Feminist Kant

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/a-feminist-kant/?hp&rref=opinion

In one of his more memorable essays, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” David Foster Wallace describes a visit to the Illinois State Fair. The friend who accompanies him, whom he calls Native Companion because she’s a local, gets on one of the fair’s rides. While she’s hanging upside down, the men operating the ride stop it so that her dress falls over her head and they can ogle her. After she gets off the ride, Wallace and Native Companion have a heated discussion about the incident. He thinks she’s been sexually harassed and thinks something should be done about it.

Consulting yet another dead white male about the problems of oppression didn’t initially strike me as the best idea.
Wallace asks, “Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole little sick exercise? … this doesn’t bother you? As a Midwesterner, you’re unbothered?” To which Native Companion replies, “So if I noticed or I didn’t, why does it have to be my deal? What, because there’s [harassers] in the world I don’t get to ride on The Zipper? I don’t get to ever spin?” … What’s getting hot and bothered going to do about it except keep me from getting to have fun?” Then, Wallace: “This is potentially key. … The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun … whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun. … I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.” Native Companion: “They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring [them]. That’s pretty much all you can do with [expletive].”

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http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Away-Already-Being-Pretty-ebook/dp/B0078XGTWK

What would I give to write like this? ..........................
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One of the fully assembled rides near the Hollow’s west end is something called The Zipper. It’s riderless but in furious motion, a kind of Ferris Wheel on amphetamines. Individual caged cars are hinged to spin on their own axes as they go around in a tight vertical ellipse. The machine looks less like a zipper than the head of a chain saw. Its off-white paint is chipped, and it sounds like a shimmying V-12, and in general it’s something I’d run a mile in tight shoes to avoid riding. But Native Companion starts clapping and hopping around excitedly as we approach The Zipper. (This is a person who bungee jumps, to give you an idea.) And the operator at the controls sees her, waves back, and shouts down to Git on over and git some if she’s a mind to. He claims they want to test The Zipper somehow. He’s up on a kind of steel platform, elbowing a colleague next to him in a way I don’t much like. We have no tickets, I point out, and none of the cash-for-ticket booths are manned. By now we’re somehow at the base of the stairway up to the platform and control panel. The operator says without looking at me that the matter of tickets this early on Opening Day “Ain’t no sweat off my balls.” The operator’s colleague conducts Native Companion up the waffled-steel steps and straps her into a cage, upping a thumb at the operator, who gives a sort of Rebel Yell and pulls a lever. Native C.’ s cage begins to ascend. Pathetic little fingers appear in the cage’s mesh. The Zipper operator is ageless and burnt-brown and has a mustache waxed to wicked points like steers’ horns, rolling a Drum cigarette with one hand as he nudges levers upward and the ellipse speeds up and the individual cages start to spin independently on their hinges. Native Companion is a blur of color inside her cage, but the operator and colleague (whose jeans have worked down his hips to the point where the top of his butt-crack is clearly visible) watch studiously as her spinning cage and the clanking empty cages circle the ellipse approx. once a second. I have a particular longstanding fear of things that spin independently inside a larger spin. I can barely even watch this. The Zipper is the color of unbrushed teeth, with big scabs of rust. The operator and colleague sit on a little steel bench before a panel full of black-knobbed levers. Do testicles themselves sweat? They’re supposed to be very temperature-sensitive. The colleague spits Skoal into a can he holds and tells the operator to “Well then take her to Eight then you pussy.” The Zipper begins to whine and the thing to spin so fast that a detached car would surely be hurled into orbit. The colleague has a small American flag folded into a bandanna around his head. The empty cages shudder and clank as they whirl, spinning independently. One long scream, wobbled by Doppler, is coming from Native C.’ s cage, which is going around and around on its hinges while a shape inside tumbles like stuff in a dryer. My particular neurological makeup (extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I’m “lifesick”) makes even just watching this an act of enormous personal courage. The scream goes on and on; it’s nothing like a swine’s. Then the operator stops the ride abruptly with Native C.’ s car at the top, so she’s hanging upside down inside the cage. I call up Is she OK, but the response is just high-pitched noises. I see the two carnies gazing upward very intently, shading their eyes. The operator’s stroking his mustache contemplatively. The cage’s inversion has made Native Companion’s dress fall up. They’re ogling her nethers, obviously. As they laugh, the sound literally sounds like “Tee hee hee hee.” A less sensitive neurological specimen probably would have stepped in at this point and stopped the whole grotesque exercise. My own makeup leans more toward disassociation when under stress. A mother in shorts is trying to get a stroller up the steps of the Funhouse. A kid in a Jurassic Park T-shirt is licking an enormous flat lollipop with a hypnotic spiral on it. A sign at a gas station we passed on Sangamon Avenue was hand-lettered and said “BLU-BLOCK SUNGLASSES— Like Seen On TV.” A Shell station off I-55 near Elkhart sold cans of snuff out of a vending machine. 15% of the female Fairgoers here have their hair in curlers. 25% are clinically fat. Midwestern fat people have no compunction about wearing shorts or halter-tops. A radio reporter had held his recorder’s mike up too close to a speaker during Governor E.’ s opening remarks, causing hellacious feedback. Now the operator’s joggling the choke-lever so The Zipper stutters back and forth, forward and backward, making N.C.’ s top car spin around and around on its hinges. His colleague’s T-shirt has a stoned Ninja Turtle on it, toking on a joint. There’s a distended A# scream from the whirling cage, as if Native C.’ s getting slow-roasted. I summon saliva to step in and really say something stern, but at this point they start bringing her down. The operator is deft at his panel; the car’s descent is almost fluffy. His hands on the levers are a kind of parody of tender care. The descent takes forever— ominous silence from Native Companion’s car. The two carnies are laughing and slapping their knee. I clear my throat twice. There’s a trundly sound as Native Companion’s car gets locked down at the platform. Jiggles of movement in the cage, and the door’s latch slowly turns. I expect whatever husk of a human being emerges from the car to be hunched and sheet-white, dribbling fluids. Instead she sort of bounds out:

“That was fucking great. Joo see that? Son bitch spun that car sixteen times, joo see it?” This woman is native Midwestern, from my hometown. My prom date a dozen years ago. Now married, with three children, teaches water-aerobics to the obese and infirm. Her color is high. Her dress looks like the world’s worst case of static cling. She’s still got her chewing gum in, for God’s sake. She turns to the carnies: “You sons bitches that was fucking great. Assholes.” The colleague is half-draped over the operator; they’re roaring with laughter. Native Companion has her hands on her hips sternly, but she’s grinning. Am I the only one who was in touch with the manifestly overt sexual-harassment element in this whole episode? She takes the steel stairs down three at a time and starts up the hillside toward the food booths. There is no sanctioned path up the incredibly steep hill on the Hollow’s western side. Behind us the operator calls out: “They don’t call me King of The Zipper for nuthin’, sweet thang.” She snorts and calls back over her shoulder “Oh you and whose fucking platoon?” and there’s more laughter behind us. I’m having a hard time keeping up on the slope. “Did you hear that?” I ask her. “Jesus I thought I bought it for sure at the end that was so great. Fucking cornholers. But’d you see that one spin up top at the end, though?” “Did you hear that Zipper King comment?” I say. She has her hand around my elbow and is helping me up the hillside’s slick grass. “Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole little sick exercise?” “Oh for fuck’s sake Slug it was fun” (Ignore the nickname.) “Son of a bitch spun that car eighteen times.” “They were looking up your dress. You couldn’t see them, maybe. They hung you upside down at a great height and made your dress fall up and ogled you. They shaded their eyes and made comments to each other. I saw the whole thing.” “Oh for fuck’s sake.” I slip a little bit and she catches my arm. “So this doesn’t bother you? As a Midwesterner, you’re unbothered? Or did you just not have an accurate sense of what was going on back there?” “So if I noticed or I didn’t, why does it have to be my deal? What, because there’s assholes in the world I don’t get to ride on The Zipper? I don’t get to ever spin? Maybe I shouldn’t ever go to the pool or ever get all girled up, just out of fear of assholes?” Her color is still high. “So I’m curious, then, about what it would have taken back there, say, to have gotten you to lodge some sort of complaint with the Fair’s management.” “You’re so fucking innocent, Slug,” she says. (The nickname’s a long story; ignore it.) “Assholes are just assholes. What’s getting hot and bothered going to do about it except keep me from getting to have fun?” She has her hand on my elbow this whole time— the hillside’s a bitch. “This is potentially key,” I’m saying. “This may be just the sort of regional politico-sexual contrast the swanky East-Coast magazine is keen for. The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun—” “Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.” “— whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun. In New York, a woman who’d been hung upside down and ogled would go get a whole lot of other women together and there’d be this frenzy of politico-sexual indignation. They’d confront the ogler. File an injunction. Management’d find itself litigating expensively— violation of a woman’s right to nonharassed fun. I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.” Native Companion kills a mosquito without looking at it. “And they all take Prozac and stick their finger down their throat too out there. They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring assholes and saying Fuck ‘em. That’s pretty much all you can do with assholes.” “This could be integral.”

Wallace, David Foster (2012-04-01). Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All: An Essay (Kindle Locations 340-341). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.