Diary of a Bad Buddhist

Bad Buddhist vs. Breakups

noreply@blogger.com (Marie Drennan) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:25:00 +0000

Well, but the thing with breakups is that although they suck, sometimes they suck less than whatever was going on before the breakup — whatever needed to be broken up in order to let everyone move on, find true love, get healthy, meet new people, get rid of all those bad gifts they had to pretend to like, finally finish that Ph.D. dissertation, etc. As Leonard Cohen says, "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in."

Well, but sometimes one person's light is another person's nuclear flash — blinding people, melting faces, killing everything in its path. And often it's not just one person getting crisped, but lots of people in that person's orbit. The fallout can contaminate other relationships and extend to entire communities. And I don't just mean the community of people traumatized by Brad dumping Jen for Angelina. (Team Aniston, stay strong!) The Buddha was pretty much against this (see Bad Buddhist vs. the Third Precept). He saw humanity as one big community and was quite protective of it, encouraging us to consider that whatever hurt the community probably would not make any individual truly happy — it might feel gratifying at first, but that's only because we tend to grasp at pleasure and run from pain without really understanding that the source is in each of us, not in the person or thing we're identifying as good or bad.

Well, but who says my personal needs are less important than those of a community? Why should the hive-mind be privileged above the individual? We're not all just a bunch of identically programmed robots (yet. Watch out if you're a Capricorn, though). That's totally fascist and un-American and probably some damn hippies made it up to manipulate girls into sleeping with them. Come on, baby, do it for the cause! And what if the community itself is fucked up? Isn't it better to revolt than to conform? Think how many shitty situations have stayed shitty because the sufferers were afraid to speak up and risk alienating people — rape victims, for example, or cult kids, or people who privately suspect that Mad Men is vapid and unreconstructed misogynistic crap.

Well, but Mad Men won tons of Emmy (TM) awards! It is actually giving an accurate portrayal of a time period when women really were thought of as empty-headed dolls to be ignored, bullied, medicated and disposed of. It's an Emmy (TM)-winning show! It's social criticism. It's smart. That's why it won all those Emmys (TM)!

Well, but that's bullshit — there's no critique going on there. We're not seeing women treated like idiots, we're seeing women as idiots. All of them — all working women, all married women, pitted against each other in their hunt for/efforts to keep husbands. Women, as a class, are presented as sharing the basic traits of stupidity, jealousy, and self-interest without self-awareness. The show could have presented women as people with inner lives, frustrated by the narrow roles into which society forced them, to which society reduced them. But no. These women are definitively without intellect or interest. There are three exceptions: the abnormally bright (thus homely) new girl who rises above and proves she can do a man's work; the abnormally liberated bohemian mistress who "doesn't make plans and doesn't make breakfast" (and who seems interesting and cool at first but soon vanishes into a nowhere world of frivolous sluttery); and the abnormally self-possessed and capable love interest (whose exotic-erotic Jewishness contrasts so enticingly with the blonde, blue-eyed Gerber baby that we are to believe is someone's wife). These three women share one thing: access to the male lead character's penis (either literally or in the form of his masculinizing professional endorsement). He's very complex, you know, way deeper, way more real than the other characters. Therefore the women he screws (or allows to write ad copy) are by association more complex and more real — again, unlike the rest. The function of these three women is to reify the natural inferiority of their species — the rest being so numerous that they automatically represent the female gender in its entirety. The other women on the show are mere types, and nasty ones at that — the slutty, gold-digging secretary; the gossipy, spinsteresque switchboard operators; the repressed, resentful wives. None of this is called into question in any way; it is strictly set-dressing. No, worse. It's misogynist ideology snuck past us as eye candy (those clothes!) and easy laughs (those airheads!), masquerading as something insightful and revealing when in fact it is manufacturing, not interrogating, the most insidious and insulting of stereotypes. I actually like eye candy and easy laughs, but I don't enjoy being psychically bitch-slapped at the same time. (And why is it necessary, anyway? Seriously, who felt the need to tack that on? Who is that for?) Mad Men is a vile and despicable excuse for entertainment and the Emmy (TM) academy should die of shame.

Well, but what does this have to do with breakups or bad Buddhism? Just this: a breakup is a kind of bomb that you lob not only into someone's life, but also into a crowd. Some crowds deserve it — and won't even be affected by it anyway; I doubt anyone associated with Mad Men (or their cheerleaders) is going to worry about crazy Marxist feminist bloggers ranting about gender this and hegemony that. Clearly chicks like us are frigid and lesbians and don't watch TV anyway, which is why we've been given The L Word. Problem solved. But some crowds are deeply affected and don't deserve it. They don't deserve the bomb. They have built an enclave, cultivated an ecosystem of trust relationships that evolved over time and required care and maintenance. It isn't fair when one person flips out and slashes at the ties that bind the whole thing together. For instance, I broke up with my boyfriend's band a while ago — which I had the right to do, since they were refusing to honor obvious basic boundaries and counting on the friendship to pressure me into silence about it. This was, to me, a community that did not merit my adherence and to which I refused to conform. And I let them know in a way that no one could really expect to come back from.

Well, but the thing is, I also screwed things up mightily for my boyfriend. Now his girlfriend officially doesn't get along with his band and won't go to any of their social events, which puts him in an awkward position and also strains the relationship since our social lives are now largely separate. He feels like he can't talk about any aspect of his musical life, which is really important to him, without offending me. He feels disloyal for enjoying something that has always been a very central part of his existence. And I lose, too: when I go to his shows, I feel all self-conscious and defensive instead of just enjoying watching him play. So what has been gained here? I made my point, and it seemed really, really necessary to do that at the time. There was real pain, and justifiable anger, that needed to be expressed. I felt I had to make myself heard. But what was that need, really? As urgent as it felt at the time, what did it accomplish? Who is better off now? Looking back, I wish I hadn't been so caught up in what I thought I needed, and that I'd cared more about keeping a community intact, even if it wasn't perfect. That might sound debased and self-abnegating, like something coming from the docile blonde wife-bot on Mad Men, but even a bad Buddhist can figure out pretty easily that the harm here far outweighed the good. So what if his bandmates seemed like jerks to me? It's a question of what (or whom) I was willing to sacrifice for my own satisfaction, and what I sacrificed wasn't really mine to dispose of. I got what I wanted at the time, but now all I feel is sorry.

Plus I know I'm going to watch the first episode of Season Two of Mad Men as soon as it comes out on DVD. Because I just don't learn.

Straightforward iconic representation of a breakup.

Reasonably apt metaphor.

Apparently, meteors also experience breakups.

But this really tells the whole story.

Augh! They morphed! And the Brad/Angelina (Brangelina?) version is even creepier!

According to Mad Men, this is you. And you. And you. And all the rest of you.

Diary of a Bad Buddhist

Bad Buddhist vs. Breakups

Bad Buddhist vs. the Lord (and Celine Dion)

Bad Buddhist vs. Bourgeois Heroes

Bad Buddhist vs. Yoga

Bad Buddhist vs. The Eighth Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Seventh Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Sixth Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Fifth Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Fourth Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Third Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The Second Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. The First Precept

Bad Buddhist vs. Breathing

Bad Buddhist Really Means It This Time. Seriously.

Bad Buddhist Signs On