"Featherweight:" Good Title for the Latest New Yorker Story

"One Night Standards"

        By Ashley McBryde 

I ain't gonna stay for the weekend
I ain't gonna jump off the deep end
I ain't gonna ask where your ring is

Thing is, we all got secrets

You don't wanna hear about my last breakup
I don't wanna worry 'bout the space you take up
I don't even care if you're here when I wake up

It's just a room key
You ain't gotta lie to me
Can't you just use me like I'm using you?

And so forth and so on in the same vein.  The lyrics of this song, identified by The New York Times as one of the best songs of 2020 came to mind as I was reading a short story called "Featherweight" in the March 29, 2021 New Yorker.  It's by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and concerns a young Native American man who has gone away to college.

Basically, it's an ode to hookup culture even when it arguably morphs into something that resembles a relationship, but not one that gets much further than sex, and even that turns out to be not what the young man in question thought it was. If you're interested, you can read the story for the details.

As we know, sex sells. It's sort of like the law of gravity: it never changes. Mr. HolyWhiteMountain clearly knows it and the New Yorker clearly sees no reason to resist. 

The story is written in the first person and the unnamed hero, having left his reservation, wants to "know what larger America is all about."  In his case, that means having sex with as many white girls as possible. Readers are told a couple of their names but little else about them other than that they are into power, hatred (not against him) and that "racist cowgirls give the best head."

Now let's turn to the usual New Yorker interview and see what Mr. HolyWhiteMountain has to say about this portion of his story:

"The white girls come to the table with their notions of what indians are, and what it means to be an indian, which don’t really speak to his experience at all, whereas he’s noticing things about them that they don’t know about themselves, things that indicate an unbridgeable gap. There’s a difference between assumptions that come from stereotypes and the kind of understanding that results from closely observed experience. The early situation in the story was a way for me to talk about how whiteness—which, and this is something we never talk about, is different from being white—functions. The most striking thing about people who really embody whiteness is that they see everything but themselves. Whereas people who aren’t coming from that space, usually people of color but not always, see themselves (because they’ve been objects of the white gaze for decades and centuries) and the peculiarities of whiteness at the same time. This blind spot is one of the reasons this country is such a mess right now; whiteness doesn’t get to function in an unimpeded manner anymore, and this process of coming to self-awareness is extremely painful, both for these people waking up to the values that underpin whiteness and for the rest of us, who have to experience their resistance to that awakening. I felt from the start that much of the support for Trump was about this: the promise of a return to a time when white people didn’t have to look at themselves, which means they could continue participating in the great American project of forgetting—the past, how the country was made, etc."

This strikes me a little like conceptual art:  you see a small heap of objects on the floor of an otherwise bare room that appears, well, like a small heap of objects. Staring at it for some time doesn't change much.  Then you notice that on one wall, usually in small print, the piece of art is identified and underneath, is a lengthy explanation of the work by the artist. There you learn it is all about, say, colonialism, slavery, racism, exploitation, police brutality, etc. etc. 

This is called conceptual art and one can, I suppose, view Mr. HolyWhiteMountain's story in that context. There is the text and then there is what he says it is supposed to be all about. 

Mr. HolyWhiteMountain's notion that people who embody "whiteness" (see Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" for the best explanation of this) don't see themselves while others do is an interesting notion worth exploring beyond just a concept. Why doesn't Mr. HolyWhiteMountain, who in the interview says he is working on a couple of novels, actually do so? As opposed to maintaining that a bunch of undescribed tawdry hookups comporting with "One Night Standards" somehow illuminates it.

Well, if it weren't for all the sex, would readers bail out on this piece?

Finally tiring of white girl hookups,  the story goes on to what the narrator describes as his first love, a native American girl, but of a different tribe than his. What readers learn about that is, surprise, surprise, their sex life -- and how a French woman studying abroad is forced to listen in. Our hero views the French girl in much the same fashion he imagines people of "whiteness" view others. "She was an endless entertainment to me."

While the narrator of "Featherweight" has little in his mind throughout the story beyond his next sex act, his girlfriend appears at least somewhat more substantial if in only as a trope. She's interested in social justice issues when not locked in the bathroom by herself smoking dope. 

In the end things don't work out leaving the protagonist wishing that, if only for a moment, he could be a classic (white American) "dreamer" living in suburbia (see again the aforementioned "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi-Coates).

Mr. HolyWhiteMountain is, by the way, currently a lecturer at Stanford University.  Sounds like something a "dreamer" might like to be.

Women, Too, Can Objectify Sex

 For many writers -- particularly male, but not exclusively so -- female sexuality is a difficult topic. And never more so than in the present when it seems to increasingly be a moving target.

In that vein, Maya Phillips, a poet and cultural critic, had an interesting piece in the Feb. 4, 2021 "New York Times" entitled "On Female Sexual Desire" in the print edition, but confusingly, something different in the electronic version of the paper.  In any event, you can find it by clicking on the hypertext above.

The article, which discusses three TV shows, explores various aspects of female sexuality, all problematic in what Ms Phillips identifies as "our predatory culture," but for this post, I'm only going to talk about one of them.  I may come back to others later.

It's a familiar trope that when it comes to sex, men "objectify" women, or as Ms Phillips puts it: "with straight male characters, sex is rarely shown as anything more than an act."

To what extent might women be  drifting around to the same approach?

At the end of December, The Times, making its usual heavy contribution to year-end list journalism, published "The Best Pop Songs of 2020" by each of two of its critics.  

Generally unfamiliar with current trends in pop music (I did think Lady Gaga did a great job with the always troublesome national anthem at the Biden inauguration), glancing over the list, my eye fell upon Jon Pareles' third choice: "One Night Standards," by Ashley McBryde, who, not surprisingly, I had never heard of.  What was this song all about, I wondered, searching for the lyrics.

It's all about a woman, "I ain't Cinderella," who has initiated a hook-up, or a one-night stand as they used to be called in line with the title of the song, and wants her partner -- presumably a man, but perhaps not -- to think of it as nothing more than that.  In other words, she is determined to objectify her partner and make sure that what is happening is no more than an act (as Ms Phillips would put it).

"Can't you just use me like I'm using you?" Ms McBride sings at one point.

If you are interested, you can read the rest of the lyrics here. They continue entirely in that vein.

My point is that it appears straight men may well no longer have a monopoly on the objectification of sex and the Times apparently thinks that is important for readers to know: third best pop song of 2020, on one of the paper's two lists at any rate.  The other list, by the way, puts "WAP" by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion at number seven, but that's a different if highly illuminating take on just where female sexuality stands today.

The way things are going, Ms Phillips could be well advised to reel in her indignation a bit. Meanwhile, fertile ground for authors on how their female characters can be convincingly depicted.