Masks of the Red Death: Week #25 of 52 Mini-Essays Project

On masking, masklessness, being masked, MASKS

Batman and Robin. The Lone Ranger. Captain America. The Phantom of the Opera. Green Lantern. Zorro. The Dread Pirate Roberts. All of them not just masked, but half-masked—defiantly covering only the upper part of their faces. This look is useless for protection against airborne disease, yet apparently a perfectly effective disguise. (The lives and livelihoods of most of these characters depend on their not being identified.) If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then I suppose throwing them into shadow, scrambling the information coming from that part of the face, is sufficient to render the half-masked unrecognizable.¹

So why am I having so much trouble recognizing people whose eyes are out there but whose chins are covered? This fall it took me half a semester to learn my student’s names. And it’s not like I’m teaching any 200-person lectures this term: right now I have one class with 15 students and one class with seven. (No, this is not normal! Don’t worry, I am definitely still earning my salary!) It’s true that I usually struggle a bit to learn all my undergraduates’ names; it often takes me a few weeks to get them all memorized, and I always have to study the photos on the class roster to get those last few non-talkers implanted in my head. But seven weeks to learn all the names in a 15-person seminar? That is ridiculous, even for me.

Obviously it’s the masks. I hate to say it, but from the nose up the majority of my students look the same to me: thin, pretty white girls with long straight hair. I got a few names down on the first day—anyone with visible tattoos, anyone who talked. But apparently I cannot pick a silent white masked sorority girl out of a lineup. In my defense, there is clearly a lot more distinguishing facial information between the nose and the chin than any of us had realized. Maybe the fact that you can’t see people’s entire faces fucks with some reptilian part of our brains that has to do with facial recognition? Who knows. Some neuroscientist should do a study.

Even more oddly, I have discovered that my brain tends to “fill in” that masked space in ways that are usually hilariously wrong. It’s as if human faces are divided in half, top to bottom, right along the nose line, and the combination of the two halves is plain random. We’re all basically Mr. Potato Heads. So when I do see my students’ nether-faces—when they slip their masks down to drink or to make themselves heard in class (um, are you sure you’re clear on the concept here?)—I am always shocked by their appearance.² (I am not alone in this. A fellow professor friend reports that the first time she adjusted her mask in the classroom, moving it briefly away from her face, a student cried out in consternation, “That’s not what I thought you’d look like at all!”) I have no doubt that were we to stop wearing masks before the end of the semester, I would fail to recognize any of my students on the first maskless day.

• • •

There’s something about wearing masks that makes everything feel muffled (well, okay, obviously literally—but also metaphorically), like life is happening underwater or in a dream. When I’m in the classroom these days, I don’t feel fully present. If teaching on Zoom felt like talking to fish in an aquarium, teaching in masks feels like a ballet in zero G—I’m kind of floating around, waving in my students’ general direction, hoping they’re filling in the blanks between sentences they can understand.

This is kind of like what depression feels like. I guess this is probably depression.

• • •

When I watched Derek Chauvin receiving his verdict on TV I felt a stab of unwelcome sympathy for him as the decision was announced. Like anyone wearing a mask, he was all giant eyes atop a blank space that made it look like he was crying out in surprise or horror. Some ancient structure in my brain interpreted the mask as being sorry for what it had done, realizing the full implications of its actions, desperately wanting to go back in time and undo its crime, apologize to George Floyd and his family, dedicate the rest of its life to social justice, quit the police force and start a hemp farm and yoga studio. I do not mean to make this funny. It was a deeply disturbing moment. Even as a prison abolitionist who does not want to see anyone rot behind bars, I still resisted thinking of this callous neck-kneeler as a person, and oddly, weirdly, paradoxically, the mask made him more like one to me. As soon as the penitent, horrified mask was led from the courtroom I ran to my computer and Googled pictures of Derek Chauvin before the pandemic. Thank heavens the rest of his face made him look like a cold-blooded psychopath.³

• • •

Early on in the pandemic, back when it was all fun and games,⁴ someone Tweeted a joke about how we’re all like the surgeons on E.R. now, getting into our cars at the end of a long work day and impatiently ripping off our surgical masks. It was even kind of funny to see your friends in masks for the first time, like we were playing dress-up. We all felt a little self-conscious, a little histrionic even. Now if you name a friend or colleague of mine, I can instantly tell you what kind of mask they normally wear: style, color, whether they have a mask wardrobe or just wear the same kind every time.

• • •

Because I have internalized self-loathing rooted in childhood trauma, I own an Apple Watch. Every day, as is its wont, my timepiece informs me how I performed: steps taken, exercise minutes undergone, amount of restful sleep achieved, average heart rate throughout the day. On teaching days I rarely get to do any formal exercise, just walking back and forth across campus to my various classes and meetings. Yet on those days I regularly crush my movement and exercise goals, usually far more easily than on days when I work out. Is it all that pacing in front of the classroom? (The fact that my students are mostly checked out this semester means lots more performing from me—lecturing, gesticulating, cracking jokes. It’s fucking exhausting.) Or is it that I’m doing it all through a NIOSH-approved N95 mask? I think my Apple Watch misinterprets all that constricted breathing and slight hyperventilation as exercise. Maybe it is.

• • •

Every time I enter a campus building I put on my mask in what I think is the same way. I have a whole system: bookbag down, glasses off, unpinch metal nosepiece, mask over nose, first strap on back of head, second strap over the head to the neck, free hair from neck strap and fluff, pinch nosepiece, glasses back on, pick up bookbag. (Once a colleague walked by while I was performing my mask ritual and cracked, “You gotta get more efficient at that!”) Yet it’s always a complete crapshoot whether my glasses will fog up as soon as I walk inside and start talking. If they’re fogging up that means the nosepiece is not really secure, and virus could be leaking through the gap. Yet I don’t know how to fix it: pinching and re-pinching doesn’t seem to help. You either get it right during the ritual, or you don’t.

• • •

A few weeks ago we were informed that the university was going to provide free KN95 masks for faculty and staff; we just had to indicate that we wanted them. So I said yes, of course; even though I’m using N95s myself (purchased with my own money), I figured it would be good to have some on hand to give to students. A couple weeks later we received an email from our department administrator letting us know that the masks had arrived and were in our mailboxes. I was confused. How did they get a whole box or big bag of masks in each of our little mail slots? But I need not have worried, since apparently each employee has been granted one single mask. Either they don’t understand that these masks are disposable or they don’t give a flying fuck. Or maybe they’re trolling us.

I have put my one free KN95 mask on the ceramic phrenology bust I keep in my office.

• • •

The politics of masking and not-masking are so incredibly stupid, I just can’t even. I don’t have any analysis juice left for this crushing social problem. I am pretty tired.

Beth F. has a great idea: “I have this theory that they could have made masks a sign of virility, like a codpiece, and marketed them with patriarchal hetero bullshit like ‘real men protect their families,’ and we’d be better off. Then for the suburban Karen moms screaming about their kids, something equally stupid. ‘Masks for motherlove,’ or something in annoying calligraphy.”

• • •

I have friends in New England who report that people wear masks alone in their own cars, and will glare at you at stop lights if you’re sitting in your car maskless.

Here in Mississippi, some employees in stores and restaurants will pretend you’re not standing in front of them if you’re wearing a mask.

• • •

Liz M. writes: “I have occasionally gotten into arguments with my children where they insist they need a mask even when they don't! Last Saturday morning I was walking to the park with one of my sons, and I told him he did not need to wear a mask while we walked to the park, but he insisted he wanted to wear one. We argued the whole way. I'm really glad my boys are so diligent about wearing masks, but it always feels extremely weird to be trying to convince a small person to take their mask off when we can't get half the country to wear one at all. Just goes to show that there's nothing ‘natural’ about going maskless, I guess.”

Face masks: The New Natural.

• • •

The other day as I was leaving my afternoon class, just in the space of time it took me to walk from the classroom to the front door, I saw five students—inside, in the building—hanging out without masks. The first one I saw was an older Black student, talking to another Black student who was masked, and I felt uncomfortable reprimanding him so I walked on by.⁵ The next couple whizzed by me before I could react. The last two were sitting on a bench right in the lobby, maskless, on their phones (of course). Unfortunately they were going to have to bear the brunt of the first three as well. I walked up to them and sharply asked them to put their masks on. They “Yes ma’amed” me and looked startled—“Oh dear! I am as surprised and chagrined as you to notice that I seem not to be wearing a mask! How did this state of affairs come to be? I see there is a mask around my throat; perhaps a marauding gang of anti-mask desperadoes has pulled it from my face and I failed to notice until your timely reminder!”—but their reaction was almost certainly bullshit. I wonder if I had doubled back a minute later I would have caught them with their masks back down around their throats?

• • •

“A Southwest Airlines pilot was cited on alleged assault and battery last month following a dispute with a flight attendant over mask-wearing at a San Jose hotel bar. A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines confirmed that an off-duty disagreement between crew members occurred, prompting an ongoing internal investigation at the company. A spokesperson with the San Jose Police Department told USA Today that the altercation involved a disagreement over mask-wearing or masks. Less than a week after the incident occurred, Southwest sent a memo to all pilots and flight attendants highlighting the importance of civility and following the golden rule.”

So many questions. Why were a pilot and flight attendant, who presumably were not in their home city and thus still had to fly somewhere relatively soon, getting drunk in a bar? Are these people who normally have recourse to physical violence? Which one was pro-mask and which one anti? What routes do they regularly fly, so I can avoid them? And finally: What does the Golden Rule have to do with any of this?

• • •

Jill E. writes: “I do like that wearing a mask forecloses unwelcome demands from male strangers that I smile.”

Is it because they can’t tell when we’re (not) smiling? Or that they assume that we won’t, or can’t?

Can we?

1. There are very few iconic masked characters who cover only the lower halves of their faces. Hannibal Lecter is an obvious one, but he is not in disguise. He really doesn’t care if you recognize who is carving out your liver.

2. The surprise I feel upon seeing people’s nasal-chinular area for the first time is nothing, however, compared to the visceral horror I feel when I see someone’s nose hanging outside their mask. It’s like seeing someone’s naked genitals in public. I now understand a little better cultures that feel that displaying one’s hair in public is deeply shameful. It doesn’t take long to instill a new taboo.

3. His mouth is cruel. That is, his psychopathy is in the lower half of his face. I never would have believed it possible where it not for The Picture of Dorian Gray: “In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange. He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind.... The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.”

4. It was never fun and games.

5. I know this is messed up. I am still new to Mississippi and I don’t understand—at all—the cultural codes and internalized strictures around race in the Deep South. As a middle-aged white Yankee lady I feel deeply uncomfortable speaking sharply to Black students, even when they do (or don’t do) things for which I would get all peppery with white students. I know this is probably internalized racism in action, but am not sure what the lesson is: maybe I should feel uncomfortable speaking sharply to white students as well? (N.B. I don’t do it often. It always involves a student doing something openly disruptive, like using a cell phone in class or sauntering in late.)