Seven Tips From Susan Sontag for Independent Thinking
What would the intellectual powerhouse think about our culture of groupthink and self-righteousness?
If you are sitting around wondering what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment, a new collection of her writing and interviews from the ’70s about feminism, On Women, offers tantalizing glimmers and hints. Imagining Sontag, with her flair for aphorisms, unloosed on Twitter is easy: “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.” She would have thrived in the Twittersphere, though elements of its culture of groupthink and self-righteousness would have unsettled her.
In her introduction to On Women, the critic Merve Emre notes Sontag’s “refusal of easy answers or offended pieties.” Now that we are in the heyday of easy answers and offended pieties, Sontag’s stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours. This is one of those moments when smart voices from other times can offer us clarity and fresh perspectives on our own. In the spirit of Sontag’s own numbered lists and notes (the most famous of which is “Against Interpretation”), here are some tips from On Women for independent-minded readers.
By Susan Sontag
- Say what you mean. Be specific. Don’t be content with prepackaged jargon. Avoid the clichés and platitudes that blossom in undergraduate papers. Where many feminists today might say or write breezily that in our culture older women are “invisible,” “erased,” or “silenced,” citing “heteronormative” this and “problematic” that, Sontag cuts to the core of the issue. She writes in such a way that evading the truth of what she is saying is impossible; her vividness forces the reader into a confrontation with her point. In a stinging essay on “The Double Standard of Aging,” she writes: “The profoundest terror of a woman’s life is the moment represented in a statue by Rodin called Old Age: a naked old woman, seated, pathetically contemplating her flat, pendulous, ruined body. Aging in women is a process of becoming obscene sexually, for the flabby bosom, wrinkled neck, spotted hands, thinning white hair, waistless torso and veined legs of an old woman are felt to be obscene.” Rather than glossing over the taboos against aging with familiar abstractions, this unflinching description shows how they work their way deep into our psyches. She writes, “Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.”
- Look at the world honestly, even if doing so involves unearthing complex and disturbing dynamics. Avoid narratives with overly simplified villains and victims while still trying to illuminate how oppression actually works in daily life. Sontag writes, for instance, “Behind the fact that women are more severely penalized than men are for aging is the fact that people, in this culture at least, are simply less tolerant of ugliness in women than in men. An ugly woman is never merely repulsive. Ugliness in a woman is felt by everyone, men as well as women, to be faintly embarrassing.” In conversations today, most of us are more comfortable talking about things like “toxic masculinity” than about women’s participation in the policing and enforcing of oppressive beauty standards. Sontag exhibits no such fear.
- Don’t be boring. Sontag writes a colorful, slashing, attention-grabbing takedown of the institution of the family: “The modern ‘nuclear’ family is a psychological and moral disaster. It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory and a school of selfishness.”
- Resist the urge to look at history, the world, or a cultural moment through a single, overarching, oversimplifying lens. As Sontag puts it, “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded. That is its power and … that is its limitation.” One of the most fascinating exchanges in the book is between her and the poet Adrienne Rich. Rich objected to an essay Sontag wrote called “Fascinating Fascism,” on the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, because Rich felt that Sontag was writing about Nazism without paying enough attention to the oppression of women. Rich writes that “Nazi Germany was patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form.” She continues, “What are these but masculinist, virilist, patriarchal values?” Sontag sharply points out the absurdity of viewing the Nazis primarily as oppressors of women. In her cutting way, she exposes how dangerous it is for Rich to overlook the racist violence and fascism of the Nazis. Mocking Rich, Sontag writes that “all that epiphenomenal trash is nothing ‘in light of’ the real stuff, ‘patriarchal history.’” To Sontag, Rich’s well-intentioned perspective was myopic: “It is surely not treasonable to think that there are other goals than the depolarization of the two sexes, other wounds than sexual wounds, other identities than sexual identity, other politics than sexual politics—and other ‘anti-human values’ than ‘misogynistic’ ones.”
- Stop worrying so much about feelings. Sontag would not, for instance, have approved of the trigger-warning requirement that Cornell University’s student government attempted to pass in March, which would have forced professors to alert their classes to “traumatic content” of any sort. She would probably have argued that part of the thrill of intellectual exchange is being unsettled or uncomfortable or unmoored. In general, Sontag likely would not have appreciated an intellectual atmosphere that privileged feelings over rigorous thinking. Rich accused Sontag’s feminism of being “more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality.” Sontag shot back: “Anyone with a taste for ‘intellectual exercise’ will always find in me an ardent defender … I much prefer that the text be judged as an argument and not as an ‘expression’ of anything at all, my sincere feelings included.” To dispel any ambiguity, she asserted that she wouldn’t dissociate herself from feminism but that she would dissociate herself “from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (‘intellectual exercise’) and emotion (‘felt reality’).”
- Don’t overuse political language. By throwing around words like patriarchy or fascist or racist, we risk draining them of their power. Sontag writes, “If a point is to have meaning some of the time it can’t be used all of the time.”
- Be independent. One of the most interesting and subversive elements of On Women is that Sontag writes critically about “the feminists” and also writes ardent feminist reflections. She is both inside and outside the movement. The contemporary reader may very well feel impatient: “But which side are you on?” We are primed to see this shifting stance as a flaw, a weakness. But Sontag herself views this complex positioning as a strength: One can operate with total independence when one is both inside and outside a political ideology. In our political moment, people are constantly being divided into teams—woke and anti-woke, feminist and anti-feminist, racist and anti-racist—and the effort of this sorting, of castigating people who are insufficiently playing for the team, occupies a huge portion of the public discourse. And yet Sontag’s darting in and out of conversations, her movement from sharp critic of feminism to brilliant, impassioned feminist theorist and back again, is a useful reminder. A single mind working out the issues can be a powerful force, coming to its own unexpected, idiosyncratic conclusions. The striving toward ideological purity, toward consistency, toward the perfect witty expression of the totally conventional view, is something Sontag resisted early on. She wrote against a certain strain of feminism’s “demands for intellectual simplicity advanced in the name of ethical solidarity.” She always took the side of nuance, of arcane individual thought processes, over consensus. Sontag puts it succinctly: “I don’t like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.”
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