There’s a story I have alluded to but I’m pretty sure I have never actually told in this Tohu Bohu. It’s about a couple of fish who are swimming along in a lake when—splash!—they are frightened half to death by the sudden appearance of a frog, who chuckles in an avuncularly amphibian way and says how’s the water, boys? before disappearing. In the awful silence afterward, one of the fish says to another What does that word he used mean, “water”?
I think a lot of us American men, this week, out of our wits with fear or grief or rage, are asking ourselves What does that mean, “water”? What is this culture we are all in, anyway? Why haven’t we ever noticed it before—or, more accurately, why do we keep forgetting that it’s there? And for the sake of everything Divine, nobody thinks I’m wet with it, do they?
I don’t have anything useful to say about the murders people are calling the Isla Vista killings. I suppose when I was talking about sexual assault on campus recently, I might have made some connections to a more general problem of violent misogyny, but then I might not have—I wasn’t talking about why sexual assault is common on campuses, just that it is, and I wasn’t talking about why it is so commonly covered up, just that it is. And while I think the why stuff is clearly important, it’s not something I have any particular insight into.
Y’all have read what you want to read this week. Lindsay Beyerstein, Amanda Marcotte. Jessica Valenti. Laurie Penny. Jess Zimmerman. Many others. If you must read a male perspective, Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds by Arthur Chu is pretty good.
No, I have nothing about that.
Or, of course, read the #YesAllWomen posts directly. Quantity has a power all its own.
The only reason I am throwing any contribution into the conversation at all is that I am, perhaps, the only person in America who is this week reading Votes for Women!, a play by Elizabeth Robins that premiered in 1907. I hope I’m wrong about that, too, by the way, but on the probabilities of things, I thought I would inject Ms. Robins’ dialogue between two women who support the titular policy, after the House vote that failed:
Mrs. F. You don’t think all men in Parliament are like that!
Miss L. I don’t think all men are burglars, but I lock my doors.
That was a hundred years ago.
My Latin tag—we endure what must be endured, you could render it, although I prefer deal we shall for deal we must—was never meant to suggest that we should tolerate the intolerable. But we do, we always do, and we have, we always have. The hope is, I suppose, only that we see what it is we are putting up with, see it clearly enough to remember to keep doing something about it, even as we go on living through it, because there isn’t, after all, any other way, is there? What the Suffragists dealt with, what the Abolitionists dealt with, what the Freedom Riders dealt with, what we all deal with all the time is how to keep on.
holaykh el-darom v’sovayv el-tzafon sovayv/sovayv holaykh ha-ruach v’al-s’vivotav shav ha-ruach, The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. Keeping on. Striving for justice while living with injustice. Taking the long view without ignoring the present. Swimming in water without getting wet. Keeping on.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.