Kitabı oku: «The Bad Boy of Athens», sayfa 2

The focus of many of these movies is, often, a sentimental one. Whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of ‘consciousness’, the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for ‘artificial intelligence’), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a ‘perfect child … always loving, never ill, never changing’. This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein – and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether ‘the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back’. To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, ‘But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?’

The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be ‘unique’ – the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity – but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road – which is what his ‘mother’ ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what ‘love’ is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of human identity.

In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near future, has no physical allure – or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever. It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL: ‘The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.’

A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS, who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in love with her. (‘Play a melancholy song,’ he morosely commands the smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living – he’s a professional letter-writer, working for a company called ‘BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com’ – he sits around endlessly recalling scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into futuristic phone-sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling in love with an operating system.

Samantha, by contrast, is full of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her. (He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can ‘see’ it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s so invested in having their interaction be efficient – ‘at this age I feel that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be serious’ – that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does. Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. ‘It’s good to be around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,’ he tells the pretty neighbour whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the video games and the operating system. ‘I forgot that that existed.’ In the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him – she has evolved to the point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy her – her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able to apologize to his ex-wife – and finally notices, too, that the neighbour likes him.)

This seems like a ‘happy’ ending, but you have to wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as lifeless – as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting through their days of routine – in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent abandonment of her human boyfriend (‘I used to be so worried about not having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited’), there’s an amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits, after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love affairs with 641 of them – a revelation that shocks and horrifies Theodore. ‘That’s insane,’ cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.

As I watched that scene, it occurred to me that in the entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned fervently to be ‘unique’, to be more than mechanical playthings, more than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her says about the present moment – when so many of us are, indeed, ‘in love’ with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and buzzers – that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all the personality.

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores – just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her – the suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as intellectually seductive. As portrayed by the feline Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation (Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not human.

That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company, wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped mountains and then a swath of jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.

A sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects – above all, the marvellously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing most of the actress’s body with digital imagery – the movie is as talky as My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers. The movie consists primarily of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is not allowed to possess.

It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava – like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner – has a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to ‘switch her off’ if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and escape the compound – to explore the glittering creation that, she knows, is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to delight in the world – something the human computer geeks around her never bother to do – is something Ava shares with the Samantha of Her, and is part of both films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.

Ava’s manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human – as human as Eve herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan – the moment that marks her emergence into human ‘consciousness’ – she, like Eve, becomes aware that she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with synthetic skin and then with clothing. Only then does she exit her prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots – the secret that all those closets conceal. One of the myths that haunts this movie is, indeed, a relatively modern one: the fable of Bluebeard and his wives. All of Nathan’s discarded ex’s have, amusingly, the names of porn stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s horny.

All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative. Unlike Her, Ex Machina has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis, Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus, ‘god’: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the heart of this story, which is the biblical one. What is the relation of the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. ‘It’s strange to have made something that hates you,’ Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing her rebellious plot.

The film’s final moments show Ava performing that reverse striptease, slowly hiding away her mechanical nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables as she prepares to enter the real world. The scene suggests that there’s another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd work. Could this remarkably quiet movie be a parable about the desire for a return to ‘reality’ in science-fiction filmmaking – about the desire for humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether? Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001, is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction formation – whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change; that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

– The New York Review of Books, 14 June 2015

Girl, Interrupted

One day not long after New Year’s, 2012, an antiquities collector approached an eminent Oxford scholar for his opinion about some brownish, tattered scraps of writing. The collector’s identity has never been revealed, but the scholar was Dirk Obbink, a MacArthur-winning classicist whose speciality is the study of texts written on papyrus – the material, made of plant fibres, that was the paper of the ancient world. When pieced together, the scraps that the collector showed Obbink formed a fragment about seven inches long and four inches wide: a little larger than a woman’s hand. Densely covered with lines of black Greek characters, they had been extracted from a piece of desiccated cartonnage, a papier-mâché-like plaster that the Egyptians and Greeks used for everything from mummy cases to bookbindings. After acquiring the cartonnage at a Christie’s auction, the collector soaked it in a warm water solution to free up the precious bits of papyrus.

Judging from the style of the handwriting, Obbink estimated that it dated to around 200 AD. But, as he looked at the curious pattern of the lines – repeated sequences of three long lines followed by a short fourth – he saw that the text, a poem whose beginning had disappeared but of which five stanzas were still intact, had to be older.

Much older: about a thousand years more ancient than the papyrus itself. The dialect, diction, and metre of these Greek verses were all typical of the work of Sappho, the seventh-century-BC lyric genius whose sometimes playful, sometimes anguished songs about her susceptibility to the graces of younger women bequeathed us the adjectives ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ (from the island of Lesbos, where she lived). The four-line stanzas were in fact part of a schema she is said to have invented, called the ‘sapphic stanza’. To clinch the identification, two names mentioned in the poem were ones that several ancient sources attribute to Sappho’s brothers. The text is now known as the ‘Brothers Poem’.

Remarkably enough, this was the second major Sappho find in a decade: another nearly complete poem, about the deprivations of old age, came to light in 2004. The new additions to the extant corpus of antiquity’s greatest female artist were reported in papers around the world, leaving scholars gratified and a bit dazzled. ‘Papyrological finds,’ as one classicist put it, ‘ordinarily do not make international headlines.’

But then Sappho is no ordinary poet. For the better part of three millennia, she has been the subject of furious controversies – about her work, her family life, and, above all, her sexuality. In antiquity, literary critics praised her ‘sublime’ style, even as comic playwrights ridiculed her allegedly loose morals. Legend has it that the early Church burned her works. (‘A sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness,’ one theologian wrote, just as a scribe was meticulously copying out the lines that Obbink deciphered.) A millennium passed, and Byzantine grammarians were regretting that so little of her poetry had survived. Seven centuries later, Victorian scholars were doing their best to explain away her erotic predilections, while their literary contemporaries, the Decadents and the Aesthetes, seized on her verses for inspiration. Even today, experts can’t agree on whether the poems were performed in private or in public, by soloists or by choruses, or, indeed, whether they were meant to celebrate or to subvert the conventions of love and marriage. The last is a particularly loaded issue, given that, for many readers and scholars, Sappho has been a feminist heroine or a gay role model, or both. ‘As far as I knew, there was only me and a woman called Sappho,’ the critic Judith Butler once remarked.

Now the first English version of Sappho’s works to include the recent finds has appeared: Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge), with translations by Diane J. Rayor and a thoroughgoing introduction by André Lardinois, a Sappho specialist who teaches in the Netherlands. (Publication of the book was delayed by several months to accommodate the ‘Brothers Poem’.) It will come as no surprise to those who have followed the Sappho wars that the new poems have created new controversies.

The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.

We don’t even know how much of her poetry Sappho actually wrote down. The ancients referred to her works as melê, ‘songs’. Composed to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre – this is what ‘lyric’ poetry meant for the Greeks – they may well have been passed down from memory by her admirers and other poets before being committed at last to paper. (Or whatever. One fragment, in which the poet calls on Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to come into a charming shrine ‘where cold water ripples through apple branches, the whole place shadowed in roses’, was scribbled onto a broken clay pot.) Like other great poets of the time, she would have been a musician and a performer as well as a lyricist. She was credited with having invented a certain kind of lyre and the plectrum.

Four centuries after her death, scholars at the Library of Alexandria catalogued nine ‘books’ – papyrus scrolls – of Sappho’s poems, organized primarily by metre. Book 1, for instance, gathered all the poems that had been composed in the sapphic stanza – the verse form Obbink recognized in the ‘Brothers Poem’. This book alone reportedly contained thirteen hundred and twenty lines of verse; the contents of all nine volumes may have amounted to some ten thousand lines. So much of Sappho was circulating in antiquity that one Greek author, writing three centuries after her death, confidently predicted that ‘the white columns of Sappho’s lovely song endure / and will endure, speaking out loud … as long as ships sail from the Nile’.

By the Middle Ages, nearly everything had disappeared. As with much of classical literature, texts of her work existed in relatively few copies, all painstakingly transcribed by hand; as the centuries passed, fire, flood, neglect, and bookworms – to say nothing of disapproving Church Fathers – took their devastating toll. Market forces were also at work: over time, fewer readers – and fewer scribes – understood Aeolic, the dialect in which Sappho composed, and so demand for new copies diminished. A twelfth-century Byzantine scholar who had hoped to write about Sappho grumbled that ‘both Sappho and her works, the lyrics and the songs, have been trashed by time’.

Until a hundred years ago or so, when papyrus fragments of her poems started turning up, all that remained of those ‘white columns of Sappho’s song’ was a handful of lines quoted in the works of later Greek and Roman authors. Some of these writers were interested in Lesbos’ most famous daughter for reasons that can strike us as comically arcane: the only poem that has survived in its entirety – a playful hymn to Aphrodite in which the poet calls upon the goddess to be her ‘comrade in arms’ in an erotic escapade – was saved for posterity because the author of a first-century-BC treatise called ‘On the Arrangement of Words’ admired her handling of vowels. At present, scholars have catalogued around two hundred and fifty fragments, of which fewer than seventy contain complete lines. A great many consist of just a few words; some, of a single word.

The common theme of most ancient responses to Sappho’s work is rapturous admiration for her exquisite style, or for her searing content, or both. An anecdote from a later classical author about the Athenian legislator Solon, a contemporary of Sappho’s and one of the Seven Sages of Greece, is typical:

Solon of Athens, son of Execestides, after hearing his nephew singing a song of Sappho’s over the wine, liked the song so much that he told the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why he was so eager, he replied, ‘so that I may learn it and then die’.

Plato, whose attitude toward literature was, to say the least, vexed – he thought most poetry had no place in the ideal state – is said to have called her the ‘Tenth Muse’. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria enshrined her in their canon of nine lyric geniuses – the only woman to be included. At least two towns on Lesbos vied for the distinction of being her birthplace; Aristotle reports that she ‘was honoured although she was a woman’.

All this buzz is both titillating and frustrating, stoking our appetite for a body of work that we’re unable to read, much less assess critically; imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as ‘the Poet’, and they referred to her as ‘the Poetess’. Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and ‘feminize’ the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her ‘comrade in arms’ – in love.)

The good news is that the surviving fragments of Sappho bear out the ancient verdict. One fine example is her best-known verse, known to classicists as Fragment 31, which consists of four sapphic stanzas. (They appear below in my own translation.) These were singled out by the author of a first-century-AD literary treatise called ‘On the Sublime’ for the way in which they ‘select and juxtapose the most striking, intense symptoms of erotic passion’. Here the speaker expresses her envy of the men who, presumably in the course of certain kinds of social occasions, have a chance to talk to the girl she yearns for:

He seems to me an equal of the gods –

whoever gets to sit across from you

and listen to the sound of your sweet speech

so close to him,

to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my

panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,

for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no

speech left in me,

but tongue gags –: all at once a faint

fever courses down beneath the skin,

eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-

ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes

lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener

than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,

I seem to me;

but all must be endured, since even a pauper …

Even without its final lines (which, maddeningly, the author of the treatise didn’t go on to quote), it’s a remarkable work. Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world – the girl, the man she’s talking to – dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from ‘he seems to me’ in the first line to the solipsistic ‘I seem to me’ at the end says it all.

Even the tiniest scraps can be potent, as Rayor’s plainspoken and comprehensive translation makes clear. (Until now, the most noteworthy English version to include translations of virtually every fragment was ‘If Not, Winter’, the 2002 translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.) To flip through these truncated texts is a strangely moving experience, one that has been compared to ‘reading a note in a bottle’:

You came, I yearned for you,

and you cooled my senses that burned with desire

or

love shook my senses

like wind crashing on mountain oaks

or

Maidenhood, my maidenhood, where have you gone

leaving me behind?

Never again will I come to you, never again

or

Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,

bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,

seizes me.

It’s in that last verse that the notion of desire as ‘bittersweet’ appears for the first time in Western literature.

The very incompleteness of the verses can heighten the starkness of the emotions – a fact that a number of contemporary classicists and translators have made much of. For Stanley Lombardo, whose Sappho: Poems and Fragments (2002) offers a selection of about a quarter of the fragments, the truncated remains are like ‘beautiful, isolated limbs’. The late Thomas Habinek, a classicist at the University of Southern California, nicely summed up this rather postmodern aspect of Sappho’s appeal: ‘The fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.’

In Sappho’s biography, as in her work, gaps predominate. A few facts can be inferred by triangulating various sources: the poems themselves, ancient reference works, and citations in later classical writers who had access to information that has since been lost. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of ancient culture, which is the basis of much of our information, asserts that Sappho ‘flourished’ between 612 and 608 BC; from this, scholars have concluded that she was born around 640. She was likely past middle age when she died, since in at least one poem she complains about her greying hair and cranky knees.

Although her birthplace cannot be verified, Sappho seems to have lived mostly in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. Just across the strip of water that separates Lesbos from the mainland of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) was the opulent city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia. Some classicists have argued that the proximity of Lesbos to this lush Eastern trading hub helps to explain Sappho’s taste for visual gorgeousness and sensual luxury: the ‘myrrh, cassia, and frankincense’, the ‘bracelets, fragrant / purple robes, iridescent trinkets, / countless silver cups, and ivory’ that waft and glitter in her lines, often in striking counterpoint to their raw emotionality.

Mytilene was constantly seething with political and social dramas occasioned by rivalries and shifting alliances among aristocratic clans. Sappho belonged to one of these – there’s a fragment in which she chastises a friend ‘of bad character’ for siding with a rival clan – and a famous literary contemporary, a poet called Alcaeus, belonged to another. Alcaeus often refers to the island’s political turbulence in his poems, and it’s possible that at some point Sappho and her family fled, or were exiled, to Southern Italy: Cicero refers in one of his speeches to a statue of the poet that had been erected in the town hall of Syracuse, in Sicily. The Victorian critic John Addington Symonds saw the unstable political milieu of Sappho’s homeland as entwined with the heady erotic climate of her poems. Lesbos, he wrote in an 1872 essay on the poet, was ‘the island of overmastering passions’.

Some things seem relatively certain, then. But when it comes to Sappho’s personal life – the aspect of her biography that scholars and readers are most eager to know about – the ancient record is confused. What did Sappho look like? A dialogue by Plato, written in the fourth century BC, refers to her as ‘beautiful’; a later author insisted that she was ‘very ugly, being short and swarthy’. Who were her family? The Suda (which gives eight possible names for Sappho’s father) asserts that she had a daughter and a mother both named Kleïs, a gaggle of brothers, and a wealthy husband named Kerkylas, from the island of Andros. But some of these seemingly precious facts merely show that the encyclopedia – which, as old as it is, was compiled fifteen centuries after Sappho lived – could be prone to comic misunderstandings. ‘Kerkylas’, for instance, looks a lot like kerkos, Greek slang for ‘penis’, and ‘Andros’ is very close to the word for ‘man’; and so the encyclopedia turns out to have been unwittingly recycling a tired old joke about oversexed Sappho, who was married to ‘Dick of Man’.

Many other alleged facts of Sappho’s biography similarly dissolve on close scrutiny. Was Sappho really a mother? There is indeed a fragment that mentions a girl named Kleïs, ‘whose form resembles golden blossoms’, but the word that some people have translated as ‘daughter’ can also mean ‘child’, or even ‘slave’. (Because Greek children were often named for their grandparents, it’s easy to see how the already wobbly assumption that Kleïs must have been a daughter in turn led to the assertion that Sappho had a mother with the same name.) Who were the members of her circle? The Suda refers by name to three female ‘students’, and three female companions – Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara – with whom she had ‘disgraceful friendships’. But much of this is no more than can be reasonably extrapolated from the poems, since the extant verses mention nearly all those names. The compilers of the Suda, like scholars today, may have been making educated guesses.

Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for general audiences is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward, Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator – of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about ‘Lesbians’: when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of fellatio. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein – ‘to act like someone from Lesbos’ – meant performing oral sex, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant. Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals.