Telemachus earned his manhood when he told Penelope to shut up.
This proposed paradigm for all Western literary and political discourse is not the way I wanted to start my Women’s History Month.
But here we are, in 2018 #MeToo America, and popular classicist, respected author, and famed Twitter victim Mary Beard claims that despite appearances and advances in women’s rights, the public forum is gendered toward males before we open our mouths: Our understanding of powerful speech is male from the thought bubble, and it’s time for some rethinking.
“Women & Power: A Manifesto,” a collection of essays delivered as part of a lecture series at the London Review of Books, is an unusually snappy form for the “troll slayer” known for her provocative and perspicacious reevaluations of classical culture. She’s a Cambridge don who can make the rare claim to popular bookshelves (a reviewer of “SPQR,” her history of Rome, recalls toting it through Chicago O’Hare as airplane reading) and to classics professors’ libraries (a classics professor at UVA recently gave a high recommendation for “Pompeii”). She writes with clarity and nuance that belies a critical, even-minded, intelligent mind. “The classical world’s most controversial figure,” according to the Guardian, does good history.
And for years, she has been ripped apart for precisely that on Twitter and her popular blog: She’s stupid, she’s a woman, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s a woman.
Beard has armored her reputation as an academic Amazon with her willingness to scare out the critters that crawl in the dark corners of the Twittersphere. She’s an instigator. But she’s no longer sure that shouting from the shadows has ever given a woman an equal hearing.
“Public speech was a — if not the — defining attribute of maleness,” Beard writes. “The elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking.’ A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.”
This question is teased out over and again in ancient literature and history:
Penelope does so out of necessity, waiting for Odysseus to show up and Telemachus to step up. Clytemnestra’s upper register is uniquely amenable to prophesying and bringing about doom. And the “yapping” Afrania, to take a particularly graphic example from history, earns herself this eulogy at her death in 48 B.C.: “With unnatural freaks like this it’s more important to record when they died than when they were born.” This for her audacity to speak — or rather, “bark” — in the forum.
It’s either comedy or tragedy, or, again, both: The forum is locked into a male paradigm, and women are silenced as men “thunder” about women’s “thin nasal tones … twangs, whiffles, snuffles, whines, and whinnies.” No one is comfortable, but the introduction of the chaos that would ensue in tossing aside such an ingrained system is more problem than solution.
According to Professor of Classics K. Sara Myers of the University of Virginia, what male authors accomplished in restricting the role of women was to set up an ideal, and a rather binary one: men have authority, power, mind, muthos, while women have the grace of passivity, silence, and by implication, powerlessness. It is unclear how these spheres should overlap. It is obvious that they should not, too fully.
“The ancient world was very sophisticated. They could see gender polarities and imagine reversals,” Myers told me. “But these reversals often ended up reinforcing the status quo,” operating as they did under that old comedic premise: “You think things are bad now? Yeah, but they could be worse!” Aristophanes uses this technique in Lysistrata when his women exercise political power through a sex strike.
“It was an ancient ideal for women to be silent,” Myers said. “But we can’t always trust ideals; the reality might have been quite different.”
How to jump across the gender divide — in the forum, in the mind? How, while respecting order in nature, in politics, in the distinct gifts and tendencies of woman and man?
And aren’t we, in 2018, nearly there?
What’s fascinating about Beard’s academic work and about “Women & Power” is that, consistent to her reputation as “debunker,” she peers into the gaps between facts and accepted narratives. A review of “Pompeii” pointed out the Beard theme that the blanks in our knowledge of ancient societies shape what we understand about the classical world, so different from our own. And in “Women & Power,” her most powerful moments come when she asks readers how, regardless of recent accomplishments, they think of women in positions of power.
Beard herself, Cambridge professor and world-renowned scholar, asked herself to picture a typical professor. She pictured a man. She Googled “cartoon professor”: a man.
The external status quo notwithstanding, have we adapted the ideal or shunted it to the subconscious?
Beard draws no clear conclusions. Her mission is not positive, but relative, with an eye to the ways we can see, listen, think, differently, better. The hour it takes to read “Women & Power” stretches into the days after, and comments on the interviews and profiles of celebrities and politicians.
Beard’s challenge echoes across disciplines. It brings into question the way I view art, first. Take film, no longer such a male-dominated medium in production, but: Strongest Female Lead? Why is the category for Best Male Director superfluous? And why does this question sound, in Beard’s terms, so shrill?
Of course it’s because we should be asking for great, not gendered, art. But when women’s work is seen as its own separate sort of thing from the beginning…
In a column for the Guardian earlier this month, Lili Loofbourow writes along the same lines when she points to the “male gaze” in art, that which judges value with an a priori assumption of male depths and female surfaces. When the female voice is considered frivolous, the aural equivalent of her fleeting beauty, concerned with the aesthetic and not eternal, art by females is not taken seriously in the public forum of, say, award ceremonies or art journals.
“We still don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say. We imagine them as small and careful, or petty and domestic, or vain, or sassy, or confessional,” Loofbourow writes. “We don’t expect them to be experimental, and we don’t expect them to be great…Women are fine; they have their place, certainly, but they lack universality. They are not The Public.”
The “male gaze” is a human phenomenon, and a human problem. I, for one, have operated under, and been continually awakened to the ways I operate under, this paradigm since I was a young girl who wanted to sit with my father and the other pastors because they were the ones who talked about ideas.
But even (or especially) a Christian paradigm can’t escape this problem of the gendering of speech, that humanity-defining activity. Genesis uses a different word for man before the creation of woman — before gender, there was humanity. Adam’s first political dialogue is a conversation with the “bone of his bones,” which, in Hebrew culture, means the same stuff as himself, created by the same God for a shared purpose.
If “humanity first” seems like a dodge to those who point out man’s and woman’s separate roles — man active, woman passive; man providing, woman nurturing — (And who hasn’t groaned at a speech with the takeaway that, hey, we’re all human, so everybody love everybody?), it’s also a move that philosophers, theologians, and other notable classicists have been exploring more seriously for the past century or so, and it’s becoming a destination point.
The move these thinkers make is from the “male gaze” to the person. It makes a delicious sort of sense that one of the central arguments of “On Being Human,” by Dorothy Sayers, classicist, novelist, and woman in a man’s cultural world, now sounds so absurd: The workplace should be such that women can wear pants, regardless of the fact that many women prefer skirts. This is a synecdoche for the public workplace — that it should be free for women, regardless of how many thrive within the domestic sphere.
In the late 1960s, John Paul II based his entire “Theology of the Body” on personalism, or the idea that his conservative vision of male-female marriage only makes sense when spouses begin not within a love for a particular male or female, but for the whole person.
And the contemporary philosopher Robert Spaemann, oft quoted in a recent World Youth Alliance conference on human dignity at Hillsdale, claims that the person is primary, regardless of gender, handicap, race, and clothing preference: Personhood is both description and demand.
What if gender were a subgenre within personhood, true, essential to understanding the fullness of both the woman and the man, but not distinct from the title and the claim: “Human,” rational, animal, and intellectual, with the capability for and the right to speech?
Or, as Beard phrases the question: “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?”
Personalism shows the problem with gendered muthos is in its crude dualism. The “women are different than men” thesis is not wrong, but it gets ahead of itself. Humanity is the threshold and the forum and political efficacy is not gendered. It is used differently — naturally — by members of both sexes.
What does this look like for Beard? Not women politicians wearing power suits as unspoken uniforms and disguises of womanly weakness. Not “women’s issues.” Not the assumption that a woman must “put on manliness” to enter politics.
“Telemachus’ rebuke to his mother Penelope when she dares to open her mouth in public is one that is still, too often, being replayed in the twenty-first century,” Beard summarizes.
And she proposes an amendment: “It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession. What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually.”
If we read Genesis, “The Odyssey,” and simple human dignity rightly, the power of human speech does not need to be redefined. It needs to be realized, respected, and nurtured. Man was not made to be a Twitter troll.
Fortunately, and challengingly, for Beard, the humanization of muthos is all in our heads. The power is at our fingertips.