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Back in March, a photo of a truly hideous bathroom made the internet rounds. The home owner, a single male whose proclamation that "woman play an unfair role in the home-buying process" (sic) made it clear that we were dealing with a men's rights activist, possibly an incel. He said "my bathroom is designed with a woman in mind. It will have a powder room that will be completely useless to me, but is the kind of thing a woman would look at and say, OMG I want this" (I should say that by "powder room", he meant an alcove in the bathroom with a make up table).

This person regarded himself as a DIY expert, and set out to do the remodel himself. The original bathroom in this person's high end home looked like this:

IMG_1880

(Image shows a large and expensive white bathroom with three big windows on the left filling one wall, a hot tub against that wall centred under the middle window and extending into the middle of the room. The near and far walls have matching big vanities against them. Three doorways to the right lead, presumably, to the toilet, shower, and an door to the rest of the house).

After two years and many misadventures due to his incompetence (he cut through floor joists, for example), the person finished their remodel, achieving this:

horrid bathroom1

(Instead of white, the bathroom is now black and dark metallic grey with red highlights. Glitter wallpaper on the walls. One window and one vanity have been replaced with a ridiculously huge walk in shower. The other vanity has been replaced with a pair of much smaller vanities. The hot tub has been replaced with an ordinary (but expensive) bathtub, sitting in a bed of gravel in the middle of a black slate floor). Thanks to the walls of the walk in shower, the vanity and tub area looks cramped).

And the highly appealing to women makeup table, taking the place of the original shower:

horrid bathroom 2

(this shows the back wall of the bathroom. To the left, a closed door presumably leading to the toilet. To the right, a makeup table. In the middle, your escape from this black/grey/red nightmare of bad taste. The makeup table has a small mirror above it, lit dimly by a single chandelier. A hideously garish painting is visible on the wall next to the makeup table).

When women helpfully pointed out to this person that his bathroom design lacked adequate storage for personal care products, especially in the shower and around the tub, lacked adequate light for the makeup table, and looked like a dark and gloomy cave, he condescended to them.

Intrigued, I investigated and learned that the same person had remodeled his bedroom a few years previously:

IMG_1885

(A blue wall is dominated by a ridiculously huge black built in headboard towering over a mattress covered with red and grey bedding. The foundation of the mattress is enclosed inside a black box. The far wall is white and is mostly storage cabinets. light timidly ventures into the room through windows with dark grey blackout curtains on them).

Proving once again that while some sexist assholes are aesthetically challenged, others wouldn’t know aesthetics if it jumped out and bit them in the leg.

When I showed the before and after images to Morgan, she told me that it's hard to do makeup properly in a high humidity environment, so another point against his master plan to make the women swoon when they see his washroom. Morgan also said,

"The only way I can see myself using that bathroom would be if I was high priestess of a blood cult into human sacrifice, in which case it would be the perfect place for my handmaidens to wash me when I was having my period."

That pretty much sums it up.
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One of the last substantive conversations I had with Morgan, before the pain got to be too much for her to converse even a little bit, was about Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, his awful mess of an attempted anti-racism novel that manages to be incredibly racist. This is me trying to reconstruct the gist of that conversation, which might, in an alternative history, have become part of Morgan's Bibliogramma review of the novel.

Written in 1964, the novel begins with a nuclear war. Farnham, his family, his live in Negro servant, and his house guest for the evening have just enough warning to go into their fallout shelter. The last bomb to drop sends their shelter and them into another world, a green wilderness with the same landscape as their old home, but no people, no buildings. The nuclear survival novel suddenly turns into a frontier wilderness novel, and then turns into a time travel novel when they are finally found by other people and learn that they have been living in a wilderness area, and that this is the future, centuries after the war destroyed American and European civilization and left the planet in the hands of Arabic speaking, brown skinned Muslims. White people like themselves are slaves in this future world. The worst thing, Farnham discovers, is that some whites in this world are bred and slaughtered as food for their masters. The novel ends with Farnham and his new beloved (the house guest) sent by their masters back in time to just before the bombs drop. By driving like mad they manage to get out of the blast radius before the bombs drop, and set up house as after-the-bomb survivors in a new time line.

What Heinlein intended as an anti-racist "lets turn the tables and put make white people the enslaved minority" satire comes off instead as a "see how awful things would be if we gave any power to brown people" story that falls into the trap of depicting nonwhites as inherently bad, evil and cannibalistic. Farah Mendlesohn argues that it is the cannibalism that flips this book from an antiracism satire into a racist story.

Morgan had not read Mendlesohn's take. Talking with her the morning after she finished the novel, her first reaction was how, as with "Magic, Inc." and "Jerry Was a Man," once again a Heinlein story that dealt specifically with American racism vis a vis African Americans came off as incredibly tone deaf.

I think I was the one who first mentioned the problem of the character of Joe. Here's a Black man in America in the mid 60's who works as a live in servant, a job that was essentially extinct at that point. He's not given even a single line of dialogue about whether his relatives might be safe or not - every other character has family, backstory, a history - aside from knowing French, Joe seems to have been grown in a vat. He doesn't make any references to the civil right movement.

Morgan and I agreed that for a novel about racism written in 1963-64, to have an adult African American character *not* make any reference to the ongoing struggle for civil rights is a huge and glaring lacunae in the narrative, and this failure to make Joe a real character who is either engaged with current events of relevance to him as a Black man, or has a convincing reason to not be so engaged, is the real point where the novel starts to go wrong. This is even more true in light of Mendlesohn's appraisal that Joe is the novel's real protagonist, the active character who saves the day, the one approved of by cats, and Hugh Farnham is yet another Watson-like viewpoint-holding sidekick.

Mendlesohn talks about how Heinlein saw racism as colour prejudice, full stop - he had no concept of the systematic structures in institutions and in society that oppress and discriminate against non-white people. Instead. like a lot of other white moderates, he subscribed to the victim-blaming analysis (as found in Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, and as popularized after Farnham's Freehold was written by the Moynihan Report) that endemic Negro poverty and family instability were a legacy of slavery's warping of Negro culture, that there is such a thing as a slave mentality, and that mental outlook, rather than anything that white people needed to worry about changing in their institutions or culture, was the source of Negro immiseration.

In private letters (one to F.M. Busby, published in a preview of the limited, stupidly expensive Virginia Edition; another, very similar in content to Arthur George Smith exists in Heinlein's "story ideas" file, available for $2 from the Heinlein Archives), Heinlein expresses contempt for the Civil Rights movement, as well as for African and American Negro accomplishments and culture ("as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved," and similar sentiments).

His (self declared) lack of colour prejudice enabled him to tell himself he wasn't a racist, unlike whites from the South who he looked down upon. Meanwhile, he looked down upon Negroes just as much if not more. And that contempt led him to think it was OK to to remain ignorant of Black people, to not read anything they were writing. Which is why Joe is such a cipher, and which is how Heinlein managed to write a novel about racism that is so utterly tone deaf, whose actual impact is so completely opposed to Heinlein's intended aims.

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