A Humorous Take on Stereotypes, Why I LOVE 'Bad Guys', Masculinity, Peacocks, Men, and Heavily Needed Sassy Gay Friends

Stereotypes, we all know, are horrible labels to give to someone. 

And yet, we’ve all know people in our lives who fit them.  For example, to paraphrase something Brittany said in class, “all girls at some point date that one guy who treats her like total shit.”  We all know someone likes this, a modern day conquistador looking for victory in the beds and broken hearts of our peers.

The beginning of our culture was a precursor for the small and varied continued violences that still happen today, like WWE wrestling.  In class we talked at length about a masculinity that can’t rest as part of its gender identity and that it always needs to be out there proving itself over and over again.  Like in the documentary on wrestling, I’ve knew people in my high school years that over compensated to look like a ‘tough guy’ by bullying other more effeminate males.  I could tell looking around the class that everyone was in some degree horrified by the documentary, and yet the more I’ve reflected on it since that class, the more I’ve realized we seem dulled down cases of the wrongs wrestling showcases in my real waking life.  Domestic violence, possessive men who treat their women like garbage, people hounding after someone simply because they want their body, bullies beating and taunting other school children, homophobia, the list goes on and on.  In a world like this, how can parents teach their kids that there’s strength in walking away from a fight?  How do we teach young men that just because you’re effeminate, you don’t have to turn to violence?



The world of today is all about domination and conquests in the form of self gratification and a warped perspective of what it means to be masculine.  And yet, the world didn’t always used to be this way about its conquests – it used to be much, much worse.  Along with the hopes for personal gain, men ‘settled’ all over the world for government and God, ripping apart the native populations that came into their line of fire in the process in a show of violence that can only be called overpowering and unapologetic.  In Diaz’s writings he blatantly says “Our Lord Jesus Christ was indeed sending us help and assistance” (Diaz 72).  Seriously?!  Let me battle this quote with my own, courtesy of Zoë from Firefly: “Don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?”  And yet, I’m sure all cultures have their stories of religious killings.  More and more I can’t help but wonder how many of the people who use the bible for justification of horrible and violent deeds have actually read it.  Personally, I think Cortes must have used his as a paperweight.

Honestly, conquistadors remind me of peacocks, and not because they were brightly colored to attract mates.  They loved to be seen, and much like the birds I’ve compared them to, show off.  When entering the enemy city, Diaz writes “Wide though it was, it was so crowded with people that there was hardly room for them all.  Some were going to Mexico and others coming away, besides those who had come to see us, and we could hardly get through the crowds that were there.  For towers and the cues were, full and they came in canoes from all parts of the lake” (Diaz 69).  Can you say vanity?  I feel like the Spanish at this point were so drunk with power and superiority they couldn’t help but to shout ‘Look at me, look at me’ to all the Native people, who were apparently happy to oblige.  “Who could now count the multitude of men, women, and boys in the streets, on the roof-tops and in canoes on the waterways, who had come out to see us?  It was a wonderful sight” (Diaz 70).

You know what else would have been a wonderful sight?  If Eliza Wharton had had a Sassy Gay Friend, who fixed everything and stopped her before she (with everyone’s help) ruined her life:

I can see it now:  "What are you doing?  What, what, what are you doing?  Eliza, honey, stop window shopping and pick a man already!  This isn't like choosing between Prada and Gucci.  Stop running around with Sanford before you end up ruined worse than Hester Prynne!"

One of the things that most tied The Coquette to The True History of the Conquest of New Spain wasn’t the very nature of conquest, sexual and other, in both pieces.  It was the blatantly unapologetic nature which both writings assume at times.  Eliza Wharton can’t be blamed for everything that befell her, but neither can Boyer and Sanford – her ruin was a group effort.  I think Lucy Freeman (who undoubtedly of everyone in the novel seemed to have the most sense if you ask me) said it best when she told Eliza “But to the disgrace of humanity and virtue, the assassin if honor; the wretch, who breaks the peace of families, who robs virgin innocence of its charms, who triumphs over the ill placed confidence of the inexperienced, unsuspecting, and too credulous fair, is received, and caressed, not only by his own sex, to which he is a reproach, but even by ours, who have every conceivable reason to despise and avoid him” (Foster 63).  What kind of friends, knowing that Eliza was weak to the temptations Peter Sanford put before her of all the joys she most wanted in life, would continue to allow him chances to get nearer to her?  For example, though Mrs. Richman says that she has a low opinion of him because he is “a professional libertine, by having but too successfully practiced the arts of seduction; by triumphing in the destruction of innocence and the peace of families” and yet she still allows him to be a guest in her home when he comes to call (Foster 20).

On the subject of the men in this novel, I find it hard to cast them opposite each other.  While I agreed with Brigitte and Hannah when they described Peter Sanford as Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother respectively, I can’t put him in just one role, or put Boyer as Dr. Horrible to Sanford’s Captain Hammer (from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog in case anyone is confused about this reference).  For me, Sanford represents my ideal description of passion: pure, unadulterated, and utterly wild.  Passion is, I think, important in a relationship.  What would life be without passionate love, without something that consumes us in a fire we gladly welcome?  Is this enough to redeem Peter Sanford for his appalling treatment of women as trophies?  I don’t think so.  But do I think that he’s a prime example of all the best things about passion?  Hell to the yes.  Even though I knew it was horrible, part of me loved when Sanford said “I love her too much to see her connected with another for life” (Foster 56).  Yes, it’s horrible that he plans to ruin her potential relationship with Boyer, but at the same time I felt my heart leap. 

Maybe it’s because I’m slightly addicted to fiction characters who are obviously ‘bad’ but passionate, like Erik from The Phantom of the Opera or Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh!, I’m drawn to characters that are passionate – let’s face it, Raoul was kind of a weak character.   Much like John Willoughby from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I feel like Sanford would have done well on today’s reality television show ‘The Bachelor’.  He’d probably think he died and gone to heaven having a dozen women who all want his attention in one house ripe for the taking.  Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that Sanford is a deplorable match if you’re looking for a husband of any kind, reformed rake or no.  My blood literally boiled when he said “Though I cannot possess her wholly myself, I will not tamely see her the property of another” when referring to Eliza (Foster 35).  Honestly, I wished I could jump into the pages and tell him to get over himself.

And then there was Boyer, perfect and appealing to all the ladies of the time in which this book is set – except, you know, Eliza.  The entire time I was reading The Coquette my mental picture of Boyer was Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, which I can’t believe anyone would find appealing.  And yet, if I was in that time period, I undoubtedly would follow my family and friend’s advice and marry Boyer if they told me to, because it would be a good match.  Would I be happy?  Hell no, I wouldn’t.  But would it be better than ending up how Eliza does at the end of the book?  I’m pretty sure misery isn’t as bad as being pregnant and then dying.  Yet, at the same time, a life full of reason and without passion?  Can you say stale crackers?  For me, I feel Eliza feels the same way about marrying Boyer that Sanford does about marriage and the idea that she has to “conform to the sober rules of wedded life, and renounces those dear enjoyments of dissipation” (Foster 35).  For Eliza, I feel marriage to Boyer would be a fate worse than death.  What do you think?

And now, I’ve reached the greatest contributor to Eliza’s grim fate – herself.  Frankly, if people (Eliza included) describe you as “young, gay, and volatile” you’ve got a serious attitude problem (Foster 13).  Much like the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I feel like Eliza wanted too much and couldn’t be contented with anything less than the most extreme version of what she considered freedom and liberation.  Like Gigi in He’s Just Not That Into You, Eliza thinks she can be the Exception instead of the Rule when it comes to Sanford, evident when she says “is it not an adage generally received, that ‘a reformed rake makes the best husband’” (Foster 53).  Whether its naiveté or sheer stupidity, she obviously feels she can be the one to rein Sanford in and make him heel. 

As for her own personality, she’s reads as being such a whiny little bitchy baby.  Pathetic and clinging to everyone for advice she never heeds, she needs to be the center of attention in every conversation and social gathering.  Is there anything worse than a girl that doesn’t know when enough is enough?  Her sumptuous view of her delusional little world seeps into her opinion of Boyer and Sanford when she says “Why were not the virtues of the one, and the graces and affluence of the other combines” (Foster 53).  If I was Lucy Freeman, I would have gotten into a carriage, ridden to where Eliza was, and smacked her in the back of the head.  For me, Eliza is a womanly interpretation of gluttony and greed.  She wants everything to be perfect, and doesn’t understand that part of being in a relationship is accepting someone flaws and all.  Instead, she wanted to combine her favorite parts of her two greatest suitors, and instead ended up alone.

Schadenfreude, Faith, and the Human Pysche

When reading or discussing books and various other texts for classes, in my experience there’s always at least one person who makes a comment or mutters about how things like this would never happen in today’s world.  But is that really true?

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, for example, Hester Prynne is made to stand on the pillory in town with her baby and the red ‘A’ stitched into her dress for all to see for three hours.  In this way she’s made to be a living sermon against sin, a living and breathing example parents can point to and say to their children “She’s a sinner, and that’s bad”.  Just like Cotton Mather’s explanation of the Salem Witch madness, in this tale one woman is persecuted for the good of the whole congregation.  She’s used as an educational display for the congregation, her shame used to dissuade others from making the same mistake.  In this way people like Hester became part of human stigmata, which we discussed in class, by being incorporate into the ritual of public shame.  Historically, this has happened before "during the fourteen century Holy Inquisition" (Shaw 286)*.  The church began "digging up the bodies of non-believers it wished to disgrace" by "pubically mutilating their corpses" (Shaw 286).  This practice only furthers the theory that public humiliation is a ritual in which different sects of human kind choose to incorportate into their teachings for the sake of using it as a teaching method.

However, if you take a look at Puritan culture, what happened to the fictitious Hester  Prynne would have been – in the eyes of the ministers and congregation – seen as an attempt to offer her salvation.  Part of weeding out sin was to have the offenders admit that they’d done wrong and thus seek salvation.  In The Scarlet Letter, there is a passage I think illustrates this brilliantly, when Dimmesdale calls on Hester to reveal the name of her baby’s father:  “If thou feelest it to be for they soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow sufferer!  Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide his guilty heart through life”  (Hawthorne 31).  In this society, admitting to sin was part of the ‘healing’ process, like how in the witch trials one surefire way to survive was to admit to witchery and thus be allowed to live and pray for salvation. 

But were all acts of pillory simply meant to educate and bring salvation?  Based on pure human psychology, that answer would be a resounding NO.  For the pillory to be effective as a punishment, there had to be a crowd to come and jeer at you – and I’m pretty sure the last thing on the crowd’s mind would be anyone’s salvation.  It’s inbred in human beings to laugh at someone else’s pain in various forms, and always has been.  Sure, today we don’t have pillories so we can go point and laugh at criminals or sinners, but for a minute think about what we do have.  Most of reality television is centered on people that can easily be mocked.  Shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” contain quite a bit of ‘hilarious’ videos of people injuring themselves or other people.  And, just for a second, think about the song Schadenfreude from the musical Avenue Q.  The lyrics state it quite plainly: Human nature/Nothing I can do/It's Schadenfreude/Making me feel glad that I'm not you! 

Another interesting point that people haven’t changed over the years is in how differently men and women are treated in regards to sex and sexual matters.  For a moment let’s pretend that Dimmesdale had come forward with Hester in The Scarlet Letter.  If our understanding of history serves us right in his instance, we can infer his punishment would have been less severe than Hester’s for the same crime.  On the handout we got in class, it even said “Still, mothers of bastard children were punished more severely by both the church and the courts than their male counterparts.  Unwed mothers would not be reinitiated into the Puritan community with a simple penitent statement and a fine” (handout 19).  Seriously?!  They let the men off with a fine and a penitent statement, but girls wouldn’t even be let back into the community?  I wish I could say that this kind of treatment ended with the Puritans, but that would be a lie.  As we saw from the clip of “Easy A” we watched in class, Olive was being picketed for supposedly having sex.  And, just for a minute, think about your own high school experiences.  In my high school, I remember girls who had reportedly had sex or performed sexual favors getting called any number of names, from the seemingly less offense – slut – to the highly offensive – whore.  You’d think they would have treated the guys just as badly, but they didn’t.  For the most part, a guy who was reported to have ‘got some’ from any number of girls was treated like a king in the popular circles.  Since I was not a part of any of these popular circles, I felt no qualms in muttering to myself about how certain guys were man-whores or sleazebags, but for the majority of my high school population, the bad reputations came down mostly on female heads.

Still, is there power in being othered by a culture?  According to human stigmata, several of the other options of what happens to social dirt is to other it, segregate or isolate it, or label it as dangerous/evil. But could there be power buried inside being set aside?  For Hester, continuing her life as best she can under the circumstances thrust upon her shows how strong she really is.  In being able to survive what was before thought to be unlivable, Hester gains power over her life and actions.  For Olive in “Easy A”, for a while she finds power in the fact that where she used to be invisible, she’s now (overly) visible to her peers.  In this way, finding a way to self-author your own identity can be empowering, even if the identity you’re working under can be wrought with bad connotations.  After all, once you’ve hit rock bottom, you have two choices:  wallow, or try and find a way to fix things.

Thus I come to Mary Rowlandson, and A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration.  Honestly, I think Mary Rowlandson chose to wallow.  Without the sudden lucky appearance of a Bible into her existence among the Indians, I feel she would have gone and wallowed herself to death in self-pity.  For me, it rings true with the question of ‘When you have nothing else left, what do you cling to?’  For Mary Rowlandson, religion became her sole rock in a sea of uncertainty, both for the hope her faith gave her and the fact that it was a tangible piece of her old life she could cling fast to, much like it has been said that the Jews in concentration camps clung to their religion to see them through the Holocaust.  Throughout the text there were points where Mary would find a section of text she could attribute to her own misfortune, such as “I opened my Bible to read, and the Lord brought that precious scripture to me.  ‘Thus saith the Lord, refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears, for thy work shall be rewarded, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy’ (Jeremiah 31.13) This was a sweet cordial to me when I was ready to faint; many and many a time I have sat down and wept sweetly over this Scripture” (Rowlandson 316).  In her captivity, the Bible became her source of hope that she would be saved. 

However in her predicament, I can’t blame her for scrambling for something to cling to.  Having something to hope for, and something to put your faith in, must have been an amazing tonic for the pain and fear of her captivity.  If ever there comes a time that I or someone I know would be in any kind of situation that can compare, I only hope they too can find some kind of solace.

*Quote taken from The Giant Bathroom Reader by Karl Shaw

Hysteria, Thy Catalyst is Witchery

Everyone has skeletons in their closet they’d rather not talk about, things they would rather forget.  In essence, everyone in their own way has a tortured past. 

For Puritans settled in New England around the same time as Cotton Mather, after a torturous past of religious persecution, the stigma of ill fate continued to plague their people with the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.  As I was reading through various parts of On Witchcraft by Cotton Mather, I couldn’t help but feel that he was trying to justify that innocent lives were taken by, essentially, a massive mob.  Blinded by religious fervor and a feeling that their mission was to root out the unholy witches among them, the Puritans sought to destroy the witches in their midst to protect their colony, the witches having been sent by the Devil because “The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s territories” (Mather 14). 

In this way, it seemed to me that you could equate the Devil to a jealous ex-boyfriend.  Try to image:  a new boyfriend, here played by the Puritans of New England, moves in on your ex-girlfriend you’re not completely over yet, or that you still have some manner of feelings for.  As the ex-boyfriend, the Devil, would you be upset?  In my experience, that answer should be a resounding yes.  So, what would you do?  As Cotton Mather put it, the Devil then “immediately try’d all sorts of methods to overturn this poor Plantation” to, following the metaphor I’ve created, get the new beau away from his ex-flame (Mather 14).  In one view, the taking of land that had once according to Mather belonged to Satan could be seen as an act of war.

As was touched upon in On Witchcraft, the Stephen Asma readings, in the movie shown in class and in our class discussions, the idea of the Devil and the ways in which evil manifests itself in various forms is, to me, both fascinating and disturbing.  The basis of my reasoning for this is as follows:  If the Devil can take any form, even the form of an innocent person, how then would we as humans be able to tell the different between Satan, God, an Angel, or a Demon if confronted by one?  Given this, how could anyone know the difference between what is holy and true, as opposed to what is evil and a lie?

Does my posing of these questions mean then that I think the girls in Salem who started all the ruckus of accusing people of witchery were not to blame for being faced with something we can’t fully explain or understand?  No.  Whether or not my image of these girls is tainted from my outside knowledge having seen the movie and read the script of The Crucible by Arthur Miller every year of my high school career for some class or another, my view is not that the girls are innocent babes thrust into an adult world wide eyed and scared.  In our modern world, no matter how much we pick and prod and probe at the past trying to figure out just way these young girls slandered and caused the deaths and imprisonment of so many innocent people, I feel we must also take into context the time and place in which these things happened.  While it is true that we can’t understand how things got so out of hand, it is also true that the world and its views used to be a lot different.  We can’t see through the eyes of the accusers or the accused in this instance and in such can only piece together our own theories without ever actually putting all the pieces together.

So what is my theory?  To paraphrase what someone said in class, “After seeing a scary movie, I see things in the shadows from the movie for days”.  For me, I think the girls of Salem were under the same captivating spell, at least at first.  Seeing magic performed by Tituba, something the girls knew even at their young ages was against the rules, the physical symptoms of the girls could have manifested themselves out of fear and thus could not be explained by a doctor.  Do I think the entire operation was mere fear and a bunch of girls thinking it was true?  Not in the least.  After getting so much attention and learning just what it was Tituba was showing them, and also why it was wrong, it is my belief that the girls became power-hungry.  Given so much attention by people of high rank in their society, when they were usually overlooked as unimportant for both being children and being female, the new idea that they might have something important to say or contribute must have been a powerful drug to them. 

For me, I imagine these girls the same way I picture one of my younger cousins, who I shall refer to from here on out as Kat.  As a young child, Kat liked to be the center of attention.  As a four year old, when she wasn’t the center of attention, she would do whatever she could to get attention, even if it meant telling lies.  I picture it being the same way with the girls of Salem who started the whole hysteria and witch hunts.  Anyone who’s told a lie can tell you; once you’ve started it’s as addictive as nicotine to a smoker.  Things keep going and snowball until they’re out of control.  And thus we have hysteria.

History repeats itself.  Sure, we’d love as Americans to say that the Witch Trials was a onetime deal, that we learned our lesson and moved on, but did we really?   No, we didn’t – just ask anyone persecuted during the Red Scare by McCarthyism.  During the Cold War, Rebublican Senator John McCarthy was that "a red scare of epic proportions was sweeping the United States" (Judge 95)*.  People left and right were being called communists, much like people were called witches back in the Puritan witch affair.  And yet, thinking about both black marks on our nation’s history, I can’t say that I can honestly blame anyone completely.  If I were a Puritan accused of being a witch, my options would be to say I was innocent and get hanged, accuse someone else, or admit to being a witch to get thrown in jail.  What would you do in that situation?  Follow the crowd for fear of being trampled by them?  Or, as John Proctor and a few other characters do in The Crucible, stand strong and speak out against the madness around you?

What, exactly, is evil anyways?  Is it like fate, or something that can be shaped and, in such, be avoided?  Is it in fact inherent inside all of us, lying in wait for the right moment to break free?  Or are we innocent as a people of the world until such a time that we choose to do evil unto another?  In today’s world words don’t hold as much weight as they used to.  People can throw around the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ like they were feathers, and yet they can mean so much.  As per the quote Suzanne regaled us with in class from Hannibal Lector, “Can you stand to call me evil?” had been weighing heavily on my mind.  Could I call someone evil, even someone depraved or demented?  Is anyone really evil?  Or just misguided?  And, once fallen from the path, can someone get back on it again?  Can we really repent and make up for old wrongs, for sins we’ve committed?  Or in the end are we all doomed from our first breath?  Needless to say, this class has given my brain quite a workout already.

The entire time I was reading On Witchcraft, the point of Puritans being good as a collective and doing what they felt that had to in order to preserve the community as a whole rang very much for me like the finally Harry Potter book.  A young Albus Dumbledore and Grindelwald talked of Muggle casualties if the magical community tried to assume their place as the superior race as a necessary evil for the greater good.  In this way, the Puritans and Harry Potter seem to have a similar message, if only for a moment.  The people that were innocent yet murdered anyways in the Salem Witch Trials were the Muggles in this situation; their deaths were regrettable but necessary to the preservation of the whole. 

Is this a horrible and pathetic justification on Mather’s part?  In my opinion – YES, it very much is.  Whatever happened to the whole ‘Thou shall not kill’ part of the commandments?  Does killing in the name of God suddenly make murder okay?  This was not a matter of survival.  It was a matter of hysteria and panic causing people in a position of power to abuse said power and end innocent lives.  And yet, do I feel this part of history could have been avoided?  No, I don’t.  People as a whole tend to overreact in situations where they feel threatened.  As a Puritan, if I thought the Devil was sending witches to posses my neighbors and possible hurt myself, my family, or my children, I’m sure I would probably overreact too – especially if everyone around me was also overreacting and making it into a huge fuss.  What would any normal human being do in a situation of panic except be prone to overreact?

In a time of predestination and a religious education where Satan could be anywhere and everything, who wouldn’t be scared?  As Asma explains it in Biblical Monsters, God had to have created the frightening or ‘evil’ creatures that plagued the world, or at least allowed them to keep existing in it.  To quote Timothy K. Beal as Asma does, “Who is more monstrous, the creatures who must live through his vale of tears, or the creature who put them here” (Amsa, 63).  Try to image God as a parent with several children.  Now image the Devil as the school bully who is opening attacking and harming said children, or even as another adult abusing these children.  What kind of parent would allow their child to be treated so horrible?  Image being a Puritan with the view of God as a vengeful, uncaring parent, then try to tell me you wouldn’t be afraid of everything.  Who wouldn’t be scared in a situation where no matter what you did, your fate was already decided for you, and God didn’t care if you were a saint during your life time if it hadn’t already been decided that you were predestined to get into heaven?  In short, predestination is a scary mistress.  No wonder the Puritans panicked about the idea that the Devil might be in their midst with witches to aid him in corrupting their souls.

Whether you’re talking about Puritans and the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare and McCarthyism, or any other such case of panic snowballing into illogical hysteria, one fact remains true: a tortured past can follow us all.

* Quote taken from A Hard and Bitter Peace: A Global History of the Cold War by Edward H. Judge & John W. Langdon