Journalistic propriety, or mark of the patriarchy?

In the year 2020, I am constantly checking myself to see if what I put out into the world -- through this blog, through my reviews, through my podcast, even in my emails and social media posts and conversations with friends -- is sufficiently apologetic for the fact that I'm a privileged white male.

Oh, this is not some kind of sob story about what I can or cannot say or how the world no longer has room for me. Please do not mistake this for that.

What I mean is that as a person who engages with culture on a daily basis, I used to move through the world with a sort of blitheness of knowing that my essential demographic and sociopolitical perspective would not be challenged. I don't think I said much I'd be sorry for, because I think I've always been sensitive to how I present myself and who I give a fair shake. But now I worry about it juuust a bit more.

I want to neuter myself, just a bit, but it's a willing neutering. It's an attempt to be in conversation with people who have not traditionally had the advantages I have, rather than, as some shameful white men have done, being threatened by them. It's a desire to shift the tone and the tools of my discussion so they come out right to begin with, and don't have to be clarified or apologized for later. I want to move to their playing field, after they spent so many years on mine.

It's toward that end that I am examining a new trend -- probably not actually new -- that I have recently noticed that bothers me, though I'm not sure that it should.

Now, I should start by saying that most of these methods I have for engaging with the world are still governed by basic journalist principals. I have never liked the idea of finishing anything, even a text, without a period -- or a full stop, as it is called here in Australia. I don't like to begin sentences without capital letters. I don't like to string multiple sentences or thoughts together without distributing periods, commas, semi-colons, question marks or exclamation points at all the correct junctures. I think similar thoughts should be contained together in the same paragraphs and different ones should be segregated into separate paragraphs. I believe in beginnings, middles and ends. I do concede to certain "newer" styles of writing -- for example, as you will see right now, I love separating parenthetical expressions with dashes -- and one of those is starting sentences with conjunctions. I love starting a sentence with a good "But" or "And." But in most respects, I am a stodgy grammarian, which until now I have not found inconsistent with having an open mind toward new paradigms of critical discussion.

That last paragraph may have been a bit of a diversion, but it lays the groundwork for the annoyance I'm about to talk about.

One basically sacrosanct rule in journalism is that you refer to the person you are talking about by their last name on second reference. If I'm talking about Tom Cruise in a piece I'm writing, I will call him "Tom Cruise" on first reference and "Cruise" every time after that. I might throw in a "Tom Cruise" again if I am trying to make a sort of semantic flourish in my argument, and there was one newspaper I used to work for where the style was to refer to him as "Mr. Cruise" on subsequent references. I guess that newspaper wanted to be the New York Times or something.

Never, though, would I refer to him as "Tom."

I am wondering if this is one of the old-fashioned parts of me that puts me at odds with the people I am hoping to relate to on an even playing field. And unfortunately, in this case, that seems disproportionately to be women.

I have now gotten to the thing I am actually going to talk about.

I was listening this past weekend to The Slate Spoiler Special, a sort-of spinoff of The Slate Culture Gabfest, probably because it is hosted by Gabfest host Dana Stevens. This podcast has been the repository for a number of my complaints in the past, and so, it must be again today.

The episode in question was about Little Women -- a few weeks late, but I'm still trying to catch up with my podcasts after falling behind over the holidays. On this episode Dana was joined by a freelance journalist named Rachel Syme, with whom I don't believe I was familiar before this podcast, though she's been on this podcast before so maybe I just missed those episodes.

Syme launched the discussing of specifics about the movie, and I noticed something straight away. She didn't refer to Greta Gerwig as "Gerwig" on second reference, but as "Greta."

And then Florence Pugh as "Florence." And then Saoirse Ronan as "Saoirse." And then Meryl Streep as "Meryl."

No.

Just, no.

Do you know these people, Rachel? Are they your friends?

I can't remember if it's Dana's default position to do the same thing, but she definitely played along, even if only because Rachel set the standard. I'll use this moment to make an aside about another thing that Dana does do, however, that annoys me, which is to slavishly pronounce the names of French people correctly, due to her own background with the language. She refers to Timothee Chalamet as "Teem-o-tay," which, just, grrr.

I don't want to say I've never heard this casual usage of first names before, because I have. Slate writer Aisha Harris is also guilty of it.

But I do think I've never heard it from a man.

Now, there is not anything inherently "wrong" with calling an artist, or a musician, or a filmmaker, or an actor, by their first name. The only reason it's "wrong" is that we have developed a convention of treating these people with a certain professional distance, which we demonstrate by choosing an impersonal rather than personal way of talking about them. Which, you could argue, is a major part of retaining our impartiality as journalists.

It's the convention that I'm wondering about. Is this a convention established by, and perpetrated by, white men? And therefore, should it continue?

If I step entirely outside myself and all my preconceived notions, I can see the benefits of referring to Greta Gerwig by her first name. It's certainly a way of humanizing the person, of indicating that he or she is not some kind of remote, monolithic figure. For some artists, their very humanity is part and parcel to what their art is trying to accomplish. Some artists would hug you and immediately invite you to start calling them by the nickname that only their closest friends use for them.

Where this feels like a problem to me is that it prevents you from really criticizing the artist. Dana and Rachel -- I call podcasters by their first names -- were fulsome in their praise of Little Women, and rightly so. It was my #4 movie of 2019. I gave it five stars. It's great.

But what if they had not liked Little Women? Do you then shift to calling the artist by her last name? It's easy to imagine them saying "I love how Greta presented the events of the novel out of sequence," because I don't have to imagine it. It's not so easy to imagine them saying "Greta really screwed the pooch with that whole non-chronological narrative thing."

I really would be interested to know if they would change the way they refer to her -- consciously or subconsciously -- if their huzzahs curdled into guffaws. And I could certainly make the argument that any critical practice that invites you to alter its fundamental elements, depending on whether the scenario involves praise or scorn, is flawed indeed.

But then I think: Is there something inherently gendered about this paradigm that I am failing to connect with?

Or more generally, do I just have to take the pole out of my butt?

It's a pretty shitty and regressive type of stereotyping to say that women are more capable of intimacy and sensitivity than men, though in this case I feel like it's a fairly complimentary form of stereotyping. And if I'm talking about new critical paradigms introduced by critical voices that weren't once heard, I have no choice but to identify the defining traits of those paradigms. I mean, less than a decade ago you mightn't have been able to listen to a movie podcast featuring one female voice, let alone two.

If women podcasters want to refer to artists and musicians and filmmakers and actors by their first names, is it my role to begrudge them that?

And yet while I can ask myself this question with the best of intentions and the most hopeful senses of optimism, I still can't get past it. I still say YOU DON'T KNOW THESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS.

I guess the thing I worry about most is coming down on something, and having others determine that it is a practice unique to a particular minority, be it racial or gender or related to sexuality, and then having them decide that I'm carrying a bias against that racial or gender or sexuality minority. And maybe not even telling me about it so I can't even do anything to address it.

It's a complicated age we live in.

It occurs to me that it's appropriate that Little Women is the film, quite coincidentally I think, prompting these thoughts. This very argument is addressed very literally in the text of the film, as it features a number of tete-a-tetes between a representative of the establishment (the publisher played by Tracy Letts, a man) and an up-and-coming, new and very different voice (Jo March, played by "Saoirse," a woman). These scenes state the themes Greta Gerwig is grappling with in unusually straightforward terms, in part because they are played as comedy. The publisher wants one thing because it's what he's always done and because he believes it's what the world expects and wants. The author presents another way of looking at things, and says, with an unkillable moral certainty, "What if this, instead?"

I'm with Jo -- I can also call literary characters by their first names -- in the argument she is making. But I just can't side with Dana and Rachel in their own implicit argument.

Over the course of this post I’ve listed two scenarios where I would refer to someone by their first name, albeit being a bit cheeky. But maybe it’s context dependent for Dana and Rachel as well. I have to consider that the medium of a podcast is inherently conversational, as opposed to writing, which is more formal. I don’t read a lot of Dana’s writing (something I should do more), but I can say with almost total certainty that she would not say “Greta” in a piece of writing, if only because until recently, she had a stodgy representative of old-world journalism editing her pieces. Julia Turner, late the editor of Slate but now with the LA Times, and still a member of her Slate podcast, would not stand for such a thing. (And ha, she’s a woman.) Maybe it’s podcasting itself that is the new paradigm, not the voices I’m hearing on it. Now granted, I’d never refer to her as “Greta” on my podcast, but I think maybe one of my (male) podcasting co-hosts has done such a thing in the past. And they’re 15 years younger than I am, so age may also be a factor here (though Dana is older than I am).

The majority of this post was written when I was halfway through the podcast on Little Women. I rarely get to listen to a whole podcast in one sitting, or in this case, one session of putting away the laundry. But two other noteworthy things happened before I ultimately finished it the next day: 1) Rachel adjusted her pronunciation of Timothee Chalamet’s first name from “Timothy” to “Timothay,” perhaps as a compromise between her own preferred pronunciation and Dana’s; 2) they both said “Gerwig” on second reference at least once (though never Pugh, Ronan or Streep, that I heard). And then another noteworthy thing a few days later, when I was listening to the male-hosted podcast Filmspotting, in which Adam Kempenaar (a male) referred to Spike Lee as "Spike."

I think it just goes to show that we are all feeling our way through formerly rock-solid ways of doing things into newer, murkier, more flexible alternatives. There’s a “When in Rome” quality to much of this. All communication is a kind of give and take, a meeting your fellow conversant on common grounds, a learning of something new.