If you might be sitting round questioning what Susan Sontag would make of our present political second, a brand new assortment of her writing and interviews from the ’70s about feminism, On Women, presents tantalizing glimmers and hints. Imagining Sontag, together with her aptitude for aphorisms, unloosed on Twitter is simple: “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.” She would have thrived within the Twittersphere, although parts of its tradition of groupthink and self-righteousness would have unsettled her.
In her introduction to On Women, the critic Merve Emre notes Sontag’s “refusal of easy answers or offended pieties.” Now that we’re within the heyday of simple solutions and offended pieties, Sontag’s fashionable, idiosyncratic strategy to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her period might be distilled fairly properly into tangible steerage for ours. This is a type of moments when sensible voices from different instances can provide us readability and recent views on our personal. In the spirit of Sontag’s personal numbered lists and notes (probably the most well-known of which is “Against Interpretation”), listed below are some ideas from On Women for independent-minded readers.
- Say what you imply. Be particular. Don’t be content material with prepackaged jargon. Avoid the clichés and platitudes that blossom in undergraduate papers. Where many feminists in the present day would possibly say or write breezily that in our tradition older ladies are “invisible,” “erased,” or “silenced,” citing “heteronormative” this and “problematic” that, Sontag cuts to the core of the difficulty. She writes in such a manner that evading the reality of what she is saying is unattainable; her vividness forces the reader right into a confrontation together with her level. In a stinging essay on “The Double Standard of Aging,” she writes: “The profoundest terror of a woman’s life is the moment represented in a statue by Rodin called Old Age: a naked old woman, seated, pathetically contemplating her flat, pendulous, ruined body. Aging in women is a process of becoming obscene sexually, for the flabby bosom, wrinkled neck, spotted hands, thinning white hair, waistless torso and veined legs of an old woman are felt to be obscene.” Rather than glossing over the taboos towards growing old with acquainted abstractions, this unflinching description exhibits how they work their manner deep into our psyches. She writes, “Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.”
- Look on the world truthfully, even when doing so entails unearthing complicated and disturbing dynamics. Avoid narratives with overly simplified villains and victims whereas nonetheless making an attempt to light up how oppression really works in every day life. Sontag writes, as an illustration, “Behind the fact that women are more severely penalized than men are for aging is the fact that people, in this culture at least, are simply less tolerant of ugliness in women than in men. An ugly woman is never merely repulsive. Ugliness in a woman is felt by everyone, men as well as women, to be faintly embarrassing.” In conversations in the present day, most of us are extra comfy speaking about issues like “toxic masculinity” than about ladies’s participation within the policing and implementing of oppressive magnificence requirements. Sontag reveals no such worry.
- Don’t be boring. Sontag writes a colourful, slashing, attention-grabbing takedown of the establishment of the household: “The modern ‘nuclear’ family is a psychological and moral disaster. It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory and a school of selfishness.”
- Resist the urge to have a look at historical past, the world, or a cultural second by means of a single, overarching, oversimplifying lens. As Sontag places it, “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded. That is its power and … that is its limitation.” One of probably the most fascinating exchanges within the e-book is between her and the poet Adrienne Rich. Rich objected to an essay Sontag wrote referred to as “Fascinating Fascism,” on the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, as a result of Rich felt that Sontag was writing about Nazism with out paying sufficient consideration to the oppression of ladies. Rich writes that “Nazi Germany was patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form.” She continues, “What are these but masculinist, virilist, patriarchal values?” Sontag sharply factors out the absurdity of viewing the Nazis primarily as oppressors of ladies. In her slicing manner, she exposes how harmful it’s for Rich to miss the racist violence and fascism of the Nazis. Mocking Rich, Sontag writes that “all that epiphenomenal trash is nothing ‘in light of’ the real stuff, ‘patriarchal history.’” To Sontag, Rich’s well-intentioned perspective was myopic: “It is surely not treasonable to think that there are other goals than the depolarization of the two sexes, other wounds than sexual wounds, other identities than sexual identity, other politics than sexual politics—and other ‘anti-human values’ than ‘misogynistic’ ones.”
- Stop worrying a lot about emotions. Sontag wouldn’t, as an illustration, have accredited of the trigger-warning requirement that Cornell University’s scholar authorities tried to go in March, which might have compelled professors to alert their courses to “traumatic content” of any type. She would most likely have argued that a part of the joys of mental change is being unsettled or uncomfortable or unmoored. In common, Sontag seemingly wouldn’t have appreciated an mental ambiance that privileged emotions over rigorous pondering. Rich accused Sontag’s feminism of being “more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality.” Sontag shot again: “Anyone with a taste for ‘intellectual exercise’ will always find in me an ardent defender … I much prefer that the text be judged as an argument and not as an ‘expression’ of anything at all, my sincere feelings included.” To dispel any ambiguity, she asserted that she wouldn’t dissociate herself from feminism however that she would dissociate herself “from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (‘intellectual exercise’) and emotion (‘felt reality’).”
- Don’t overuse political language. By throwing round phrases like patriarchy or fascist or racist, we danger draining them of their energy. Sontag writes, “If a point is to have meaning some of the time it can’t be used all of the time.”
- Be impartial. One of probably the most attention-grabbing and subversive parts of On Women is that Sontag writes critically about “the feminists” and likewise writes ardent feminist reflections. She is each inside and out of doors the motion. The modern reader might very properly really feel impatient: “But which side are you on?” We are primed to see this shifting stance as a flaw, a weak point. But Sontag herself views this complicated positioning as a power: One can function with complete independence when one is each inside and out of doors a political ideology. In our political second, persons are consistently being divided into groups—woke and anti-woke, feminist and anti-feminist, racist and anti-racist—and the trouble of this sorting, of castigating people who find themselves insufficiently enjoying for the staff, occupies an enormous portion of the general public discourse. And but Sontag’s darting out and in of conversations, her motion from sharp critic of feminism to sensible, impassioned feminist theorist and again once more, is a helpful reminder. A single thoughts figuring out the problems generally is a highly effective drive, coming to its personal surprising, idiosyncratic conclusions. The striving towards ideological purity, towards consistency, towards the right witty expression of the completely typical view, is one thing Sontag resisted early on. She wrote towards a sure pressure of feminism’s “demands for intellectual simplicity advanced in the name of ethical solidarity.” She at all times took the facet of nuance, of arcane particular person thought processes, over consensus. Sontag places it succinctly: “I don’t like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.”
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