Salon.com > Lorraine Berry

“Walking Dead”: Still a white patriarchy

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:14:00 +0000

Near the end of season two of "The Walking Dead," Sheriff Rick Grimes had his masculinity challenged by his former best friend, Shane, when the two of them had their High Noon face-off in a field under a full moon. Shane told Rick that he had a broken woman and a weak son, that Rick wasn't man enough to take care of his family or to keep them safe, and that the best thing would be for Shane to kill Rick and assume leadership of the band of survivors of the zombie apocalypse. In the struggle, Rick killed Shane by stabbing him in the chest, but it was Carl, Rick's son, who shot Shane through the head when Shane "turned," and became a walker.

Season three ended last night with Rick once again being told that he wasn't man enough to keep the group safe. This time, his interlocutor was his son, Carl. Rick had confronted Carl because the boy had killed a young man who was attempting to surrender to Hershel and Carl, and Hershel had told Rick that Carl had gunned down the young man in cold blood.

Raylan Givens “Justified” my love

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

I am not drawn to men who swagger. In fact, I'm repulsed by them. It's long been my experience that a man who swaggers is, contrary to his walk, insecure and out to prove something by behaving as if he is a king in this world, and the rest of us are just minions. So, how then, do you explain my adoration of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, whose chronicles are told in the FX series "Justified"? It's hard not to argue that Raylan (played by the magnificent Timothy Olyphant — and why has this man not won an Emmy yet?) does, in fact, swagger. Raylan moves through two separate worlds as if he owns them both. But my boyfriend opines, as we keep our Tuesday 10 p.m. appointment with "Justified" each week, that what Raylan wears is not arrogance, but a "righteous swagger. Informed by self-confidence and self-history. More important accessories than any gun, badge and hat."

The gun, badge and hat (and jeans and cowboy boots) announce him. Raylan is rarely seen without his Stetson (except for an early episode in which he lost the hat in a bar fight), and his marshal's badge, which he wears on the right side of his belt, just in front of his gun holster. You might think that those things just about comprise his identity, but there you'd be wrong.

I’m one of the NRA’s “bad guys”

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:38:00 +0000

We have rare live moments when we know we are collectively, as a nation, listening to the ravings of a mad man. I felt that way as I listened to Wayne LaPierre's "conversation" with America regarding guns. While they waited exactly seven days and 90 minutes since the horrific events of Sandy Hook as a matter of respect, it was clear that any NRA soul-searching had resulted in a position that is so anathema to me as a professor, as a parent and as a human being that I was reduced to sputtering on Twitter and anguishing on Facebook.

As soon as the speech was over, I went looking for the transcript, which can be found here, but in the first few moments after the news conference, the html line read "Armed police officers in every single school in this nation. This is insanity talking." Apparently, I wasn't alone in the world thinking that Wayne LaPierre was having a moment of psychosis and sociopathy in front of a national audience. And I felt an immediate kinship with the Washington Post news poster.

I won’t shop on Thanksgiving

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Last week, I had a conversation with a student at the upstate New York college where I teach. She’s a retail employee who would be working an eight-hour shift on Thanksgiving, not be spending dinnertime with her 4-year-old son and the rest of her clan.

What would she do? I asked. Would the family wait dinner for her?

"No," she said. "I'll eat leftovers when I get home from work. It's what I did last year, too."

And I was so angry on her behalf. But she needed her job, and she couldn't say no without the risk of being fired, and so a mother who should have been spending time with her child on our most family-friendly day was shipping off to help sell cheap flat-screen televisions to the masses.

How did this happen?

Thanksgiving used to be a time to be grateful for what you already had. Back when George Washington declared it a national holiday, almost all work came to a stop. I’m still moved by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover, depicting a family's simple joy. The painting was called “Freedom From Want.”

“The Walking Dead” has become a white patriarchy

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

There's a crucial moment in the opening episode of "The Walking Dead" when we realize that everything has been erased, and if humankind is to survive, things are going to have to change. That moment comes after Sheriff Rick Grimes has been rescued by Morgan and Duane, an African-American father and son who have boarded themselves up in their home. Outside, the zombies — walkers — congregate at night, and Morgan's job is to keep Duane safe. When night comes, and the men hunker down, we watch as Morgan's walker-wife comes up the stairs and tries to let herself into the domestic sphere from which she has been banished. The doorknob turns and turns, and as Duane cries, Morgan reassures him, "That's not your mom. That's not your mom." The turning doorknob was featured in the credits for the first two seasons of the show, which caused me to think that gender and race would turn, too.

As I have watched "The Walking Dead," however, I have been disappointed to discover that, while the writers occasionally take a moment to comment on the state of gender — and of race — in this new world, in the end they leave these issues to die and reconstitute a world in which white men rule. Men of color are reduced to occupying a nebulous space, and women (with rare exception) are to be protected. Even more pernicious, any power that women have usually comes to them in the old-fashioned, stereotypical way of manipulating the men in their lives into doing what they want them to do.

Caitlin Moran: Women have won nothing

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I first fell for Times of London columnist Caitlin Moran when I read her memoir-cum-feminist-treatise “How to Be a Woman” — laughing out loud as she evoked the experience of growing up working-class in England. I felt an instant kinship with her since my working-class parents had fled with me in tow to the United States to escape a system that kept them bound to their class status. Reading her book gave me a sense of what my life might have been like had we stayed. But I was also taken with her raw candor, a feminist who just told it like she saw it, in a world so determined to shut women up.

So I was eager to interview her about feminism, with her new book publishing here on Nov. 6 (it’s already out in the U.K.): "Moranthology," a collection of essays from her columns at the Times, where she has been writing since 1992. Our conversation had been commissioned by Bitch magazine. And then, in a strange turn of events, Bitch's editor-in-chief Kjerstin Johnson killed it when Moran tweeted, on Oct. 5, something that would bring opprobrium — from all corners — down on the writer's head. Moran is no stranger to controversy — she has more than a few detractors, namely Katie Roiphe and Heather Wilhelm, who've both derided her interpretation of feminism as being crazy, jaded, embarrassing and mortifying — but still, I was astonished that a feminist magazine would censor another feminist. Another woman, period.

My slide back to painkillers

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I have been told by more than one medical practitioner that I have a high pain threshold. After I watched one doctor insert a needle into a knuckle torn open on the edge of a cat food can, he said, "The last time I did this, the man passed out. You didn't even flinch."

How to explain to him that I grew up in a family where crying over a scraped knee prompted my grandmother to tell me, "Don't be soft"? My father, a soccer coach who wanted to raise his girl to be as tough as any boy, used to tell me whenever I hurt myself, "Walk it off."

We judge each other’s tolerance for pain. We tell ourselves that pain makes us stronger, that it sharpens our character, that it demonstrates our will. We expect high-paid athletes to play hurt. We debate whether women should use drugs during labor. We wonder if we rely too much on over-the-counter medications for the ordinary aches and pains of life. That must be why I opened this essay about my addiction to painkillers by telling you that I’m not a whiner. I want you to know that I’m not the kind of person who runs to the emergency room with a hangnail. I can take it.

Dear female students: Stop writing about men

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

My college students write a 20-page piece of creative nonfiction at the end of every semester, many of them memoirs. Over the years, I have heard about suicide attempts, rapes, arrests and the deaths of friends. I can never predict what they'll write about, but here is one constant: The females in the class tend to write about a romantic relationship, and the males do not.

I'm not saying my male students are not sensitive. Some have detailed abuse at the hands of relatives; years spent in the foster system; hunting trips with their fathers; the thrill of learning to race motorcycles; but only once or twice in the nine years I've been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.

But the women do. They write reams about The One, or the One Who Got Away. Sometimes, the student outlines in heartbreaking detail the lengths she went to maintain a relationship — transferring schools so they could be closer, putting up with poor treatment, and so on — all to no avail. At some point, the relationship ends, and she's left mourning the person she imagined to be her great love. Another common theme — and this one never fails to shock me — is the young woman who discovers her boyfriend is cheating by reading his texts on his cellphone. So he's cheating, but she's invading his privacy. I have to still my hand from writing "WTF?" in the margins.

The ashes I wasn’t meant to find

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

I have a long-standing fantasy that I’m going to find the $7 million that once belonged to gangster Dutch Schultz, who secreted the cash in the upstate New York hills where I live. The money has been missing for decades, so when I first saw that box, sitting there in the graveyard where I occasionally walk my dogs, I actually said out loud: "Oh my God, it's buried treasure."

The box wasn’t nearly large enough to contain so much money — it looked as if it might be a 4-by-6-inch index card box — but then again, how many times do you stumble across a box sitting in an open hole?

I crouched down, the late afternoon Friday sun hot on my neck. The box was not stone, as I had originally thought, but a heavy-duty black ridged cardboard. Hmm, I thought, perhaps someone’s family heirlooms?

On a grave not too far from where we stood, someone had left several pieces of costume jewelry atop one of the headstones. I lifted the heavy box out of its shallow hole. On one end, someone had typed a white label.

A man’s name. A place of residence. And the note: “Human remains. Cremated August 1, 2011.”

How getting divorced revived my sex life

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000

At 38, my libido came roaring back. Its return delighted me in ways that cannot be overstated, because what came before that was a period of mortification.

I met my husband when I was 24 and he was 26. We married two years later, and except for nights we spent apart, I can't remember a time in the first nine years when we weren't physical. We lived in the Pacific Northwest, and we hiked often, finding it impossible not to stop and fool around in the many meadows and forest beds we created. When we decided to get pregnant, I had read that it was best to wait 36 hours between bouts of intercourse, and it became a running joke that we were the only couple we knew who had to have less sex in order to have a kid.

But things changed.

No one is to blame for where that piece of me went for the five or six years when sex felt like an obligation, instead of what it had been in my 20s: fun, an expression of pleasure and love, and did I mention fun?

Certainly, I played a part. Just before giving birth to our second child, I had blown a disc in my neck. Chronic pain, pregnancy and prescription painkillers are not a recipe for erotic bliss. Instead, I found the closeness I'd always craved holding my children, nursing, carrying an infant. My husband's job sent him out of town once or twice a month for days at a time, and I was in a high-pressure graduate program when I wasn't caring for our children.

No, female professors aren’t ruining college

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:01:00 +0000

No doubt, Professor X will find himself lauded as the reluctant hero who is one of the rare college instructors not only willing to give students the F they deserve, but to also write about it unflinchingly, while letting his readers know that he's really a nice guy who agonizes over each of the failing grades he must administer. It's not his fault that, as he describes in his book (recently excerpted on Salon), he is toiling away in a feminized academy where, he surmises, the influx of women professors has created rampant grade inflation. According to Professor X, feminine qualities have compromised the mental toughness and rigor once necessary to get through college and replaced these with a reliance on compassion and nurturing.

Codswallop.

As a (female) professor who knows many other (female) professors, I wouldn't dream of generalizing about all of academia like Professor X does. But I can tell you from my own experience that Professor X has it wrong. Of course women can be as tough, even tougher, than male professors. But it's not "nurturing" in the classroom that has led to grade inflation. It's that nurturing -- or, if you prefer the word, "coaching" -- can lead to better teaching.

Our first date was the last day of his life

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:01:00 +0000

I woke up when Yves thrust himself off the mattress. "My head is killing me," he said. "I'm going to take some more Tylenol."

I heard him open the cabinet door, turn on the water as if pouring himself a drink. Then a loud bang startled me from bed.

Yves slumped on the floor, his back against the wall, his side against the bathtub. Tylenol was scattered on the tiles.

"Help me stand up," he said. But when I wrapped my arm around his waist and pulled him toward me, we both fell forward, my back hitting the vanity as I struggled to cushion him from the fall. His eyes fluttered. He was clearly in pain.

"I think we should call a doctor," I said.

"No, no," he said. "I just need to get back to bed. Give me a minute." Then he closed his eyes.

"Yves," I said. No response.

I sat beside him, stroking his back, letting him know that he was not alone, while we waited for the ambulance. I had only met Yves in person that day. But it felt like we had known each other for a lifetime.

I'm not sure what made me get in touch with Yves when I saw him on Salon personals. How can we untangle the mysterious calculus that is attraction? I liked how he playfully listed the languages he spoke as "French, English, and Body Language." I liked the description of the woman he was seeking: "sensualist a must. a self-confident goddess too. a mermaid is also welcomed."

Being a teacher-therapist in the wake of suicides

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

I live in Ithaca, where three Cornell students jumped to their deaths from our bridges into our spectacular gorges last spring. Another three Cornell students committed suicide by other means. The body of the third student who jumped was never recovered, and I am haunted by how his family must feel -- knowing he's somewhere in the opalescent blue of Cayuga Lake, most likely never to surface. How do you bury a child without proof?

I don't teach at Cornell, but I do teach creative writing at another local university. As school begins again, what presses on me is not merely assembling a syllabus and handouts, but also assessing my responsibility to my students and preparing myself to meet it.

It's not an empty exercise. Last semester, two of my students were close to their breaking points. Both of them came to talk to me, and I know that it helped them. So, even though I'm not a trained psychologist, I try to trust that my empathy and honesty with future students will at least give them temporary succor.

My students have tales that make my stomach hurt. One suffered from things done to him a long time ago; the other from things that were happening spring semester over which he had no control. I can't give out more information; I need to protect their privacy. But I have continued to carry their pain around inside of me.

Does Mehlman deserve our understanding?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:55:00 +0000

Sometimes, those stereotypes turn out to be true. Namely, that the more homophobic a man is, the more likely he is to be conflicted about his own sexuality. A secure man, the story says, doesn't care what gay men do in their bedrooms.

Unless he's the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.