Ascent of the A-Word Page 12

  You get addicted to his love . . .

  He’s a good time cowboy Casanova,

  Leaning up against the record machine.

  That’s a fine tribute to a bygone genre of heel songs like Porter Wagoner’s 1967 “You Can’t Make a Heel Toe the Mark.” But by now the notion of the heel is as outmoded as that of a Casanova, not to mention record machines. And the type can’t be resuscitated, even in period dress. In the series’ first season, Mad Men’s Don Draper treats women with the self-considering callousness that would have made him a classic heel if he appeared in a John O’Hara story. But the show’s meticulous reconstructions of 1950’s clothing and furniture can’t evoke the attitudes of the era. Draper is no Pal Joey; the show gives us far too much of his anguished inner life to qualify him as a heel. In his relationships with women, he’s just a twenty-first century asshole in narrow lapels and a skinny tie.

  Reclassifying the heel as an asshole imputes a psychology to him, a diagnosis of his condition. If the heel’s offense is to exploit the natural ascendancy given to men, the asshole’s offense is to delude himself that there is one—that the mere fact of being a man entitles him to privilege his own needs and appetites. At the same time, asshole implies a broader understanding of the man’s responsibilities in a relationship. It isn’t enough simply to be faithful or honest; the man has to understand and acknowledge the woman’s feelings and the effects his actions have on them. In a scene from The Wire, Detective Jimmy McNulty has just had sex with Assistant DA Rhonda Pearlman. After they finish, she says to him, “You’re an asshole, McNulty,” and he responds with his signature line, “What the fuck did I do?” Actually, we’re not exactly sure what he did, either. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t have qualified him as a heel, but it does make him an asshole. What we have here is a failure of empathy: McNulty’s cluelessness about his own conflicted feelings about Rhonda makes it impossible for him to understand, much less empathize, with her.

  Or take a darkly funny scene in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. Harry’s wife, an analyst played by Kirstie Alley, has learned that he has been having an affair with one of her patients. In the midst of a session with another patient, she keeps interrupting her therapeutic conversation to leave the room and scream at him:MR. FARBER: I think I should quit my job, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Maybe because my brother-in-law treats me kindly . . .

  JOAN: Er . . . excuse me one second (leaves him and we hear her off-screen while staying with Farber) . . . I can’t believe you did this. You fucking asshole! . . . You fucked my patient! You don’t fuck somebody’s patient. That is a sacred trust!

  HARRY: What do you want? Who else do I meet? I’m working here. We never socialize.

  By any traditional standard, Harry is a heel, “a double-talking, wise-cracking, tap-dancing liar,” as one character puts it. But the film’s focus is on Harry’ inability to connect with his family or friends and his self-deluding rationalizations. He’s no less contemptible than Zachary Scott, but he’s more pathetic, and by the end of the movie even pitiable, unable to find anyone to accompany him to a university ceremony in his honor and brought face-to-face with his inability to function in life. (Google Books offers 147 hits for pathetic asshole, and just one for pathetic heel.)

  Whatever the substantive achievements of second-wave feminism, it rapidly achieved a number of symbolic victories. Job titles were neutered, words like coed became scarce, and male executives became circumspect about referring to their female secretaries as “my girl.” And for whatever reasons, men began to acknowledge the values implicit in the new sense of asshole, using the word to concede their blindness or insensitivity, usually after the fact:And then he stopped with the keys in his hand and he reached out for her very gently and held her close. “I’m sorry I’ve been such an asshole.” (Season of Passion, Danielle Steele, 1979)

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “What an asshole I was.” (Three Penny Lane, Fielding Dawson, 1981)

  In Annie Hall, too, Woody Allen implies that there may be a bit of the asshole in the way his alter-ego Alvy deals with women:ALVY: Well, I’m sorry, I’ve gotta see a picture exactly from the start to the finish, ’cause I’m anal.

  ANNIE: That’s a polite word for what you are.

  As Allen knows, saying that you’ve been an asshole in a relationship is one way of demonstrating the sensitivity that proves you’re one no longer. Or sometimes, “I’m an asshole” can be offered as a variant of the it’s-not-you-it’s-me approach to facilitating a break-up: Your eyes are all wet now,

  You know that I’m lying,

  I swear I was only protecting your heart.

  But there are some reasons

  And also some pictures,

  Which if you saw they would rip you apart

  And I won’t watch you cry.

  Goodbye, I’m an asshole.

  —Jude, “The Asshole Song”

  Men are more likely to confess to having been an asshole than having been a prick. You can recover from the first condition when you’ve seen the error of your ways, whereas the prick suffers from no delusion and hence has no error to perceive. There’s a whole genre of films that turn on the personal redemption of an asshole, the modern reinterpretation of a plot line that stretches back to Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Tom Cruise has personified the type in a number of films: the self-involved, exploitative yuppie of Rain Man who finally abandons his plan to cadge part of the inheritance of his autistic brother; the self-involved, cocky pilot of Top Gun who has a change of heart when his aggressiveness causes the death of his radar officer; the self-involved, two-timing bartender of Cocktail who cleans up his act after the suicide of a friend; the self-involved, immature crane operator of War of the Worlds, the self-involved, misogynistic televangelist of Magnolia, and so on, each of them coming to appreciate the humanity of others after encountering his own frailty.

  Backlashholes

  To be sure, not all men who call themselves assholes are contrite about it, particularly in the era of the backlash against feminism and the reassertion of masculine prerogative. That’s the attitude, in both senses of the word, that runs through reality TV shows like Jersey Shore and in the “you poke it you own it”—style beer commercials that show men behaving badly. (In an ad for Coors draft, a guy sets up a bar in his home, complete with a bartender, a pretty waitress, and a bouncer who refuses to let his girlfriend enter: “You’re not on the list.” “Bob has a list?” “Yeah, and you’re not on it.”) It’s behind the emergence of what the New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum calls the dirtbag sitcom—shows such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Two and a Half Men, and Californication, whose male protagonists are nonchalantly promiscuous. And it has given birth to a genre of lad-lit that has been called fratire. Some of these writers have tried to turn the asshole label into a badge of pride, with titles like The Complete Asshole’s Guide to Handling Chicks and Assholes Finish First, Tucker Max’s bestselling chronicle of his boozy sexual misadventures. At his website, Max explains:My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.

  This posture clearly has some appeal for the sorts of young yobbos who walk around wearing “I’m an asshole, deal with it” T-shirts. But asshole isn’t about to be rehabilitated as a positive term, no more than bitch is, outside of some feminist circles. In fact it really isn’t meant as an effort at reclamation so much as a show of bad-boy naughtiness. There’s a certain delusion in the assumption that there’s some virtue in coming clean about one’s assholism. The fact is that there’s no such thing as an “honest asshole”; it’s in the nature of being an asshole that you’re obtuse about your entitlements and about the way others see you. If you’re consciously and deliberately offending or manipulating someone, you necessarily belo
ng to another breed. So when you hear somebody proudly declaring himself an asshole, it’s a fair conclusion that he’s not an asshole at all, he’s just a dick.

  But as we’ll see, there’s a current of another sort of assholism that runs through many of these backlash genres, particularly when they’re justified in the name of political incorrectness. When a Yale fraternity has its pledges pose in front of the Yale Women’s Center holding a sign that says “We Love Yale Sluts,” the gesture means something more than guys leering at a sexy woman in a Super Bowl ad; it turns old-fashioned assholism into a political gesture.

  The A-Word and the B-Word

  In heterosexual relationships, the role of the asshole is reserved exclusively for the man, probably because men have always been thought of as singularly susceptible to the kind of insensitivity that E. M. Forster called the undeveloped heart, the failing of a long novelistic line of bluff, thoughtless males who say things like, “Good Lord, woman, now what’s the matter?” It isn’t a fair generalization, but it’s one neither men nor women have had much of an interest in disputing.

  But even leaving relationships aside, asshole is still applied vastly more frequently to men than to women. One big reason for that, to be sure, is that that’s what most assholes are. The disparity is almost overdetermined. For one thing, there are simply more men in the positions of power that assholes are apt to abuse: if eight out ten bosses are men and 10 percent of all bosses are assholes, then 80 percent of asshole bosses are going to be men, independent of any gender differences in personality. Then, too, men are more likely to base their sense of self on their position or status, which swells their propensity to respond to challenges to their assertions of privilege with “Do you know who I am?” And men are more given to behaving officiously or aggressively than women are—more disposed to take a personal pleasure in bossing people around or in passing other drivers on the road and less willing to back down in the face of disagreement.

  None of that entails that assholes are categorically male, but it does mean that men will make up a bigger slice of the asshole population. And to be sure, the word does show up alongside the names of women, particularly ones who are powerful or prominent, like Hillary Clinton, Lynne Cheney, Sarah Palin, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, and every one of the hosts on ABC’s The View. But even when a woman does something that would manifestly qualify her as an asshole, she’s more likely to be described as a bitch, so much so that people sometimes talk about bitch and asshole as if they were just names of the females and males of a single species, like ewe and ram. Yet the words are clearly different in meaning. Bitch is a much more general term—depending on the context, it can imply that a woman is lewd, unfaithful, frigid, malicious, treacherous, or imperious, among other things. Or often, bitch doesn’t imply any specific fault at all, but merely serves as a misogynistic term of abuse that seizes on whatever unappealing trait comes to hand. (In the BYU Corpus of Historical English, the five most common modifiers of bitch over the past eighty years have been little, old, stupid, black, and crazy, with white, fat, skinny, and ugly not far down the list.) At a stretch, you could argue that there really is no such thing as a bitch, in the same sense that there’s no such thing as a weed.31

  Still, there are numerous traits which might lead someone to call a woman a bitch but which wouldn’t make someone an asshole—being frigid, for example. (“She’s a cold bitch” occurs more than two hundred times on Google, while “She’s a cold asshole” occurs not at all.) Viciousness, too, is much more likely to evoke bitch than asshole, which doesn’t convey the same sense of feral, hell-hath-no-fury rage. But there are cases where either word might in theory apply. Take the passenger berating the airport gate agent for not providing an upgrade. It’s hard to see how the passenger’s gender makes any difference to the presumption or obnoxiousness of the act, but coming from a woman, the abuse is likely be seen as a violation not just of civility but of gender norms—“What an arrogant bitch!” Not that many people would say that the woman isn’t being an asshole. But bitch is clearly the more demeaning insult, and the one that calls up a more visceral fear and anger. That’s why people often use the word for women politicians they find detestable, on both the left and right. Often the word just suggests spitefulness or abrasiveness—“the crazy bitch from Minnesota”; “Who cares about this bitch from Alaska?”; “I see where the San Francisco bitch complained about O’Reilly.” But it can also conjure up the specters of emasculation that in 2008 engendered the pants-suited Hillary Clinton nutcracker “with stainless steel thighs” (still available online at $24.95) and the spectacle of critics ostentatiously cupping their whizzers. As the MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson put it, “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs.”

  Some feminists have urged that bitch be retired from the language; others have tried to repurpose the word, turning it into a reclaimed epithet like queer—a move that goes back to Jo Freeman’s Bitch Manifesto of 1968 and the source of the names of numerous rock groups, songs, websites, and bitch magazine (“feminist response to popular culture”). But bitch works in that context precisely because it trades on the negative stereotypes it’s associated with. The fact is that there are specifically female and male ways of being disagreeable and unkind, and there are times when it’s convenient to have words for them, not least in the abstract (what would become of William James’ “bitch-goddess success” in a neutered world?). That isn’t to say that men can’t be bitches or that women can’t be pricks, but it requires some characterological cross-dressing.32 Still, as in other matters, it’s a distraction to bring in gender when it isn’t relevant to the point at hand. If Eddie Fisher was an asshole for dumping Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, then why wasn’t Taylor an asshole for dumping Fisher for Richard Burton? If you think Barney Frank is being an asshole to the press, then why isn’t Sarah Palin being an asshole when she does the same thing? It isn’t just a matter of equity but economy of explanation. When both labels come to mind, asshole is always the more accurate and revealing judgment. If you can explain someone’s behavior by pointing to a deluded sense of entitlement, why would you need to overlay it with a primordial female malignity? Assholes are assholes.

  chapter six

  The Asshole in the Mirror

  There is nothing more theoretical than the language of the street.

  —Paul de Man

  Broken Hearts Are for Assholes

  With its focus on inauthenticity, the rise of asshole seems of a piece with the familiar picture of the seventies as an age steeped in self-preoccupation—the period that Tom Wolfe called the “Me Decade,” and that Christopher Lasch excoriated in his 1979 bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism. Those characterizations may be reductive, but clearly a lot of the energies unleashed in the sixties had clearly been redirected inwards. As Todd Gitlin recalls in The Sixties, his classic history of the movement left and the counterculture: “In the early Seventies it seemed that no ex-movement household was complete without meditations, tarot cards, group therapies, the Tao Te Ching, and the writings of Alan Watts on Zen, Fritz Perls on gestalt therapy, Wilhelm Reich on the recovery of the body, Idries Shah on Sufism . . . and most of all, Carlos Castaneda’s parables of an intellectual’s skeptical yieldings to the Yaqui Shaman Don Juan.” The bookshelves of other households would have reflected a similar interest in self-discovery, though often along the less strenuous paths set out by bestsellers like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, How to Be Your Own Best Friend, I’m OK, You’re OK, and Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm. It’s safe to say that there has never been an age that had so many buzzwords prefixed with self- (esteem, -realization, -fulfillment, -actualization, -discovery), or for that matter, that used the prefix so often its reproaches, as words like self-absorbed and self-involved, became dramatically more frequent. Whether or not the self was the only thing on people’s minds, it was undeniably a major focus of interest.

  For the middle class, that focus was nouris
hed by an alphabet soup of therapies, cults, and movements promising self-realization and personal growth: Arica, bioenergetics, encounter sessions, Esalen, Gestalt, Insight Seminars, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, primal scream therapy, Scientology, Silva mind control, Transactional Analysis, and Transcendental Meditation, among numerous others. But the connection between assholes and inauthenticity was made most explicit in est, which was launched in 1971 by Werner Erhard, ne Jack Rosenberg, a charismatic one-time car salesman who drew on the techniques of Scientology and Dale Carnegie. It became the self-realization program of the moment, endorsed by celebrities like John Denver and Jerry Rubin, and attracting several hundred thousand people to its seminars over the following decade. The program promised to “totally transform” participants by assaulting their belief systems until they “got it” (and if you had to ask what getting it meant, you hadn’t). The transformations were accomplished in four-day workshops of fifteen-hour sessions during which the participants were seated on hard chairs, permitted few bathroom and meal breaks, and shouted at, lectured, humiliated, and submitted to interminable harangues in which asshole figured prominently as a term of abuse. The flavor of the sessions was reconstructed in The Book of est, a sympathetic account of the program by the est graduate George Cockroft, to which Erhard wrote the foreword. After the 250 or so participants have turned in their watches and agreed not to smoke, chew gum or leave their seats unless instructed to, a trainer addresses them:MY NAME IS DON MALLORY. I AM YOUR TRAINER AND YOU ARE THE TRAINEES. I AM HERE BECAUSE MY LIFE WORKS AND YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOUR LIVES DON’T WORK. You are all—every one of you—very reasonable in the way you handle life, and your lives don’t work. You’re assholes. No more, no less. And a world of assholes doesn’t work . . .