At this year’s Toronto Word On The Street, I picked up two chapbooks from Bookthug, one titled My Vagina, by André Alexis, and the other titled Deep Too, by Stan Dragland. My Vagina is, obviously, about vaginas. Deep Too is, implicitly (the title is the punchline to a joke), about penises. It occurred to me that these chapbooks complement one another. They ought to hang out together, get to know one another, maybe go out on a date. If things go well, they can use my place.
I have a new thing I do whenever I read books by men that touch on women’s concerns. I call it the David Gilmour screening test. Ever since the David Gilmour thing, my brain has suffered some kind of obsessive infection. I promise: after this post, I’ll never mention David Gilmour ever again (unless of course I think of a good joke at his expense, in which case I won’t be able to help myself). Anyways, the screening test. Whenever I read a book by a man that touches on women’s concerns, I ask: is the author an asshole? If not, then the book has a reasonable chance of being a worthwhile read and I give it my full attention.
My Vagina
Alexis offers a meditation on the vagina as it manifests itself to each of the five senses. The prose at times can be detached, almost intellectualized. I imagine a curator preparing a museum exhibit. I think to myself: another man idealizing some aspect of the feminine. The Feminine! Capitalized. I wonder if maybe he’s falling into the practice which Betty Friedan first dissected in The Feminine Mystique—that passive aggressive trick of idealizing the woman as Woman, putting her on a pedestal as a way of keeping her in her place, then, when real women inevitably complain, answering with: why can’t you appreciate that we’re honouring you? (with a tacit Ungrateful bitch! as subtext).
And yet there are two things that suggest otherwise. One is subtle. It is a matter of tone. Like the delicacy of his sensory encounters with the vagina, there is a delicacy in the tone of My Vagina. The delicacy almost goes too far. There’s a Torontoness to it that suggests a regional flavour of irony. Here (i.e. in Toronto), the quality of irony is not strained. But elsewhere, it can escape the ear altogether. We must listen closely.
I hear that Diane Francis has written a book that offers up Canada as fodder for the Manifest Destiny. I abhor the thought of an American takeover of Canada, not because it would produce a cultural invasion of our local pleasures (too late for that), nor because it would facilitate an economic plundering of our resources and industry (NAFTA took care of that), but because it would undermine my God-given right to be ironic. I like being able to say “I’m sorry” in true Canadian fashion while really meaning “Fuck off and die.” It’s an important local code I would hate to lose.
I’m sorry for the brief aside. Back to My Vagina. The point is: when Alexis seems solicitous, it’s unlikely.
The second thing (to suggest that Alexis isn’t playing some passive aggressive game at the expense of women) is more obvious. He takes pains to establish his situatedness. He tells us exactly how he comes to the vagina. Matters of gender, race and culture have acted upon Alexis to produce the vagina. As he would say: it is My Vagina. And you have yours. Not to sound religious or anything, but: oh taste and see.
Result of the Gilmour screening test: not an asshole.
Deep Too
At first, Stan Dragland gives the impression of having written a book for guys, guy guy’s, real guys who hunt moose and have their way with the ladies (or is it the other way around?). There are limericks that rhyme with Nantucket, snippets of graffiti, penis jokes, pick-up lines, yarns, megadik spam emails, penis lattes. But underneath it all, swimming like a dark snake, is a bit from Thomas Hardy’s Tenebris II: “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”
And what is the Worst? Well, we’re not going find it here amongst the penis jokes and spam. Dragland lulls us into a har har jokey guy state, then wallops us between the eyes, our third eye. By lulling us, he leaves us unprepared for the horror he forces us to witness. I’ll say nothing of the particulars except to observe that I don’t think the particulars are the Worst. The Worst is the clear path he traces for us from our innocuous-seeming penis jokes to the most horrific violence ever perpetrated against women. The Worst is our complicity. Not what I was expecting. And because I wasn’t expecting it, it leaves me reeling. And wondering. What the hell just happened?
Result of the Gilmour screening test: not an asshole.
Order it here.