Monthly Archives: May 2004

Remembering Gloria Anzaldua

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Gloria Anzaldua, a pioneering figure in Chicana feminism and queer studies, died last week of complications from diabetes. An obituary can be found here.

In the field of Chicana literature and history, Anzaldua was a giant. In 1981, wiith Cherrie Moraga (from whom I took classes at Cal), she edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. In 1987, she published La Frontera/Borderlands.

The title poem included the memorable searing lines:

Cuando vives en la frontera
people walk through you, wind steals your voice,
you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat
forerunner of a new race,
half and half – both woman and man, neither-
a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht
eat whole wheat tortillas
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border check points…

The obit in the Times drily notes:

The author’s intensely personal style broke the conventions of scholarly writing and kept her outside the mainstream of academia, a position that Anzaldua, who published widely in alternative journals, did not seem to regret.

I know that my own desire to infuse the classroom with personal narratives was rooted in my own response to Chicana/Latina feminist writers and academics like Anzaldua, Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Norma Alarcon. More than their “white” sisters, they refused to de-legitimate emotion and personal experience. In 1990, Anzaldua wrote:

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women-of-color. Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus we need teorías that will enable us to interpret what happens in the world, that will explain how and why we relate to certain people in specific ways, that will reflect what goes on between inner, outer and peripheral ‘I’s within a person and between the personal ‘I’s and the collective ‘we’ of our ethnic communities. Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries-new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. We need theories that will points out ways to maneuver between our particular experiences and the necessity of forming our own categories and theoretical models for the patterns we uncover. We need theories that examine the implications of situations and look at what’s behind them. And we need to find practical application for those theories. We need to de-academize theory and to connect the community to the academy. ‘High’ theory does not translate well when one’s intention is to communicate to masses of people made up of different audiences. We need to give up the notion that there is a ‘correct’ way to write theory.

It’s a big loss.

“Keeping score”, learning to “hit it”, and settling for second best

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David at Sed Contra links to this article from Friday’s Washington Post: “Score Card: For Some Young Women, Love Is a Numbers Game.”

It begins thus:

Some young women keep it in their head, others in a drawer of their bedside table. One even preserves it on a spreadsheet in her laptop.

We’re talking about “the number,” that sum of sex partners that college women either have had or hope to goodness they can avoid reaching. In the highly sexualized atmosphere of campus, a number gives them something to compare and dish about with their close girlfriends.

It’s not a particularly enlightening article, and I note that the students surveyed in the article seemed to be mostly white, middle-class girls at northeastern four-year universities. But what I did find striking was that the article makes an explicit connection between long-term career plans and an increase in promiscuity:

The search for the one man who will lead them to forsake all others is a process that will take longer for many young women than it did for their mothers. With college, graduate school, study abroad, or job changes ahead of them, “it doesn’t make sense to start a serious relationship in college,” says Susan Harrison, a senior at Brown University who keeps a mental list of her partners.

Anticipating these years on their own, the women begin indulging in short-term flings while worrying about bumping their number up beyond an acceptable limit.

The number of women who head off to college in search of what was once called the “MRS degree” has dropped sharply, and perhaps that is a good thing. What troubles me is the conviction that serious relationships are an impediment to (rather than a vehicle for) one’s personal growth. One thing I hear over and over and over from my best and brightest female students is “I don’t have time for a serious relationship”. What I always gently ask them is: “When do you think you will have time? When you finish with grad school? When you are half-way up the corporate ladder?” In this intensely competitive society, when is — exactly — a “convenient” time for a relationship? I often ask them what the ideal age is to have their first child; more than half now say “over 30″. (They are astonishingly confident about their own ability to get “pregnant on demand”, no matter how old they are. They can’t conceive — pun intended — of the fertility problems that come with postponing children. Ah, youth.)

But even if they do get the MBA at 28, marry Mr. Right at 30, and have the baby at 32, how on earth do they expect the arrival of a child in one’s 30s (when they are just starting, with luck, to “make it” in their chosen profession) to be any less inconvenient? They have a ready answer: “I want to wait to have a child because I want the financial resources to be able to take care of a child on my own.” And almost invariably, they add “And I don’t want to depend on a man.” Bingo. There’s the rub.

I have enraged a few folks in my classes and in the blogosphere by suggesting that much (not all) of the modern feminist movement has its roots in a “profound disappointment in men.” That does not mean that if men were perfectly reliable, every woman would be thrilled to pursue a life of happy Victorian domesticity! But it does mean that an enduring legacy of irresponsible male behavior (modeled with particular gusto by certain baby boomer men) has led an entire generation of women to conclude that trusting a man is a particularly bad investment.

Getting back to the whole “keeping score” business, to give one’s body to one man is to take an enormous emotional risk. To give one’s body to ten — or twenty or more — and to see oneself as a “player” in one’s own right: that is to render oneself emotionally numb, and hence invulnerable (the best article on this I’ve seen is the marvelous “Hooking up, Hanging Out and Hoping for Mr. Right”, available in PDF file right here.) The current phrase my high schoolers use to describe random sexual encounters is “hit it and quit it”. (The feminist in me has been very unhappy with the recent adoption of the verb “to hit” to describe sexual activity; then again, given the state of the situation between the sexes, it may be apropos). My female students, like the hip-hop artists they seem to idolize, love to talk boldly about “hitting it”; the sense of power they seem to feel when they use that masculine and aggressive language is palpable! I may be wrong, but whenever I read or hear this kind of talk, the phrase “whistling in the graveyard” comes to mind. Even in this relatively breezy Washington Post piece, I can feel the anxiety and the uncertainty dripping through the words of these young women. I am absolutely convinced that when my younger sisters compile their lists and brag about their conquests, that they are doing so because they have made a conscious or unconscious decision to settle for second best.

I can tell you this much, I’m looking forward to reading what these young women have to say about their lives and their choices twenty or thirty years from now. For their sakes, I hope that when the bravado vanishes and the numbness wears off, the regrets will be few.

Chinnie trouble

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My birthday got off to quite a calamitous start. Friday night, I came home from my small group meeting, and promptly took Matilde the chinchilla out to play. As I was lying on the bedroom floor, engrossed in (of all things) National Geographic magazine, I lost sight of her for a moment. The next thing I knew, I heard a thump and a strange whine; Matilde had chewed through the electrical cord for the clock radio by our bedside and had shocked herself badly. She was lying limp on the floor, still connected to the cord, and I had to gently pry her teeth away from the wires (receiving a nasty shock myself). At first, she was barely breathing, but within minutes, as I caressed her desperately, Matilde (or Matty, as we like to call her) began very gingerly to move herself.

My girlfriend was still out, and so I bundled my poor chin into a paper grocery sack (we don’t have a carrier for her), and raced off to the pet hospital (after calling three places to find a vet on duty at that hour who knew something about chinchillas). By the time we got down to South Pasadena and the medical center, Matilde was furiously trying to climb out of the sack, which I took as an excellent sign. My girlfriend arrived not long thereafter, and we were both able to meet with the vet and receive some reassurance. Midnight and the start of my 38th year of life found us sitting in front of Matilde’s oxygen tank (a necessary step after electrocution, apparently), trying to comfort her and each other.

Matilde came home on Saturday, and is still quite weak and a bit groggy. She has flashes of playfulness, but tires easily. She is eating very little, and we are worried that we may have to take her back into the hospital if she doesn’t come back on her food soon. We also are forced to give her medication several times a day, and she loathes the process.

It was an anxious weekend, and I am still more than a little stressed at the start of the week. If I get this frantic about a chinchilla, I can only imagine how I will respond to a child! In any event, lots of grading to do this week — it’s our last full week of classes, and thus blogging may indeed be light.

Birthdays and a lengthy Friday musing on my old women’s studies textbook

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I had hoped to have broadband internet service at home by today; alas, I miscommunicated with my cable company, and it is to be installed next Friday afternoon. Hence, no blogging until Monday.

Today is Candace‘s birthday, please wish her many happy returns; tomorrow is mine. The question I have is whether I can still consider 37 to be my “mid-thirties”. I suspect not.

For my birthday, I would like to be able to run again. I had my third visit to the doctor in two weeks about my chronic coughing. It is getting better, but not nearly as fast as I would like. I’m back on another course of Prednisone, which makes me desperately hungry and keeps me awake at night. Still, I’m coughing less and less each day, and feel certain that with just a bit more rest, I will be back to a nice training schedule. I’m thinking about doing the Chicago Marathon in the autumn.

Anne has a fine post on “The Body and the Boys”; she touches on the rise of eating disorders and make-up consumption among American men. Anne asks:

Should we, in fact, be hailing the advent of cosmetics for boys as another step in gender-bending? Are we erasing the confines of traditional sex roles and allowing humanity to redefine itself as “people” where gender is a facet of the person but not the overriding, controlling factor?

And then does a nice job of capturing the complexity of the answer:

Idealistically, I approve of the idea of people being “free” to act as they wish (short of harming another) and to express themselves as individuals.

Realistically, we’re not to be trusted with that kind of freedom and, in fact, most of us wouldn’t be at all happy that way. Not only are most people herd animals, happiest within the confines of a society where they understand the rules and feel accepted and secure, but most of us wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with that kind of freedom. It would cause untold stress for most of us to be nearly required to act differently than those around us.

I like her conclusion but am rather uncomfortable with the way it’s phrased.

But Anne has got me thinking about contemporary feminist theory and practice, and about my own early experiences as a student in women’s studies classes in the mid-1980s. It was then and is still axiomatic in the secular world of gender studies that traditional sex roles are prisons from which both men and women must be liberated as quickly as possible. The “brave new world” of interchangeable sexual identities can’t arrive fast enough. When I took women’s studies back in the 80s, this was the sort of thing we all swallowed eagerly:

“The sexual division of labor — until recently, universal — need not, and in my opinion, should not, survive in industrial society. Prolonged child care ceases to be a basis for female subordination when artificial birth control, spaced births, small families, patent feeding, and communal nurseries allow it to be shared by men. Automation and cybernation remove most of the heavy work for which women are less well equipped than men. The exploitation of women that came with the rise of the state and of class society will presumably disappear in post-state, classless society — for which the technological and scientific basis already exists.”

This charming amalgam of Aldous Huxley and Karl Marx comes from my first undergrad text book in women’s studies: Women: A Feminist Perspective (1984 edition) by Jo Freeman. I still cling to it loyally. (Most modern feminist texts don’t seem to talk about cybernation anymore; perhaps we have stopped believing robots are the solution.)

And we also imbibed this sort of thing (from the same textbook):

The varied sex-role assignments given to men and women in different cultures suggest that the basic characteristics of men and women are not biologically determined; rather, they are based on cultural definitions of sex-appropriate behavior. Since we have no reason to assume that the biological makeup of men and women in other societies differs from that of men and women in the United States in any basic way, the observed differences betwen these cultures and our own in sex-related behavior seems to be culturally determined.

And then, near the end of the text, this ringing declaration:

“Women now face the challenge of balancing their socialization to gratify the needs of others with the new imperatives to put their own needs first — in both family and at work.“

The first quotation notes the means by which societal transformation will take place, the second explains that “nature” is not an impediment to those changes, and the third explains the movement’s ultimate goal (at least as it existed within upper middle-class secular academic feminism in the 1980s). Obviously, not all feminists then or now see putting women’s “own needs first” as the central tenet of the movement, but this last quotation is broadly representative of 1980s majority opinion.

I realize I’m asking the reader to unpack a lot very quickly. But for my own part, I remain troubled by any movement that sees communal nurseries and patent feeding (lots of infant formula, I presume, instead of that awful breast milk) as superior to devoted care from one mother and her own flesh. And I’m alienated by the description of a life of service and of nurturing as merely “gratifying the needs of others”.

I’m grateful that in recent years, gender studies has begun to move away from its earlier reliance on socialization and culture as the explanation for all sexual difference. Increasingly, thankfully, the role of biology (what some of us subversively like to call natural and intelligent design) is being given its due. But gender studies departments are staffed by folks who came of age with texts like Freeman’s, and not all have rethought their allegiance to the gods of individual autonomy, personal choice, and the glory of putting one’s “own needs first.”

Counting the Cost

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That fellow Craig from the Gilligan’s Island show isn’t taking no for an answer. He just left another message on my answering machine at work.

And before I forget, let me plug a new (to me) blog: David Morrison’s Sed Contra. He’s a Typepad guy, and here is his unique “about me” description:

David Morrison is the author of this web log and the book Beyond Gay, which Our Sunday Visitor press published in 1999 and which is still in print.

He is also the found and moderator of Courage Online, an online support community for men and women living with some degree of same sex attraction who wish to do so chastely.

Throughout his career so far David has written on human rights issues, population issues, pro-life issues and chastity issues. In addition to this web log and the writing for his day job, David speaks and writes on chastity and identity issues.

It’s been a while since I’ve waded into the complex world of “ex-gay” and “beyond gay” ministries and counseling. I’ve had a great many friends and acquaintances on all sides of that fascinating issue, and I think I need to work up a post on all that soon.

David Morrison has obviously counted the cost of discipleship. Speaking of counting the cost, the Mennonite Weekly Review has this story about Kidron, Ohio’s Central Christian School:

Amid a wave of patriotism surrounding the war in Iraq, Central Christian School’s practice of not playing the national anthem at sporting events apparently has exacted a high toll.

In the past year, dozens of students have withdrawn. Next fall, resulting layoffs will shrink the school’s staff.

Superintendent Frederic Miller said in the past year the Ohio Mennonite Conference school has lost about 50 students, primarily because of its adherence to Mennonite peace teachings.

This is not an isolated incident:

At Iowa Mennonite School near Kalona, Iowa, Principal Wilbur Yoder said the school has been stripped of its right to host state sports tournaments because of complaints about the anthem not being played there. Yoder said the school hosted a boys’ basketball tournament earlier this year, but only because it had been asked to do so before the anthem issue arose.

Next year, he said, this is sure to change.

If you want to donate (Central Christian is doing heavy fundraising to save staff positions and make up for the drop in enrollment) the link at which to do so is here.

Whether you donate or not, read the whole article. It got my pacifist knickers in a fine old twist, but it made me damned proud to be a Mennonite (even if most Mennonites don’t put “damn” on their blogs).

“Gilligan’s Island” and the seductive call of reality TV

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Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call in my office from a very cheerful man named Craig, representing an outfit called “Next Entertainment”. Craig is in charge of casting the latest reality show — a new version of Gilligan’s Island. Yes, there is a website for prospective competitors. The idea is to find authentic versions of the characters from the original 1960s TV show; they want a “real-life skipper, first mate, millionaire couple, movie star, professor and Kansas farm girl” for what will be a “Survivor-style” show set on a small island in the Pacific. Well, Craig has apparently been put in charge of hunting down “real” Los Angeles-area college professors, and he found me through Rate my Professors and this blog. He urged me to come in to his company’s Sherman Oaks offices for a video interview.

I’ll confess it: I was flattered and tempted. The mere fact that he called to ask me to come in made me happy, though I have absolutely no intention of following up. Craig schmoozed me so well, said such nice and complimentary things, and seemed convinced to the depths of his soul that I might well be the one professor they were looking for; by the end of our chat, I felt as if I were personally letting him down by declining to come in. I have neither the time nor the desire to go through what would no doubt be a truly humbling and unpleasant audition process, and even if I were chosen (I can’t imagine that really happening), I don’t want to be on an island for a month away from my girlfriend, my mountain trails, and my chinchilla! (The superficiality factor was high: Craig asked if the pictures he found on my blog were accurate, how tall I was, and so forth. More sleazily, he asked if I was married, and was pleased when I said no. When I said I had a girlfriend, he said “Well, that’s okay.” One wonders.)

Yet I’d be lying through my teeth if I wrote that I didn’t spend a few delicious moments fantasizing about temporary fame and modest fortune! I don’t watch reality TV (except for two horrific episodes of I Want a Famous Face), but like so many folks in greater L.A., I’ve spent years alternately repelled and fascinated by what is generally called “the industry.” Part of me is curious about what it would be like at my age to go through the process of trying to get on a television show, but the better part of me knows that I ought to keep my distance. Still, for fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon, I mused idly about things I had never fantasized about before.

By all means, if any readers here meet the requirements, do apply and let me know what happens.

Men, war, and victimhood

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In a great comment on my post on Feminism and Abu Ghraib, Amy asked:

Hugo, are you worried about what the military will do to men? And if not, why not? If I may ask…

Valid questions indeed! I am always leery of those who seek to protect women from hardship and suffering and war by saying “men are better equipped to handle those sorts of things.” It’s not that I dispute the existence of innate difference! Surely, most young men are physically stronger than most women of the same age. But what troubles me is the denial that men, including soldiers, can be victimized and traumatized. From a pacifist standpoint, war falls short of the mark regardless of the sex of the combatants. From the standpoint of gender studies work, arguing for the exclusion of women from combat because men are somehow impervious to trauma does both men and women a profound disservice. There’s an old bumpersticker: “War is not healthy for children and other living things”. Well, men are living things.

I’m quite insistent on the point that men can be victims. On an only tangentially related note, I ws immensely troubled by reaction to the Mary Kay Letourneau case. (She was the Washington state school teacher who had a sexual relationship with her 14 year-old male student). Time and time again, I heard the same lines: “He (the boy) was lucky”; “He wanted it as much as she did”; “I wish that had happened to me”, and so forth. While we all seemed to be perplexed as to why a married woman in her mid 30s would desire a boy in his early teens, the notion that the boy could have been traumatized and violated to the same degree that a 14 year-old girl would have been by a male teacher seemed ludicruous. Both men and women seem reluctant to see boys or men as capable of being victimized. We minimize male trauma, whether it be inflicted on an adolescent (ala the Letourneau case) or on adult men in combat.

As a feminist man and as a Christian, I am increasingly aware that all humans are complex, vulnerable, broken creatures. Yes, adults must answer the call to be responsible. Yes, Christians must answer the call to take up the cross. Suffering will happen in this world despite our best efforts to avoid it. Those of us who aren’t pacifists believe that sometimes, suffering must be inflicted on a few to prevent even greater suffering from being inflicted on the many. Perhaps that’s true. But let’s let go of our precious illusions about men as invulnerable, and let’s recognize that real war when fought by real human beings scars everyone involved down to the depths of their soul.

Feminism and Abu Ghraib

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Barbara Ehrenreich and Phyllis Schlafly, two stalwarts on opposite sides of the feminist fence, weighed in this week on the role of the three women guards (Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman) in the Abu Ghraib scandal. In the Los Angeles Times, Ehrenreich wrote:

The photos did something to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species’ tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.

But it’s not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral edge — or simply the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence, was more or less beyond debate.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman — a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military — is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle — the struggle for gender equality — when in fact we have many more. (Bold emphases are Hugo’s)

Meanwhile, dear old Phyllis Schlafly opines:

The pictures are stark illustrations of the gender experimentation that has been going on in the U.S. military. The images have lifted the curtain on a subject about which the public has largely been kept in the dark.

When he was still in office, Former President William Jefferson Clinton made clear his contempt for our military, but the Clintonista feminazis were more focused in their disdain. They were determined to give us a gender-neutral military or, as one of their representatives said, an “un-gendered” military.

That goal means masculinizing women and feminizing men… The result is a breakdown of military discipline and a dramatic coarsening of women and of men’s treatment of women.

I suspect that the picture of the woman soldier with a noose around the Iraqi man’s neck will soon show up on the bulletin boards of women’s studies centers and feminist college professors. That picture is the radical feminists’ ultimate fantasy of how they dream of treating men. Less radical feminists will quietly cheer the picture as showing career-opportunity proof that women can be just as tough as men in dealing with the enemy.

The gap between Phyllis’ expectation of feminist reaction and Ehrenreich’s more accurate understanding of the feminist response was too good to ignore! What I appreciated most about Ehrenreich is her proclamation that feminism cannot ever be satisfied with mere “gender equity.” Simply integrating women into male-dominated systems of power will invariably produce the Megan Ambuhls, Lynndie Englands and Sabrina Harmans. Ehrenreich concludes:

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

Ringing words indeed. (And let me plug, in passing, Camassia’s post on the subject). And while I am of course much closer to Ehrenreich than to Schlafly, I don’t think that “infiltrating” and “subverting” the military is either a viable or a morally acceptable answer for the women’s movement (even if it were possible to raise sufficient feminist consciousness among young American working-class females). As easy as it is to poke fun at Phyllis Schlafly, there is no denying that while the military may not feminize men (that seems absurd) it does coarsen women, because coarsening human beings of either sex is what the military does in order to accomplish its goals. Or perhaps it’s just the pacifist in me that leads me to be unable to rejoice when women rise in the ranks of any branch of armed service.

Nakedness and the Torah

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Last week’s posts on modesty (here and here) led to some sharp exchanges in the comments section on the relationship between shame and the body and between sexuality and the visual. Yesterday, good Jonathan Dresner sent me this link to a Torah commentary by a Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld. The rabbi asks

How does the Torah describe Adam and Eve before their sin? How does it put into words the loftiness of these spiritual giants? “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not embarrassed” (2:25). Is this all the Torah has to say about them — that they were naked — and too naive to feel any shame? There is nothing more profound or complimentary for the Torah to say?

The answer is that after the sin of Man, Man realized he had to cover his body — and the source of his passions. As soon as Adam and Even sinned, the Torah writes that they realized they were naked. Beforehand there was no need for clothes. Man’s physical and spiritual sides were in total harmony. There was no temptation to misuse the physical. It was entirely pure; it was a reflection of the spiritual world. Man’s body was no more than a tool to serve G-d. And of course, serving G-d gave it the ultimate physical pleasure. Before the Sin, that which was spiritually good was physically pleasurable as well. There was no contradiction.

With the fall of the physical world, however, this was no longer the case. The physical obscured G-d’s Presence. It could possibly be seen as something capable of being misused, as something which lived on its own and for its own sake. It could be corrupted. One could obtain a sense of pleasure — albeit a fleeting one — from living for the physical alone. It could be seen as having a reality of its own. Adam and Eve could have been seen — and could have seen each other — as objects of passion — as sex objects. The room for confusion — and the temptation for misuse — was great indeed. Man would now have to cover himself to avoid this misconception — as well as to preserve society. His physical was no longer pure or spiritually-inclined. Man could never again be totally comfortable with his inner passions.

Bold emphasis is mine. Those who come from outside the Abrahamic religious traditions may find this all a bit nonsensical, but the rabbi’s commentary fits nicely with Christian interpretations of modesty and the fall. Obviously, what body parts are covered varies from culture to culture to some degree (though virtually all Western cultures cover the genitals, and almost all cover the female breast). What doesn’t vary is the conviction that at least some parts of the body ought to be covered publicly because when exposed, the person who is exposed will inevitably be reduced to, as he puts it, an “object of passion.” Such body parts can and should be exposed to the spouse, but only after that spouse has come to “know” one for one’s true spiritual nature, and thus not inclined to reduce one to a mere object.

Women, appetite, and male fear — UPDATED

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I know you’re all eager to know what I’m lecturing on this afternoon. Oh. You’re not? Here goes anyway…

We’re working this week on an interesting issue in body history: the relationship between the appetite, eating disorders, and female sexual desire. In her seminal (sorry) work “Fasting Girls“, Joan Brumberg traced the development in the 19th century of ideas about young women’s desire for food and their simultaneous sexual maturation:

The health of young women was definitely influenced by a general female fashion for sickness and debility… to the physician’s mind, a young woman caught up in the process of sexual maturation was subject to vagaries of appetite and peculiar cravings. Thoughout the medical and advice literature an active appetite or appetite for particular foods (especially meat or spicy items) was used as a trope for a dangerous sexuality. Mary Wood-Allen warned young readers that girls who masturbated ‘will manifest an unnatural appetite, sometimes desiring mustard, pepper, vinegar and spices, salt, etc.’ Because appetite was regarded as a barometer of sexuality, both mothers and daughters were concerned about its expression and control. A good mother was expected to manage this situation before it escalated into a medical or social problem.

With great understatement, Brumberg says that as a result of this Victorian conflation of sexuality and food,

Bourgeois society generated anxieties about food and eating — especially among women.

My students, initially, see little parallel between these notions and the contemporary American situation. But as Susan Bordo points out in Unbearable Weight (another instant classic in the field), that even in modern culture,

Eating is not really a metaphor for the sexual act; rather, the sexual act, when initiated and desired by a woman, is imagined itself as an act of eating, of incorporation and destruction of the object of desire. Thus women’s appetites must be curtailed and controlled, because they threaten to deplete and consume the body and soul of the male.

Bordo references the tiresome 1980s Hall and Oates song “Maneater“:

I wouldn’t if I were you
I know what she can do
She’s deadly man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter
Ooh, the beauty is there but a beast is in the heart

(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater
(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater

What’s the point? I’m convinced that even as we teach young girls ever more extreme strategies to make themselves objects of desire, we remain decidedly fearful about women — of any age — as agents of desire. To eat is to satisfy one’s body’s demands. A woman who feeds herself in response to hunger, who eats to satiety, may well be a woman who might make similar demands upon men. In a world where men are increasingly anxious about their abilities to satisfy women sexually (witness the veritable explosion of drugs to treat impotence), one unconscious strategy to cope with that fear is to depress women’s appetites. Given the longstanding connection between sexuality and eating in women’s lives, it thus follows (according to Bordo, Brumberg, and others) that our cultural obsession with controlling what women put in their mouths is, at least in part, a manifestation of a fear about the power of women’s sexuality. In this analysis, our culture “reads” a slender woman as submissive and undemanding; she is “safe” for a man who doubts his own ability to satisfy her. Thinness is thus less about aesthetics and more about a twisted combination of morality and anxiety.

We’ll see where the discussion goes.

UPDATE: Had a great discussion this afternoon, focusing on the phrase “too much“. I asked how many of my female students had ever been told that they were “too much”. When applied to a man, it refers to his sense of humor: “Oh, that Hugo, he’s too much.” When applied to a woman, it has a far more condemnatory tone: “She’s too loud, too obnoxious, too aggressive, too sexual, too hungry, too demanding, too much like a man.” Virtually all of my students had stories about being warned — usually early in adolescence — about eating too much, showing too much, talking too much, asking for too much. A few also related deeper fears that they were too much: too intense, too filled with emotion, too complex and needy to ever be loved or understood. We talked at length about how what we often perceive a woman as being “too much” when she makes reasonable requests to be treated like a human being and to be allowed to have the same desires (and the opportunity to satisfy those desires) as her brothers.

I realized today, not for the first time, that when we men tell women that they are “too much”, we are really asking them to lower their expectations for us. Often, the demands that “uppity” women make on men are demands not so much for sexual performance (or a nice meal) as they are that we men simply show up emotionally and physically and engage them as fellow rational human beings. That’s a scary thing for many men, and it is far easier to label otherwise natural and reasonable requests as evidence that a woman is “too much.”