Tag: catholic church

⧑ the best/a man/can get ⧒

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Last week Gillette released an advertisement called The Best Men Can Be (25m+ views) which in 90 seconds presents this masculinity pageant: toxic masculinity has been perpetrated by men forever, now the #MeToo movement has shed light on it, now nothing will be the same, we’re not afraid of it because men can be better, here’s a couple of clips of men already being better.

This morning, I read this plainspoken line in Heather Havrilesky’s new book of essays, What If This Were Enough: “We are living in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonesty.” There’s a fever going on right now and the dead-end racist, sexist bluster that is destroying our governmental infrastructure by pushing out government workers, the two documentaries about the fraud and waste of the Fyre Festival (resplendant in its stupid fucking novelty spelling), and Tony Blair grinning like a naughty schoolboy as he struggles to defend himself against the characterization of Davos as “a family reunion for the people who broke the modern world” all seem to be in dialogue with each other.

We’re also trapped in this this slow motion racist gaslighting sparked by a group of white boys from a Catholic school harassing a man they assumed had no power. When the public gave that man power through their attention, their parents circled to protect them and used every connection they had to take it back. A friendly CNN interviewer and the President helped them do it.

Last year, the Canadian government asked the Pope for an apology to the Inuit and Métis peoples for the role the church played in operating genocidal boarding schools and orphanages for Native children. A spokesman for the Pope responded: “After carefully considering the request and extensive dialogue with the bishops of Canada, he felt that he could not personally respond.”

Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington, when asked if he felt like apologizing for his actions, said “I wish we could’ve walked away and avoided the whole thing, but I can’t say that I’m sorry for listening to (Phillips) and standing there.” In his written statement, he wrote, “I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me”.

Here’s what connects these phenomena: We are living through a time where the mechanism by which privilege perpetuates itself—by controlling the story and by controlling what context gets incorporated into the story—is becoming more and more nakedly visible as the divide between those who are benefitting from current political, cultural and economic conditions and those who must change those conditions in order to have a thriving future is becoming wider. Privilege is the power to say “you didn’t see what you saw. And if you did it wasn’t that bad. And if it is that bad, you should see what this other person did. And if you still have a problem with that, Jesus said ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'”

It’s bullshit.

Here’s why the Gillette advertisement is bullshit, too:

  • Gillette’s shaving products do not play a significant role in gender-based violence or economic inequality. They did not, for example, run a PSA about not using single-use plastic items.
  • The advertisement perpetuates a fantasy alternate history where toxic masculinity was a thing that nobody knew was wrong, then #MeToo happened and men realized it was wrong and changed the world. You can’t simplify the narrative like that without performing the same erasure that toxic masculinity needs to perpetuate itself.
  • Gillette continues to sell rectangular razors to men in tough blue and gray boxes and oval razors to women in pretty pink and green boxes.
  • Gillette apparently believes that you solve toxic masculinity by being tough and intervening in fights and shouting positive affirmations at your daughter in the mirror*, as opposed to, say, looking at pay inequalities and family leave policies in their company and supply chain.
  • You cannot credit with–or protest–Gillette changing the culture of masculinity without imputing authority over masculinity to Gillette. Both sides reinforce the desired message, which is that buying Gillette is being a man.

*Which was very cute, I’m not a monster.

Pointing all of this out pedantic, because we all have a baseline expectation that power and bullshit go together. The government is so clogged with bullshit it cannot perform even the most basic functions. The church is so full of shit that people stopped going then discovered what a better social adaptation that is. Institutions that used to police bullshit like universities and newspapers now support themselves by distributing the bullshit (plus, we know that they only ever policed bullshit for white dominant culture, so even calling them the bullshit police is itself a kind of bullshit). Brands are bullshit, but they also seem to kind of work and are kind of accountable to the public sometimes so we give them feedback with love or scorn because that sometimes works and nothing else seems to work.

Gillette has total control over its workplace. It has control over its products, its marketing. It has a lot of influence over the city and state in which it has offices. It did not choose to make change in those spheres in which it has a lot of power. Instead, Gillette is trying to change the way you think about masculinity, which is a power that you have to give it.

So gender progressives have to pretend that liking an advertisement means supporting women and gender troglodytes have to pretend that their honor was sullied by a razor blades and queer folks have to pretend that a company that differentiates its products by gender are going to teach men to protect nonbinary kids and on and on and on…

I think all of that pretending has a cost. I think every time that we do it we erode, just a little bit, our ability to see what else could be possible, what real change would look like. Resisting, though, is not cute and feels useless. In my own real life, where I have total control over me, someone asked what I thought of the Gillette ad and I just shrugged and didn’t say anything. 

baking the body of christ

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I was fascinated by this story on the economics of the communion wafer market from Killing the Buddha. Rowan Moore Gerety illustrates the changes in the Catholic Church in America and the commercialization of religious goods and functions by contrasting market leader the Cavanagh Company, a commercial bakery, and convent bakeries in Missouri and Texas:

Like many of the mom-and-pop business relationships buried and mourned with the rise of the corporate, the ties that bind monastic bakers and “their” churches are not easily reduced to those of sellers and buyers. Historically, the connection of convent bakeries to their clientele bears only an incidental relationship to its economic viability. It is not an industry, Sister Lynn said, but an “an extension of our Eucharistic charism…a way we support the faith life of the Church.” Commerce in the service of religion, rather than Cavanagh’s religion in the service of commerce.

The difference is evident on the factory floor. The production plant at the Clyde, Missouri monastery, is adorned throughout with crucifixes and religious art, like a flour-dusted store-front church. Beneath Jesus on the cross, the nuns’ concentrated devotion recalls the Shaker cabinetmakers of the nineteenth century, sculpting the back of dresser drawers for His eyes only. The Cavanagh Co. does not have any religious ornaments in their production facility: in a factory constantly clouded with pulverized wheat, it would be inappropriate, Dan Cavanagh reasoned, “to put a cross up and have it essentially defaced with flour dust.” Cavanagh Co. retains a Christian sensibility, but what capitalist does not think his customers’ beliefs are sacred? “The majority [of our staff] is Catholic, but I am not sure if they go to church regularly,” Dan went on. “From a company standpoint, this is not important, as their job entails making sure that the product quality is top-notch.” They simply do not identify with the product in the same way that women religious tend to. The Sisters in Clyde tell their customers “they’re not just getting a product, they’re getting a prayer,” and consider their prayers “part of our promise to our patrons.” They are enriched through prayer themselves.

Another of the prescriptions to emerge from Vatican II was that the hosts be uncontaminated during production. In a fortuitous convergence of doctrine between the Food and Drug Administration and the Catholic Church, the Cavanagh Company has taken “contamination” to mean human touch, and the company maintains a fully-automated production process where employees are forbidden from laying their hands on the wafers. “I feel pretty strongly that the host should not be touched,” Dan said. His view makes it easier to comply with legal guidelines for industrial food production, but it also gives the company something to market. “Our wafers are untouched by human hands,” boasts one promotional brochure. “That gets my dander up,” a Sister in Clyde told the Chicago Tribune: The Sisters’ touch gives what other businesses would call “added value.”

One interesting note in the story is one of the original ways that Cavanagh gained its market prominence was by marketing whole wheat communion wafers, and it also mentions that a growth sector is individually sealed communion kits, with individual servings of communion wine and and a single communion wafer. It’s hard not to see that as a symbol of the church becoming more like the world and losing its soul.

For another story of the hidden consequences of shifts in societal behaviors and preferences, see Mac McClelland’s story on working for a shipping distributor that contracts with Amazon.com.