McDonald’s and the Ambivalent Society: come as you are but don’t necessarily come out to your family6/17/2010 There's a French McDonald's ad circulating the blogosphere, which seems to be creating a stir. The ad features a young man having lunch with his father at McDonald's. While his dad orders, he sits in a booth and looks down onto a class photo. Five seconds into the clip we hear the young man's cell phone, and at eight seconds, he's telling the caller with unambiguous affection that he was just "thinking about you too." Then a hasty goodbye as his father returns, and if we hadn't already guessed it, the ensuing conversation leaves little doubt that the young man is hiding his relationship with a classmate from his father. “Too bad your class is all boys,” the father tells his son, and we know at last his son is gay and in the closet. This is the subtext of the chat, which is ostensibly about love lost, namely the father’s memories of himself as a ladies’ man. . . I suspect the moment between the father and his son is familiar to many men, like "watching a memory-in-process" [1]. As I said, the conversation, the commercial, is about love lost, but put in less charitable terms, is also about love that that cannot exist openly for one man juxtaposed against the nostalgia of heterosexual conquests of another. It’s true that the ad recounts for many a familiar and sacred moment, but in the remaining seconds the familiarity is interrupted as the audience is reminded that heterosexuality isn't nearly as certain as the setting of the sun. The audience must reconcile their own affection for the loving father character and the son who feels unable to tell him he isn’t interested in being a ladies’ man. It is, then, nostalgia with a twist. A song plays in the background. "I'm going down my road" comes the final lyric, and a closing tagline embraces the viewer to "come as you are." The ad isn't about sex; it's about sexuality, but given the tendency to see sex when talking about gays and lesbians, it is worth mentioning that the message to "come as you are" is an English translation tacked beneath the original French, "venez comme vous êtes," so we can assume the rather vulgar, double entendre was not intended. This isn’t to say that McDonald's is above sexually suggestive advertising. The folks at Queerty emphatically made this point when they posted a shot of a McDonald's billboard pitching to passersby an "Ogre-load" of creamy white McFlurry. . .
While I respectfully disagree with Queerty that McDonald's is necessarily "going after the gays" in their sexually provocative Shrek ad (ejaculation figures into heterosexual fantasies as well), the larger point that Queerty has fingered is that multi-million dollar ads are not designed in haste, and we can rest assured that every square inch of that billboard, just as every millisecond of the French television spot, has been endlessly scrutinized and discussed by many people working across many levels. There is no question in my mind as to whether McDonald's is aware of the meanings, articulations and associations its ads both reflect and produce. While they may not discuss it in the terms given in this post, I would argue that McDonald’s and the marketing firms that work with McDonald’s understand their role in the production of ideology. So I view this recent hubbub about the ad as an extension of what McDonald’s execs and their team of underlings have already been doing. Blog entries like this one are attempting to deconstruct or reverse engineer, if you like, the cultural logic which accounts for why this ad went viral, receiving more than 600,000 views after the first week of its May release on YouTube and nearly 2 million views by the end of June. Why, in other words, was it important enough for Bill O’Reilly to subject it to his so-called no-spin zone? (here). Miriam at Feministing, suggested the question in its most succinct terms when she wrote, “I can't decide if this is progressive..or smugly portraying a kid who has to be closeted with his father.” What follows is my answer to this question. First, as Miriam seems to allude to, there is a fundamental tension between an explicit message of openness and acceptance, or that you "come as you are," and an implicit one about the calculated wisdom of remaining in the closet. In fact, I would argue that the very success of the ad depends on this tension, because we are able to appreciate the chain's openness especially when reminded how truly difficult it still is for a son to be openly gay. The tension, then, is ultimately the means by which we are enticed to associate good feelings with McDonald’s hamburgers. In an interview with the independent LGBT news website, Yagg.com, the brand director at McDonald’s France, Nathalie Legarlantezecs, boasted that “We wanted to take a look at how French society is today” and “There's obviously no problem with homosexuality in France today." While it feels appropriate here to point out that gays and lesbians are still unable to legally marry in France, one need not look beyond what is given in the commercial to evaluate Legarlantezecs’ remarks. Strictly speaking, the spot is not depicting broad acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships in France. Judged on its own terms, the commercial is not even promoting such an acceptance, which is a point most bloggers seem to have missed. On the contrary, French society is depicted as deeply ambivalent about gay relationships, and what the commercial promotes is the fantasy that McDonald's is an oasis of liberal acceptance in a world that is often very nervous about such relationships—perhaps especially when they involve youth. So at the risk of stating the obvious, the McDonald's ad is a self-conscious positioning of a brand within a taken-for-granted and much broader system of ideas about the appropriateness of gay and lesbian relationships, what such relationships represent, and to what extent they are permissible. McDonald’s depends on this ideology or “common sense” about sexuality in order to successfully tug at our heartstrings and position its brand. And they do this task of positioning well. There is nothing outlandish about the spot because on some level it makes perfect sense to us that the young man must not confess to his father that he is in love with another man. We get it. We understand all too well that he will soon abandon the oasis and return to the ambivalent society, and we understand there are often consequences for such confessions. The young man is silent because his society is ambivalent, and this is such a basic truth, it need not be explained to us. In fact, exposition would only be an awkward distraction. In French society, as in the US, prolonging the secrecy might still be the safest choice. All of this is to say that the spot’s verisimilitude and nuance, lauded by so many commentators, is a rather tragic indictment of our prejudice. So at this juncture, my criticism is not (yet) aimed at McDonald’s, but the system of ideas afloat today that have allowed this thirty-second spot to resonate with so many people. I hate that I live in a time and place where this ad works for McDonald’s. I despise the fact that McDonald’s is able to position it’s brand as an oasis, and amidst all the controversy stirred up about this ad, no one questions for a moment whether McDonald’s has invented a petulant society, which is hostile to gays and lesbians. That part of the spot feels so true to so many as to be unremarkable. The marketing genius behind the ad then can be said to be fluently trading in the system of ideas that most of us already use to make sense of the world, but I think it is fruitful to press this metaphor of trading further and add that while McDonald’s may be adept in working this system of ideas, it does not trade like the rest of us. Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, makes just this point (here) that “people who work in the media are producing, reproducing and transforming the field of ideological representation itself. They stand in a different relationship to ideology in general from others...” (p. 104; italics added) [2]. How so? To put it bluntly, such people stand in an influential position to articulate or re-fix meaning. Their tools are different than those of regular folk and they generally have a larger audience. The ad, then, in its capacity to produce, reproduce, and transform a system of ideas which work to render the exclusion of gays and lesbians as unremarkable, is where one must ultimately look to answer Miriam’s question. If as I’m arguing that a progressive ad is one which contests the reproduction of social relations and the ideology that undergirds them, then is this ad really all that progressive? I don’t think so. Despite being encouraged to come as we are, McDonald’s dared not depict itself as a truly liberatory space. At best, it is a temporary shelter, masquerading as a liberatory space. A more accurate tagline, albeit less catchy, would read, “come as you are, but don’t necessarily come out to your family.” The ad is not progressive because there is no cultural innovation here. We aren’t shown by example how a young gay man might find a way to speak honestly about his new love, which is very likely the most consuming topic on his mind. There are no new articulations here, no innovative connections drawn to the relationship between gay men and their often loving fathers. Instead, there is a story that unfolds in a subtle way, but is ultimately revealed as utterly predictable. As I remarked above, rearticulating and fixing new meanings are choices and do not simply happen by accident. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading a recent reflection about the ad by its creative director. He remarks that "Among the ideas [pitched], I immediately loved this one. Originally we were going to have him come out to his father, but we thought the teen telling his father he's gay, in front of a burger and fries, that would have been ... unsubtle." Whether the ad was to be progressive may have hinged on that very decision, and I think it is important to interrogate why remaining in the closet, or in the creative director’s terms remaining “subtle,” consistently feels like the right choice. Lester Andrist [1] Emerson, Jim. 2010. Jim Emerson's Scanners: Blog. "Once I had a Secret Love... (Royale with Cheese)" Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved June 17, 2010. (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/06/once_i_had_a_secret_love.html). [2] Hall, Stuart. 1985. "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates." Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 2:91-114.
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For two semesters now, about 60 students have registered for my class on the sociology of gender. They've arrived, some of them with their jitters quite visible and others with what appears to be a cultivated indifference. Hand over hand, my syllabus skates through the rows, and they eagerly thumb through the pages—even the indifferent ones. I imagine many of them are contemplating whether to drop my class and take their chances on the waiting list of another section, so I encourage them to take their time. Perfunctory introductions, then a deep a breath, and at last we launch headlong into the sociological study of gender. Teaching sociology is akin to playing Morpheus to a group of students who haven't yet seen how deep the rabbit hole goes, and I am convinced that fewer classes are more challenging to teach than gender. I approach the topic most identifiably from a culturalist perspective and draw most notably from material many would identify as falling within the jurisdiction of the sociology of knowledge. Time and again we return to the social and historical processes behind the construction of values, beliefs, and other intellectual structures. How are they built, sustained, recreated, and manipulated? I set as my first task excavating a level of deep culture by asking them to consider how gender is socially constructed. Students are of course more than capable of parroting such constructivist sentiments as Simone de Beauvoir's remark that “One is not born but rather becomes, a woman.” What is needed to transform students’ thinking is to dislodge their foundational assumptions—the premises upon which they begin to think. It is necessary, then, to begin by cultivating uncertainty, or by forcing them to interrogate and articulate their own common sense understandings of the world. A recent discussion from the class stands as a good example. In it, students took aim at unequal beauty standards and exaggerated swaggers as the constructed implements of a gender stratified society. Not surprisingly, most students were at ease with rejecting any natural affinity between women and domesticity; however, the timeless truth that homo sapiens are naturally divided into two distinct types—men and women—remained unscathed. Cultivating uncertainty, I pressed them, "So what do we make of the fact that some societies count three genders?" "There are always exceptions," came one response. "By this logic, your schema renders exceptions. Why not modify it?" The student conceded that he believed his model was based on what was most clearly given by biology. Thus at last the premise underlying so much of his certainty was exposed. This student and others couldn’t disagree more with de Beauvoir’s assertion. For them, one is born a man or a woman and does not become one—not really. Having identified this premise, I marked it on a placard and propped it up on the table at the front of the classroom like a life-sized, pop-out book. Biology—if we're being honest—is not given as a clear binary but exists as a spectrum. Women and men cannot just be identified by disrobing and neither will a snapshot of a person’s chromosomes yield a definitive answer. As Cary Costello asserts in his comments regarding the spectacle surrounding athlete Caster Semenya in 2009, "Dyadic sex is a myth—sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads—they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour." Class discussion desperately moved from the macro to the micro, from the genitals to the genome; each student in turn attempting to retrace what they once believed was an impenetrable basis upon which they invested so much of their thinking. But they were on a threshold, for they were wrestling with something very unsettling: our dyadic gender claims to be based on biological sex, but in fact, dyadic sex is itself a myth. This moment of dislodging a foundational premise is not simply akin to that feeling of disorientation when awakening in an unfamiliar place; rather, it threatens to be more permanent and irresolvable. It is something like being unable to discern whether you were just now a person dreaming you were a fish, or all along a fish dreaming you were a person. Coaxing students into this uncertainty, this zone of indistinction, is the beginning of the teaching moment. However, collective uncertainty is no place to dwell for an entire semester. If my claim is that they can no longer uncritically draw upon their usual common sense to evaluate the world—if that way of knowing is to be cast in suspicion—then what am I proposing as a replacement? What will they use to evaluate their common sense? Beginning photographers are often told they must learn again how to “see” light, which is really a process of paying attention to the way light paints their subject matter. Student photographers must all come to terms with the fact that they were never able to truly “see” the objects which populate their world, only the light reflected from those objects. This is more than elaborate explanation because learning to “see” is really learning to see through illusions. It is about (re)learning that sugar, dove soap, and snow are not necessarily white. Where these objects fall on a grey scale is contingent on how much light they are reflecting back in a given composition. To learn to “see,” photography students are shown photographs and they are shown how to reproduce such photographs. This process is not dissimilar to the one sociology students of gender must confront. Having coaxed students to suspend their common sense and having plunged them into a pit of indistinction, a fleeting moment arrives where they are more open to a critical alternative. It is at this juncture that the pitchman (in my case) must finally demonstrate his product, lest the crowd disperse. Like the photography students who were shown that snow is sometimes black, I must demonstrate by example how gender is socially constructed. The process of social construction has been theorized in a number of ways, but focusing on the way it happens through media representation and signification works well as a particularly vivid example. To this end, Jean Kilbourne's 1999 documentary, Killing Us Softly, continues to have an impact on students. The film chronicles pervasive representations of men and women in the media. The problem here is that many of my students were ten years old when the movie was made, leading to the oft heard dismissal, “Thank God that doesn’t happen anymore!” There is also the more sophisticated critique that many of the examples deployed are “one-sided,” or that the evidence was hand-picked by Kilbourne to invent a story about objectification. Students presumably dismiss the film's objectification thesis once they have identified that plenty of images exist where women are not objectified. Thus the problem confronting teachers is that students of sociology need to be shown how gendered messages are continually asserted through popular representation, and this needs to be demonstrated in a way that cannot be easily dismissed as an artifact of a regrettable past or a biased simplification. So there could be no question as to how current the information was, I drew upon an advertisement for the new iPad from Steve Jobs and company. The ad pretends to be a casual chat with four of the creative tech geeks at Apple, who just love what they do and are gushing to talk about this cool thing they invented. Women are conspicuously missing from this eight-minute clip; yet I would argue that even among women the ad is largely successful for Apple. While questions have surfaced about how truly innovative the iPad is, fewer have questioned the natural affinity depicted in this commercial between male logic and technological innovation. Hearing the epithet "computer geek," we in the U.S. mostly think of men, and that is precisely who we want designing our high tech gadgets because we associate men with logical integrity. Perhaps Apple intuitively understands that if they featured an exuberant woman in the ad, it would suggest that the iPad’s programming is logically flawed. This analysis baits controversy among my students, and almost immediately hands are raised. A flurry of remarks ensue, each insisting on counterexamples which demonstrate that women are definitely also represented in our society as having technological prowess. Plenty of visual representations suggest that they too belong to the symbolic universe of high technology. “This is true,” I tell them, “but consider the technology women are typically paired with.” Here I turn to play a second short clip, this time taken from TED Talks, a non-profit which hosts presentations related to ideas of technology, entertainment, and design. Jane Chen, the CEO of a company called Embrace, recently gave a presentation for them which caught my attention. In it, she promotes a life-saving and inexpensive incubation technology for premature infants, which her company invented. While this spot is about a high technology, it is presented exclusively by a woman, and therefore begs a corrective to my earlier claim that technology is the privileged domain of men. It's not that women have no place in high technology; they clearly do. Rather, this clip demonstrates that we want women involved with technologies related to nurturing and saving the lives of newborns. The take-away for my students is really twofold and recalls the idea that a lot of popular thinking about gender is informed by a common sense which continually attempts to link gender to biology. This affinity between woman and incubator works because it conforms to the pervasive assumption that nature produces two distinct types of people, and one is naturally more nurturing than the other. We are primed, in a sense, so that certain messages resonate with us, while others seem odd or inappropriate. By that same token, these clips and the institutions that built them are implicated in continuing to replicate distinct pairings of gender and technology. Noteably, commercials which claim to be exclusively about technology, make significant contributions to people's common sense about gender. I mentioned above that collective uncertainty is no place to dwell and that if teachers ask their students to be suspicious of their common sense, they are obliged to offer their students an alternative. I don't know if an alternative can be cut from whole cloth, but modifications are certainly possible. To this end, I try to conclude my class by encouraging students to discuss the way their assumptions about nature and biology have informed their own thinking. I encourage them to reflect on the way these regimes of representation have invaded their own evaluations of the people in their lives. Ideally, this particular teaching moment concludes with students comprehending the way their common sense is always informed by a larger culture which envelopes them. Lester Andrist When meeting new people we should be able to rely on the kindness of mutual friends to handle introductions and alleviate potential awkwardness. New bloggers have this need too, so I thought I'd rely on a biographic sketch written by my close friend, Theo DeJager. Unfortunately, I failed to specify that the biography needed to be factual, so please take what follows with a heavy grain of salt. In fact, it is worth noting that this sketch was originally denied publication in a modest little newsletter, partially because the editor believed it stretched the truth a bit too far. In my opinion, it does more than stretch the truth. 90% of it is an outright fabrication, albeit a hilarious one. I won't ruin the fun by exhaustively detailing what parts my biographer got right, however, I will verify just one detail: It is absolutely true that I once had a heartstopping encounter with an adolescent grizzly bear. Les --------------------------------- I once heard a story of an encounter between a young outdoorsman and a grizzly bear in the wilderness. As the story goes, the young man was out hunting and trapping, and while kneeling down to set one of his traps, he neglected to notice the gargantuan animal’s surprisingly stealthy approach. As the young hunter looked up, he virtually looked straight into the rheumy eyes of a 1000 pound bear, with a head as big as that of a sociologist who’s been published in ASR, and paws the size of pizza boxes (I’m talking Papa John’s extra large….and that’s pretty big!) Instinctively, the hunter froze, inwardly cursing himself for having left his rifle leaning against a rock some yards away. Suddenly, the monstrous bear reared up on its hind legs with a roar, sniffing the air as it extended itself to a height of over 8 feet. Our young hunter remained calm however, realizing that death was imminent should he make one wrong move. He eyed a sapling tree a short distance away, but realized that even with his incredible athletic ability he might not be able to outrun the bear, and even if he did, the tree was so small that the bear would simply pluck him from it like a ripe fruit. There was no escape. He would have to meet the bear’s challenge head-on if he were to survive. Drawing on all his outdoor know-how (Whoever said folk-wisdom wasn’t valuable?) and every shred of courage, the hunter jumped up and lunged toward the colossal bear, shouting and waving his arms wildly. For a moment it seemed as if the bear would simply swat him out of existence with one gigantic paw….but then, with a grunt, the bear retreated and simply meandered away. As the bear walked off, it paused, turned its head, and looked at the hunter; their eyes locked briefly and a tacit understanding passed between them; they were kindred spirits, born to live wild and free. Who was this young outdoorsman in our story? He was none other than our own dearly beloved colleague, Lester Andrist. Who is Lester Andrist? Many have asked, few have known. You might think you know Lester Andrist, but you don't. Did you know that he had aspirations to play professional basketball? Did you know that he's an accomplished martial artist and cyclist? Did you know that he speaks fluent Mandarin? Did you know that his favorite movies are "Shall We Dance" and "Mad Hot Ballroom"? Did you know that he's a remarkably skilled quantitative methodologist? Chances are you didn't know any of these things, and that's why you should keep reading. Through my friendship with Les (as he's known to his friends), I've gained a unique insight into what makes this complex man tick, and with this biographical sketch I'm going to introduce you to the real Lester Andrist; the man behind the enigma. Les and his identical twin, Ryan, were born to a large family in the small town of Menominie, Wisconsin. His father, Eddie, was a high school basketball coach, and his mom, Kerry-Sue, was a part-time nurse and stay-at-home mom. The Andrist children were always athletic, particularly the twins, Les and Ryan, who – with the encouragement of their father – both excelled at basketball from an early age. Les’s younger sister, April, proved to be a talented track star, and she would later go on to become a personal trainer to various Hollywood celebrities. The Andrist boys were very competitive, particularly on the basketball court, and their initial rivalry would set the tone of their relationship for the rest of their lives. While very capable on the court, Ryan could never quite match Les’s natural talent, and Les started to distinguish himself from his twin with extraordinary displays of skill and athleticism. Their father, Eddie, soon noticed that Les held some real promise, perhaps even enough to one day embark on a professional sports career, and he consequently started to personally hone the boy’s abilities. Soon young Les found himself traveling various high school basketball circuits around Wisconsin and neighboring Montana with his father, putting on instructional displays of highly technical movements and strategies during coach Eddie’s training sessions. (Years later, Les would attribute a host of physical ailments to the rigors he had to endure during those long, merciless training sessions.) By the time he reached high school, Les was set on pursuing a professional basketball career, but then, during a match against a rival school, disaster struck! While hovering near the basket with his arms raised, waiting to execute his signature move (known as the “Menomonie Sinkhole”) upon receiving the ball, Les’s attention strayed momentarily and he didn’t see the ball traveling toward him at high speed. A split-second later the ball smashed into his upraised left arm, dislocating his shoulder, tearing muscle, and shearing tendons. He crumpled to the floor, barely conscious. Upon subsequent examination, the doctors determined that his shoulder was so badly damaged that it necessitated rather extensive surgery, and hence Les’s dreams of a basketball career evaporated forever. The next few years following this catastrophe were tumultuous, and Les freely admits that his life briefly descended into near chaos because of his own anger and bitterness. The remainder of his time in high school included bouts of depression, excessive drinking, and several run-ins with local law enforcement. One such unfortunate encounter culminated in a late-night pursuit that saw Les fleeing into the darkness at high speed on a motorcycle, and later barely escaping with his life after having crashed into a roadside swamp. It seemed to him that he had yet again cheated death, and this sobering realization gave him pause to reconsider the trajectory of his life. As if awakening from a bad dream, Les understood that he needed to leave Wisconsin with all its childhood disappointments behind, and that he had to venture out into the world to discover (or perhaps to make) his own destiny. A few months after graduating high school, Les hitchhiked from Wisconsin to the west coast, ending up in San Francisco, where he immediately boarded the first merchant vessel that would give him a job as a deckhand. After several months of cruising the Pacific on the fishing ship Ning-Po (meaning “calm waves”), Les set ashore in Hong Kong, and proceeded to explore this vibrant and bustling city. After having been entirely candid about his childhood, Les seemed strangely pensive and recalcitrant when our interview turned to the topic of his experiences in the Far East. Even to his close friends, these few years seem inexplicably secretive and shrouded in mystery. The following exchange between us, while researching this biographical sketch, illustrates the point: Theo: “So, Les, in a previous conversation you mentioned that you actually briefly trained with the martial artist and actor Steven Seagal in Hong Kong?” Les: “Yes. That’s true. He was my sensei for some time.” Theo: “I heard a rumor that you and Seagal were once involved in a brawl with some gang members in Hong Kong. Can you confirm this?” Les: “Err….I can neither confirm nor deny.” Theo: “I see. . . cryptic. You don’t deny however that you once raced against Gary Fisher, the inventor of the mountain bike, in Hong Kong?” Les: “No, that I won’t deny. He was one tough old dude. Exceptionally spry for a man of his age.” Theo: “I also heard a rumor that you supported yourself in Hong Kong by working as a male underwear model? Is this true?” Les: “It is true, sadly. Enough said.” Theo: “Is it also true that, while living in Hong Kong, you were – for a short time – the proud owner of a mogwai? Les: “That’s not true at all. Never happened. Don’t believe everything you hear.” Theo: “OK, whatever. I’m just asking.” After his time in Hong Kong, Les journeyed onward to Taipei, where he would later meet his future wife, Julie Chang. After the mayhem of Hong Kong, Les was hoping to find some relative tranquility in Taiwan, but, as always, trouble would invariably cross his path, and, as he had done with that grizzly so many years ago, he would meet it unflinchingly. Running low on funds, Les had to resort to staying at various low-rent, fleabag hotels in some of Taipei’s seedier neighborhoods. One late night, while wandering the city streets deep in thought, Les found himself in front of a tavern, and he decided to go inside for a drink. He took a seat at the bar next to a woman and started up a conversation with her, and within a few minutes it became clear that this was in fact no ordinary drinking establishment, but a front for a brothel. Sensing trouble, Les proceeded to get up and leave, only to find his way blocked by the establishment’s irate proprietor, who claimed that he now owed her money after having taken up the time of one of her employees (presumably the woman with whom he had innocently spoken at the bar). Naturally, Les refused to pay, realizing that he had fallen victim to a local scam designed to extort money from unsuspecting tourists by forcing them to buy a preposterously priced $60 “ladies drink.” Upon his refusal, the owner became even more incensed and promptly summoned two muscle-bound characters who appeared to be the establishment’s bouncers. Faced with no possibility of escape, Les acquitted himself efficiently and effectively in the scuffle that followed, making good use of some of the more unusual techniques imparted to him by his erstwhile teacher, Steven Seagal. Needless to say, he left the place without having to pay anything. Although he was enjoying his sojourn in Asia, Les felt restive and unsatisfied, as if his life was somehow undirected and empty, and he therefore decided to return to the States, in the hopes of finding some worthwhile pursuit.
After making it back to America, Les decided to return to Wisconsin, but he eventually ended up in Montana, where he would work as a waiter, a gas station attendant, a donut fryer, and an assistant in a photography studio. Not satisfied with the tedium of service sector work, Les subsequently decided to try his luck on the Montana rodeo circuit, but not before completing a brief stint in the notorious Montana militia, where he was instrumental in drawing up their secessionist constitution. (Ultimately he found secessionist politics to be a dead-end though, and he departed the militia as swiftly as he had joined.) He achieved moderate success on the rodeo circuit, even earning the nickname of “Ponyboy” among his peers, but real success eluded him because he was constantly plagued by his old shoulder injury. After having experimented with a range of potential vocations – and finding them all equally unfulfilling – Les concluded that he needed to go back to school, and he proceeded to enroll in Montana State University’s prestigious film school. (Incidentally, while at film school, Les was contacted by a talent agent who offered him an audition for a small part in “The Horse Whisperer.”) He had always loved the cinema, and he felt confident that a career in film, particularly in directing, would give voice to his creativity. Unluckily, however, this plan would also not come to fruition because, at the end of his first year, Les directed a controversial student production (too explicit to discuss here) that caused him to fall afoul of the narrow-minded institutional authorities. He wasn’t kicked out of the film program, but it became apparent to him that his unique vision would not be accommodated within stale institutional boundaries, and he consequently decided to move on. Once again searching for something to give meaning to his life, Les’s first encounter with sociology would happen entirely by chance, in a small public library in rural Montana. While casually browsing the stacks one morning, Les happened upon a dusty volume called “The Social System,” by one Talcott Parsons. Intrigued, he checked out the book and took it home, where he read it voraciously. “I immediately loved Parsons’ concise and clear style. . .” he said, “. . .and I found his structural way of thinking quite liberating.” Newly motivated by his discovery of sociology, via Parsons, Les enrolled at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities the next semester and declared sociology as his major. The next four years would be relatively uneventful, and in addition to successfully completing his BA in sociology, Les would get married during this time. After graduation, Les and his wife Julie would move to the DC-area in search of jobs, and Les would ultimately be hired by Westat, a contract research organization based in Rockville, Maryland. At Westat, Les’s amazing mathematical mind would stand him in good stead, and he quickly made a reputation for himself as a precise and meticulous analyst. However, he would soon tire of the mechanistic routine of statistical analysis and he found himself yet again looking toward intellectually greener pastures. Always a man of action, Les applied to the PhD program in sociology at the University of Maryland, and then promptly quit his job at Westat upon receiving notice of acceptance into the program. That very next semester our cohort met for the first time during orientation, we all became fast friends, and the rest is history, as the saying goes. During his time here at UMD, Les has impressed faculty and peers with his quick wit, keen intellect, and incisive commentary. Initially Les worked as a TA for Dr. Smith, teaching one of the undergraduate statistics courses. It is rumored that after observing Les’ statistical acumen for two semesters, Dr. Smith quipped approvingly that “. . .the student has now become the teacher.” It seems that Les has found his place in the world at last, and in the process has become quite an interesting person. If you pass him on the street or return to this blog, pause for a moment and say hello. Get to know him; I’m sure you’ll be amazed at what you find. Theo DeJager In what follows I’ll be sharing a hint of scandal about my marriage and my wife, Julie. Introductions are an appropriate place to begin. Julie is an educational administrator at a local University and epitomizes the busy DC professional. By day, she is known among her colleagues as a shrewd pragmatist, but this characteristic often lingers into the evening, well after she’s left the office. Also noteworthy is that English is Julie’s third language, and although her command of it is impeccable, she scrambles the occasional idiomatic expression. Her residual professionalism coupled with her dynamic use of idioms led to a recent conversation where Julie expressed her reservations about me sharing the difficulties of my relationship with future colleagues. The conversation was stuffed full of remarks about “contingency plans” and possible “anonymity measures.” She was skeptical of the wisdom behind my consent to write the piece, and pointed out that “If push comes to worst”—a novel combination of the expressions “if push comes to shove” and “if worst comes to worst”—I can always take a leave of absence and live with my mom in Montana until things cool over. She had a point, but in the end, I convinced her the exercise might prove cathartic for me, and who knows, it might be of some benefit to someone else’s relationship. In the end, she consented on the condition that she has editorial discretion.
So I sat down to write and recalled the warnings I had received when after divulging my plan to begin graduate school. A close friend told me plainly that graduate school would likely pose a challenge to my marriage. I believe I was stirring my morning coffee at the workplace lunch counter when it happened and bragging that I would soon tender my resignation for the more noble pursuit of education. His message was that graduate school was a hornet’s nest and that I would need to find balance. Unfortunately this particular friend is a habitual whiner and tends to go through the day hanging his head and shaking it from side to side, as if warming it up to reject the entire day. “Life is a travesty,” he would say. “There is a new outbreak of Ebola in Africa.” “More and more polar bears are drowning.” “Marriage can’t survive graduate school.” I didn’t take his warning seriously, and anyway, by this time, Julie and I had already transcended a number of struggles together. I’m talking about real epic triumphs, like the time I screamed at Julie for waking me up to change a flat tire. From that argument, I learned to pick my battles. My confidence was also bolstered by my belief that the sum of my experiences as a serial monogamist had prepared me for this single moment in time. I was a gladiator poised to be elevated into the coliseum of graduate school, only superficially aided by a few pulleys and levers. I had my own weapons, and I had honed my own method. This was not going to be a problem. By 2002, Julie and I had already been in DC for a year, and graduate school was beginning to loom large on the horizon for both of us. Julie had announced that she would soon begin working toward her Ph.D. in education. That year, I remember the theatrical release of the movie “About Schmidt,” starring Jack Nicholson. The previews seemed to loop endlessly for a few weeks, and they always featured Nicholson’s character as narrator. “Helen and I have been married 42 years. Lately, I find myself asking the same question. Who is this old woman who lives in my house?” How I pitied Nicholson’s character, particularly his feelings of unfamiliarity with his partner. “Of course this baffles me!” I thought, “Unlike Schmidt, I married the right person for the right reasons, and anyway, I know myself! I would never just idly sit by like soggy-shorts Schmidt and play witness to the dismantling of my marriage. The instant I perceived distance, I would bring in the fire brigade. Just as we had in the past, Julie and I would sit down and work to articulate what the hell is going on—name it and banish it from our island!” But I was soon to learn that the mischievous workings of graduate school are often cloaked. We enter our first year with an unenviable work load, and insurmountable expectations abound. Reasons to forgo such indulgences as stretching the legs, spending time in rooms with windows, and unwinding are easily found. In the beginning the assault is obvious, but soon it begins feeling blunted and appears to fade. I suspect this is because we learn to cope, but it must also be because that which is omnipresent appears mundane, normal and unremarkable. In the same way we fail to notice the buzzing noise of an electrified city or the greenish glow cast by fluorescent lighting, we eventually cease fixating on the effects of our stress and the routines we’ve casually adopted as a means of coping. Then it happened. For the first time in my marriage, I noticed myself becoming inexplicably resentful about Julie’s allergies. Her quirky penchant for bringing random pamphlets home despite my protest suddenly seemed to be a direct statement about her failing commitment to the marriage. I remember feeling exasperated one evening when she demanded equal space for her own books on our book shelf. “Who is this woman?” There was a malignant dissatisfaction growing within me, and I watched myself—as though a spectator—take it out on Julie. Time spent on classes, getting papers ready for publication, socializing with classmates, and navigating department politics – the cumulative effect of these changes in this new graduate world had the effect of a wayward current. Julie and I had begun to drift apart. Schmitt’s gripe finally made sense. “Editorial discretion” urges caution at following the narrative any further, but I’ve already shared plenty. What’s imperative of any cautionary tale is that the author state in unambiguous terms precautions one can take or a list of pitfalls to avoid, something akin to “Here are the ten things I did to survive a night floating in the Atlantic with sharks nipping at my heels.” Ten tips to save your relationship while in graduate school would be admirable, but I’m partial to the humor of a good anticlimax so I offer only one. Most enduring relationships require a measure of time and attention; yet graduate school nibbles away at the graduate student’s schedule like pez, and it liquefies the grey matter involved in attention—like the brain-on-drugs egg in those commercials from the Reagan administration. Aiming for balance, people attempt to schedule time for their relationships, but once classes begin, time slips away and they feel they’ve lost their balance. I think we should dispense with this notion of balance. The metaphor suggests a teeter-totter or seesaw held level by two discrete entities of equal weight. Eight hours of graduate school is answered with eight hours devoted to relationships. Thinking about these spheres as separate and balanced is inaccurate and unhelpful. The distinction between what is work and what is personal often collapses, especially when important relationships are formed with one’s classmates and professors. Thinking in terms of balance is also a problem because it encourages us to regard our relationships as entities opposed to work. We are enticed to cultivate our careers and relationships as though they were distinct spheres, hermetically sealed from each other. In building our careers we exit our relationships. The gravity well that is graduate school makes all this talk about striking a delicate balance sound a bit disingenuous. We would do well to forget balance, and instead allow or even encourage our relationships to be folded into graduate school’s gooey goodness. To this end, baking metaphors might be more useful. This integration of spheres will likely look different for different people, but for Julie and I, it has meant that we recognize scheduling evening time will not always be enough. To keep our lives integrated, I’ve begun attending more of her professional conferences, and for her part, she has begun hanging out with my graduate friends more often. I’ve learned far more about the field of education than I care to, and she’s learned to navigate conversations marked by frequent self-reflective, Goffman-esque comments about the conversation (lol, snort). Lester Andrist |