Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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Cognitive Mapping and Human Cognition” (a lecture presented to the UCLA Marschak Colloquium, Jan. 31, 1997), Reginald G. Golledge, professor of geography and director of the Research Unit on Spatial Cognition and Choice at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied blind adults and children to explore “how route following strategies can build up a cognitive map [to] explain why cognitive maps may be fragmented, distorted, and irregular” (lecture abstract). Golledge identifies the types of “errors” that can occur in relation to navigation and thus cause spatial disorientation: “sequencing of places or route segments; route versus configural understanding; interpoint distance comprehension; locational displacement; variable place recognition; directional misunderstandings; misaligned landmarks (anchors); poor spatial integration; angle generalization; changing perspective; incorrect orientation; incorrect directional comprehension” (lecture handout). My thanks to Louise Krasniewicz for bringing this lecture to my attention.
31. There is evidence that, as a cultural phenomenon, male reluctance to ask for directions is not limited to the United States. Sociologist Bernd Jurgen Warneken of the University of Tubingen, in southwest Germany, and his colleagues Franziska Roller and Christiane Pyka have noted the same phenomenon in the German context. See “Of Course I'm Sure,” People, Sep. 6, 1999, 135-36.
32. The gendered connection of shame to this kind of being lost or having to ask for directions is illuminated by the phenomenological sociology of shame wonderfully explicated by Jack Katz, How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Katz speaks not only of the feelings of social vulnerability, moral incompetence, fear, and chaos that attach to and constitute shame but also of shame's humbling effect: “When put to shame, one is cut down, forced to abandon a prior, arrogant posture” (166). Insofar as the space of the world is seen by men in a given culture as “posited” and “mastered” by them, they are socially and morally shamed by “not knowing where they are” and by having to further display this lack of knowledge by asking for directions. The humbling here is felt ontologically as it is exposed socially and emerges as “the shame of discrepancy arising from the sudden loss of all known landmarks in oneself and in the world” (167; Katz is quoting Helen Merrill Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], 39). Katz also makes the point that, given its passive nature, shame can only be “gotten rid of” through its transformation into other more active emotions (very often resentment and anger) or through engaging in certain “ordinary” but “ritual practices” that honor “the congruence of one's nature and an order—any order—that is clearly moral” (167).
33. Indeed, although almost all the men I know say that they don't have a problem asking for directions (at the same time acknowledging that most other men won't), the phenomenon is enough of a commonplace to be a frequent subject not only of comedy (see the Rosie O'Donnell joke that is epigraph to this section) but also of advertising. Ford Motor Company published a full page ad aimed at women announcing a free copy of a booklet called “Car & Truck Buying Made Easier.” The large ad headline read: “Because women aren't afraid to ask directions.” Similarly, a garment tag on a brand of “Activewear for Women Only” reads: “And while it is not specifically forbidden for men to wear these garments, such misappropriation may result in a svelter form, a secure feeling of support, and an uncanny ability to ask for directions.” There are also many cartoons on the subject. One shows a man saying to his male companion: “Do you realize that if Columbus was a woman we'd never have been discovered? She would have been willing to ask directions to Asia!” Another shows Moses leading his people through the desert as a woman behind him says: “We've been wandering in the desert for forty years. But he's a man—would he ever ask for directions?” A joke in a similar vein asks the question: “Why does it take one million sperm to fertilize one egg?” The answer: “Because they refuse to stop and ask for directions.” Two more recent cartoons are inflected by new scientific and technological developments. Both show a couple in a car; in one, the male driver says to the woman beside him: “Because my genetic programming prevents me from stopping to ask directions—that's why!” In the other a woman says to her grim-looking male companion: “Are you telling me you won't even ask the computerized navigational system for directions?” The joke has even turned up in the recent children's film Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar, 2003), when its lost CGI animated male and female fish protagonists, Marlin and Dory, find themselves in nihilistically dark waters; faced with the possibility of being able to ask directions from a single lurking but suspicious fishy figure, Marlin keeps shushing Dory, saying they'll find the way themselves, until Dory, exasperated, asks, “What is it with men and asking for directions?” (My gratitude to Victoria Duckett, Chen Mei, Louise Krasniewicz, and Kate Lawrie for sending me some of these materials.)
34. John Gray, PhD, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 20-21; and Deborah Tannen, PhD, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 61-64. (I use the uncharacteristic “PhD” designation here and in the text since, it seems, psychologists and sociologists need such manifest warranting in popular trade book publication.)
35. Gray, Men Are from Mars, 21.
36. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 63.
37. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl,” in Throwinglike a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141-59. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
38. It might be added that although there would be certain variations in the structure, ratio, and experience of the immanent/transcendent relationship to worldly space, the same might be said of human beings objectified as other on different bases than gender. In our present culture it would be predominantly persons of color, the disabled, the aged, the diseased, and the homeless. Insofar as it was made visible to others through manifest codes of behavior and dress, one could include homosexuals and lesbians—and the poor. For further discussion of this issue see the section “Whose Body? A Brief Meditation on Sexual Difference and Other Bodily Discriminations,” in my The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 143-63.
39. This telling distinction was revealed to me through an intense personal experience. After playing out a typical, very lengthy, and very hostile “lost couple” scenario, when I and my male companion arrived at our restaurant destination extremely late and were asked what happened by our hungry friends, I responded, “We got lost.” My companion, furious and clearly in denial, countered, “I was not lost; I made a wrong turn.” Note, along with the variance in interpretation of and cathexis to the event of our spatial disorientation, my plural attribution (less of guilt than of condition) and my companion's singular assumption of both agency and responsibility.
2
Scary Women
Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects
I once heard a man say to his gray-haired wife, without rancor: “I only feel old when I look at you ”—ANN GERIKE, “On Gray Hair and Oppressed Brains ”
“I'm prepared to die, but not to look lousy for the next forty years.” —ANONYMOUS WOMAN TO ELISSA MELAMED, Mirror, Mirror: The Terror of Not Being Young
What is it to be embodied quite literally “in the flesh,” to live not only the remarkable elasticity of our skin, its colors and textures, but also its fragility, its responsive and visible marking of our accumulated experiences and our years in scars and sags and wrinkles? How does it feel and what does it look like to age and grow old in our youth-oriented and image-conscious culture—particularly if one is a woman? In an article on the cultural implications of changing age demographics as a consequence of what has been called “the graying of America,” James Atlas writes: “Americans regard old age as a raw deal, not as a universal fate. It's a narcissistic injury. That's why we don't want the elderly around: they embarrass us, like cripples or the terminally ill. Banished to the margins, they perpetuate the illusion that our urgent daily lives are permanent, and not just transient things.”1 This cultural—and personal—sense of aging as “embarrassing” and as a “narcissistic injury” cannot