I used to love the song, “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” the way husky-voiced Roberta Flack used to sing it back in the 1970s. I understood it as a quintessential woman’s dream, the romance of finding a man who understood his woman so well he could tell her story, “killing” her with his empathy.
I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him
To listen for a while.
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song. . .
He sang as if he knew me
In all my dark despair.
And then he looked right through me
As if I wasn’t there.
And he just kept on singing
Singing clear and strong.
But the song is fraudulent. Pretending to represent a woman’s desire, it was written by a pair of men, so it is they who are speaking, creating a fantasy of a woman creating a fantasy of a man.
Um hmmm.
Until the line “And then he looked right through me as if I wasn’t there.” Once we understand that the speaker behind the speaker is a man, we can see this as a sort of male “gotcha”, the author aligning with the singer to pull the carpet out from under a woman who assumed an intimacy that didn’t exist. Leaving her out in the cold. A woman who is sandwiched between creator and performer, who is herself the passive recipient of both, who is constructed as “yearning helplessness” by both men.
Women eat it up.
A culture’s literary canon tells us about the people who create and cultivate the canon. The canon, the collection of works deemed essential mirrors of the culture, doesn’t just come about by chance. Or by popularity. The works are chosen by gatekeepers who have historically been just as male as the authors they elevate.
Literary scholars have noted that the entire history of American literature fits one “anti-domesticity” narrative. For anti-domesticity, read anti-woman, anti-family. All the great American literature written by men is about men who escape women and their need for intimacy. Think Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Norman Mailer, all shooting animals in the woods or hunting whales to the death of whichever. Think Thoreau, who proudly wrote about his years of solitude in a cabin by Walden Pond, but went home to his mother’s home-cooked meals when the sun went down. Self-reliance is the great American male fantasy.
It's not a bad thing; of course it’s not. But it’s only one human desire and exists more in the aspiration than in the practice. We all need people. That includes those most rendered invisible – the shoemakers, cloth weavers and clothing sewers, growers of crops and makers of meal, and of meals. Manufacturers of transport vehicles. Without other people most of us would be naked, unfed barefoot wanderers. Both the desire for intimacy and the desire for independence are universal and are as related as two halves of a whole. All people, male and female, want both these things. To be able to flow from independent action to mutually dependent intimacy in natural rhythms is the epitome of individuation. But western men have constructed a scenario in which it is women alone who want intimacy, and men who need to escape into masculine solitary independence. These constructed beings may be the dregs of patriarchy, created when people were becoming urban and male hunting and fighting for survival a more or less distant memory. What do you imagine women did during those times when they were responsible for keeping everyone safe and fed without able-bodied men? No, what kind of women would they have been? Would we even recognize them?
How do you maintain the illusion of an ancient masculinity when you spend your days in an office? In part you create an illusory femininity of dependence and neediness. Or, in the newest male craze, a femininity of “agreeableness”. There’s nothing new about this at all, of course, it’s just repackaged “nice” and “kind”. Agreeable women are the “angel in the house” as (male) British authors named her 200 years ago.
It’s a very appealing aspiration for many, many women because, I think, it calls for the greatest human achievement – self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Men risk death in battle if the cause is just, or if the survival of their tribe demands it. Women deny themselves. It seems highly moral. But who do women deny themselves for? It’s one thing to sacrifice for the sake of one’s children, or for the preservation of the species. It’s an entirely different thing to deny oneself for a man.
But this is what women seem constantly to do.
I want women to understand that this is not a moral act. It serves no valuable function at all. If your first instinct in a social setting is to be nice (to men), you are not exercising your ethical muscle, you are simply doing the easiest thing you could possibly do – reacting mindlessly out of your conditioning.
Being “nice” or “kind” should take a struggle. Making the ethical decision should take effort. It requires overcoming all the easier, lazier, more self-indulgent, ego-satisfying possibilities. The cashier gives you too much change, do you keep it or return it? Someone shouts insults at you, do you return the favour, or restrain yourself? All of us encounter such choices pretty regularly, and it always takes at least some small effort to do the right thing.
“Niceness” as a feminine characteristic is newly visible on social media, where we all see women treating men with synthetic sex identities as if they have the right to pretend to be a woman. Many of us are appalled at all the women supporting such men as they take over women’s spaces, money and awards, and tweet disapprovingly en masse about the “be kind” crowd, or the “choose me” gang.
And then we watch it happen again and again, and find that even gender critical women are not immune. Recently a man claiming to be a woman infiltrated Canadian twitterspace, offering himself to everyone as a “reasonable” “transwoman,” saying all the things women love to hear. He opposed the social transition of children without parental knowledge, he said. He boasted that he refused to wear pronoun badges – everyone knows what I’m going for, he said, his hormone-enhanced cleavage on display.
When pronouns are compelled, everyone calls him “they”, he lamented. When they’re not compelled, he can count on the kindness of women to call him “she”, even -- he gushed -- without being asked! Women will be nice without being asked to be nice, how nice is that, he enthused in wide-eyed wonder. Imagine that!!
And even those who know that men can never be women, who bridle at wrong-sex pronouns, called him “she”! How can kindness hurt, they asked, as they modelled capitulation to all their followers.
But here is the truth. If a woman has to be asked to be nice, she has already failed. Feminine niceness must be offered before it’s demanded. A woman who has to be asked to be nice is not a nice woman. Our social conditioning works to eliminate any gap between the opportunity for kindness, and the decision to be kind. Eliminate the gap, eliminate thought, eliminate conscious decision-making. And you eliminate moral agency.
I still remember, with some shame, walking along a sidewalk near my home when a man uttered the one word, “smile” as he passed me. I automatically lifted my head and the corners of my mouth. Automatically. I was in my fifties. I smiled because a random man had casually commanded it without even stopping as he continued the march of his own life.
Much of the time when I see women choosing nice instead of real, I think of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem about African Americans in post-slavery America.
We Wear the Mask We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
Women hide our real selves, dare I say our “authentic” selves, behind our smiles, our niceness, our agreeableness. And men believe us when we lie.
That, that is the reason we have to stop. When the choice is between truth and kindness, we have to choose truth.