A couple of weeks ago a friend had breast implant surgery. No idea about the details – bra sizes are as big a mystery to me as tennis scores – but the operation was a great success and recovery is going well.
He’s thrilled with the result. Or should that be, results? Should I be even considering that question?
When we meet again he’s bound to be curious what I think. In fact, I’m curious what to think, or at least what to say. He’ll want me to be honest – though how far is uncertain. He’ll expect me not to lie – though how much truth am I expected to offer? And he’ll naturally be looking forward to a friendly answer – though what the hell friendly entails precisely in any circumstance is not always easy to discover. The situation demands that I bring to it the best of whatever character, qualities, virtues and values I possess, and not hide behind evasion, flippancy or diversion. What he wants from me is to be a genuine critical friend.
Of course I could do what most of us do in similar situations and prevaricate. Like most men I’m well practised in this tactic (“does my bum look big in this?” “Hmm, how do you feel …?”) and like most men I’ve learned that the ploy has diminishing returns, unless you enjoy serial, short relationships with insignificant others that is. Friends deserve better.
I could do the next likeliest thing and simply be nice. Everything is marvellous and wonderful and what a fabulous person you are and how terrific to know you … But we all know deep down inside that nice is usually just a fob off. At best it’s what the academics call “phatic expression”, using words to soothe and reassure rather than for communicating any conceptual information. Which is nice. But it’s only pretend friendship.
I might try and be philosophical about it and search for a rule or a maxim to apply. There are at least three relevant moral rules: 1 Tell the truth; 2 Do no harm; 3 Do unto others as you would be done to. It’s easy to see where rule 1 and rule 2 could conflict even if my intentions were honourable – we all can have egos as flimsy as soap bubbles and self-esteem as precarious as a ping-pong ball on a paper straw sometimes, so who knows the damage you might do if the truth was delivered with a misjudged word or an inappropriate image? And rule 3 is hopeless – I know myself well enough to know that my own needs, desires and tastes are not generalisable, and I’m blinkered by my individual inclinations. How do I know how I’d want to be treated if I were driven by different priorities and put in a situation I’d never even considered before?
So, when my friend next comes for a pint with me and asks, “so Phil, what do you think of these little beauties?” (and before anyone gets the impression I’m trying to be jokey or derogatory, that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d say, and I can even hear the exact tone of voice in my head) how am I meant to respond? If I can’t rely on blokiness, or politeness or a prior sense of the correct political-ethical regulation to get me through, how am I going to be his critical friend and answer how he deserves?
Of course I’m thinking about this in the context of the Suzanne Moore/Julie Burchill/transgender social media brawl this week. Very little friendliness shown on either side, just a heck of a lot of critique – mud slinging and rule-mongering and pointing out of deviations from the narrow path of righteousness – it really did make me wonder … it made me wonder if social media can sometimes extinguish our moral imaginations, or at least stunt them enough to make all that terrible public behaviour possible. Because in the end it is about imagination – the imagination to step out of our skins, let go of our need to be right, and loosen the grip of what we know to be absolutely, fundamentally, incontrovertibly true – and social media often seems to subvert imagination by being a place that magnifies the moral spot you were born with.
Funny thing is I can quite understand the urge to be mean online, to give into the temptation to spout a party line or indulge in clever put downs. I often say things from behind the safety of my laptop that I’d never say out loud in company. So, perhaps it’s face to face, individual encounters that are where we learn and practise genuine critical friendship and our social media presence is entirely derivative – it can subvert as much as support our attempts to be kinder, more decent, considerate human beings.
Anyway, I can’t see much in the previously mentioned debate that will help me answer the question I began with. So instead, as always, I turn to a book, and one that’s over a hundred and fifty years old, thus predating the possibility of the practical occurrence of the question of how to answer a man who has acquired a new set of secondary sexual characteristics by well over a century. But then, George Eliot wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, and is a much better read than Moore or Burchill …
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims: because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality – without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.
Oh, and anyone who quibbles with George Eliot’s use of “man” in that passage really needs to grow some irony. She actually was serious about the “all” in creating that “wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.” Unlike many of her more linguistically pernickety contemporaries.
It’s nice to be nice. Although, often, it’s nicer to horrid.
I am a bit tired of the moral outrage echoing around twitter like so many poisonous tumbleweeds. I think the only genuinely worrying thing about all ‘outrage’ is that Suzanne Moore’s point in her original article in the New Statesman (here: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/01/seeing-red-power-female-anger)- that women’s rights and opportunities are being eroded and the hatred we face is being absorbed so that so many of us undergo surgery to look like some (man’s) idea of perfection – is being conveniently ignored in order for everyone to prove how liberal they are.
Anyway, I’ve decided I’m getting bored of all this online commentary, the merits of the novel are once again revealing themselves to me. I might go and read one. Or write a blog post about them…
There’s some weird semantic shift around the word “Liberal” … seems to mean entirely the opposite of what it did in George Eliot’s day.
Yes, parading one’s offendedness is incredibly tedious.
I’ve just noticed Spiked have republished Burchill’s article … not sure if that’s classically liberal either.
Spiked have re-published it because the Observer have removed it because it offended some people.
Observer were daft to publish in the first place if they couldn’t stand by what she said. And Spiked are just doing the same as Burchill … grabbing attention. I can’t see the merit really (though was amused by the Telegraph’s tactics – they got there way before Spiked.)
It’s all a bit dotty.
Birchill’s piece is poor, but the point (in both her piece and Spiked’s reproducing it) is a defence of freedom of expression against our current “I-find-that-offensive”, “you-can’t-say-that” culture – which the Observer obviously isn’t willing to defend. Like you say, if they’re going to publish something they should stand by it.
Freedom to be intentionally offensive … have we got to this where we’re having to defend people who self-servingly bait the overly offended?
A sense of humour and a willingness to dismount the high horses might not have gone amiss, on all sides. Bloody tedious really.
Call me cynical, but the whole row looks to me to be a desperate attempt to draw attention – any attention – to The Observer before it’s quietly morphed into a seven-day Guardian.
Anyone commissioning Burchill knows what they’re going to get.
To then disown what you’ve commissioned looks like last-gasp PR to me, to get the paper’s ‘values’ dissected by the Twittering (and just offline twittering) classes.
Your friend who has had breast breast implant surgery, are you sure that he is the pronoun that your friend would prefer to have used? It’s entirely possible that your friend prefers to be referred to as he of course (neither gender nor sex are a binary and there are a wide range of pronouns to choose from) but if you do know that the correct pronoun to refer to your friend is she then using anything else is not on.
That’s the personal pronoun he still uses. Of course I checked, but we have talked about that kind of thing. When and if he chooses differently I shall refer to the pronoun of choice … what’s so hard about that? Simple manners, surely?
I am glad 🙂
Ha, I think my point was that we can’t rely on traditional etiquette, ethical rules, or theoretical sophistication when we encounter another person … it is about imagining what it’s like in their shoes (if I were Julie Burchill that would be a cue for a mean, spiteful joke, wouldn’t it!)
But that also goes for the offended. If someone says a word or phrase that offends try to work out if offence is meant or if it was just thoughtless – sometimes the language we inherit does our thinking for us, no matter how intelligent we thing we are.
I’m pretty sure Burchill’s article was intended to offend!
Hurumph Julie Burchill, not going there….also not sure why I’m answering this but do mad things when not sleeping.
So much unsaid in the question ‘so Phil, what do you think of these little beauties?’ Is it your ability to be critical/honest/constructive or your friendship/predjudices in his new world that is going to being tested by yr friend? In other words are you actually being asked whether yr now a critical drifter, critical friend or supportive friend? Can be a tightrope walk when your own outlook on life is really what’s being examined and how closely its going to link with a future that’s going down a transgender path.
So if you want suggestions about words to put in yr mouth through the tightrope walk (and not sure you really do but can’t think that well after no sleep since 4am), & on the basis of yr comment that when ‘he’ wants to self refer as ‘she’ you will, how about pick n mixing from
* admiring his determination, endurance etc about going through with everything
* hoping that it will make him happy, content with his body and self perceptions ……
* admitting that its outside your experience and own wants so you won’t be getting yr own pair (I’m making assumptions again)
* boobs come in all shapes and sizes so in themselves its fairly unchallenging to say they look natural (even if their ‘placement’ isn’t)
* asking him & sympathising if he’s experienced any predjudice since his op
and then the big one that’s always there uncomfortably across the genders with the layers that really don’t need unpicking in this case?
* just a friend so bodies are surely really irrelevant, another (future?) relationship where original question is better placed
The last isn’t a ‘cop out’ its a fact, where there is no attraction by definition there is no real/authentic positive perspective. This is the last place to be theoretical?
Bloody hell, I’ll never remember all that … fancy coming along for a pint too (in a kinda Cyrano scenario!)
And, no, I shan’t be getting my own pair. I’m lazy, and boobs seem terribly high maintenance.
Aah being a bloke i see, made me smile though. Don’t think boobs are high maintenance just depends whether you like shopping for nice boobie bands as my youngest calls them. No Cyrano offer coming through either think you’re on yr own there
ah, you almost had a new career opportunity there!
You’re right though. It’s an awkward situation but not impossible, and there are ways of responding graciously … awkward because of habit and old, familiar relationship patterns, not because the situation itself is a problem … but I think you knew that.