Cru Jones Society

 

Having a Master’s Degree in communication is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, I believe communication (more specifically language) is all we have to differentiate ourselves from animals. It is the paramount quality standing head and shoulders above all others in what makes a human a human, which renders its study the most vital prism through which we understand our world. And on a practical level, having a sophisticated understanding of communication makes you better at getting jobs, maintaining relationships, and seeing through bullshit. It’s philosophically interesting and utilitarian, therefore rare in terms of its dual usefulness.

On the other, you study so many different aspects of communication, otherwise immediately pointless bullshit seeps into your consciousness years after the fact rendering your ability to focus on imminently important things (i.e. buying a house, planning a wedding, doing the job you’re actually paid to do) goes completely out the window. This is one of those times for E Dagger.

In the field of communication, as with any course of study rooted in history, you spend the lion’s share of your energy examining a bunch of dead white Europeans. Because learning without context is like trying to cook without ingredients. All you get is a bunch of directionless motion, some idle clanging, and an end product devoid of substance. Trying to make a cake without vanilla extract makes the cake taste like shit just as trying to understand contemporary communication theory is ridiculous without first examining, say, Cicero.

Once enough dead white European context is achieved, you’re then free to delve into everything else that’s come since. Living with Lady E, and given the bent of many of my instructors in graduate school, I became exposed to more feminist theory than I ever even knew existed. Regardless of how you feel about the term “feminism,” a term so bastardized, misused, and misunderstood it bears little resemblance to its original meaning, there’s no denying its rhetorical importance. The field of gender communications provides a rich and fertile landscape for rhetorical study and countless avenues for analysis, argument, and new theory.

So, four paragraphs in, and what’s the point? My history with studying gender communication, theories of living in a “post-gender society” (more on that later), and three intersecting events this weekend have kept my mind busy analyzing the state of gender and gender relations in America. First, the three things leading to my distraction:

 

1) After tasting a bunch of wedding food this weekend at our hotel where I endured yet another round in the seemingly endless cycle of “Hey, you’re the groom, you don’t have to plan shit for this wedding!” jokes that I fucking hate, Lady E and I headed to a good friend’s house for their housewarming/engagement party.

First of all, I help out with the wedding where I’m needed and when I’m invited to participate. Any guy that actively disengages from the wedding planning process when he’s invited to participate is an asshole in my book. Conversely, any woman that dictates the entirety of her wedding absent input from her future life mate – also an asshole. This is my wedding too, so don’t assume just because I happen to be carting around this y chromosome, I’m disinterested in this process. I have to be there too, I’d like some input. Lady E has been great about this, but the world at large seems to either mock, ridicule, or remain unable to grasp my interest level in planning this wedding.

Secondly, when we showed up at this party, they had tacked up two big sheets of easel paper in the hallway soliciting marriage advice from their guests. I was profoundly disappointed by the trite, ugly, reductionist nonsense I found there. People always think they’re being cute when they write something like “Let him believe he won a fight every once in a while,” but they’re really just alerting the world they have no idea how to properly communicate with their husband. After a couple of Maker’s Marks, I was tempted to write my advice on the sheet which would have summarily dismissed everyone else: “Ignore all the lame John Gray bullshit on this sheet and have a real marriage.” But I didn’t feel like making a scene nor had the energy to argue, so I just let it go and went back to watching the Rockies beat up on the Giants on television.

Third, before we left, Lady E and I saw a commercial for the new G.I. Joe movie. She told me that for whatever reason she wasn’t allowed to play with G.I. Joes growing up and had to get her fix with some of her male friends. She wanted to play with the Joes, but was expressly forbidden from having any. This made me sad.

I then told her that when I was about 7, while at Target with my mom, I picked up a Barbie and the Rockers coloring book (see lead photo) and asked if I could have it. She said sure, and I had myself that snazzy new coloring book.

But I knew I probably wasn’t supposed to have it, so I covered it up the best I could on the way to the checkout line and invented a bunch of weirdo explanations for why we’d be buying this should anyone ask. Keep in mind I was 7. Yet I felt compelled to hide this from the world. Why?

There was that guilt and the thick coat of shame I wore about wanting something I was told from the get go was not intended for me. Again, why? I wasn’t hurting anyone. And look at all those bright colors. Those cats look like they’re having a zippity-zap-tastic time up there jamming away on their keyboards and guitars! So a little boy wants a coloring book ostensibly geared toward girls. Why the shame? And a little girl wants to play with Army toys but can’t. What’s going on here?

2) After a weekend jam packed with activity, I found myself struggling to stay awake Sunday afternoon. I knew I couldn’t nap because like an infant, if I slept too much that afternoon, I’d never be able to sleep that night and be grouchy all day for work on Monday. All the usual Sunday activities (bike ride, write a new CJS article, hump hump dance with Lady E) were unappealing at best considering how groggy and mildly cigarette hungover I was, so I busted out my Xbox and opted to play through one of my old games.

I picked up Def Jam: Fight for New York and instantly remembered what ridiculous fun game this is. It’s like Double Dragon mixed with WWE and Tekken all sung in the key of gangsta rap. You’re an up and coming brawler in the underground fight world of New York populated by hip hop artists posing as elite fighters. You’re new on D-Mobb’s crew and flanked by Method Man, Redman, Ludacris and a bunch of other dudes as you fight your way up the ranks against the likes of Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes and all around badass Danny Trejo.

The story is terrific, but one of the game’s purest (and oddest) pleasures is decking your character out in bling, new threads, and tattoos. Showing up with new ice and dope new clothes (provided by the ghettotastic likes of Enyce, Sean John, and others) nets your character charisma points and gets an otherwise hostile crowd on your side. The advocacy of conspicuous consumption in this game is in full force, but has tangible utility in terms of progressing the story.

More important than the functionality is the bizarre joy of pimping out your character. You’re likely never going to find me wearing a bright blue Marc Ecko hockey jersey with a $15,000 diamond encrusted naked lady pendant with one leg of my jeans rolled up to my knee and a pair of Lugz, but damned if that wasn’t what my character wore at a recent fight. It’s pure fantasy and a way to vicariously live out a dream you didn’t even know you had.

Fundamentally how is this different than little girls dressing, undressing, and redressing their Barbie dolls over and over again?

Answer: It isn’t. They are the exact same activity, yet if a little boy finds joy in putting Barbie in a princess costume, a section of society frowns on that and immediately wants to shove a G.I. Joe in his face instead. If a young boy loves decking his fighter out in gaudy Phat Farm gear and hideously large diamond earrings, that’s somehow okay. Hmmmm….

3) I’ve been listening to the Adam Carolla Podcast almost religiously over the last couple of months and one of the recurring rants Adam takes off on is the breakdown of traditional gender roles in society. As a former carpenter, Carolla can fix/build/refurbish anything from new drywall to a busted carburetor to a brand new deck. He’s of the opinion that men should take care of home and vehicle maintenance while women should handle cooking, cleaning, and blowjobs.

He laments the fact that most women can no longer sew a button or bake an adequate casserole and haven’t picked up any new skills to compensate for this loss. He complains that he continues to meet men who not only have no ability to properly use tools, but no inclination to learn either. His is an extremely traditional viewpoint.

I thought about Carolla’s persistent laments as I considered our wedding preparation, the advice I read on the wall at the engagement party, Lady E and her G.I. Joes, me and my coloring book, and the bizarre act of playing dress up with a bunch of video game rapper fighters and I wondered if we were finally living in a post-gender society. The advocates of post-gender society argue that no one has a defined gender role anymore and that in terms of the way we define ourselves, society is moving closer to androgyny and that this progression is a good thing. So, is this a post-gender society?

My answer: Absolutely not.

This idea has always rung ridiculous to me. Androgyny is almost never universally a good thing, and while I love how similar Lady E and I are, my favorite things about her are the ways she’s so different from me. She’s a lady who enjoys being treated like a lady and loves girly shit just as much as I love laughing at farts, quoting from inane movies with my friends in lieu of talking about actual stuff, and playing through a video game for the umpteenth time.

But I also realized that our traditional gender roles are wildly outdated and too painfully simplistic. Life is too short to shoehorn yourself into the narrow expectations of our traditional roles. My mom bought me that Barbie and the Rockers coloring book when I was 7, and despite the crushing weight of history telling me I shouldn’t have it and my own illogical shame, I didn’t turn out to be a glitter-covered, showtune-singing flamboyant homosexual. On the flipside, had Lady E been allowed to indulge her desire to have an awesome fictional battle with a bunch of Vietnam propaganda, would she be driving a tractor trailer full of engine parts through the Canadian Rockies at this point in her life? I think it’s safe to assume she wouldn’t.

And I think this is the point that Carolla’s missing. Our inability to handle basic household tasks like swinging a hammer and hemming a pair of pants aren’t the result of erosion of traditional gender roles, this has largely occurred just because society as a whole has gotten a hell of a lot lazier. Laziness is always a byproduct of capitalism because as we have the ability to pay for more and more things – and our society dictates that we do to continue growing – we become more and more detached from our stuff and have no practical need to fix anything when help is but a call or Internet click away.

If by proxy this has eroded gender roles, I think you can only consider that collateral damage at best. Gender roles are much too complicated in today’s world to be tidily summed up in the reflected actions of a show like “Father Knows Best” and require a much deeper thought process to understand their current place in our world. Which brings me back to our conversation about toys.

As we talked about our respective G.I. Joe and Barbie experiences, Lady E and I hoped we’d be “enlightened” enough to let our kids play with whatever they wanted should we ever have any. If our son wanted a doll collection, who are we to deny him? We’re not fascists. If our daughter idolizes Chuck Liddell instead of Miss America, we’re not standing in her way.

Because while we both love being what we are, why do we have to be solely defined with one all-encompassing label? True – I’ll always be a man; she’ll always be a woman - but does that mean we can’t dip our toes into the other’s pool? I’ll watch Legally Blonde and love the hell out of every minute. Lady E will cash a Flabongo and cut a belch that could capsize three nearby boats. But that needn’t define who we are in totality.

I’m reminded of our conversation about guilty pleasures last week. To paraphrase Chuck Klosterman again, the only people who believe in some kind of universal behavior-a consensual demarcation between what’s correct and incorrect-are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s activities to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.

So while we definitely don’t live in a post-gender society, and that’s a good thing, I firmly believe we shouldn’t restrict ourselves any longer when the world is full of so many awesome things to do. So take pride in your Def Jam character’s appearance. Battle your G.I. Joes. And color in those plastic rock stars with pride. Don’t worry about what Adam Carolla says (Although, knowing how to do basic shit like changing your own oil is almost always universally a good thing. But which of you knows how to do it – husband or wife – is irrelevant.) Life’s too short to give a damn about the consequences or the uncreative assholes who want to wedge you into their own limited worldview.

Until next time…

edagger@crujonessociety.com