So here’s the latest facet of American culture that I’ve been pondering: cross-dressing. Specifically, cross-dressing as either a comedic or non-comedic element of movies and television. While watching a comedy sketch in which a man was playing a female character, Jim and I got to discussing the popularity of men playing women in comedy sketches and the relative unpopularity of women playing men.

Certainly this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the disproportionately high number of men in comedy groups – when you’re using your entire female cast in a sketch and still need another female character, or when your entire cast is male, the obvious solution is to have one of the male cast members dress up as a woman. But this can’t be the sole explanation, since there have been plenty of times on SNL when a man has played a female character and there was no shortage of available female cast members. Furthermore, when a man dresses up as a woman for a sketch, he is rarely simply playing a woman; he is mugging for the camera, playing a grotesque caricature.

The fact is, there is something intrinsically funny (at least to most Americans) about a man dressing up as a woman, but the same is not true of a woman who dresses up as a man. If this statement doesn’t seem intuitively correct to you, I think I can demonstrate it by cataloguing some of the more popular instances of cross-dressing in films.

Before I do that, I think it’s important to make a few distinctions between different “types” of cinematic cross-dressing. There are movies in which characters of one gender are played by actors of another — for example, Hairspray. Then there are movies in which a character of one gender has to pretend to be the other gender for some kind of instrumental reason — for example, Mrs. Doubtfire. Finally, there are movies that feature transgendered characters who actually want to be the other gender, transvestites who derive sexual pleasure from cross-dressing, and mentally ill characters who manifest their sociopathy by dressing like the other gender — e.g. Boys Don’t Cry, Psycho. (Note: I’m not equating transgenderism and transvestitism with psychosis here, I’m just putting them all in the same category of non-instrumental cross-dressing.) For the purposes of the current analysis, I am only looking at the middle category, within-the-movie instrumental cross-dressing, although I’ll probably talk a little about the first category sometime in the future.

Now, gathered from the Wikipedia page on Cross-dressing in film and television, here is a list of American movies that fit into the instrumental cross-dressing category, along with whether it is a male or female cross-dressing, and whether the movie is a comedy or a drama. (Note: I am ignoring Victor, Victoria because it’s way too confusing to categorize. Also, this is in no way a complete list; if you have anything to add, leave it in the comments.)

So, we’ve got 14 movies in which men dress as women, 13 of which are comedies (the lone drama is a James Bond film in which the villain apparently dresses as a woman to escape capture) — that’s about 93 percent. And we’ve got 9 movies in which women dress as men, 4 of which are comedies (if we count Shakespeare in Love, which I consider more of a romance than a comedy, but whatever). You know what, let’s be generous and include Motocrossed as a comedy as well, since it’s a Disney movie. So that would be 5 out of 9, or 56 percent. (Update: After I posted this article, a friend who has seen Thunderball informed me that it shouldn’t even be on the list, since the cross-dressing is transient and irrelevant. So let’s make that a whopping 100 percent of male cross-dressing movies that are comedies.)

I think it’s safe to say that this supports my argument that, in mainstream American culture, cross-dressing men are inherently funny in a way that cross-dressing women are not. In fact, the only argument this data supports even more persuasively is that cross-dressing men are essentially never not funny.

Rudy Giuliani dressed as a woman? High comedy. Nancy Pelosi dressed as a man? Confusing. An obvious explanation is that men have less leeway when it comes to gender conformity — woman are free to wear pants, and tomboyism is accepted if not encouraged — which means that male gender transgressions are viewed as far more taboo (and therefore far more hilarious). But I don’t think this fully explains the phenomenon, and I think that looking more closely at the motives behind cross-dressing in these films will show that.

Let’s discount the dramas for now and just look at the comedies. In the female cross-dressing comedies, the main character dresses up as a male so that she can participate in some activity off-limits to women: journalism (Just One of the Guys), acting (Shakespeare in Love), motocross (Motocrossed), soccer (She’s the Man), paid work (Twelfth Night). That is, there is something disadvantageous about their femaleness given their interests or needs, and so they need to pose as men in order to be allowed to participate. The comedy arises from the trouble they have posing as men (since they have no experience acting “tough” and manly) and the inevitable confusions that arise when they fall in love with men who are unaware of their buddies’ true identities.

In the male cross-dressing comedies, on the other hand, the main character dresses up as a woman because he is in trouble and has to hide his real identity in some way, and the only option he has is to dress up as a woman. Robin Williams’ character needs to disguise himself in order to see his kids because his custody was revoked; the only way he can become part of their lives again is to become a (female) nanny (in Mrs. Doubtfire). Three guys get kicked out of their frat, and in order to get back into the Greek system they have to pretend to be ugly girls and pledge the ugly girl sorority (Sorority Boys). Michael Dorsey has been blacklisted by directors due to his difficult nature, so he has to disguise himself as a woman in order to get acting parts (Tootsie). Two musicians who witness a murder have to get out of the town in which they live, and the only job they can find that will help them escape is an all-girl band (Some Like it Hot). (In the few male cross-dressing movies that don’t fit this mold, the male usually has to dress up like a specific person, not a generic female — it is the particular identity that is important, not just that he be disguised as a woman.) And the comedy arises from, yes, the characters’ difficulties acting “feminine” and the threat of accidental homosexuality, but also from the constant humiliation and degradation that the men-disguised-as-women experience at the hands of the men around them.

So for the women, dressing up as a man is a privilege; their newfound masculinity empowers them, enables them to do things they were unable to do as women, although it may temporarily prevent them from getting the guy. But for the men, dressing up as a woman is a punishment of sorts, a necessary evil that they must withstand if they are to accomplish the goal that has been jeopardized by a previous misdeed. After all, why would someone want to be a woman if he can be a man?

And that is my theory as to why male cross-dressing is funny while female cross-dressing isn’t necessarily: as the zeitgeist sees it, a man who dresses as a woman is essentially demeaning himself, and as the past popularity of minstrel shows and current popularity of comedians like Kathy Griffin and the Wayans brothers can attest, there is nothing America finds funnier than a person demeaning himself or herself.

This is all a half-baked theory, of course, and I hardly think this is the entire explanation; as I hope I’ve made clear, there’s never only one reason for any cultural phenomenon. For this particular phenomenon, there’s probably an entire web of intertwined factors, each exerting influence on the others. I’d be interested to hear alternative theories, so if you have something to contribute, post it in the comments below. Try to keep it constructive.

Alas, the review came out today, and it seems that the grey lady saw fit to devote only three paragraphs to this cesspool of popular culture. I was hoping A.O. Scott would heap abuse upon the movie and all that it signifies for a good two or three pages — especially given the Times’ time-honored “Kids today!” tradition — but instead we have the same predictable criticism that could have been levied against any other movie intended for preteen girls: the movie promotes an ultimate ideal of physical attractiveness; the diversity of the cast is belied by an underlying reliance on stereotypes; the movie promotes the very materialistic paradigm it pretends to question; the script is dull and unoriginal.

I’m unsatisfied with the three-paragraph treatment. I loathe Bratz dolls (which I see as a sign of the impending apocalypse if ever there was one), but more than that I loathe the laziness that seems to accompany modern preteen cultural production, where “Why bother cooking dinner when they’ll eat stale pork rinds?” seems to be the reigning motto. So I think Bratz deserves a more thorough takedown, one that impugns not only the quality of the movie but of the cultural beliefs that inform its success.

To that effect, let’s begin with a breakdown of the trailer. I’d recommend you watch the trailer first, if only so you can see how much it resembles an SNL skit. So go ahead, watch it. When you’re done banging your head against the wall, come back here.

Now here’s what I will from now on call the Elise Treatment.

-We open on four girls with arms linked. We have: a blonde, a redhead, a black girl, and an ambiguously “ethnic” girl who could be interpreted as Asian, Latina, or some blend of the two. So we’ve got our racial diversity covered.

-The narrator describes the girls as “inseparable friends.” As evidence of this, we are shown the girls performing a group handshake while shouting “BFFs!” and giggling. This ritualistic performance of their friendship will no doubt come up later.

-The girls show up to their first day of high school, which is apparently very different from middle school, as evidenced by their collective “Whoa.”

-And here we have the villainess. She is blond and perky, as villains in preteen girl movies are wont to be. She is obviously vain — she wipes lipstick off her teeth — and socially manipulative – she extends a hand as though to shake, then retracts it. Oh, dis!

-The villainess controls the school by maintaining “48 distinct cliques.” She describes some of them, accompanied by camera shots. Hasn’t this been done before? Except in a vastly funnier and more accurate way? “Disco dorks”? Seriously?

-The Bratz are unmoved by this explanation of how high school social dynamics work. Unmoved! They want to sit together. This distresses the villainess, but she is not concerned: “the system is flawless,” and nature will have its course.

-Sure enough, we now discover that the four Bratz not only span the set of race but also the set of types of female teenagers. We have: the nerd (the ambiguously Asian one — unsurprising), the jock (the blond one — progressive!), the cheerleader (the black one — whoa, I wasn’t expecting that!), and the loner (the redhead, dressed in hippie clothes — I was kind of expecting that). The Bratz separate, each joining their appropriate clique (except for the loner, who has a clique of one).

-Musical montage! Each Brat hangs out with her clique. The villainess rejoices. In her pool, because she is rich, as blond, perky villainesses are wont to be.

-Food fight montage! One Brat accidentally spills her lunch over a balcony onto another Brat, and somehow in midair the food morphs into about ten pounds of cooked spaghetti. More people throw spaghetti. Someone in stiletto heels slips in a kiddie pool’s worth.

-Oh ho, the gloves come off. The loner yells “You stupid cheerleader!” at the cheerleader, making manifest the resentment that this system of cliques foments. Gosh, and they used to be BFFs.

-More throwing of spaghetti. The villainess is, naturally, unharmed, having honed her spaghetti-dodging skills in previous school-wide food fights.

-Okay, this shot I’ll admit I kind of like. The visual shock of transitioning from a fight to the four Bratz sitting totally still in a classroom is nicely accompanied by the change in music. I promise that is the only nice thing I will say about this trailer.

-My appreciation is short-lived. Scenery-chewing commences. “What happened to us?” asks the nerd. “It’s the cliques,” the loner states. “We’re all in them,” she adds, apparently in denial about her own situation. The Bratz have come up with a solution: they should be themselves. Brilliant!

-The loaded gun in the first act goes off in the second. “BFFs!” Followed by giggling.

-The Bratz start to fight back. They refuse to follow the villainess’s clique system; in retribution, she tells them that they can’t go to her Super Sweet Sixteen unless they’re in a clique. (Does this mean that the Disco Dorks can go? Suh-WEET!)

-The Bratz undermine this form of control as well, showing up to the circus-like Sweet 16 dressed as… Oktoberfest prostitute waitresses? Ah yes, this harkens back to that well-known phrase, “The best revenge is serving drinks at the party you weren’t invited to, while dressed in an inexplicable but slutty costume.”

-This means war! And the final showdown is the talent show, which the villainess has apparently won three years running. Here we learn that the loner Brat is actually a singing loner. The Bratz perform in the talent show wearing surprisingly conservative clothes, although there is some stripperesque chest-shaking. I think we can guess who wins the talent show. (HINT: The movie is called Bratz, not Blond, Perky Villainess.)

-And we end with another musical montage, this one set to Avril Lavigne. Shots of the Bratz in their natural habitats (sports, cheerleading, science, singing) and then of them strutting around and posing. The villainess AND HER DOG get their hair washed at a salon.

-Finally, we reach the title screen, and we discover that the movie is titled “bratz.” This is the part where I originally fell out of my seat.

-Then we have what I’ll call the kicker scene (the little two-second clip at the end of a trailer that is supposed to solidify your desire to see the movie): an elephant knocks the villainess into a pool, and she screams. The Bratz laugh and shout “Oh my god!” The screen goes to black and “omg!” appears. I cry myself to sleep.

Okay, recapping that was only moderately painful, although watching that one actress struggle with the line “It’s the cliques. We’re all in them!” multiple times hurt my soul a little.

Now, there are the obvious crimes against humanity that this movie commits. The first is its unoriginal and amateurish screenplay: more than anything, the trailer seems like a cobbling together of every possible teen-movie cliché that the writers could think of. The second is its terrible acting: was this really the best cast they could find?

Third is the problematic message that the New York Times reviewer brings up: sure, you can flout social conventions and rebel against the popular kids, provided you are skinny and beautiful and like to show off your boobs. The four Bratz may have different hair and skin colors and vaguely different “personalities” (read: hobbies), but they all look essentially identical. I’m surprised that romantic subplots don’t seem to play much of a role, but there’s no way I’m going to see the movie in order to determine whether that’s actually the case.

And there are the mixed messages about materialism, which are also hinted at by the Times reviewer. The villainess is obviously supposed to be very wealthy, and her characterization relies heavily on depictions of excess: her lounging in her pool, her (obviously spoiled) dog who gets its hair done at a salon, her Super Sweet 16 with acrobats and circus animals. Equating profligate wealth with immorality is nothing new. But the ways in which the Bratz defeat the villainess and save the day are equally materialistic, though in a subtler way: they dress in elaborate matching costumes and learn to “walk the walk” of the Southern California culture in which they no doubt live. And, of course, the movie is named after a popular line of dolls, a tenuous brand tie-in that clearly serves no purpose except to sell more movie tickets and more dolls. (The movie has nothing to do with the dolls and was probably written before the brand tie-in even existed, like a sinister Super Mario 2.)

But the thing that bothers me the most about this movie is what some might call its saving grace: its message about cliques. While the movie suggests (or seems to suggest based on the trailer) that cliques are evil because they keep people from interacting with people who are different — a message that has been trumpeted time and again and still hasn’t made a lick of difference — it doesn’t question the underlying assumption that people — particularly females — are easily categorizeable in the first place.

The four heroines do not struggle with questions of identity but rather with the dilemma that, given their identities, they are expected to sever ties with their former friends. In order to be able to hang out with their friends, they must destroy the entire clique system: their identities are discrete and immutable, so instead of changing who they are they need to change the social system that “forces” them to hang out with the people exactly like them.

This depiction is symptomatic of a larger fragmentation of the female self. I’ve spent many hours studying oral contraceptive ads, and a recurring theme is the idea that the contraceptive in question meets the needs of three or four different “types” of women (and those “types” are surprisingly consistent). But watch any commercial for Viagra or Cialis, and you’ll notice that the appeal is directed toward “guys” or “men”: the collective is united, homogeneous.

There are countless popular depictions of sets of different “types” of women, from The Babysitter’s Club to Sex and the City. (There are also the ensuing online quizzes which invite women to determine which character they are — are, not most resemble.) Men are almost never represented in such groups of complementary types; if they are categorized, it is usually according to some binary principle such as “bad boy” vs. “nice guy,” where it is not that different men are different types but rather that there is some characteristic that some men possess and others do not. When men are categorized as “types,” it is in the company of women — e.g. The Breakfast Club, any movie about cliques — and the focus is on types of people, not types of men.

You may be wondering why this is problematic. After all, I just said that men are depicted as a homogeneous collective, which is arguably just as bad as being subdivided into different types, right? Well, I don’t think so. When “men” are treated as a homogeneous group, individual differences can still exist: to refer to “men” as a group is not to imply that all men are the same but rather that they share some characteristic (namely maleness).

To refer, explicitly or obliquely, to “types” of women, is to imply several things: one, that women can be broken down into a finite (and usually small) number of categories; two, that these categorizeable differences exist along only one or two dimensions — that is, women differ in their marital status and their occupation, or in their intelligence and their promiscuity, or, in the case of Bratz, in their ethnicity and their hobbies. Three, it implies that no woman is by herself a complete person, but rather a fragment of some ur-woman that comes into being only when complementary fragments put on identical outfits in different colors and dance at a talent show, or get together to drink some Cosmos and talk about fellatio.

It is my uneasiness with this paradigm that makes me hate Bratz, a movie that tells girls that they can be good at science or good at sports or good at singing, and that their choice determines the type of person they will be — the type of woman they will be. It’s one-dimensional, and it’s lazy.

Unlike elephants shoving villains into pools; now that’s priceless.

Burn This Book
Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That
I Want Candy
On the Other Hand
Choose Your Own Election
Greetings From Earth
Notes from the Interstate
Are You Pro-Choice?

Yes, that would be the associate editor of this newspaper. No, it wasn’t a bizarre new kind of editing wherein the editor and writer mud-wrestle over grammar disagreements, although I could get behind that idea. It was intramural softball, and last Monday I found myself in the strange situation of playing against the Cornell Dairy Sluggers (an athletics official made a typo).

I was on the Kitsch Magazine team. Imagine the match-up: a small features magazine facing off against a newspaper that could draw its team from over 200 members, including a sports board. Plus, they had Per Ostman, and that guy’s like eight feet tall. My five-foot-two self was understandably intimidated.

But somehow we won. Somehow, despite the fact that our opponents were a hard-boiled conglomeration of athletes and Mexicans while we were a ragtag team of English majors and gay men, despite the fact that our team shirts were an oh-so-intimidating shade of baby blue, despite the fact that at one point we had two runners on third base at the same time, we won. It was like an after-school special.

Were I more of a team player (or a chauvinist), I’d call it a bittersweet victory; while I do love a good win, my tenure at The Sun has been one of the most significant parts of my time at Cornell. I started as a second-semester sophomore and soon developed quite a crush on the paper, if such a thing is possible; it was all I talked about — The Sun this, The Sun that — and I’m sure it drove my friends nuts. The prospect of writing a column with a readership in the thousands was dizzyingly exciting, and, as an added bonus, guys outnumbered girls on staff by something like five to one, which seemed like pretty good odds to my single self.

Well, two and a half years later, some things have changed and some haven’t. I still spend far too much time each week writing my column (it usually expands to occupy an entire day, believe it or not) and I still become semi-delirious with excitement at the thought that thousands of pairs of eyes look over the newspaper in which my column runs. Though my extracurriculars have grown exponentially over the years, my column for The Sun is still the accomplishment I list most proudly on my résumé, and the lessons I’ve learned about the writing process, along with my criticism-thickened skin, will hopefully stay with me for the rest of my life.

Which, incidentally, begins with the end of this column. My thesis has been handed in — I defended it Monday afternoon — and I’m not taking any classes this semester, so by the time you read these words I’ll be essentially done with college. All that’s left is commencement, and then it’s on to the next phase of my life, pursuing a PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago. (By the way, the good odds paid off; I’ll be moving to Chicago with fellow columnist and love of my life Jim Shliferstein ’06.) As much as I hate to sound trite, it seems like just yesterday I was walking into the Sun office for the first time, wide-eyed and terrified of what I was getting myself into. Even then, I planned what I would write in my last column, but as I sit here at my computer, I feel as though this task has suddenly been foisted upon me without warning.

And there’s something nice about that, I think — about the fact that it all feels like it’s ending way too soon. Who wants to stay somewhere until they get sick of it, bringing resentment and bad memories with them when they go? No, it’s better to go while you still want to stay; there’s beauty in that fleetingness, that precarious balance between too little time and too much. The sunset, with its transient ebb and flow of colors, is all the more enthralling because you never know when the brilliant reds and oranges will subside into a dull navy blue. Where the bloat of surfeit is filled with regret, the empty ache of wanting is steeped in possibility.

Which I guess is all just a roundabout way of saying that, as much as I try to be cynical, I am optimistic at heart. My moniker, “Vim and Vinegar,” was chosen to reflect this balance; though I have complained, week after week, about the various problems of the world, I think I’ve made it clear that my criticisms stem from adoration — there is a hopefulness in the acerbic edge to my voice. I love this crazy, ill-informed, misguided world, and I can’t wait to dig in.

But first I have some thanks to give, of course. To those who have edited me, Carlos, Zach, and especially Erica: thank you for shortening my intros, lengthening my conclusions, and making my middles slightly less incoherent. To my parents: thank you for supporting me, even in some of my most reckless decisions, both financially and emotionally. To the professors who have inspired me, especially Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Elaine Wethington, and Kath March: thank you for your guidance and your advice, and for taking me seriously, although I’ve never been quite sure what I did to warrant it. To my fantastic housemates, Simmie, Melissa, Brita, and Jess: I am really going to miss living with an ensemble cast (I’ll be living with Jim next year, but I have a feeling that will be less like a sitcom and more like an Abbott and Costello routine). Melissa, I hope we can get adjacent apartments in Chicago so that we can knock out messages to each other in Morse code. And to Jim: there are no words that can express the richness you have brought to my life.

So that’s that — another package neatly tied up. Another phase of my life come to a close. And though there may be beauty in the fleeting, my eyes aren’t filled with tears because I’m overwhelmed by the beauty; it’s because I don’t want to go. I think that means it’s time.

Which puts me in a bit of a tricky situation. I’ve got 950 — now, 850 — words left to say all of the things I haven’t gotten to say, so I need to choose carefully. In the past two and a half years I’ve written about 50 columns, and I probably could have written 10 or so more if I had never bagged. Some of the times I bagged it was because I didn’t have the time to write, but most of the time it was because I couldn’t think of anything to write about; I’d start with some raw idea and attempt to bake it into a column, but (to continue the metaphor) then I’d discover that I didn’t have any butter, so I’d replace it with half margarine and half shortening, and then I’d realize I was out of baking soda, so I’d double the baking powder, and… well, let’s just say the fire department wasn’t too pleased.

Damn, there go another 150.

So, with the clock ticking away, here’s what I’m going to do: the first and last Vim and Vinegar liquidation sale. Every idea must go! What follows are some of the ideas that could have been turned into columns, but instead sat stagnant in a Word document entitled “Daily Sun Column Ideas.”

• Meta-entertainment. In this column, I was going to talk about the American obsession with meta: Television Without Pity, satirical musicals (The Producers, Avenue Q), Christopher Guest mockumentaries, and reality television in general. People are tired of the artifice of genuine attempts to entertain, and instead want to see things that obviously flout or make fun of such unabashed servitude. What’s going to happen in 50 years, when we get tired of the meta? Satire of the satire? Is that already happening?

• Internet self-help. Here, I was going to give a play-by-play of a day of attempted self-improvement, courtesy of dumb internet quizzes. For example, I took a compatibility test with my boyfriend of one-and-a-half years, and we were zero percent compatible. Because internet tests are never wrong, I broke up with him, and began looking for a girl with small breasts and an ample derriere, because the “T&A Quiz” told me that was what I wanted.

• A rebuttal of a year-old column. In April of 2005, one of my fellow columnists, Will Evans ’06, wrote a column in which he pointed out the tendency for women to be less verbally assertive than men and then gave a few suggestions as to how to rectify the situation. Such as the idea that women “should be proactive.” Of course, the idea that one could be more assertive by, say, being more assertive is right up there in the pantheon of theoretical breakthroughs alongside the idea that one can emerge from poverty by earning money, and live longer by not dying so young. I was going to talk about why women can’t just “be more assertive,” and I was also going to talk about the dangers of making sweeping generalizations by gender and how that’s part of the problem in the first place. (For the record, I did tell Will, who is a friend of mine, that I was going to respond to his column… a year ago. Um, surprise!)

• An inexplicable lede. For a column originally intended to run on February 15th of this year, I wrote the following inscrutable beginning: “Can you smell that? That cloying aroma floating on the breeze, a blend of fermenting flowers and day-old perfume?” That was all I wrote, and for the life of me I cannot remember where I was going with it.

• A story that was never told. A while ago I received the URL to a flash game in a Kinderegg. The game featured Mike Mission, a mole who was involved in some sort of policework, and it consisted of clicking on the right objects at the appropriate time. He had some assistant who followed him around — a female mole, judging by the lipstick. So at the end of the game, when you’ve clicked on all the objects, some old mole via teleconference congratulates Mike and says, “Mission Accomplished!” But Mike says, in a significant tone of voice, “Not yet!” and before you can wonder what’s happening, a heart forms around him and the heretofore unmentioned assistant. Fade to black. I’m not sure what I was going to use this story to show; perhaps the ways in which the idea of a “complete narrative” is culturally determined.

• Choosing an egg donor. I’m kind of sad that I never got to write this one, but I waited too long and it was no longer topical. There was a classified ad in The Sun for a while looking for a egg donor with certain characteristics and offering a fair amount of money; this apparently offended some people, who felt that it was “unnatural” to be so blatantly specific about the person who would be contributing genetic material to your child, and to put a monetary value on personal traits. But don’t we do essentially the same thing every time we choose a partner? And, in the case of certain couples (cough-DonaldTrump-cough), isn’t money essentially switching hands? I think that what really upsets people is that, faced with a more obvious example of genetic engineering, it is impossible to continue insisting that a value cannot be placed on attractiveness or intelligence.

Well, there you have it. That was cathartic. I’ll see you again next week, same time, same place — and since I’ve exhausted my cache of column ideas, prepare yourself for some real sap. I can’t make any promises, but it may very well begin with “Can you smell that?”

I got pretty excited when I found out about WHM, partially because I’m interested in women’s history but mostly because it occurred to me that my column would be a perfect platform for proclaiming some other month, perhaps June, to be National Elise Kramer Appreciation Month. I began dreaming up the ways in which NEKAM would be commemorated: posters, dramatic public readings of my articles, Take Your Daughter to Elise Kramer Day. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be; apparently, in order for a month to be declared the National Month of Anything, a resolution needs to be passed by Congress.

So I’ll just have to be satisfied with WHM, which shows how far our country has come. Whereas women couldn’t even vote a century ago, now we get an entire twelfth of the year! Well, we don’t get the entire twelfth of the year — that would just be greedy. We share our month with many other important issues, such as: Play the Recorder Month, National Frozen Food Month and National Umbrella Month. For too long, Americans have wandered around in the rain, getting sopping wet and thinking, “If only there were some kind of portable dome made out of waterproof material that I could hold over my head when it rained! And why does it take so gosh-darned long to make mashed potatoes?”

Okay, so maybe it isn’t so hard to get Congress to devote a month to your cause after all. But it’s probably safe to say that more people celebrate WHM than, say, Deep Vein Thrombosis Month (are you supposed to fight thrombosis or develop it?). That’s because WHM serves a seemingly noble and expansive goal: narrowing the gender gap by emphasizing important women in history, a topic not usually covered by the standard history curriculum. As the history books would have it, the world was created by starched, frilly white men, with only a few exceptions:

• Betsy Ross, who sewed a few pieces of fabric together for the starched, frilly white men
• Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony, the only non-metaphorical women to appear on federally minted coins — and, coincidentally, also the only non-metaphorical women to appear on coins that became so despised by the American public that they weren’t even spent
• Amelia Earheart … ’nuff said.

WHM attempts to provide alternative role models, women who have changed the world for the better by breaking out of the stereotypically feminine mold. The National Women’s History Project (NWHP), creators of WHM, provides educational materials for classrooms, including a list of honorees that changes every year. Previous honorees have included obvious selections — Abigail Adams, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger — as well as not-so-obvious ones: Frances Willard, leader of the ill-advised Temperance Movement; Tye Leung Schulze, a Chinese interpreter; and Kitty O’Neal, a stuntwoman who has “jumped off a 105 foot cliff, has crashed cars, been set on fire, and jumped off a ten-story building.” (I’m duly impressed, but do we really want to be teaching seven-year-old girls that being set on fire is the way to make history?)

In case I haven’t made it clear already, I don’t think WHM is a good idea. In fact, I think it’s a pretty bad idea, for several reasons. For one, it’s counterproductive; why should we be encouraging schools to limit the teaching of women’s history to a single month? While that’s obviously not the goal of the movement, it is its effective consequence. Back in December, Morgan Freeman appeared on 60 Minutes with some harsh words about Black History Month (BHM): “I don’t want a black history month,” Freeman told an astounded Mike Wallace, “Black History is American History.” Like BHM, WHM implies that women’s history is separate from American history, when what we really should be doing is making sure to talk about the other 50 percent of the population when teaching “regular” history in schools.

And how should we do that? Certainly not the way that WHM recommends, talking about individual women overlooked by history. Sure, you’ve got your Marie Curies and your Elizabeth Cady Stantons, who should definitely be discussed if they aren’t already, but… a temperance activist? An interpreter? A stuntwoman? While these women have surely accomplished more than the average person, they wouldn’t warrant mention in an elementary school classroom if they had been white males. This is historical affirmative action, and it sends the message that the standards for importance are lower for women — that women have not really accomplished all that much, and so we should take pity on them and celebrate the most insignificant of their achievements, be it unsuccessfully banning alcohol or jumping off a 105-foot cliff.

This country didn’t have founding mothers; our presidents, our generals, and a majority of our activists have been male; and even today, a majority of the history-making positions in the country are held by men. The way to counteract this sad fact is not to make up reasons why women have been just as influential as men — it is to educate students about why women haven’t been as influential on the whole. Teach them about inequality, about how women were proudly called “the weaker sex” for centuries; about how it was thought that education would shrivel women’s reproductive organs, rendering them infertile; about how women were considered their husbands’ property and expected to submit to their every need; about how, until Margaret Sanger came along, countless young women killed themselves because they couldn’t stand to have another child and had no other way to staunch the endless flow. That is American history and women’s history, and it makes clear the strength of the women who fought against the overwhelming current and helped us get where we are today.

The term “hate crime” has always struck me as slightly bizarre. It implies that only a small subcategory of crimes stem from hate — that the remaining crimes are the result of, what, confusion? “Oh, dear, I seem to have bludgeoned you repeatedly with a blunt object. I do apologize.” Every violent crime is motivated by hate on some level, and to separate crimes based on type of hate is not only impossible but undesirable and counterproductive. Anyone who ties someone to a fence post, beats and pistol-whips him, and then leaves him for dead deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail with no parole — regardless of whether his victim, as Matthew Shepard was, is gay. I wish there were a magical balm that could cure society’s wounds, but hate crime legislation is no panacea.

First, there is the difficulty in establishing what, precisely, constitutes a hate crime. This difficulty exists on two levels: obviously it’s extremely hard to determine motive beyond reasonable doubt (without the aid of a foolproof lie detector), but more significantly, it’s extremely unclear which kinds of “hate” fall under the purview of “hate crimes” and how direct the connection between the hate and the crime needs to be.

Most would agree that it’s a hate crime if a white person attacks a black person while shouting racial slurs, but is it a hate crime if a black person attacks a white person while yelling anti-white sentiments? If a closeted gay man beats another gay man for coming on to him? If a middle-class woman tired of being hooted at on the street takes out her anger on one particularly vocal construction worker? If an Asian man gets into a petty scuffle with a Hispanic man and, irrationally fearing for his life based on subconscious biases, responds in a disproportionately violent manner? If a neo-Nazi attacks, for one reason or another, a light-skinned black person, without realizing that that person is black? Deciding which group memberships and differences are significant seems almost arbitrary.

But let’s put aside, for a moment, the hazy boundaries of the term “hate crime” and the inevitable Justice Stewart-esque “I know it when I see it” response. Let’s pretend that the lines between hate crime and plain old love crime are crystal clear, that motives can be determined without any doubt — should a hate crime be punished more harshly than a crime identical in all ways other than motive? The answer is a resounding no.

A common misconception about people who oppose hate crime legislation is that they are, a priori, bigoted — that their opposition can only stem from a lack of empathy for minority victims, a belief that they deserved their fate for being different. This is a ridiculously foolish assumption; to disagree with hate crime legislation is not to condone hate crimes, just as to oppose capital punishment for murderers is not to approve of murder.

That’s because punishment, on a judicial level, is not about avenging what has happened; it’s about preventing it from happening again. (Moral retribution is the job of the wronged party or whatever deity you believe in, or nobody at all.) Were revenge the goal of the criminal justice system, our society would be reduced to barbarism as criminals were tortured at the whims of the government. Punishment must be forward-looking, with the goal of obtaining the best possible consequences. This means focusing on two main principles: deterrence — preventing others from committing similar crimes — and preventing recidivism — keeping criminals who cannot be rehabilitated off the streets and in jail.

Which means that any argument in favor of hate crime legislation must prove one of two things: that hate crimes are uniquely situated such that a harsher punishment would act as a better deterrent to future hate crimes, or that those who commit hate crimes have a higher recidivism rate that would warrant a longer jail sentence. The latter of these suggestions seems improbable; is a person who violently kills a stranger for no apparent reason any less likely to do it again than a person who does it for a reason, albeit a terrible one (bigotry)? Both acts suggest such moral depravity that neither person should be allowed to return to society.

The other suggestion, regarding deterrence, is slightly trickier; while it’s probably true that increasing the punishment for hate crimes would have a greater deterrent effect, there’s no apparent reason why the punishment for similar non-hate crimes should not then be identically increased. The people who commit hate crimes are no more rational or better able to weigh long-term consequences against short-term “indulgence.” If a punishment is not severe enough to deter hate crimes, it must not be severe enough to prevent analogous non-hate crimes either, and to increase the punishment of one without the other is foolish.

But here is the crux of the argument: those who advocate hate crime legislation say that it is the elevated punishment of hate crimes — the additional weight they carry because of their motives — that is the important part, that sends the message that this society has zero tolerance of bigotry and so nobody should even contemplate being prejudiced. The harsher punishment is not to prevent other instances of the violent act itself; it’s to combat bigotry.

While combating prejudice is a noble goal, hate crime legislation is the entirely wrong way to go about it. Punishing bigotry does not eliminate it — it only makes it more insidious. It creates knee-jerk resentment and prevents the open exchange and debate of ideas, which is the only way to really abolish prejudice. Hate crime legislation divides people; it emphasizes differences; it sorts people into ingroups and outgroups, “can’t hurt” and “can hurt,” when we should be focusing on getting everyone into that ingroup. Everyone should be in the “can’t hurt” category. Every violent crime, every heinous act that denies a person his status as human, is a hate crime.

I can understand peppering 78-year-old men in the face with birdshot and burning down consulates to protest accusations of being violent, but, frankly, Oprah’s one-blowhard crusade has left me scratching my head. Memoirs aren’t exactly a genre known for their accuracy, nor should they be; who wants to read about a person’s actual, mundane life, replete with poor comedic timing, esprit d’escalier, small dreams and big disappointments? The “true” anecdotes we share with others would, without a bit of poetic license, be boring beyond belief. In the retelling, the situation becomes just a little more dramatic; we become just a little wittier; ensuing hijinks become just a little zanier. As David Sedaris, the queen of the entertaining memoir, once said, “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough.”
So I don’t really care that Frey lied about the veracity of his novel — in fact, I wish more authors would follow suit. I don’t have a problem with people making things up and claiming they happened; I have a problem with people making things up and claiming they didn’t happen.

Let me explain. I have, for a while now, been unable to really enjoy fiction. This likely stems from my rather poor decision to take a creative writing class in high school as part of my senior-year curriculum. The first half of the year was spent writing poetry, which was easy enough; you just took a sentence, removed the punctuation, replaced every noun with an overwrought metaphor, and added line breaks wherever you pleased.

But the second half of the year was spent on fiction writing, which was a lot harder to fake. I was absolutely terrible at making up stories (I had an imagination deficit) and I felt dumb just writing down the actual events of my life. It soon became apparent, however, that this was the protocol for the class; everyone unabashedly took the events of their own lives — a messy breakup, the death of a loved one, a struggle with one’s cultural heritage — and changed the names, occasionally modifying the outcomes to align with the way they wished things were. The goal was not to invent new concepts, but to reinvent old ones and pretend that they weren’t the embarrassing truth.

I believe that this class was directly responsible for my subsequent loss of interest in fiction, not for the obvious reason — reading story after poorly-written story about goodbye sex with ex-significant others whom the author would “never, ever stop loving” — but because I became too immersed in the procedural aspects of writing. Four years of textual analysis in college, studying the paradigms and syntagms of storytelling and the politics of speaker’s intent, only made my focus on production more instinctive. When I read a work of fiction now, I don’t imagine the experiences of the narrator; I imagine the experiences of the author, extracting and shaping her own life into that of a character with a different name and background. I analyze the story arc, looking for familiar structural elements: the unexpected setback, the love story, the plot twist, the denouement. I’m too distracted by the meta-content to become absorbed in the actual content, and the pretense of the author’s detachment — her implicit assertion that the story’s narrator is not herself — can even be irritating.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to authors. They do, after all, invent characters they’ve never met and plots they’ve never witnessed. But it is impossible to create something truly new and independent of one’s experiences; just as an artist’s original drawing is made up of the same lines and curves and colors as every drawing before it, the people and things that even the most creative among us imagine are reconstructed from a pool of character traits, mannerisms, and emotions that we have already observed. The difference between the artist and the fiction writer is that the artist presents her art as her own portrayal of the world seen through her own eyes, while the fiction writer attributes her thoughts and dreams to a character who doesn’t exist.

Frey wrote something that people have found dramatic, heartrending, and uplifting, but because it’s written in the first person and its truth (or lack thereof) was challenged by an investigative website rather than the author himself, people feel betrayed. But I would like to say thank you, Mr. Frey. Thank you for imagining yourself more interesting than you really are, for writing a story about the things you wish had happened, and for having the courage to reveal who you’re really writing about: yourself.