There was this guy in college that I just hated so much. He was a thirty-year-old creative writing major in my introductory Victorian literature class, and he was just, the WORST. For starters, context clues alone (his age and choice of major) allow us to decide that he was a shitty writer (who, incidentally, didn't know how to read context), who came crawling back to university for a degree after he couldn't hack it on talent alone--and he returned to a private institution on the upper east side of Manhattan, instead of the cost-effective city college a few blocks away. Apologies to my creative writing majors, but you do not go back to school, much less a private school, for a useless fruity non-major unless you're an old lady who wants to interrupt my art history classes with her inane opinions about the pretty colors and a meandering story about her granddaughter who saw a painting in Paris. Creative and academic majors are for dewey-eyed youngsters and old people with too much time to kill, not some oblivious bastard who believes he's not getting writing gigs because of "the system".
So this son of a bitch would come to class every day in what I would (and did, frequently) term his "freelance writer/journalist costume". It's what you would wear on Halloween if you're one of the killjoys who refuses to get into the holiday but still wants to come and drink at the party: F. Scott Fitzwriterman was always and forever unshaven, but in such a way that you know that he shaved immediately after class so it'd be the exact shade of "I'm just more concerned with my art than with your social construction of my facial hair" every day. Baby blue button-down shirt, unbuttoned at the cuffs and rolled halfway up his forearm because he's getting down to fucking business, okay? By writing. He would also leave the first few top buttons open, for the ladies. Or gay gentlemen; he doesn't judge, he's too progressive. A progressive writer. He also wore Levi's instead of expensive designer jeans, I can only assume to traverse the rough and rowdy terrain of Victorian literature, and loafers. Did you expect socks with those loafers? Fuck your expectations. Fuck socks, and your expectations. He is encumbered by neither. This is fucking Victorian Literature: an Introductory course, so allow me to introduce you to W. B. Writes. He does what he wants, which is writing.
I'll take a moment now to remind the few of you who were educated about art and literature under the Third Reich that the English Victorian Era is characterized by basically three things: sexual repression, sexual "repression", and corsets. Because you are of sound and normal mind, I don't need to tell you that all three of these topics are deeply entrenched in gender relations. The English Victorians are a people who stole ancient Egyptian fertility-god artifacts just to display them in museums without any dicks on them because what if ladies saw dicks??! They took fertility artifacts, whose focal points were their giant auto-erotic dicks, and they removed the dicks; the "focal points", if you will. Somewhere stashed in the British Museum there is a pile of ancient erect stone dicks and a very concerned intern who regrets her rambunctious curiosity.
So Ernest Writingway would sit sprawled out at his desk, surrounded by fawning hipster girls who just could not get enough of this red-hot modern philosopher, and throw this perfect storm of incoherent yet intelligent-sounding questions at our poor, haggard professor. Like, if you walked into the class knowing absolutely nothing about history or sociology or humans, you might think that this guy was some kind of avant-garde genius. But in reality he was just a privileged asshole who didn't care to understand the basic tenements of the world he lived in, and profited from.
For instance, in response to Charles Dickens' furious hate-drunken rant about an influential painter's representation of the Christ child as a red-head (representative in that time of Jewish people, sluts, the poor, and the disdainful Irish--which astute readers will note that Christ was at least two of), a letter which must only be read with a ShamWow close at hand, such is the frothiness of his rage, this casual-button-down-bedecked pioneer of academia suggested, reading from his scribbled notes in a Moleskin (I can't report for sure that it was an actual Moleskin but--it completely was a Moleskin), that perhaps we're all just reading far too into it all, and maybe when Dickens referred to the child as "a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed gown" he just thought the painting was ugly. I mean although it's generally not stupid or imperceptive at all to take fictional writers at their word without reading context clues or any kind of symbolism, and although Dickens had a storied history of hideous anti-Semitism in his work, particularly anti-Semitism characterized by greedy red-headed villains, we're probably just taking this whole 'gross caricature of a disenfranchised minority' thing too seriously.
But the one curveball question that really stuck to my ribs and filled the back of my eyes with such white-hot frustration that forever burned his image into my brain came late in the semester, when a harried T. S. Idiot sighed deeply and moaned to no one really in particular, "When can we just stop talking about gender already?" Our professor immediately zeroed in on his woeful, passive-aggressive whine and simply responded, roughly, that "there wouldn't be any Victorian era without gendered tensions. Perhaps as a straight white Christian male you feel that removing the lens of gender would serve the purpose of studying the era because it removes the conflict of people who aren't just like you, and maybe that's just what you're accustomed to hearing about: your story. In order to do that you can take just about any history course. But in my class, we study the entirety of the era, from every angle, and gender is everywhere... except when told solely by men. You're studying for a liberal arts degree, in a liberal arts class. Act like it."
And in that moment, I think we all felt like a confused intern at the British museum. Because in this life, you sometimes just find dicks in unexpected places.
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