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    My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection

    There's an interesting debate at slate about whether Sara O Holla's tumblr "MyHusband's Stupid Record Collection" is inadvertently sexist because it confirms the stereotype of only men being music nerds.*

    In our culture we do tend to associate men with the nerdly characteristic of getting overly enthusiastic about some narrow area and then trying to become frighteningly completist with respect to it. If we didn't have that association we wouldn't have the locution "nerd girl" (for more info, see the funny tumblr "Nerd Girl Problems") If you just call a guy a nerd you don't have to say "nerd boy."

    I think that these stereotypes might have a little bit to do with why women are underrepresetned in philosophy. There's not much difference between a music nerd reclassifying his sixteen boxes of LPs and someone organizing the dialectical space around everything anyone has ever said about Fitch's Paradox.


    Part of why I'm interested in this stuff is because I'm a father, and I see so many of my students who are afraid to be passionate about anything because of the hegemony of cool.** I don't want my kids to turn out so paralyzed. Michael Chabon talks about this very issue with respect to his four daughters in Manhood for Amateurs. He desperately wants them to be unembarrassed about cultivating passionate interest in aspects of the world. To accomplish this he started "The Doctor Who Project." If he could get his daughters to become Dr. Who completists then they would be willing to cultivate their own interests autonomously. In the book he describes it as having worked. I think I'm going to try the same thing with my son and daughter.

    [*For a counterexample, see Robin James' awesome comment on this thread about a reading group, and check out her cool blog.

    **There was a brief period during the Clinton administration tech. bubble where just about everyone convinced themselves that nerdiness was the new cool (cf. Richard Florida's "The Creative Class"). The Bush administration (populated by people who beat up nerds in school and felt no retroactive shame for having done so) showed the Clinton thing to have been a work all along. It was just one more way to get people who were doing the actual labor to go along with other people reaping the rewards. Even though it was a work, I'm a little nostalgic for it. When you taught Honors Introduction to Philosophy you'd get all these idiosyncratic people just following their own bliss. Since the tech bust you increasingly get pre-med students just worried about getting an A. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bummer that our culture doesn't produce as much of the other type any more.]

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    7 responses to “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection”

    1. Yan Avatar
      Yan

      I’m trying to decide why I find the critical response to that tumblr uncomfortable or disheartening.
      On the one hand: of course it’s great to encourage nerdy, passionate kids to let their freak flags fly. And of course the nerd=male stereotype can be harmful and shouldn’t be actively promoted. And of course the form of “cool” that suppresses all passionate enthusiasm and activity is a bad thing.
      On the other hand, 1. I think there are healthy and not so healthy forms and expressions of nerdism, and that the concept of “cool” cuts across them in complicated ways.
      I’ll take my own as an example, book collecting. It is something I am extraordinarily interested in and devote a lot of time, energy, and money to. I don’t think it’s really a case of “cultivating” a passion in the positive sense. It’s not so much a passion because I don’t experience it as something I “want” or “desire” to do, but am compelled to do. For the same reason it’s not a matter of cultivating some skill or excellence, but closer to being tyrannized–other things I do have a passion for suffer from this exaggerated devotion to what is in my personality as a whole only a minor source of joy and satisfaction. It takes the form of a quantitative completism (owning every edition and format of every book) that is indifferent to the qualititative aspects that gave me pleasure in the activity in the first place (which edition, which binding, which font, which illustrations?).
      I think for many, whether applied accurately or fairly or not, the concept of nerdism is meant as a critique of these kinds of passions. It is not from the standpoint of “cool”, but in defense of the most fulfilling and satisfying and life giving passions. I get much more, for example, from my passion for reading than I do from my passion for book-collecting, and I suppress the latter precisely in order to cultivate the former.
      So, 2) I think the tumblr in question is a critique of cool on behalf of real passion. What’s wonderful about it is that the author focuses attention on the qualitative content of the albums, the real pleasure and excitement and joy that may or may not bring. In doing so she rightly, I think, implies a critique of a certain kind of nerdism that her partner engages in: a quantitative preoccupation with total, exhaustive expertise and knowledge that overlooks and undermines qualitative pleasure, ironically undermining the passion that lead to that desire for knowledge: the passion for music. I think that there is a very dangerous kind of “nerd-cool” that she’s exposing here, a passion-thwarting form of power/status/rep that masquerades as passion.
      And I worry that the claim that the tumblr promotes sexism misses this, especially since I think nerd-cool is tied to certain sexist elements in nerd-culture.

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      This all scans to me. I should have noted that I adored O Holla’s reviews of all three Adam and the Ants records (original issue of “Dirk Wears White Sox”), and think she really does get what’s great about that weird band. I also like how she defended herself in today’s post.
      As far as the completist’s curse, I think you’re right, but I want to add a Nietzschean complication. I think some of Nietzsche’s greatest wisdom (to be fair, probably lifted from Schopenhauer) concerns how it’s sometimes impossible to sever the bad from the good. If I could extricate the clinical levels of anxiety and assorted neuroses from my life, I would do it in a New York second, but if that had magically been done when I was younger I wouldn’t even recognize myself today. I certainly wouldn’t have a job where I get to read all these cool books all the time and learn from so many interesting colleagues and students. Maybe something similar holds with respect to nerd completism and genuine, valuable passion for some of us?

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    3. Robin James Avatar
      Robin James

      Hi Jon–Thanks for the very kind shout-out! It’s also worth noting that music theory may be the one humanities field with fewer women than philosophy. I tried to find the report where I saw some empirical evidence of this, but after about 10 minutes of Googling, no luck. However, I was talking to some women music theorists and musicologists last weekend, and they anecdotally affirmed that intuition. (Which I brought up bc I was the only woman on a panel with 2 other men, who were both music theorists).
      It’s interesting to note the parallels between music theory and composition, as an academic field, and analytic philosophy, as an academic field. I pretty much buy McCumber’s claim that “analytic philosophy” was in part a defense against McCarthyism. There’s a similar depoliticizing argument for specialization made in composer Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares If You Listen.” Here’s the essay: https://courses.unt.edu/josephklein/files/babbitt.pdf
      Some day, when I’m finished with the projects I”m working on now, I want to more carefully follow through that comparison, but for now all I can do is gesture toward the similarities.
      For some ethnomusicological research on gender and record collecting, Will Straw’s essay “Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture” is a great place to start. It’s in Shelia Whiteley’s “Sexing the Groove”: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415146712/ref=rdr_ext_sb_ti_sims_1

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    4. Yan Avatar
      Yan

      Jon, the Nietzschean point about the impossibility of severing the bad and the good is a fair one. I’ll admit that it’s a bit simplistic to draw a stark divide between good and bad passions, or between authentic and inauthentic passions, especially since any passion, as passion, is detrimental to others, demanding more of my time and attention.
      So, allowing for that complication, I think we can also allow for the complication that we can’t draw a stark line between nerd and cool.
      And I’d add the further complication that even when nerdism is overall a good thing (because the goods are inseparable from any bads), that doesn’t justify diminishing non-nerdist forms of appreciation, which is not uncommon among those who take their nerdism to excess, and is, I think, an implied premise of much of the criticism of the tumblr.
      I’m a music nerd myself, as well as a visual arts nerd. I can analyze, historically skewer, and pontificate about a film or a painting to with an inch of its life. But I’m also fully capable of appreciating them cold, encountering them for the first time without drawing on my nerdly expertise.
      And I actually prefer that initial “layman’s” encounter, even while I also prefer that my appreciation not end there, that it be supplemented with a more sophisticated take. So I’m annoyed that the tumblr is treated condescendingly, when what it’s doing isn’t simply okay (if you don’t have the ability to do better), but a very valuable endeavor in its own right, calling heightened attention to the core experience that expertise is applied to and that is, in the end, more valuable than expertise.
      I’m also a bit annoyed because I think it might involve an uncritical form of feminism that is in danger of taking for granted the values of the sexist culture it’s critiquing. In oversimplified form: if men say being a nerd’s good, then it’s bad for women not to be nerds, or at least cannot be bad for them to be. But what if nerdism is sometimes ethical or politically problematic?
      Another interesting take on the hubub here:
      http://jezebel.com/oh-the-unbelievable-shit-you-get-writing-about-music-a-1547444869/+TracyMoore

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    5. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Oh wow this is great.
      Yeah, I agree with you 100% about the necessity of losing yourself in the art and preserving the lay appreciation. It’s part of why I and I think her husband enjoy the tumblr, because it’s a chance to rehear these bands.
      With Noel Carroll I think that the neo-Kantian glorification of complexity and difficulty in art is mistaken and destructive. In his book “A Philosophy of Mass Art” he skewers Frankfurt School critics and post-modern defenders of mass art for accepting this bad premise (it ends up giving people bad taste, equating literary quality with the kind of complexity that makes for good critical work on the literature). Some of the defenses of Sport on the other thread came close to the postmodernist defenses.
      But I think you’ve located why it’s an important facet for aesthetic appreciation itself, not just a misreading of Kant as Carroll shows.

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    6. Dan Dennis Avatar
      Dan Dennis

      Related to what you write: A recent post at Feminist Philosophers discussed a report claiming that women are more prone to drop out of a subject when they got not so good grades, whereas men are more likely to continue with a subject simply because they are interested in it, regardless of grades…
      The discussion then speculated about whether this made women less likely to stick with philosophy, where getting good grades is particularly difficult…

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    7. Yan Avatar
      Yan

      I’ve read a bit of Carroll, but not “A Philosophy of Mass Art.” Thanks for that, I’ll have to look for it!

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