On role models, art, and dark sides

Sometimes long threads on blogs can really take you to interesting places, as the thread at Alas, a Blog on "real manhood" did when it turned into a thread on the place of role models in people's lives and it was brought up that it can be devestating when you find the dark side of someone you admire. Jam had this really interesting and poignant comment:

for me, i can remember my reaction upon discovering that Jack Kerouac -whose writing, cliche as it sounds, opened up whole new worlds of literature, music, & possibilities for me when i was young- ended up a bitter lonely man dying drunk on the toilet. i couldn't reconcile the two men in my head for a long time.

the same for discovering that Miles Davis terrorized & abused the women in his life. again, i couldn't listen to his music for a long time. despite its beauty (& it is beautiful) all i could think when i heard it was that somewhere within it all lurked a vicious thug.

and then there was the discovery that L. Frank Baum advocated genocide against native americans. that threw me for a loop, lemme tell ya.

Even though I'm not being properly post-modern when I do so, I enjoy reading up on the lives of artists and writers I like, so I am more than familiar with the experience of finding out something really awful about someone you admire. That's actually when that training in literary criticism is helpful as I gallantly remember that it's not the person that's important but the art. Art is so very subjective that the individual failings of artists can't really be construed to say too much about what one can get out of the work.

Jam will be disappointed to realize that Kerouac was no champion of treating women nicely, either. But you don't even have to read biographies on him to know how shabbily he treated women--he downright brags about it in his writings. It makes me sick and probably has a lot to do with why I dislike On The Road so much. But the funny thing about misogyny in art is it doesn't necessarily make me dislike it. For instance, I like Ernest Hemingway, who is a huge bugaboo for feminists because of his persistent unwillingness to write female characters who are much besides cunts on legs. For that he doesn't get a pass with the product-of-the-times argument, since even the garden-variety sexists of the times were full well aware that women were human. Despite that, I get a lot of his writing and I even still admire him as a person because of his uncommon bravery.

And what you get out of art doesn't necessarily match up with the artist's intentions. For instance, there's little doubt that Mick Jagger was deliberately trying to send an anti-woman message in the song "Under My Thumb", and for that you can't blame feminists for hating that song. But I like that song because there's something else that song is about--the wicked delight of torturing someone who has caused you pain and lovesickness in the past. It's wrong and immature, but there's no denying that it's a pleasure to make someone you used to beg for coming begging for you, and this song captures that nasty pleasure perfectly. I'm not hearing the sexism when I hear that song. Some female singer should cover that and reverse the sexes in the lyrics and that would probably bring that aspect of the song out more.

None of this means that feminists are obliged not to criticize sexist messages in art and music, as much as many petulant sexist artists wish otherwise. Sexist art perpetuates the problem. Criticism of sexist art therefore functions more to help people understand the way that sexism perpetuates itself and give them tools to resist it. Censorship is not one of those tools, either--hiding a problem doesn't make it go away. I think that's why criticism itself should be taught in public schools, to eliminate the misconception that criticizing something necessarily means that the critic doesn't like the work or wants to have it banned.