misandry/misogyny

Ever since I learned the word for hatred of men (misandry), I've wanted to know when it was entered into the English lexicon, and how it compared, historically, to misogyny. Today, thanks to dictionary.com, I found the answer:

Misogyny, the word for hatred of women, was entered into the lexicon sometime around 1650-1660.

Misandry, the word for hatred of men, was entered into the lexicon ~1945-1950. 300 years later, and (I think significantly) the same time the Rosies of WWII were displaced by men returning from the war.

What does this mean? Does it mean, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyun suggest in Contact that the "male lexographers" couldn't imagine a use for the word, or does it mean that hatred of men is historically more likely to be ignored? There are at least a dozen other explanations I can think of off the top of my head, but first I'd like to know what you think. What accounts for the 300 year gap?

Soap Operas and Online Art Galleries

I'm on "vacation" for the next week, but I thought I'd share three tidbits from my readings over the last few days.

First, a shout-out to "All My Children." Yes, the soap opera. They've just written soap's first transgender character into the season, and ABC has announced that over the course of his tenure, Zarf will go from Mr. to Ms.

Secondly, the NY Times reports on the Saatchi Gallery online--an online gallery in the Chelsea sense of the term, where new artists can bring their work to the public and sell it.

Last but not least... RIP Joseph Barbera. You will be missed.

Somebody Save Me

I've been talking to my friend Gabe today while obsessing over "Smallville." Gabe's something of an expert on WWII-era superhero comics, so I asked him about the propensity of such comics to make social commentary. I knew from my dad that X-Men is a metaphor for racism, but I didn't know that much about Superman. According to Gabe, what makes Superman interesting, aside from the potential Moses/Jesus parallels, is his sense of global idealism rather than nationalistic idealism. Created at the end of the 1930s, while war was brewing in Europe, Superman intended to save the world. In fact, creators Siegel and Shuster show Superman ending World War II in an issue from 1940--before American involvement. You may even recognize a few themes pertinent to today.

Network TV currently has two superhero shows on the air, and both are blockbusters. "Smallville" chronicles Superman/Clark Kent's early life, and "Heroes" is a modern-day X-Men story where genetic mutations endow a few people from around the world with "superpowers." These powers often reflect something in the character of the hero him or herself--an invulnerable teenage cheerleader, a woman whose dueling personalities reflect the cycles of abuse perpetuated on her and her sister by their father, a helpless young woman who develops the ability to make anyone obey her, a young nurse in the shadow of his politician father and brother who can emulate the powers of any nearby hero, and a spacetime bending Japanese office-worker bored with his routine, to name a few. The supervillain of "Heroes" gains his superpowers only by killing other heroes and absorbing their strengths. At first, he seems stable. Once a researcher deems his mutation inferior, however, he embarks on a quest to destroy all the "Heroes." It is envy that leads him to destruction.

Lex Luthor of the Superman comics isn't all that different. Superman's origins are contested in various publications, but the general consensus is that a disaster (war, crazy planetary meltdown) on the planet Krypton forces scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara to send their only child, Kal-El, away. Scholars have speculated about the nature of Superman and his fathers' names in the series. Siegel and Shuster were both Jewish, and Jor-El and Kal-El are similar to Hebrew phrases meaning, respectively, "fear of God" and "voice of God." After he arrives on Earth, Kal-El is adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent of Smallville. The name "Clark" is Martha Kent's maiden name. While Clark is still a teenager, Lex Luthor moves to Smallville. After Lex saves Clark's life by moving a kryptonite meteor out of the danger zone, Clark helps him set up a scientific laboratory. In gratitude, Lex attempts to create an antidote to kryptonite when an accident sets his lab on fire. In the process of saving Lex, Superman (superboy?) destroys his research and renders him bald. Lex becomes convinced that Superman is jealous of his scientific prowess and attempts to first outdo his good deeds through science and then ultimately turns against both Superman and humanity when his experiments go awry.

"Smallville" takes a different approach, but the story is ultimately the same: Lex and Clark are friends until Lex's jealousy takes over and he becomes a vessel for evil. Clark's high school sweetheart Lana Lang is at the center of the rift between Clark and Lex.

The main difference between the superhero comics of yore and today's versions is that the latter are stripped of their social commentary. "Smallville" has episodes that touch on contemporary problems like, say, illegal immigration, but ultimately they say nothing (in the episode in question, a single child in reunited with his mother and labor abuses are stopped, but the rest of the worker-immigrants are returned without amnesty to their countries of origin with virtually no mention). "Smallville" shows Clark taking on individuals entirely in rural Kansas. Problems are localized to the Smallville/Metropolis area, and a larger global view is never presented.

"Heroes" goes global, including Japan and India, but so far the closest it's come to social commentary is that politicians shouldn't take dirty money and cheating on your wife gets you in trouble.

When Gabe and I started talking, our conversation was about apathy, not superheroes, but contemporary representations of heroics (in TV--there are still some new comics that deal with serious issues) show that same postmodern nihilism and disregard for context. Superheroes are still around, so clearly we still like the idea of "being saved" and "good vs. evil"...but who is saving us...and from what?

'Til next time.

Antiseptic technology

I'm reading Emergence by Steven Johnson right now, and it's set me thinking about how we sanitize the future. At the start of the book, Johnson talks about Jane Jacobs' theories of urban development and how neighborhoods form. But as the book progresses, he only briefly touches on demographics and associated issues of class and race. At first, I didn't think it was a problem. In fact, I barely noticed it. But as Johnson moves into what eventually starts to look like technophilia and the idealization of emergent software, some of his examples give me pause.

One of the central tenets at the heart of emergent behavior is the idea that acting locally produces global results. If enough people walking along the sidewalks of the Lower East Side interact, the sum of their interactions is a self-regulating system. What's missing from this analysis, aside from one chapter analyzing the history of how the "lower classes" have fit into theorists' understandings of emergence, is a set of social "mirror neurons"--as Johnson starts to discuss emerging emergent technologies (hee), Emergence loses a lot of its socioeconomic value and Johnson's argument gets sanitized. Johnson talks about every TV coming with TiVo (or something similar) and connecting to something like the internet to create TV "neighborhoods" based on individual and global user preferences. In the midst of this argument, he refutes the idea that TV and the internet contribute to user isolation based on the fact that the technology aids communal emergent behavior.

So what's the problem?

If you don't have money, you won't have a TiVo. The communities that could potentially form won't account for the impoverished, and entertainment will continue to alternately misrepresent, ignore, insult, and exclude the poor. While media may be tailored to certain "communities" through TiVo, the same groups who have traditionally been excluded by the top-down system of the networks will still be excluded by the bottom-up system because they won't have access to the technology required to form their own communities, and thus the impoverished (and possibly other groups, this is just the obvious one) lose what little grip they had on media solidarity.

I'm still enjoying Emergence, don't get me wrong. But I'm concerned about the blanket sanitization that today's zeitgeist chasers exhibit. Just talking about technology's potential to shape thought isn't enough. Neither new technology nor bottom-up self-organization is inherently ethical. It may be useful, but many of the social problems that were around before bottom-up technology will still exist during and after it. Focusing on the technology without moral discourse draws attention away from those problems.

Even my beloved Star Trek, which early on incorporated race, rarely explores issues of class and never concerns itself with sexual orientation. Looks to me like technology glosses over social problems rather than fixing them. Hmm.

EDIT: Here's something entertaining and mildly relevant! The blog software I use, greymatter, has quotes on just about every page you work with. In the "preview" page, this quote came up:

"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."—Leonard Sweet