Astrogator's Logs

Between the approach of Valentine’s Day and recent discussions in a forum where a lot of stale sociobiological doctrines about women were put forward, I thought I’d put this up… planting a flag, as it were.

Even before hormones signaled my entry into the arena of sex, I had a sinking feeling whenever I contemplated relationships with the opposite gender. I had cause to be worried: I grew up in Greece during the sixties. At that time, the culture was as close as you could get to Islamic outside the Middle East. It approved of strong women – but its definition of female strength was endurance and constant giving. Both the Hellenic and Byzantine legacies of my people were solidly arrayed against uppity women, ready to strike, confine and prune.

So there I was, bright, science-oriented, competitive, unfeminine, demanding equal treatment, expecting my future partners to be both lovers and friends… blessed, too (or should it be cursed?) with my father’s unstinting love, as well as his frank appetites and eye for beauty in everything. Glumly contemplating the thorny path before me, I frequently complained to him for bequeathing the wrong chromosome to the zygote that produced me. A pragmatic man with a strong streak of defiant aloneness, he was unrepentant. The fourth of five brothers with no sister, he was ecstatic that his single child was a daughter to whom he could give the name of the mother they lost too early in a terrible accident – even though he had to fight with the priests, because the name was pagan (there was no separation of church and state in Greece at that time).

I took an obvious path out of my difficulties. I left Greece the moment I could, an escape made possible by a Harvard scholarship. There were other reasons to leave, granted: Greece was a military dictatorship at the time, there was no scientific research going on there to speak of… but in the back of my mind, the question of partners lay like a sleeping dragon.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Cambridge and dropped my luggage on my dorm bed was to open a bank account. The second was to visit the student health services and ask for contraceptives. Those were the halcyon days after the Pill and before AIDS, when for one brief shining moment the act of love did not come festooned with punitive legal or medical strings. The dorms were co-educational, and my experiments in the domain of love were as eager, extensive and adventurous as they were in my courses.

About thirty years and fifty men later (counting short-term encounters), I think I’m finally ready to answer Freud’s burning question: What Do Women Want? I do not purport to answer on behalf of my entire gender. But I can unequivocally say what I want in my men and to put it in a soundbite, the answer is: Snachismo.

What, do you ask, is snachismo? It is a seamless fusion of snugglability and machismo. Those of you who read excerpts of my story Spider Silk saw snachismo embodied in the Koredháni men. For those who didn’t, I will briefly explain the concept.

To avoid confusion, I should point out right away that a snacho man is entirely distinct from a Byronic demon lover, a much more common type to whom many women are fatally attracted – sometimes literally, since many in this subgroup start as Heathcliffs and end up as wife beaters. All the dark brooders found in bodice rippers, including (alas!) Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, are not snacho. Neither are alpha males or the so-called strong silent types.

So now that we know what is not snacho, let’s see if I can give you the gist of what is. A snacho man is physically, emotionally, intellectually adult. A snacho man, unlike an alpha male, gives his primary allegiance to his partner, not to other men. He actually likes women as people and is not afraid of them as partners or lovers – which means that, in contradistinction to the Byronic brooder, he has no need to dominate or play mindgames and is neither squeamish nor a prude in bed. Nor does he consider it unmanly to laugh, cry, be affectionate or express emotions beyond just anger (using words, not grunts or fists).

These are the primary irreducible attributes of snachismo. They may sound simple and easy but apparently are not, since few men achieve them. Several secondary attributes tend to arise from these. Given the pressure on both genders to conform to social stereotyping, a snacho man is likely to be a maverick and possess an unusual measure of both bravery and dash – an untamed wildcat, not a penned cattlebeast. He is also likely to have more than one active vocation or talent, and at least one in a domain considered not traditionally masculine. So a snacho man will have aspects of the bard, the storyteller, the contrary, the sorcerer, the shaman – roles that today’s men have largely abandoned in their apparent frenetic quest to become cubicle rats.

A scholarly essay must, of course, give examples… and not surprisingly, I didn’t find obvious snacho candidates among most mainstream fiction. But I can name a few in science fiction: Dominic Harlech, aka Niki Falcon in Emma Bull’s Falcon; Radu Drac in Vonda McIntyre’s Aztecs and Superluminal; the Servitors in Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country – who turn out to be the real men, rather than the so-called Warriors. And off the top of my head, I can think of four in film: Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) in the film version of Aeon Flux; Sam Gillen (Jean Claude van Damme, who would have thunk!) in Nowhere to Run; Rob Roy McGregor (Liam Neeson) in Rob Roy; and, of course, Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Last of the Mohicans. In that film, what pinpoints him as the quintessence of snachismo is not his undemonstrative bravery, the many skills, the untameable beauty, the way he makes love (though they all help!). The unmistakable signal is when Cora takes out her musket during the ambush by the Iroquois – and instead of telling her that ladies don’t do that kind of thing, he hands her his gunpowder pouch.

So what about me? Well, thirteen years ago someone looked at me across a room. He had copper hair to his waist and the most intelligent eyes I have ever seen. A month after our meeting he showed up at my doorstep with his toothbrush and moved in. Suffice it to say that he fulfills all the attributes of snachismo, both primary and secondary… so there is hope after all.

Credit must go to Peter Cassidy for coining the term “snacho”. My thanks to Jester for pointing out that Liam Neeson as Rob Roy perfectly fit the snachismo model.

Photo Credits: Top, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Last of the Mohicans. Bottom,  Aeon (Charlize Theron) and Trevor (Marton Csokas) in Aeon Flux.

The men are made tapu (sacred) while the women are left noa (common) for doing all those things at the back, like preparing and serving food. Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke, Maori noble and recorder of Maori traditions.

I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? — Sojourner Truth, at the 1851 Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio.

Curious about the scenery and forewarned about the schmaltz, I saw Luhrmann’s Australia. Like Dances with Wolves, Australia purports to express enlightened attitudes towards indigenous people. In both films, the good guys (and gals) go native; the directors condemn the casual, brutal racism of the eras they portray; and they show the indigenous people as possessing spiritual attributes vastly superior to those of their white supplanters.

In fact, these movies and their relatives shift the emphasis in “noble savage” from savage to noble but keep the condescension intact, leaving films such as The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Black Robe, Smoke Signals, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Frozen River to do the real heavy lifting. However, Australia reminded me of an uncomfortable issue ignored or glossed over in both the real and virtual world: the treatment of native women by their own men.

In Australia, the grandfather of the young mixed-race protagonist looks after his grandson’s welfare by protecting him from enemies and dangers. The grandfather appears to possess magic powers that allow him to turn invisible, charm animals, travel faster on foot than whites do by car, unerringly find his way under any circumstances and in all terrains, show up whenever the boy truly needs him, and kill more efficiently with a spear than others can with a gun.

Yet the same powerful shaman lets his daughter die a gruesome, lingering death by drowning as she struggles to hide her child from the authorities that would take him to a mission school. She is a vessel for continuation, not of intrinsic worth in herself: Her father never taught his daughter to Sing or Dream, precious cultural knowledge that he’s eagerly imparting to his grandson to keep him grounded and connected to his people.

Hollywood films kill off mothers with distressing frequency, presumably so that the heroes won’t run the horrible danger of getting contaminated by excessive contact with women (aka girl cooties). But given the impact that films have on society, the positions in these films pose specific dangers to both native cultures and the relationships between them and those of the West with which they coexist. Letting the young protagonist’s mother die without a shrug — or any visible effect on him — allows film-makers and audience to ignore her cruelly inequitable treatment as the stuff of cultural fabric, unquestionable in its wisdom and perfection borne of pre-lapsarian, pre-contact mores and traditions.

Many argue that women’s position in indigenous cultures was enviable before the extreme dislocation brought on by genocide and subsequent disenfranchisement and marginalization. Yet the cultural norms prior to the arrival of colonialists with their guns and germs were a far cry from the idyll that revisionist Western directors portray. Even more tragically, the deracination brought on by the carnage of conquest gave the male survivors of the cultures a reason to grimly hang on to the least humane aspect of what defined them as men: brute dominance over those who could neither resist nor leave — namely, their women.

When the social pendulum swung from automatically denigrating native cultures to admiring them almost uncritically, the embracing was done primarily by men following the drumbeats of Robert Bly. And there is much to envy from the viewpoint of a cubicle drone, if he is male: Native men went on vision quests, hunting parties, raids. They had the privileges of carrying weapons, having initiation ceremonies, enjoying sweat lodges, speaking up in council, becoming war or peace chiefs.

While the men played, the women toiled at all the repetitious, semi-invisible tasks that keep the sun rising each morning: they raised the children, cared for the elderly, constructed the dwellings, collected the “gathering” portion of the victuals, prepared the food and clothing, cleaned up after everyone, alive or dead. They invariably ate last and least, and the most nutritious foods were forbidden to them: bananas in Polynesia, cocoa in Mesoamerica.

And if a hostile party raided, the women’s lack of weapons didn’t spare them. Women were booty — but unlike valuable livestock, they were often killed either outright or by extreme mistreatment during captivity, after the routine of being raped and witnessing the butchery of their children. In all fairness, that was also their fate in the supposedly chivalric West unless they were noble and/or rich enough to merit ransom.

The revisionist attitude, part guilt, part geopolitical convenience, part belated recognition, has resulted in “respecting traditions” by tolerating inhumanity against women in non-Western cultures — even allowing enforcement of separate, regressive family, education and healthcare laws in non-Western communities embedded within Western societies. People are called imperialists if they dare decry genital mutilation, stonings, forced marriages, honor killings. Had this viewpoint been adopted a century ago, footbinding and suttee would still be with us (though the latter continues indirectly as bride burnings).

If the West is responsible for the deracination and corruption of native cultures into caricatures of their former selves, then it must also take responsibility for the fossilized versions of the gender relations its interference allowed to persist. And if Western art wants to investigate the stories of indigenous women with verisimilitude and integrity, it owes them the respect of animating their narrative to a degree that the audience can appreciate their plight as well as their strength.

Women’s oppressed status in Western and native cultures is not going to be cured by the cinema. But one thing is certain. Filmmakers don’t do any favors to indigenous women or what is left of their cultures by depicting them either as disposable props or as immersed in unquestioning bovine pre-lapsarian bliss.

Credits: Top, Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) in Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence. Bottom, Lila (Misty Upham) and Ray (Melissa Leo) in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River.