Ms. Marvel and Howie's Optimism Club

Marvel Comics

"Have I talked about this already?" I ask myself, as I start to write each one of these posts. "Almost certainly," I say, again, to myself. Yes, it's almost certainly out loud, and also yes, I know that this is not normal. I go through this ritual every time before cracking my knuckles and writing it anyway. Last week I read a book that was essentially a compilation of blog posts, and I found myself enjoying it a lot. It turns out books are still the best way to deliver words to eyeballs. I'm as surprised to discover that as anyone.

I've never sat down and read a blog for three hours. I generally, when trying to catch up, will read back maybe three posts and then start skipping around based on topics that interest me. I wonder if someday I'll try to put these all in a book form that one could hold in one's hands and turn the pages and read this journey from start to whenever I decide is the finish. If that's the case, there are going to be some repeating themes.

Take last week's post, for example. I know that I've talked about that before, the thing about me rooting for civilization to survive because of a couple of reasons. The first one is the biggest, which is that I depend on a handful of pharmaceuticals to survive. The second is less, like, crucial, but also so important: I want there to still be cool stuff. I like cool stuff! I'm a sucker for good graphics in a video game. I love lightweight camping gear. I think the new Voltron toys look frickin rad. I know that sounds super bougie and I'm driving the capitalist machine or whatever but your boy likes a die-cast lion that can be joined with other lions to create a super weapon. SUE. ME.

Wikimedia Commons

By the Power of Grayskull, Thundercats GOOOOO

It's an interesting kind of optimism that drives the heart of Howie's Book Club, and again, this may not be new to some of you. If you're reading this in book form maybe you're like oh the optimism thing again, OK. Hopefully I add a new wrinkle or two to this philosophy I'm kind of building, or at least you're into the cosplay up there. If you're new here, let's rap.

First tenet of Howie's Optimism Club (HOC): uninformed optimism isn't an ethos; it's a landslide waiting to happen.

Here's a thing that happens more than you may think. A county hires eggheads who go out and measure soils and water and, I don't know, rocks or whatever. Then they submit a report that says, "hey FYI if we build houses here maybe people will die? I'm like 41% confident." That report goes to a group of county commissioners who also happen to be the biggest landowners in their county and they see that report as flawed in the sense that if it isn't flawed they are going to lose a lot of money. So they thank the eggheads and zone the land for development anyway.

Folks looking to build a new house see that suddenly a new neighborhood is popping up and say, "Man, that sure looks like a great place to live. I'm sure there isn't a good reason for why it hasn't been developed yet and I'm certainly not going to look into it. I trust our county commissioners mainly because I have no idea who they are." Then it's like a hassle when your mortgage company is like "isn't that a flood zone?" and you're like "OK eggheads like you know more about dirt than the guy who owns the car dealership. Like, grow up."

Then this happens.

When you build your entire outlook on life on a foundation of willful ignorance you're investing in a bedroom full of rubble, is what this dragged out metaphor is saying. You can only turn a blind eye to the hillside of the world's ills for so long before the 100-foot tree of injustice crashes into the back window of the beautiful home that is your sheltered existence, riding in on a sea of the mud of corruption.

This is hard. Listen, I read the same headlines you do (maybe more based on the conversations I often have), and I also read the whole article. These articles are sometimes so terrible. On Sunday, while I was eating steak with my dad followed with an official Father's Day S'more Fat Boy brand ice cream novelty, a 17-year old Muslim girl was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat. She was walking to IHOP with her friends. Late last month while I was meeting with someone about a project I'm working on for my job, police and volunteers were swarming Provo canyon looking for the body of a 4-year old child who was swept into the river during a Memorial Day party. Two adults, including the little girls' mother, drowned trying to rescue her. Just 8 hours ago it was reported that three women suicide bombers killed 12 people outside of a mosque in Nigeria. And I just can't get this senseless tragedy out of my head.

You guys I spend time with those articles. I let myself grieve. I think about that little girl's family, the ones who watched her get swept away, the mother who didn't even think before jumping in after her. The people who will mourn the brilliant little ball of life that is every 4-year-old girl every year. They will wonder what she would have become. They'll torture themselves about it. I spend time in that moment and make sure I feel it. Then I go home and hug my little girls so hard.

That paragraph up there, the one with all the hyperlinks, is the hillside. And it's looming. And let's say you didn't sign up for any of this. You're not the blissfully ignorant homeowner who didn't reach out to the county office for some info on the place where they'd be raising their children. Most people don't. But it's where you're living now anyway. You inherited this situation from past generations of people -- some of whom were doing their best and many of whom were not -- and you'll be darned if you let that landslide take you over.

Here's the second tenet of HOC. You can't fix everything, but if everyone works on a little bit of it together you can.

This is some real hippy nonsense that I'm still convinced is fundamentally true. Let's look at domestic violence, because of that awful last example and because I have a lot more experience with it than other crimes in Utah due to volunteering. So, in Utah 32.8% of women will experience domestic violence in one or more forms during their life (that's higher, by the way, than the national average of 28% - discuss). That's one in three. But Howie, that's awful. How am I supposed to be optimistic about that? I know it's awful. Stick with me here.

Now I never did well in math. I took each algebra class in college twice (ok, one of them three times) before I passed with the required C or higher. The best I ever did was calculus, which I often told people that I basically aced. When I finally looked at my transcript I got a B-. I did get an A in statistics, though. Anyway all of that is to say that this is not a hard equation if even I can figure it out. Here it is: for every woman who experiences abuse there are two who are not, and therefore in a position to help.

That's not even counting the dudes! Statistics for male abuse are notoriously difficult to gather, because men are much less likely to report. Compensating for this, it's estimated that the rate of male abuse is 1 in 7. That leaves a lot of guys who are in the perfect spot to help women who are being hurt by looking out for them, finding ways to help financially or contributing time and resources.

Now. Obviously the easiest way to stop domestic abuse is to stop being abusers. Doy. There's a very good way to help with this, guys! Last year going into this has been the year of "locker room talk," in which men who often spend time in internet forums shouting "not all men" at the top of their lungs when women complain about bad behavior all rallied around the phrase "locker room talk" by saying that all men do it. Let's start by not doing that anymore. If you're in a locker room (or its equivalent) and a friend says something like, "I want to sell the house but my wife doesn't because she likes the neighborhood too much; but I preside so it's my decision," you say "bruh" (because you're in a locker room or its equivalent), "bruh that's mad gross."

If the wife or girlfriend of your good friend confides in you that he hurts her, or humiliates her, or isolates her from her family, or touches and forces her without permission or expressly against her permission here's what you DO NOT say, either to her or yourself, is this: "he's a good guy who I have known since elementary school and I know he wouldn't do that." I know that's your tendency! It makes sense unless you know the statistics. If one in three women experience abuse, then somebody is doing the abusing. Guess what? It's someone you know. It's someone we all know. He fooled that girl into marrying him. You think he can't fool you?

Don't run out and like, shoot him or whatever. Just listen. Say, "I believe you." Recognize how scary it is to tell someone about what's going on. Get to the bottom of that sh.

THIS IS HOW WE FIX THE LANDSLIDE, YOU GUYS. We stare straight at it. We collect some data. We ask experts. Then we all take our tools and whatever strength we have and we get to work. No single one of us is going to get it done, but a bunch of us will. It doesn't even have to be all of us or even half of us or even a third of us, but it does need to be a lot.

Here's what you'll start to find: you'll start to find out that when you are doing your little job on your little patch of the hillside you're not as scared of it anymore. I mean it's huge. It's just massive, this hillside. Just the Nigeria part is nuts compared to the little patch your working on. But you do your part and you look around and see other people doing their part and it feels kinda doable.

Maybe it isn't doable. That's something I think about a lot. It may be true. It's possible that at some point in the hopefully distant future (300 years seems about right), I'm on my deathbed and I say to my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren that helping others was for suckers and I didn't save the world. But if the worst case scenario is that while on the entire scale of the human race I didn't do much, but on a handful of days I made things a little better for someone who was suffering or scared or confused, that doesn't seem like that bad of a deal.

I keep calling this Howie's Optimism Club, but really it's Kamala Khan's.

Marvel Comics

Kamala Khan is also known as Ms. Marvel, and that's her origin up there. I could get into the Inhumans and what they mean and how they're different from the X-Men and blah blah blah but as deeply interesting as that stuff is to me (and I could go on for ages about this), it's unnecessary. Here's what you need to know: Kamala is Pakistani, the daughter of immigrants but born in the United States. She's Muslim. Her parents are very devout, and so is she, but she's also pretty western. Even though she lives in the Marvel Universe, she's also a Marvel Superfan.

She lives in Jersey City, which even if it weren't for Ultron and Dr. Doom and Thanos all being out there still has its host of problems. She gets some super powers and becomes a super hero. Think Spider-man when he was just starting out. Balancing schoolwork and super heroism. Having a crush but not wanting to let people into your life because you're afraid it will endanger them. But the whole time Spider-man is Spider-man he's also white and male. He gets bullied, sure, but he doesn't have to deal with a president who wants to pass a law forbidding anyone of his religion to enter the country, or who seems to view your entire gender as having value based solely on physical traits.

Khan does. She deals with racism and sexism and ignorance and also bullies and also also she's very smart and good at science but is worried about not getting a scholarship. And she sometimes teams up with Wolverine or her hero Captain Marvel. Tony Stark is really sweet to her and I just thought of a part with him that kind of made me tear up.

Here's the thing about Kamala Khan AKA Ms. Marvel. She knows all that stuff is bad. She experiences it every day. And even when it seems like it's too much and even with her powers, there's only so much she can do, she does everything that she can. She loves Jersey City because it's vibrant and filled with immigrants. She loves the United States for the same reasons. And she's happy most of the time. And optimistic most of the time. You guys, I just love her.

Marvel

This isn't something I get to say often, but Ms. Marvel is great for kids. Boys and girls. It's never preachy, but sneakily teaches about all kinds of stuff besides the great power great responsibility thing. There's a great lesson about consent in there. And about seeing people as complex individuals. Kamala's family is loving but complicated. They fear for their daughter in what seems like a scary and godless world, but they also are so excited to see what she can do.

G. Willow Wilson, the writer, is a Muslim convert. Sama Amanat, Ms. Marvel's creator and Director at Marvel, is a Pakistani-American, just like Khan. I want more of this. More people with unique experiences means more unique stories. I'm so glad that young Muslim girls have Kamala as a role-model, and I'm glad that I do, too.

Marvel

Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman and Modern Medicine

It turns out that the chances of being born in America - a country of 324,699,276 people as of Friday, September 30, 2016, in a world of 7 billion people is 4.4%. The probability of being born above the poverty line in a first world country are just over 12%. The chances of being born at all are estimated to be one in 400 trillion. 

I walk the empty halls around my room, sipping soda and biting the polish off my nails, and think about the probability of my life. 

I am blessed. - Claudia Turner, Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman

When Claudia Turner visited the doctor on what seemed like a routine pregnancy check, her blood pressure was abnormally high. Like, stroke-level high. Her doctor sent her via helicopter to a hospital in Salt Lake City. She joked about what that journey would have been like 50 years ago. "Neither of you would have survived 50 years ago," her doctor tells her.

I think about this all the dang time. I've certainly written about it a couple of times. There in those posts you'll see a couple of common themes that come up a lot on here: if it weren't for modern technology, me and many of the people I love would maybe be dead, and I wouldn't trade the "good old days" for today under any circumstances.

It's why I root for progress and against anarchy. It's why I'm skeptical about anyone who says what our cities, countries, and world need is for it all to burn down somehow so that we can get a fresh start. It's why I told Susan Sarandon that she can go soak her head when she used her considerable influence to tell Bernie voters not to vote for Hillary Clinton because Donald Trump would bring about the revolution faster.

Well here we are. The revolution everyone's been waiting for. And all I'm seeing right now is proposed cuts for health insurance and The National Cancer Institute, The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease Institute, and the National Institute of Health. Not to mention a 17% cut to the budget of the Center for Disease Control. That's what "the revolution" looks like, Sue. More money for things that kill other people, less for things that save them.

See, when we're talking about burning it all down, we're thinking about government bureaucracy maybe, or political entrenchment, or corrupt politicians running a system that average voters feel increasingly left out of. I get that. That sucks. For sure it sucks. I get just as mad as your average coal worker in Wyoming who complains about big city liberals. The ones who use the electricity that he generates to power the laptops on which they write Facebook posts about how his job should be eliminated because of butterflies or whatever.

Why should I even vote when someone on the other side of the country who doesn't know a thing about my life can cancel it out because they saw a meme about emails? Even better than cancelled out, actually, because they live in a state that actually means something in picking the president while mine is as predictably red as my face gets when a girl says a dirty word. Even if my vote mattered, what then? The people I elect will vote with their party so dependably I might as well have elected a dipping bird desk tchotchke that just pushes a button that says Democrat on it over and over again.

But that's the tricky thing about fire. It burns everything. And in the meantime there are a lot of people waiting at the pharmacist for the pills that keep them alive. And there are a lot of women in hospitals with babies in them who, if given the proper care, will turn out to be adorable and fascinating and beneficial to society. But these same women without the proper care will die.

There is a pretty real scenario that I can't help but shake and it's this one: 14 years ago instead of my wife giving birth to a healthy baby boy who grows up to be smart and interested in everything -- one who isn't the fastest hurdler (by far), but got put on the team because he works harder than anybody, one whose parents are told by every teacher that, while he struggles to turn in his homework, is a joy to have in class because of his unrelenting kindness -- instead of that, she and/or he don't survive the pregnancy. In that scenario I don't get to meet my next two daughters, either. They don't have their mom's beautiful hair. They don't have her love of learning and art. They don't have her "thin, invisible steel."

There is also a scenario in which I do get to meet these amazing children, and enjoy another decade or so of my family, and then in the middle of the night one night I die of a stroke because of my kidney-disease created ultra-high blood pressure or slowly die of kidney failure because I can't afford the treatment, or the prescriptions, or because in the decades past we as a nation decided that public health just wasn't as high a priority as, say, stockpiling tanks nobody wants.

Cemeteries and family histories are filled with these stories. The headstones with angels on them that say just "baby," next to one that says "beloved wife and mother," whose final dates are the same. 35-year-old dads who leave behind widows and kids. I'm willing to bet that if you don't owe your life to some medical breakthrough (like antibiotics), you know someone close to you who does. When we find ourselves putting imaginary political ideologies (the economic miracle of cutting spending AND taxes, the "revolution" brought about by either marches in pink hats or militias meeting in the woods; take your pick) over vulnerable people right now, I get hives that I have to hope go away because I don't know if I can afford another doctor visit.

So there's that. Modern medicine costs a lot in the United States. A lot more than any other developed country. And at the same time we have less help in paying for it than any other developed country. All of that being said, though, it is also amazing. That's what I wanted to say. The doctor who delivered our first baby, who arrived to the delivery room wearing a leather jacket and had so many patients that every time he met Kristin he started out by telling her that she needed to cut back on the ice cream before looking at her chart and saying, "oh yeah, preeclampsia," that guy can have as many mansions as he wants, as far as I'm concerned.

Back to the quote up top, though. When my wife Kristin was diagnosed, she was in a pretty stable place. She got to be home most of the time, with regular checkups. She had me handy, though I am told that I was only sporadically useful as I was A: a very young child-groom and B: extremely squeamish around hospitals, needles, and any and all fluids. She had a mom and mother-in-law always ready to help. For Turner, it was much harder. She spent two months in a hospital, a hospital that was hundreds of miles from any family. Her new husband battled alcoholism and anger issues and spent the time on and off of the wagon, often without a phone, even missing his daughter's birth while on a bender with an old friend. Even then, she's extremely lucky and acknowledges it.

Okay, I'm going through shit and Charley's going through shit, and my shit is very different from his shit. I have to deal with childbirth and he has to deal with being a man which is apparently a lot of work.

At times the forced rest is welcome, other times mind-numbing. She loves her reiki therapist, but her massage therapist talks too much. Some nurses are there just to work, and treat her like a burden (Kristin can tell some good stories about that, too), others are kind and empathetic and great. Many of them, inexplicably, look like Amy Adams. She sees the Wasatch mountains every day through her window, which I often take for granted but from time to time am completely mesmerized by. She is constantly annoyed by people commenting on how huge she is and how she's "about to pop." She bonds with the therapy dog's owner.

But you guys, I've seen Dakota on Instagram and she is so happy and sweet and is always dressed so so cute. Like, what a miracle all of this stuff is, but also, what a shame when you move beyond that "developed" country thing we keep mentioning. 800 women die per year in pregnancy related complications, 99% of which occur in developing countries. The four main causes are bleeding, infection, preeclampsia, and unsafe abortions. We take for granted that most if not all of these are avoided with extremely high success rates, but that's just here.

I once got in an argument with a woman who regularly spent time among some of these societies of indigenous people with little to no contact with the outside world until recently. She was horrified that "western" ideals were invading these previously untouched societies. She fumed that kids were now walking around with headphones. It was important to her that some societies stay the way they are because it's, important, I guess?

And sure, modern life brings with it a lot of dangers: stress, obesity, commercialism, One Direction's idiotic sentiment that knowing that one is beautiful somehow makes one less so. But it also brings some pretty rad outcomes, one of which is babies and women not dying of easily preventable causes. When I brought this up with my unfortunate coworker who has no ability to defend herself in this situation because it's my blog not hers, she said that in those societies, mothers were used to losing children. It was normal to them. I was like, lady, everyone grieves the same. The idea that Western women somehow suffer more when their baby dies is some hot hot garbage. Also, and unrelated, headphones rule and music is awesome so I think they should have that, too.

In summary: having babies is scary, but it can be significantly less scary with access to good health care and an obsession with constant improvement, research, and innovation. We should encourage that and also fight to maintain it. We also need to work hard to ensure that worldwide, women have the same care that we get in developed countries and refugee camps and even poor parts of our own countries. Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman is a fine book filled with keen observations by a woman who is deeply observant and refreshingly honest. And, finally, I need more cute babies in my Instagram feed. HMU.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and Scared Dudes

I read Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend in December, 2015. I read The Story of a New Name a year ago yesterday (you guys that post got picked up by the official Elena Ferrante website and I got, like, hundreds of clicks). I just finished the third book in the Neopolitan series: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. One would think that reading one of these books a year would mean that they don't captivate me. That they don't completely consume my soul throughout the time that I read them. That they do not tear me down and reconstruct me into a new person.

One would be incorrect. Each time I've put down one of these books it has been at the end of a period in which I have disappeared from human society for large chunks of time, blinking at sunlight like Tony Stark when he escaped that cavern, craving an American cheeseburger, and a ride in a limo with his best paid pal Jon Favreau. That's me, except that the cavern is Ferrante's Naples, the limo ride is real human contact, and the American cheeseburger is the complete dismantling of the patriarchy.

I just re-watched Iron Man with my kids, because that movie is now almost ten years old and my youngest is nine. She loves the Avengers but lacks that rich historical context. It's like she had very strong opinions about the Israel/Palestine conflict without ever delving into the Battle of Carchamish in 605 BC, in which Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the Kingdom of Judah. Imagine, if you will, happily watching as our friends the Avengers "assemble" without the deep emotional heft brought about by watching our narcissistic friend Tony understand the true meaning of humanity exemplified by his finally deciding to be nice to Pepper Potts.

No, I say as a father and as a human being interested in the future of this planet, this will not stand.

We just watched Thor, too, which for a change is about an unbearably pompous and self-important man who enjoys limitless resource and praise BUT who is humbled to the dust after being betrayed by someone who he had previously trusted. Only by realizing that the world was (barely) bigger than his pecs did he show his worthiness to be rewarded with A) that hammer thing and B) one (1) Natalie Portman.

I started out by saying that's me when I read these. I come out of the other side a more human person; these books bring about character growth. That was my whole reason for bringing them up. But now I think there's another thread worth tugging on here.

Like, why do we enjoy as a general populace the narrative of the swaggering, entitled man as he digs a hole of his own making through womanizing, unearned self-confidence, and inherited wealth and status? That we crave that moment in which he is torn down by his own hubris. Why, we love it so much we put a woefully unfit and incompetent man in the most powerful position in our nation because we thought it would be heartwarming to watch him finally understand the foibles of humanity right before he saves the planet (though only after trillions of dollars worth of spectacular destruction) just in the nick of time.

Ideally in this scenario there is already a profoundly capable woman who already gets it. She's an astrophysicist or an "assistant" who basically runs the company. Or she's Trinity, who already knows all of the crap Neo is supposed to be learning and beats up cops in slow-motion like from minute one. Behind everyone one of these cocky sos-and-sos there's a woman whose whole job is to pass on the knowledge they've spent a lifetime accruing to the "chosen one," who somehow figures it all out in a couple of days. 

Have you seen Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live. Die. Repeat? Of course you haven't, because it failed in the box office. It's awesome, though. Emily Blunt in that movie is, like, the raddest soldier in the whole bug-fightin' army. So of course the PR guy with no combat experience is the one with the special power to save the world. Women in this reality have everything they need to save the world except a magic man that they can coddle and enable until he burrows into his little cocoon to emerge a beautiful, alien killing superhero just in time to save her life because she's captured now I guess?

This is not a new thing that I just noticed. Smarter people than I have identified more examples than I care to list. I just think it's important that as a man I stroll into a space well-trodden by women and add my own special spin to the proceedings. It even has a name: Trinity Syndrome. Just for a minute though think about how many times Hermione saves Ron and Harry's life while being more or less constantly mocked for knowing things, the very things that save the day over and over again. You could call any of those books Hermione Granger and the Two Easily-Threatened By Competence Boy-Children and not change a single other word of the text.

Look at this chart! How do you argue with charts?

Is this a metaphor? Like the only thing women need is a man's gamete in order to create the miracle of life, but now she's stuck with him and so she should also teach him how to be a functional human? Maybe. It's mostly dudes greenlighting, writing, and directing these movies, though. It's my guess that it's something more sinister. Like, we get it, women. You're better in the workplace. You mature faster. You understand human feeling. But there's just nothing like a man when you really need to get that deal done. The only thing you're missing before this company/family/superhero movie really takes off is a little Y chromosome action. What it really translates into is this: DUDES ARE SO SCARED.

Interestingly enough, Dudes Are So Scared would be a pretty fitting title to Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. This is the third in a series of four books that tells the story of Elena Greco. We've watched her grow up in the poor provincial town of Naples, same old breads and goods to sell, I need six eggs, that's too expensive, etc. She and her friend, Lila, are both exceptional. Lila is a legit genius who, for various reasons, dropped out of school at grade 5 and never strayed far from the neighborhood. Elena, on the other hand, while outmatched in brilliance, makes up for it in determination.

Elena at this point is a published author and her book is starting to take off. Like I've said in past Ferrante books, this one is so real. Here's what I said about My Brilliant Friend,

Elena and Lila learn the history of the people in the neighborhood, tracing back the sources of old feuds and tragedy. They witness new ones. There is no point when Ferrante sugar-coats the experience, she never talks down to her characters as children. Never tries to paint an idyllic childhood. It’s just so impressive. Ferrante must have some kind of memory of childhood the rest of us can’t tap into, to view an entire life so clearly.

Ferrante's glimpse into the human mind is still uncanny and unflinching. For example, Elena is like a lot of us, in that what people say about us can have profound impacts. When her book is reviewed poorly, it sends her into depression. When it's reviewed well, she's briefly elated and then immediately focused back on the negatives. Most big time authors and actors will say that they don't listen to critics. They'll say that it's better to create than critique. They'll claim that their movie actually wasn't made for critics anyway. We all know they are lying. We know, because if it were us, we'd be super pissed. That looks sad and pathetic, so most everyone puts on a brave face.

Elena puts on a brave face, too, but we see past her face. Her internal dialogue (a technique I generally dislike) is so believable, pitch-perfect, and raw, that it's impossible not to get caught up in it.

How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?

That sounds like a certain humble blogger who goes through that cycle on a weekly basis. I think this is a good post, I nod, before hitting send. It's definitely a good post, I tell myself as I share it on Facebook. THIS WAS A BAD POST, I tell myself immediately after, fighting an urge to scrub it from the world forever.

*this concludes the portion of the blog post where I inevitably take a book that is about massive institutional and societal issues and make it about me*

I'm burying the lead, though. This series has always been about feminism. About the fear of young girls who catch the eye of older boys and even grown men. About the rigid rules of masculinity. About how even women perpetuate and defend their own bad treatment. In each of these books the absolute fragility of tough guys locked in a prison of their own making is delved into, and the victims are meticulously examined. These men are terrified of women and obsessed with power.

Sweet men become marital rapists and abusers, powerful mobsters become lovesick puppies manipulating dozens in order to impress one, and even well-educated men who claim to espouse equality for all tend to get frightened and attempt to control their wives and girlfriends.

Maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman... I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman.

Man, that's some heavy stuff right there. Elena seizes on this thread. The "great" women of literature written by men are actually stories of strong-willed women who eventually cave in to the man's ideal vision of them. Let's look at Joss Whedon. I have been, for some time, a pretty unapologetic fan of Whedon's, and was suckered into the idea that he was so good because he created these tough female characters. And listen, if you're a woman and super inspired by Buffy or River or whatever, that's awesome. Good for you.

But if you're a dude, I think it's worth thinking about this a little harder. Are Whedon's "strong female characters" realistic women, or are they his own fantasy girls that he creates because he wants to go on dates with them? Clearly there's a type here: women who are tiny, with very small arms, who look like perpetual teenagers but can somehow can punch grown men so hard that they fly across a room. Is he writing realistic, fully-formed characters, or are they a man's concoction of how he would be if he were a woman, and therefore his attempt to "teach" women how to be his kind of strong character.

I don't know, honestly. There's something to be said to have the woman be the one with the magic powers and the men around her acting as support. That being said, at this point I think Whedon has enough influence and pull (and money) that he could happily spend the rest of his career as a producer, hiring amazing women directors and screenwriters so they can tell their own stories from the viewpoint of, let's say, an actual woman. How much more impact could he have if instead of supporting and idolizing imaginary women, he promoted the real ones.

I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.

There's a point in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay where Elena starts being confronted about the "dirty" parts of her book. She feels like she needs to defend this as realism, but an editor of hers says that the only reason anyone cares is because a woman wrote those scenes. He points to much more explicit scenes in books written by male authors. Of course later he gets drunk and makes a pass at her, but this explanation sticks with her.

Later, though, she realizes that the reason this scene resonates with women is not because it's tawdry and exciting. It's because it tells their side of the story. The men's portrayals of sex in literature are various forms of male worship. Women throw themselves at the male characters and always always are satisfied. Ferrante's women rarely do and even more rarely are. Women quietly take Elena aside and tell her how refreshing it is to read something akin to their experience. And of course men are uncomfortable with it. It's too intimidating or scary or read about, or try to understand their partners' side of the experience, so instead they insist on the ignorant assumption that they are doing just fine, and brag about it to their male friends.

Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

This isn't male-bashing (which, of course, because feminism isn't that either), because the women in these books are also deeply flawed. Elena, because we get to hear her every thought, is often petty and jealous. She quietly wishes death on her best friend. This is a villain trait in most books, but when we're reading there's kind of a nod there, because we think terrible things sometimes too. We scold ourselves and think, what a terrible thought. But that doesn't make it not happen. We'd be horrified if anyone could read them. Most authors wouldn't delve this deep for fear of losing the reader's sympathy. Ferrante doesn't give a crap.

Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.

It's pretty amazing.

I read these books once a year not because I want to put the one down and immediately pick up the next. It's because I know that it will be over soon and I don't want to rush it. These books are special. I won't forget them ever. They're also kind of exhausting. I think that if I read them all back to back it would take away some of their power. Like Cadbury Creme Eggs, one is delicious, two is pushing it, and four leads to a tummy ache and your boy Howie on a sugar rush where I chase my cats around the house while improvising parody songs about them.