In Defense of Grammar

As if I needed yet another reason to believe that the Internet is mostly a dangerous, destructive, terrible thing, recent perusing of the self-indulgent and slightly maudlin Thought Catalog has alerted me to the awful truth: literally Anyone and Everyone is now a bona fide writer, thanks to the Internet.

You no longer need to possess any particular command of the language in order to see your name in a byline. Interesting and novel ideas are not a prerequisite for unleashing your words on the populace. Generic, pointless rubbish is not only accepted by the likes of Thought Catalog, it appears to be the preference. And, possibly most offensive and repugnant of all, good grammar is not required.

What does the Internet have against commas? Why on Earth does no one seem to regard the distinction between “your” and “you’re” as being worthy of consideration? Can I truly be the only person in existence who grinds her teeth in ill-concealed fury when writers fail to use “who” and “whom” correctly? Has simple, honest proofreading gone the way of the VHS and become extinct?

Even worse than the affronts to grammar and syntax is the vitriol that we unfortunate proponents of the English language encounter when pointing out said affronts—from being labeled as “Grammar Nazis” to being outright ridiculed for daring to draw attention to what some consider to be “trivial”. With regard to the former, calling anyone a “Nazi” (in the year 2014, no less) for being mindful of grammatical errors is distasteful, lazy, and indicative of a philistine understanding of history. With regard to the latter, it’s easy enough to fall back on the notion that the content supersedes form in terms of the relative impact of a written piece, but this attitude is woefully ignorant of the fundamentals of literature itself. One cannot hope to communicate one’s ideas, however brilliant and revolutionary they may be, if the basic structure in which they are presented is weakened by faulty machinery. And grammar is, indeed, the machinery that powers all writing. Why, then, do Internet users vociferously dismiss its importance, even to the point of chastising those who draw attention to flaws in the machinery?

I’d love to know why we seem to accept grammatical errors so easily. Is this a product of the millennial generation, the inherent belief that their words are the super special words of super special snowflakes who simply must express themselves immediately lest all their Facebook friends and Twitter followers are left to wonder in agony what infinite wisdom awaits? Is the urge to say something—anything­—so powerful that we simply accept that whatever is said is going to be at least a little bit sloppy and flawed, as millennials have all but cornered the market on being sloppy and flawed? Is our generation so uncomfortable with silence that we will connect, must connect, using the Internet’s version of the written word in order to ensure that we can never fade into anonymity?

Writing is not easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. Sort of like transplant surgery, if writing were easy, then everyone would do it, and they would do it well. In those days of yore when the distinction of having one’s writing published was reserved for those with actual talent, authors were praised for their skillful prose, their exciting notions, their memorable characters, their startling use of symbolism, their sensitive tackling of difficult issues.  They were not praised for their grammar—because correct grammar was a given. Transplant surgeons are never praised for tying a knot correctly, because knot tying is a fundamental skill in surgery that everyone who calls himself a surgeon is expected to be able to do. Good quality writing is indeed about far more than good grammar. But bad grammar negates good writing.

So this is my wish for all of us who aspire to call ourselves writers: take grammar seriously. We cannot expect to command the written word in any meaningful way if we fail to grasp the underlying machinery, those fussy little semi-colons and prepositions and verb tenses that are so easy to dismiss in our eagerness to indulge ourselves and stroke our egos by publishing our own special, precious little words with the click of a blogging button. The Internet can just as easily transform us into mindless, hash-tagging, self-impressed automatons who artlessly express ourselves in 140 nearly incoherent characters as it can educate, inspire, and motivate us to share our thoughts and ideas with the global community. I can only hope that social media, blogs, and the Thought Catalogs of the world don’t succeed in their endeavor to slowly wear down the machinery of good writing and render grammar obsolete. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m a believer in syntax over hash-tags. 

The Difficulty of Female Characters

            My dear friend John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a British WWI veteran born in the late nineteenth century, has been thoroughly criticized decade after decade for his depiction of women in his magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings. The epic fantasy trilogy is the ultimate boys’ club; every major character is not only male, but (with a few obvious exceptions) the uber-masculine archetypal warrior flavor of whatever species they represent. Sure, female characters crop up here and there: notably, we have the pristine elves Arwen and her golden-haired grandmother Galadriel, the feisty shield-maiden Eowyn, and Shelob, a gigantic, horrifying spider demon thing. That lineup says a mouthful (and a dismal mouthful at that) and gives credence to Professor Tolkien’s critics: women, when they do incidentally appear in the story, are either virtuous pedestal prizes like the elves, a jilted lover like Eowyn, or a treacherous beast like Shelob.

However, one must remember that The Lord of the Rings, written between 1939 and 1947, was in many ways a reflection of Tolkien’s world. He sought to create a mythical history of England and to critique the weapons of mass destruction that were entering the United Kingdom’s consciousness during WWII, not to comment on gender roles. Perhaps Tolkien never identified a clear purpose for women beyond being a nurturer, romantic interest, or gluttonous villain. Regardless, he chose mostly to disregard women in The Lord of the Rings. Thorough character development was restricted to male characters.

And as much as I have found myself craving a strong female heroine in the story that I’ve loved all my life, I have to give Professor Tolkien credit for refusing to attempt and spectacularly fail at writing a female main character. There are as many pitfalls to creating female characters in literature and film as there are unflattering stereotypes about women. From downright hatred to condescending oversimplification, authors (both male and female) seem to struggle with injecting their own attitudes about women into their writing, and the result is often predictable and disturbing.

Take Professor Tolkien’s close friend and colleague, C.S. Lewis, who all but cornered the market on the classic Disney-esque villainess: the formerly beautiful Empress Jadis, who later devolves into the diabolical “Witch” of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe fame. The story goes something like this: Jadis has a fight with her sister, and, in a jealous rage, speaks “The Deplorable Word”, which ends her world and kills all the people in it. All that to spite her sister. She then gets stuck in a different world, which, as it happens, is the eponymous world of The Chronicles of Narnia, and gradually takes over, crafts a 100-year winter just to be nasty, scares all the nice talking animals into hiding, and then kills the Jesus Lion Aslan. What a bitch! The thing is, Lewis takes great pains to make sure that we understand just how gorgeous and sexy Jadis is before she becomes all witchy and evil (and she’s still a hottie when she’s in witch mode, albeit in a more sinister way), which implies that her sex appeal is intertwined with her villainy. This is in direct contrast with Tolkien’s Shelob, whose villainy is externalized as hideous gluttony.

Lewis seems to have differed from his friend in that his misogyny manifests in the form of aversion to female sexuality. Take his much-maligned banishment of Susan Pevensie from Narnia on account of her interest in lipstick and nylons. Susan is barred from entering Jesus Lion Aslan’s kingdom of Heaven not because she “grew up”, as some have suggested, but because she became a “woman”—or rather, Lewis’s idea of a modern woman: sexualized and powerful as a result, like Jadis. This ties in to the classic Disney villainess, the Maleficents and Wicked Snow White Queens of literature: women who are so driven by their own desire for sexual dominion over men that they literally turn evil. These women don’t care about military strategy or omniscience or power for power’s sake. They just want to be eternally beautiful and sexy—and they must be punished as a result. How patronizing. How simplistic. How misogynistic.

Is the solution, then, to express femininity in a non-sexual and therefore non-threatening way? The well-intentioned writers of “badass chicks” seem to think so. Many fantasy writers in particular give their female characters special powers or stereotypical “toughness” that sets these characters apart from the damsels in distress. Katniss Everdeen is handy with a bow and wears flaming couture in The Hunger Games. Arya Stark is an adorable serial killer in A Song of Ice and Fire. Hermione Granger, Harry Potter’s brilliant and STRICTY PLATONIC OMG SO PLATONIC sidekick, vanquishes bad guys with knowledge and logic. While this depiction of female characters is less offensive than most, it’s still inherently reductionist and a bit condescending. Katniss and Hermione, after all their toughness and badassery, require marriage to cement their happy(ish) endings. We don’t know yet what’s in store for Arya, but I cynically suspect that she’ll end up married to Gendry. Eowyn kicks ass and kills the Witch King in The Return of the King not just because she wants to prove how much of an amazing warrior she really could be—she essentially goes on a suicide mission because Aragorn tacitly rejects her. The life of a powerful, independent woman who could be and do so much more, reduced to nothing because of a man. Which makes me wonder: is there an authentic, relatable way of writing a female character who has admirable skills and attributes? Must we feel compelled to express a female character’s inherent femininity by reminding our readers that, underneath all the toughness and competence and awesomeness, she is still just a woman and therefore ultimately an object of desire, driven by desire?

The fundamental danger of writing a competent, admirable, relatable female character is that she inevitably gets branded with the unflattering designation of being a “Mary Sue”. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a female character who more often than not serves as a self-insert for the author: a disgustingly perfect character who fits the author’s ideal of what he or she aspires to be and allows the author to live vicariously through that character. The most revolting example that I can think of is Bella Swan from the Twilight series, whose biggest “character flaw” is that she’s sort of clumsy in a cute and appealing way. Everything good happens to a Mary Sue: she charms the hero, is applauded for being classically “feminine”, gets to have oh-so-special powers and qualities, is inexplicably good at sports (I’m looking at you, Ginny Weasley), often displays tolerably plucky and sassy behavior, and always manages to save the day with her innate feminine goodness. That’s right: “bad” female characters are bad because they want to be, whereas “good” female characters, including Mary Sues, are good because they have to be. Take all the autonomy out of your female character and she becomes good by default. Readers tend to despise Mary Sues; we cannot relate to them and the self-indulgence on the author’s part is woefully transparent.

Therein lies the difficulty of writing female characters, which falls somewhere between the realms of author failure and reader resistance. Authors struggle with writing well-rounded female heroines who are not driven by stereotypically “female” motives, while readers resist well-rounded female heroines who somehow fail to fit into their mold of what constitutes an acceptable female character. It’s a vicious cycle of sorts, reinforced by those problematic archetypes that define the fantasy genre in particular, but inevitably invade other genres as well. The result is often a travesty of femininity: sexually manipulative villainesses, tough chicks with hard exteriors but soft hearts secretly longing for male attention, or Mary Sues who lose us entirely with their perfection and ridiculous amounts of good fortune. 

We also harbor subconscious expectations that a female in any narrative must serve as a harbinger of romance; even when the romance does not explicitly manifest within the main narrative, we know it’s coming. Arwen and Aragorn never interact in the text of The Lord of the Rings, but we always know that her purpose—her sole purpose--is to be his queen. Ginny Weasley is Harry Potter’s prize for saving the world: not a partner or an ally, but a reward. In the context of the real world, which has real issues with gender roles and the subjugation of women, this reduction of women is intensely problematic. Defining a woman’s purpose as it relates to the men in her life is the foundation of sexism and misogyny. Widows in India are made to light themselves on fire on their husband’s funeral pyres because they are thought to no longer serve any purpose without a husband. Female children in China are abandoned and murdered because impoverished families can’t afford the prohibitively expensive wedding customs that accompany a daughter. These are the dangers of defining women in men’s terms. When women are thought to exist solely as support for men, whether in literature, real life, or both, it becomes all to easy to dismiss the value of women not as women, but as people who happen to be female. We tend to have less trouble viewing male characters as simply people who happen to be male. Is this a product of our heteronormative, male-revering global philosophy? Is this the effect of generations of religious shaming of femininity, the original sin of Eve?

My attitude on this matter does not stem from any animosity towards men. Female and male authors alike seem to struggle with creating honest, compelling, realistic depictions of female characters. I have the utmost respect for Professor Tolkien for throwing up his hands and deciding to refrain from even attempting to write female characters, as he clearly did not possess enough insight into the female condition of his own era or of his fictional setting to write something honest about womanhood. It just wasn’t a part of his narrative. Is that the solution, then? To turn a blind eye to the difficulty of gender roles? Of course not. Nor can we hope to subvert traditional gender roles in literature by continuing to write stereotypical bitchy queens, badass lonely chicks, and Mary Sues—or by turning our noses up at any depiction of a female character that doesn’t stroke our egos or comply with our own personal status quo as a reader. Literature is and always will be a two-way street.  I don’t doubt that the difficulty of writing female characters is a symptom of the difficulty of accepting women in modern society for all our conflicting attitudes, goals, and self-perceptions. If you think depicting women in literature is tough, try being a woman in real life. If you think it’s hard to write about a woman’s success without being patronizing, try earning success as a woman without being patronized. If none of us are actual damsels in distress, evil vixens, ass-kicking cool chicks, or flawless Mary Sues, then what are we? Something even more difficult, complex, and interesting. Hard to write…but even harder to be.

The Princess Problem

I admit it. When Kate Middleton burst into the spotlight with her fabulous fascinators and polished suits, I was overcome with jealousy. For weeks, I withdrew into existential malaise, ruminating over her good fortune—she had ascended from a commoner to a princess simply because she had charmed the buck-toothed heir to the British throne. The fact that she would someday wear a bejeweled crown, ride in a horse-drawn carriage, and live in a historic palace while I continued to toil in plebeian anonymity felt like the most brutal of all injustices.

To cope with my rampant case of princess envy, I decided to overhaul my wardrobe. If I couldn’t be a princess, I could at least dress like one. I acquired beautiful, leather Ralph Lauren riding boots, tailored pencil skirts, elegant nude pumps, bold Derby hats, tweed blazers, crisp wool trousers, linen shift dresses, elbow-length satin gloves—even an intricately embroidered turban-like headband, a vague homage to princesses from kingdoms more closely intertwined with my own heritage. Thus attired, the fantasy of royalty felt more attainable.

Fortunately for my rapidly dwindling savings account, buyer’s remorse eventually overpowered my outlandish delusions of grandeur, and most of my princess costumes were returned by the time the Royal Wedding aired. I listlessly watched as Kate, in her infuriatingly lovely and tasteful wedding dress, became Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge. I reluctantly acknowledged that no amount of fancy new clothes could make me into a princess; you’re either born royal, or you marry someone who was. You can’t be awarded a crown because you studied hard or you scored highly on an exam, and you can’t sit on a throne because you organized a successful campaign and convinced people to support your cause. Being a princess is honor without accomplishment.

In Disney movies, princesses are invariably beautiful, kind, feminine, clever, and either helpless or willful, depending on the era. It wasn’t until the very recent Disney/Pixar hit Brave that a princess was portrayed as a genuinely spunky tomboy whose storyline was not dominated by the quest for a husband. As a child, I never questioned the soulless homogeneity of Disney princesses. I memorized their songs, dressed like them for Halloween (and sometimes on other days as well), and daydreamed about sitting on a throne and bossing people around. But eventually, I began to wonder: what actually made these characters special? Did being a princess mean that they were innately superior? Was everyone who wasn’t a princess somehow unworthy? I knew that couldn’t be true; my parents had emphasized the importance of education, a good work ethic, and dedication to one’s career as being the central tenets of success, so I knew that being innately superior had nothing to do with it. Then wasn’t all this princess nonsense just a bunch of elitist horseshit?

As I aged and progressed in my education, I noticed that the anecdotal use of the word “princess” had a negative connotation, and was often used as a synonym for “entitled” or “demanding”. Many of the girls who went to my college and majored in Elementary Education—the ones who wore Uggs and donned false eyelashes to go to the gym and socialize next to the elliptical machines—were derogatorily referred to as “princesses”.  There was a tacit implication, amongst observers and the girls themselves, that they had no real desire to work, and were hoping to marry wealthy men. Such girls were generally regarded as prissy, high-maintenance, and unambitious.

Bravo’s much-maligned new series Princesses: Long Island presents a particularly unflattering portrayal of young Jewish women from economically privileged families, colloquially referred to as JAPs, or Jewish-American Princesses. For the most part, the women on the show are entitled, shallow, immature, pampered, unintelligent, overly indulged, inarticulate slobs who drink too much and have no marketable skills. Unduly impressed with their own looks, they all labor under the delusion that a prosperous, handsome man is waiting for each of them in the great wide somewhere, desperate to wed and grant them eternal comfort and elysian bliss. They seem unperturbed by the fact that they bring nothing to the table: no remarkable insight, no personal accomplishments, no interesting experiences, no ambitions of their own—not even the subtle, traditionally “feminine” qualities of being a good homemaker and mother. The simple designation of being a “princess” apparently earns them the right to be cherished and adored.

After all, being a princess has nothing to do with your own accomplishments. You’re treated like you’re worthy of respect and reverence only because you’ve arbitrarily been designated as superior. Your status depends on the perceived inferiority of others and on the continuation of your father’s or husband’s sovereignty. At least princes and kings have historically been known to win battles and make important decisions; princesses are rarely more than commodities, bargaining tools, and figureheads. This is a hardly a role to which any modern woman should aspire.

What I’m about to say will probably seem unnecessarily harsh, but I’ll say it anyway. Women, stop behaving as if being female and/or attractive and/or the daughter of well-to-do parents makes you inherently superior.

The monarchy is a dying breed; civilization has finally started to wise up to the fact that nobody is born inherently superior to anyone else. Monarchy has flourished as long as it has because people have believed in the divine right of individuals who bear a certain genetic lineage to rule. Throughout history, hundreds of thousands have died in revolt against the monarchy, yet modern “princesses” uphold the belief that being arguably attractive and having been raised in a privileged environment gives them the right to certain luxuries. It doesn’t. Misogyny, like the monarchy, is also getting phased out. No one has to pay for your drinks, buy you expensive bags, and marry you simply because you exist. Modern women in the western world have every opportunity to buy their own drinks and expensive bags, because our predecessors have fought and struggled and advocated for women’s equality. It seems rather hypocritical to subvert decades of feminist advocacy so that we can view ourselves as “princesses”, because being a princess is a silly, childish fantasy that’s inaccessible to 99.999% of the female population. What is accessible to all of us who were fortunate enough to be born into middle-class families in the western world is equal pay, equal opportunities, equal education, and an equal chance to succeed. Those who live in developing countries where women are subjugated and commodified surely view our reality as a fantasy.

I’m a woman. I’m attractive. I’m the daughter of well-to-do parents. And I’m studying to be a doctor. Some women have no desire to work, and that’s fine. Kate Middleton is probably a wonderful princess, and that’s fine too. But I’m not a princess, and I never will be. I’m happy to have the opportunity to take ownership of my future and create my own stability. I’ve been give the chance to be anything I want to be, to take risks, to devise my own timeline, to marry if and when I choose. If I were a princess, all of those decisions would be made for me. Being a commodity means sacrificing autonomy, and autonomy is precious to me—much more precious than a sapphire heirloom engagement ring.

Some women have no problem with being a commodity, and I wish them well. I would also caution them to remember that, by labeling oneself as a commodity, one has no right to demand respect or equal partnership. If you’re to be coddled and pampered like a princess, you had better be prepared to be patronized and controlled as well. Don’t say no one warned you.

I won’t claim that I will never, ever don a rhinestone tiara and gaze wistfully at myself in the mirror, wishing for something more genteel and glamorous than the dreary hospital wards and lifeless white coats. Fantasy can be a harmless coping mechanism. But I will always remember to be grateful for my reality: choices, opportunities, autonomy, and self-respect. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, but I’m happy to carry the burdens that I’ve chosen for myself.