girl: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Ethan Frome. The only one I liked was Ethan Frome — a novel about a terrible accident, set in New England. Maybe that’s why my mother thought I would like The World According to Garp.
“This book is probably not appropriate for someone your age,” she said. And then she added, cryptically. “It’s about castration anxiety. So don’t be alarmed.”
It was summer, and I remember I read the book in two afternoons, sitting underneath the locust tree in our backyard. I had never read anything so funny or with such vivid characters. The settings, too, were fascinating to me, especially the scenes that took place in the fictional New Hampshire boarding school of Steering Academy. My family had lived in Exeter, New Hampshire, for several years, and so I recognized that Steering was based on Exeter Academy. The recognition thrilled me. Even though I knew that authors often incorporated real-life people and places into their work, it was the first time I’d made the connection myself.
Looking back, I am surprised by how little I knew of writers’ lives — or maybe, how little I conceived of them. Even though I knew by then that I wanted to become a writer, I still thought of books in terms of their titles and their subject matter, not their authorship. Reading John Irving changed that. Maybe because Irving had written about a place where I had actually lived, it was easier to imagine him as a real person, living in the same world as me and writing about it. Or maybe it was because so many of Irving’s books contained writer characters and descriptions of the writing process. Whatever the reason, I began to pay attention to the contemporary literary world, noticing what books were being published and what other people thought of them. For the first time it occurred to me to care about the order in which books were written and to think about a writer’s output holistically. I did this with Irving, working backwards through his early “literary” novels, and then reading the bestsellers that followed Garp: The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. (Owen Meany was my introduction to the library’s waitlist.)
When his eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, was published, I was surprised to find that I didn’t like it enough to finish it. Still, when A Widow For One Year came out four years later, I asked my parents to buy it for me in hardcover as a twentieth birthday present. The book was published in May, the same month as my birthday, and I read it as a reward at the end of my semester. And what a reward! It was a long, absorbing reading experience, especially the book’s first section, a novella-like passage that unfolds over the course of one summer, and tells the story of a grieving couple who have given up on their marriage, but not on the memory of their dead teenage sons. The custody battle over their remaining child, a young girl — who in later sections becomes the novel’s writer-protagonist — is understandably complex, but in a completely unexpected and heartbreaking way. I thought it was one of Irving’s best books, maybe even better than Garp.
By then I was in college, an English major, and I had learned, among other things, that academia did not smile upon John Irving. It was a snobbery I didn’t understand until I pressed Garp into the hands of a new boyfriend. I don’t know what I was thinking. His favorite novel was The Remains of the Day. Upon finishing Garp, all he said was, “It’s not very subtle, is it?”
My boyfriend was one of those young men to whom taste is everything, and his opinion meant more to me than it should have. When he said “not very subtle”, I heard “trashy.” Crushed, I decided to stop by the office of a professor who had given A Widow For One Year a favorable review in The New York Times. I don’t know what I expected this professor to tell me; I suppose I wanted him to legitimize my love for Irving. He ended up elaborating upon what he had written in his review, praising Irving’s ability to write good action sequences, particularly violent ones. Walking back to my dorm, I thought about the many violent scenes in Irving’s fiction, how they are always a little bit slapstick — never choreographed and slick, like in the movies, or poetic, as in “grittily realistic” literary novels. It was this comic element, I thought, that made Irving seem crude, and maybe even trashy; but to me, the injection of humor — however broad — was what made Irving an honest and humane writer, one who was not writing “unsubtle” scenes to arouse or provoke, but to represent the absurd sloppiness of life.
Later that year, I took my first fiction-writing class, where I tried to write a story in the vein of Irving, about a gentleman farmer who flies planes for fun. One day the farmer crashes his hobby-plane into his hobby-field and dies upon impact. Instead of feeling sorry for his widow, everyone says she and the children are better off without such a stupid dilettante father. The widow moves to Baltimore and something happens there, I can’t remember what. The point is, it was supposed to be a funny story, but it came out very bleak and sad. I tried to use an all-knowing and transparently authorial narrator, as Irving often does, but this only irritated my classmates, who were accustomed to narration in the close third person and wrote things in the margins like “Who is narrating this story?? It should be one of the characters.” In short, I learned first hand just how hard it is to write like John Irving. You would think that would have made me respect him even more. Instead I began to think of him as a bad influence.
In the years that followed, I approached Irving’s new novels with caution and was almost relieved when I didn’t like them. It’s only recently that I’ve wanted to return to his work, and I’m not sure if it’s out of loyalty to him, or to my younger self.
3.
It’s always humbling to admit to changes in your own taste. Over Christmas, I found myself cringing with the release of Les Miserables, as snippets of the soundtrack played during television commercials and trailers. Why, out of all the music I could have burned onto my adolescent brain, had I picked Les Miserables? I thought I would feel the same annoyed regret as I skimmed old Irving novels, but the experience was more like getting back in touch with an ex-boyfriend — there was irritation, yes, but a lot of affection, too.
In my rereading, I was struck, first of all, by how cozy and self-contained Irving’s novels are. It was easy to peer into old favorites, to smile at the inside-joke chapter headings and emblematic sayings like “Keep passing the open windows,” (The Hotel New Hampshire) and “Good night you princes of Maine, you kings of New England,” (The Cider House Rules). I’ve read Garp a half dozen times, so I wasn’t surprised that I could dip in and out of it at will, but I found that I could also make myself at home in novels of Irving’s that I knew less well. Opening A Prayer for Owen Meany, I read a passage in which the narrator describes his grandmother’s love of Liberace. This was not a part of the book I remembered, but after just reading those few pages — which included some of Owen Meany’s infamous all-caps opining — I was able to recall a whole universe of characters and situations. The best Irving novels work like that; they create their own parallel worlds, underpinned by repetition — repetition of phrases, situations, descriptions, and motifs. And, as Irving fans love to note, the repetitions often continue across books; he doesn’t hesitate to recycle milieus and symbols that work for him, even if they’re quite specific. (Vienna, bears, wrestling…) Every writer does this to some degree, but with Irving it’s more noticeable, because the atmosphere of a John Irving novel is such a key part of its appeal.
Another thing I noticed while rereading was how clear Irving’s writing is, sentence by sentence. Critics don’t give Irving much credit for his prose style, maybe because his zany plots and characters overshadow it. (Or maybe it’s his enthusiastic use of italics and exclamation points.) But I was impressed by how gracefully he writes, even when he’s being “unsubtle.” There is a transparency to his exposition that is not easy to achieve, but Irving does nothing to draw attention to his effort. In contemporary fiction, this lack of preciousness is rare. Irving’s style has only become simpler over the years. It’s almost as if he decided to keep his prose straightforward so that his plotting could become more elaborate.
Which brings us to plot. If there’s one thing John Irving wants you to know about his literary technique, it’s that he plans his storylines in advance, and that he always knows the ending of the book before he starts writing. In every interview, going back at least twenty years, he hammers this point home, going so far as to reveal the last sentence of his novels-in-progress. In 1986, while he was working on A Prayer For Owen Meany, he told The Paris Review, “The authority of the storyteller’s voice — of mine, anyway — comes from knowing how it all comes out before you begin. It’s very plodding work, really.”
I find Irving’s choice of the word “plodding” interesting, because that’s exactly how I would describe parts of Owen Meany, a novel whose narrator is so prone to woebegone foreshadowing that the plot sometimes feels soggy. Plodding might also be the word I would use to describe the experience of reading (or rather, trying to read) Irving’s last three novels. Even though the prose was as easygoing as ever, and the settings and characters as richly imagined, the storytelling felt overdetermined, with all the plot elements neatly arranged, all the coincidences pointing in the same direction. This seems to be Irving’s artistic aim, though. In a recent interview with Portland Monthly, Irving explained his method this way: “My novels are predetermined collision courses; the reader always anticipates what’s coming — you just don’t know the how and the when, and the small details”. In another interview, Irving revealed the last sentence of his next novel: “Not every collision course comes as a surprise.”
If only there were more surprises in Irving’s fiction! It’s a writing workshop cliché to say, “if there’s no surprise for the writer, then there’s no surprise for the reader,” but in Irving’s case, that diagnosis seems apt. The irony is that Irving sees his tightly controlled plotting as evidence of his advanced skill. At a reading I attended, shortly after the publication of In One Person, he addressed fans who prefer his earlier works to his later ones, saying that they were welcome to choose favorites, but from his point of view, his later works were superior, because he was so much better at crafting stories. He compared his recent novels to well-tailored suits, explaining that they were just better-fitting, that he was the tailor, and he should know.
As a reader who prefers his earlier novels, I found this comparison annoying, the implication being that I preferred shiny off-the-rack suits. The more I thought about it, however, I realized it was an apt metaphor. Irving’s late novels are perfectly tailored, they do fit better — in fact they fit like straightjackets. There is no room for the reader to move around, to get comfortable.
4.
A funny thing happened while I was writing this essay: I got sucked into a John Irving novel in the old way. The novel was The Fourth Hand, a book I attempted when it was first published in 2002, but abandoned halfway through, irritated by its depiction of women. Rereading it now, I can guess what was offensive to me in its opening chapters, which include a female character whose salient quality is her bralessness, and a scene at a feminist convention where the participants are described mostly in terms of their looks. I almost gave up on the book a second time, but I could see that at least some of Irving’s misogyny was intentional, that he was trying to illustrate the crass mindset of his thoughtless protagonist, Patrick Wallingford. The Fourth Hand is about Wallingford’s transformation from a superficial, vain, person to a kind, loving one. Naturally, it’s a love story, with the bizarre coincidences and twists of fate you would expect from any romantic comedy (or John Irving novel). It’s also a newsroom satire: Patrick Wallingford is a TV anchorman whose career, as well as his soul, is at stake. It’s a funny, messy, uneven book, with a convoluted-borderline-nonsensical storyline, and a lot of recycling from Irving’s previous novels. Oh, and did I mention that Wallingford is missing his left hand? (In the words of my mother, it’s about castration anxiety, so don’t be alarmed.) The Fourth Hand is definitely not a “tailored suit” novel and that’s probably why I ended up liking it — it had some of that old Irving sloppiness.
The ending of The Fourth Hand is subdued and melancholy, and includes an unexpected discussion of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient. Wallingford reads the novel when he’s trying to impress the woman he’s fallen in love with. But whenever he tries to discuss the book with her, he chooses the wrong parts to admire. He can’t seem to figure out what she likes about the book, or what it means to her, and finally decides that reading experiences are not something that can be easily shared, observing that good novels “are comprised of a range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or a book.”
To Wallingford’s observation, I might add that you can never exactly replicate your own reading experiences, and that books and authors are colored by age and experience, for good and for ill. As I was rereading Irving, I was aware that my formative experience of reading his novels made it hard for me to be objective about his later work. John Irving could write his best book next year, and it probably wouldn’t be as good as Garp was, the first time I read it. Sometimes you just have to be grateful for the time you had with an author, and then move on.
Illustration by Bill Morris
And indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look.
Such a legacy may sound like a curse—but then, Close does crazy so well. This spring, she returned to Broadway to reprise the starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and she’s as captivating onstage as she is in her best movies. Once more, she takes on Norma Desmond, the silent film actress fixated on her past glory from the shadows of obscurity, still ready for her closeup decades after the world has moved on to talkies (and to younger leading ladies). The plot ignites when Desmond hires screenwriter Joe Gillis to doctor the script that she’s convinced will spell out her big comeback, and though his capture isn’t quite as obvious as the one masterminded by Misery’s Annie, his gradual (co-)dependence on his new benefactress proves to be just as deadly.
Serendipitous that this essay appears today, so soon after yet another deflection from the issues via attack on a woman”s mental state by #45.
I an not the only one who has made this observation, but this very website’s comment section is rife with a slew of such attacks against women with the temerity to disagree with certain prolific commenters’ opinions. Among other terms that have been used to describe me, that can think of off the top of my head:
Obsessive-compulsive, hysterical, determined to find offense, humorless, and the good old all-purpose medical term: “Nuts.”
We see you.
Moe
My understanding was that Close derided the portrayal of a women unhinged in Fatal Attraction, as she recognized years later the ramping up or exaggeration of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (or hysteria long ago), a severe non psychotic illness which causes great suffering and is engendered by early neglect and abandonment, and often sexual assault. This neediness caused by abandonment is scorned – to be deemed needy is the worst and yet to need is to be human. A reminder: women with borderline personality disorder are capable of great compassion and empathy, despite what Harvard proffesor Dr. Baron Cohen states in his book (can’t remember title) where he lumps women with BPD in with anti-social personality disorder and incapable of empathy. Excellent essay though.
Well, change comes slow. Misogyny and sexism are monstrous, certainly, but where is the data about just HOW prevalent they are? If anything, the world of 2017 is vastly improved over the world of 1917, or 1947, or 1977, and we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality. Is it perfect yet? No, far from it, but I just wish the ID politics crowd could step out of the vacuum of the now and add a little historical context, or to show me some evidence that this problem is doing anything but getting better. It’s almost like they want women to continue be oppressed (or be perceived as every bit as oppressed as they were a hundred years ago) in order to validate their own worldview.
As for Glenn Close, her legacy isn’t determined just by a showy role in Fatal Attraction. Damages continues to grow in regard as a critically acclaimed moment in the development of prestige TV, and her reputation as a film actress with over 50 credits, including fine work in Nine Lives, Cookie’s Fortune, Reversal of Fortune, The Natural, and The World According to Garp, is far closer to the hearts of cineastes than boiling rabbits (though I do think Adrian Lyne is a provocative European-style filmmaker whose body of work is impressive in its own right). Close also stops mid-play and tells people to put their damn phones away, so kudos to her for preserving the sanctity of the theatrical experience.
@SeanH @SwogHolllow
Just going to recycle a little Swog Hollow from an earlier piece on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I am confident you will deem Swog one of that fine cohort of “clear-headed white male empiricists.”
I believe this pretty much covers the waterfront.
[Sean,
Still “I refuse to think that somehow by mere dint of one’s status as a woman or a POC, they are somehow more fit to judge the objective reality of a situation than an objective, clear-headed white male empiricist”
Is something you should think hard about. Women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC. Try listening a little more and being turned off by the messaging a little less.]
“End Swog Hollow”
Sean – good point re Close’s legacy not determined by one film.
Moe – fight the good fight. xo
Hey Moe,
I’m all for taking criticism as well as dishing it out, but what’s wrong with being a clear-headed empiricist? I simply do not think that “women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “what it’s like to be a woman or POC.” There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be gay. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc. This universalizing is the basis of racism, sexism, bigotry, and discrimination. To say that because someone is a member of a group that they INHERENTLY are a certain way, that’s racism. To say women are more emotional. To say blacks like fried chicken. To say that whites can’t dance. There is no universal experience of what it’s like to be ANYTHING.
“There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman.”
Well, bless your heart.
Moe Murph
Over and out on this thread
@Sean
Much of what you’ve written up there (against Essentialism) is Spot On… BUT (there’s always a but): look to the definition of “Empirical”. Doesn’t it privilege direct experience over observation-at-a-remove and hearsay? In other words, in discussions of Sexism/ Racism, wouldn’t Women and POC function as better “Empiricists” on the topics than Het White Fellers? Which is not to say that Women or POC *own* these conversations, but their (our) contributions, empirically speaking, are going to be more relevant than yours.
As a Het male POC, I wouldn’t dare to presume to relativize the suffering/ Othering/second-classing of Women… for two reasons: 1) the Relative intensity of a pain is meaningless to anyone in Pain (ie, being drawn-and-quartered has got to hurt worse than a serious tooth ache, but tell that to someone with a serious tooth ache, in lieu of giving them morphine) 2) how would I know, from direct experience, how bad Sexism is now, compared to “then”, and should anyone be grateful that an absolutely unnecessary (but convenient) Evil has eased somewhat in a century? Surely there will be an urgency about making *all* of the Evil disappear? Especially if the Evil impacts one directly.
But (again): it doesn’t impact *you* directly; from your distance, things appear to have gotten so much better that you feel people with complaints are exaggerating. You aren’t in possession of enough Empirical Evidence to judge; as a good Empiricist, you should be able to admit that.
In ’95, I came back to America after a long absence and stayed with married friends in a lovely house by the lake. My old (White) friend had her own dog-walking/ sitting business and asked me, one morning, to check on dogs in two different houses (masters away on vacation). Doing this for her would have entailed letting myself into nice big houses in largely-White neighborhoods at the crack of dawn. Hilarious, right? I’m a Black guy of six feet tall… even wearing white tie and tails wouldn’t have helped. I had to beg off the request. My old friend thought I was being paranoid. She lectured me that there had been lots of “changes” in the US since I had left (remember, this lecture came to me in ’95) and that I had to “face these changes” and “move on”. Racism, she told me, was becoming a thing of the past. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise.
Don’t be like *that*, Sean! laugh.
PS “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc.”
But there is definitely such a thing as what it’s like to be persecuted/ degraded for being “black etc. etc”.
I mostly hear where you’re coming from, Steven (and thanks as always for an articulate response), but there is such a thing as letting one’s life be too muhc governed by fear. If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?
Also, empiricism can cut both ways. I understand and fully agree with your point about direct observation (in a Masters & Johnson sort of way; you can’t just ASK people what they do in the bedroom, you have to literally observe and record stuff). But that said, certain experiences bias people. Are people who have lost children to drunk drivers really capable of being empirical about DWI laws? Should the widows of people who were killed on 9/11 be in charge of anti-terrorism policies? Too little experience is bad for empiricism, but so is too much.
Sean!
Ugh, as they say. Seriously: ugh. This is borderline loony (and a new kind of magical thinking, possibly):
“If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”
Sean, how will we put an end to Nigerian email scammers if *you’re* too risk-averse (and cowardly, even), to engage with them? More importantly, how will women put an end to domestic abuse if they keep selfishly leaving abusive households instead of sticking with it and taking beatings in the name of eventual progress that will come, after all the abusive husbands and “lovers” are simply worn out from beating them, posthumously?
Well, I tried.
Signed,
Articulate Black Guy Steven
PS And no, I will not “hijack” this thread with an off-piste cluster of responses to more and possibly equally absurd rejoinders. I have to mow the lawn, or something, instead. But, yeah: ugh.
Come on man! You’re better than that, Augustine. You’re totally distorting what I say with limp analogies. If you’re going to use domestic abuse as an analogy, what you’re saying by refusing to water plants for a white family in a rich neighborhood is: “Because some women get beaten by their spouses or boyfriends, why bother dating at all.” Show a little gumption, man.
Or look at it from the other side; what you are saying is that, by your logic of irrational fear, you would encourage a white person to reject a black friend who lived in “the ghetto” who asked the white guy to dogsit/be in such a neighborhood at a perceived “dangerous” time. How is that not furthering the problem? America (and the first-world west in general) is WAY safer than it’s ever been, and even taking into account that the request you received was 20 years ago, it still was recent enough to be a pretty safe activity. People live in fear because of the media. Crime is a fraction of what it was in the 70s. America is safe as hell and there’s very little violent street crime.
Do black people sometimes get harassed by the cops in wealthy, largely white neighborhoods where there are hardly any black people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. Do white people sometimes get harassed by the natives in lower class urban neighborhoods where there are very few white people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. But to give up on interraciality or to just assume you will be the victim of violence if you “cross lines” is too fearful for me to support as being anything remotely approaching a logical or empirical approach to living one’s life.
Sean
Steve didn’t distort what you said. You said:
“If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”
This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I have no words for this stupidity.
Congratulations.
This line is just classic. I can’t get over it. You have to break your brain in order to process the logic in this.
“Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists.”
Somebody should create a meme. The opportunities are endless.
“Is it more dangerous to drive a car into a brick wall? Yes, but the dudes who do so in spite of the risk are the real car enthusiasts.”
“Is it more dangerous to inject fentanyl? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real daredevils.”
“Is it more dangerous to eat 12,000 calories per day? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real foodies.”
“Is it more dangerous to jump down a mineshaft? Yes, but the kids who do in spite of the risk are the real athletes.”
(har!)
Toad,
You just compared walking alone at night to driving a car into a wall. How am I the one with logical flaws in my rhetoric?
Really, think about it. All your comparative examples are ridiculously dangerous. A woman walking alone at night is the essence of “take back the night,” it is the absolute essence of feminism–that a woman has every right to walk by herself at night that a man has, and that she should do so with just as much freedom and ease, and without fear of reprisal or harassment.
You don’t have to break your brain at all to see the difference between my examples and yours.