The Problem of Bullying

Many utopias purport not to need a police or other type of civil force. Citizens are described as complying with the society's blueprint. Something as basic as More's city-dwellers NOT moving to the countryside for 2 years is never addressed (or even contemplated). Goods NOT being automatically distributed as requested is also never addressed. 

The non-compliant behaviors aren't crimes, not by any credible moral standard. Simply--human nature. Suppose a city-dweller decides to leave the countryside before the 2 years of required labor are up? Suppose a citizen doesn't agree to give up a garden plot after the allotted time? Or an artisan doesn't want to leave one family to live with another as expected? 

The narrator claims that there are few private disputes in Utopia, which "observation" doesn't correspond to any human society that has ever existed in the course of history. 

Granted, More's Utopia is partly a thought experiment--but one imagines that a thought experiment would include some way to enforce the expected social customs/structure. Faced with how often human beings would fall short in More's Utopia, how could it possibly be kept going as described by the narrator?

There are only two ways: totalitarianism or bullying. 

More falls back on a combination. The ultimate punishment is in fact death--first, the malefactor (breaker of customs) is placed into slavery (from which the malefactor can be pardoned), but if the prisoner/slave continues to rebel, the slave is killed. 

The section on Punishments and Rewards, likewise, focuses more on condemning bad behavior than on establishing fair laws. The virtuous are rewarded with accolades while the threat of possible stigma lurks around every corner (social media, anyone?). Citizens, for instance, can eat at home rather than in communal cafeterias but "no one does it willingly because it is not thought proper...besides, it would be stupid." 

Guess all us homebodies will have to go live in one of the colonies (thank goodness!). 

In sum, many utopias disguise their inherent bullying with raves about harmony and helpfulness alongside lovely vistas, rather like bored Soviet hospitality managers taking small-minded American idealists on a boat ride. Oh, my, everything looks so nice--how can Reagan be so critical of the USSR?!

In Chapter 3 of His in Herland, I have Terry make the following point: 

"To be held inside walls without consent is imprisonment, however beautiful the walls or pleasant the food." 

In Gilman's Herland, the three men are taken captive by a cohort of tough, athletic women, about forty in number. Terry is carrying a gun but shoots over the women's heads. Interestingly (and I think correctly), Gilman has Terry balk at shooting the women directly. He is a product of his nineteenth-century upper-class culture. "Women and children first" was not quite as common as popular culture likes to argue (on the Titanic, most of the crew simply wanted passengers, any passengers, to get in the lifeboats). But the concept existed. Terry, for all his faults, is a man's man. He won't shoot women. He won't shoot anyone in the back. 

I took the guns away since my Terry is somewhat more cool-headed and slightly more ruthless--and is perfectly aware that women can be soldiers.

However, I also have my Terry "pull his punches" in the confrontation with the women. The men have arrived on the island/in the country, imagining they are tourists who will be shown the nearest hostelry. The women see them as invaders and behave accordingly. Terry doesn't want to start an international incident.

Gilman gives the women a bland, remorseless demeanor, but she also tries to present them as non-violent. It isn't...force! Oh, no! It's a kind of...herding...

Gilman is a good writer--a point I will refer back to later--and I want to give her her dues. But Terry is my truthsayer and the truth is...Taking people captive is taking people captive. 

Bullying is bullying.

One of the worst aspects of modern-day bullying is when people argue that their "niceness" or "good intentions" or "high-mindedness" or "identity" or, for that matter, other people's bad behavior/thoughts somehow wipes out the fact that they are using underhanded and cruel techniques to accomplish actually nasty things: take away people's jobs, smear their reputations, steal their life's work, commit violence against them, and attempt through various venues to cow them into submission. 

It's jealousy and small-mindedness under a veneer of benevolent righteousness. 

Likewise, taking people captive--while it might be justified--doesn't transform into something else simply because it is labeled something else. Violent or not, justified or not, the women ignore the men's human rights and put them in the equivalent of prison. 

In Herland, Van, the social scientist, tries to to explain everything (away); Jeff, the chivalrous, well, boob, thinks the women are pure and noble simply for being women. Both try to excuse the women's behavior by labeling it something else. Only Terry sees it for what it is--and he respects it. 

Elizabeth Bathory

To her credit, while keeping Terry somewhat more obnoxious than even I can stomach (but appropriate to his time frame), Gilman allows that Jeff, at least, is off-base. 

As my Terry states in the next chapter:

"Hopefully, the women’s agenda wouldn’t entail screwing us before chopping off our entrails or sending us on suicidal missions against a prowling enemy or playing games with our disemboweled guts or mounting our decapitated heads on spikes." 

My Terry knows more history that Gilman's Terry. Everybody has the capacity to be nasty. Someone doesn't instantly stop being a bully because that someone is female or the upholder of a utopia.   

Chapter 3

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding