Monthly Archives: August 2004

Male feminism and links

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I just found out today about a raging debate going on over the fine old question of whether a man can be a feminist. Trish Wilson tipped me off to it here. I then went and read the post that sparked the problem: this piece by a Matt Stoller. Amanda at Mousewords then weighed in with her customary fire and zing. (Oh, I could spend a whole post deconstructing my own use of the phrase “weighed in” when talking about gender and the body, but I’ll skip it. For now).

Given that I am teaching two sections of women’s history at PCC again this fall, I think I need to pull a post together on male feminism and “pro-feminism”. Not today, however, as I am due to go run in 96 degree heat by the Rose Bowl soon. Still, Amanda at Mousewords issued an interesting challenge that put me to work at once and I thought I would post on it quickly. She wrote in the post linked above:

Men who blog and want to be feminist have one major obligation–read female bloggers and link to them. My blogroll is 50% female, so why can’t they do that?

I count 54 blogs currently on my blogroll. (I haven’t added any today since reading Amanda’s challenge; I will be adding more soon). Three are “group blogs” (like Cliopatria) that have contributors of both sexes; the other fifty-one are either individual blogs or blogs where all regular contributors are of the same sex. And the count is:

Male blogs: 24 (and that’s counting both of Rudy Carrasco’s blogs)

Female blogs: 27

How’s that for balance! I also read through many of my old posts, and note that I mention female bloggers more often than I do men… So, fellow bloggers, break down your linkage and report!

Whoo hoo!

Miscellaneous Tuesday notes and lists

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I’ve just dismissed my 1:00PM Modern European history class. I’ve now met with all seven of my classes (two sections of Women’s History, three sections of Ancient Civ, one section of Modern Europe and one section of Men and Masculinity). Folks outside the community college system are always stunned by that load, but it’s fairly standard around here. Our contract calls for five courses per semester, and we are allowed to teach up to three “overload” classes. I have a handful of colleagues who teach eight sections. There is little doubt that we would be more effective with lower teaching loads — on the other hand, institutional need and our own greed (in terms of wanting overtime) conspire together to ensure that we teach all of these sections.

Naturally, the hardest part is turning students away. My enrollment is capped by the number of seats in the room; this morning, I had 71 students show up for a class that maxes out at 40. It is hard to send folks away, but the fire code and sanity decree that I must. I usually hold lotteries for available spaces, and we are discouraged from permitting unenrolled students to hang around in the classroom for too long. Fortunately, the last day to add comes at the end of the second week, and after that, things do settle down considerably.

Because my more recent posts have been so serious, I’ll put up a little list of things I’ve been up to, and invite readers to share their own in the comments section.

Last fiction book I finished: The Photograph, Penelope Lively (terrific)

Last non-fiction book I finished: The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation In Spite of Itself, David Bushnell (less depressing than I had feared)

Last CD I bought: John Hiatt Anthology (mixed, but the later stuff is fabulous)

Last movie I saw: What the Bleep Do We Know? Alternately bewildering and compelling, I came to scoff and left stunned.

Favorite blogs this week not yet on my blogroll: Utopian Hell and Marriage Debate.

Currently craving: Cadbury Cream Eggs and a really good chicken korma. Washed down with lots of cold diet Coke.

Current favorite Scripture passage: Mark 6:31. After seven classes, the reason should be obvious.

Off to home to check on Matilde the chinnie, and then an afternoon run in the heat of the Arroyo.

Supply, demand, and the abortion struggles

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Before anything else, Lynn alerts us this morning that the “pimp and ho” costumes many of us blogged about last week were a hoax. I am embarrassed to have been taken in so easily, but I’m far more relieved.

Barry at Alas, A Blog dropped me a line, asking if I had had a chance to see this post from April. It’s part of a discussion that I’ve only observed from afar, about the tactics of focusing on demand or supply when it comes to reducing abortion. Here’s an excerpt:

I assume that the primary goal of a sincere pro-lifer is not to punish the guilty, but to reduce abortion as much as possible. So I therefore assume that pro-lifers support pro-life policies – and pro-life politicians like George Bush – because they think pro-life policies will reduce abortion. But there are legitimate reasons to doubt that’s true.

First, how likely is it that abortion will ever be banned in the USA? Reagan couldn’t do it. Bush Sr. couldn’t do it. So far, Bush hasn’t been able to. Face it: the country is divided on abortion. The most pro-lifers could possibly accomplish is throwing abortion to state-by-state restrictions; but some states will never ban abortion, so all that will do is force women to cross state lines.

Even if legal abortion could be entirely banned, it’s unclear that this would actually reduce the real number of abortions by a significant degree. Before the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade ruling, American women had somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million abortions a year in the U.S.. Although measuring something as hidden as illegal abortions is always difficult, the best pre-Roe scholarly assessment came to a figure of about a million abortions a year…

There’s more there, so please go and read the whole thing. It ends with a rather stretched but interesting case for John Kerry as the pro-life choice for president.

As my students (and regular readers of this blog) know, I’m not big on “either/or” forced choices. I’m very fond of “both/and” ways of seeing the world. Feminists for Life, the one anti-abortion organization to which I contribute money regularly, uses a “both/and” approach to the abortion issue. FFL lobbies for changes in the law to protect human life in utero, while simultaneously working to raise awareness of alternatives to abortion and to change hearts and minds. Frankly, most pro-life organizations address both “supply” and “demand”, and most spend more money on the latter than on the former. (Pregnancy counseling centers that arrange for adoption cost more, long term, than lobbying Congress!)

I agree with Barry — and with President Bush — that the abortion struggle can only be won through a change in hearts and minds. It can’t be won on the legal front alone. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile and noble to expend energy and money on curtailing legal access to abortion — I think it is. But it’s even better to devote time and resources to reaching those women most at risk for abortion, preferably before they conceive a child. That can include abstinence education and information on contraception. One does not preclude the other, nor do I see any reason to believe that teaching both together vitiates the message of either.

Unlike some of my more conservative brethren, I think many forms of artificial contraception are excellent weapons in the war on abortion — condoms, for instance. (The Pill, as most folks know, has abortifacient qualities that render it morally problematic for those who believe life begins at conception.) My goal is to end the destruction of the unborn and to protect and enrich and enhance the lives of the already born — and I am ready to embrace any and all tools in that struggle. So, I rejoiced when President Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion ban. I also support the distribution of condoms in high schools. (I’m quite aware that there are relatively few folks who hold those two positions together.) I know full well that condoms don’t always work — but they work a hell of a lot better than nothing at all. If the availability of condoms prevents even one abortion, then I say “hallelujah.”

My problem with most of my fellow pro-lifers is that they often see the abortion issue as simply one part of a larger culture war. (Frankly, the same could be said for the pro-choice movement). Too often, knowing where someone stands on reproductive issues is a highly accurate predicter of a host of other views on issues ranging from guns to gays to the war on terrorism. I don’t think that’s at all helpful. This outlook locks us into ideological boxes that make it impossible to admit that the “other side” might have some excellent and useful ideas. Those of us who care equally about all parties involved in the tragedy of abortion — the child in utero, the mother, the father — must be willing to make coalition with anyone and everyone who can help us in the struggle to save the lives of the unborn and save the psyches of those who terminate them.

In the end, I see no reason not to embrace both a “demand” and “supply” strategy in the struggle to end all abortions, both legal and illegal. I am skeptical about the willingness of politicians of any party to fight this fight on all fronts. Ending abortion is not just about changing the make-up of the court, or re-electing President Bush — it’s about reaching our friends and neighbors, one at a time. It’s about reaching out to those most at risk for choosing an abortion, and proposing alternatives ranging from abstinence to artificial contraception to adoption.

Barry has kindly added me to his blogroll, but placed me in the category of those who are “even further right“, relative to others to whom the editors of Alas link. Given my stance on abortion and a few other select cultural issues, I suppose that’s deserved. But as someone who voted for Socialist Equality Party candidate John C. Burton in the California recall last autumn, I’m tickled to be hangin’ with the righties in anyone’s eyes!

Catholics, porn, and the meaning of condoms

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Here’s my second post of the day on Catholics, culture, and sexuality.

One conservative Christian magazine that I haven’t mentioned recently is Touchstone. The politics are execrable but the writing is clever, and so I read it fairly regularly. The editors also have a blog, called Mere Comments, and this entry caught my eye. Entitled “The Pornographer’s Insight”, it was posted in response to this New York Times article on the attempt by Los Angeles-area state legislator Paul Koretz to pass legislation mandating the use of condoms in porn films. (This all goes back to the Lara Roxx story from the spring.) Not surprisingly, Koretz is running into heavy opposition from the adult entertainment industry.

The Touchstone editors write:

The people who consume such material (pornography) don’t want the actors to wear condoms, because, judging from what the story says, they want what they see to be real and they want it to appear spontaneous, natural, and passionate, indeed overwhelming. And in a world where such people as the actors portray may be carrying a virus that will kill their partner, completely trusting.

They want to see two people (all right, in the best cases, just two) give themselves to each other without hesitation or reserve. If all they wanted to see two (or more) people engaged in a variety of sexual acts with each other, why would they object to condoms?

Because at some level they want, I think, to see on the screen what in the real world will only happen securely and completely within marriage. The movies themselves will, of course, show people doing so outside marriage and indeed outside any commitment at all, but even a libertine will admit that people rarely achieve this kind of free sexuality in his world.

Huh? Who knew that the consumers of pornography were so eager to see relationships that are “completely trusting” portrayed on the screen? (And newsflash to Touchstone: there are married couples in America that use condoms as a method of contraception. Some of those couples are Catholics. End newsflash).

It’s funny, but I have a very different intuition about why those who consume pornography don’t want to see condoms. (And I think my angle is closer to the view of the Times story, to boot.) To a Catholic conservative who opposes artificial birth control, a condom symbolizes a lack of commitment. To more liberal folks, condoms symbolize the exact opposite. For those of us raised in a secular culture, condoms symbolize health; they symbolize caring for one’s own body and that of one’s partner; above all, condoms symbolize the recognition of the very real consequences of sexual intercourse. In a more progressive culture, to use a condom is to declare that pleasure and obligation are concomitant. For sexually active unmarried teens and adults who do not wish to make babies, the willingness to use a condom (particularly on the part of a man) is evidence of maturity, not irresponsibility!

Condoms remind us that sex has consequences. Porn is about fantasy and the flight from reality. It is about the self and the self alone. The consumers of porn don’t want to see condoms, not because they want to imagine that the couples on the screen are giving themselves fully to each other, but because, I suspect, the last thing they want is the very real reminder that sex is about more than pleasure.

Then again, I don’t imagine that the good editors of Touchstone have much occasion to reflect on either condoms or pornography.

Deal Hudson, hypocrisy, and disclosure

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This is the first of two posts touching on Catholicism, culture, and sexuality. Second one comin’ up soon.

In 1988, while a junior at Cal, I was baptized and confirmed as a Roman Catholic at the campus Newman Center. My post-adolescent spiritual journey had led me to Rome (albeit the Paulist Fathers’ liberal version of Rome). I was only “actively Catholic” for a few years — but even as I have wandered off down many other roads, I still sense the “tug” of Catholicism. This explains, to some degree, why I still read lots of Catholic journals in print and online: the neoconservative First Things, the fairly liberal National Catholic Reporter, and so forth. I don’t rule out a return to Rome in the future, either, though as I have no intention of having my earlier marriages annulled, it doesn’t seem likely. (I could rant about annulments at great length; it seems to be an oft-abused practice. Pull it together, folks, and if the marriage failed, live with a divorce on your record, for crying out loud. Annulments are like mulligans in golf. It’s just a complex way of avoiding responsibility. Sheesh.)

Anyhow, two things caught my eye today. One is the coverage of the Deal Hudson story. Hudson, for those who don’t know, is the publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis. A former Baptist from Texas, he spent several years as a philosophy professor at Fordham University before resigning in 1994. Hudson has been particularly close to the Bush Administration; he headed the Catholic outreach team for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000. Hudson has been a culture warrior par excellence (his magazine’s title implies his sense of mission), and he has been relentless on the need to restore morality to public life. On Bill Clinton, the culture, and private life, Hudson wrote about:

“… the lie that a person’s private conduct makes no difference to the execution of their public responsibilities. It’s this lie, alive in our culture of death, that has shaped the character of Bill Clinton and encouraged the moral softness in all of us.”

Hudson, however, had a tale of moral softness of his own. On August 18, the National Catholic Reporter published the story of Hudson’s brief sexual encounter in 1994 with a Cara Poppas, an 18 year-old student of his at Fordham. (At the time, he was 44 and married with children). The account in NCR (which is quite detailed) makes it clear that Hudson took advantage of a depressed and fragile young woman. She eventually dropped out of school, and Hudson paid her a $30,000 settlement. He also lost his job teaching philosophy.

The day that NCR printed the story, Deal Hudson resigned from his high-ranking position with the Republican National Committee. He detailed his reasons in this National Review op-ed piece. Here’s a key excerpt:

“(The National Catholic Reporter is digging up) allegations from over a decade ago involving a female student at the college where I then taught. At the time, I dealt with this in an upright manner and the matter was satisfactorily resolved long ago. It was now being dug up, I believe, for political reasons — in an attempt to undermine the causes I have fought for: the defense of Church teachings on life, the priesthood, the authority of the pope, and the need for faithful Catholic participation in politics.

I’ve been married seventeen years, my daughter is fifteen, my adopted son from Romania is seven, and my wife and I are happily married. When we entered the political fray in the 2000 campaign we knew the risk of political involvement but considered the issues worth the potential cost. We still do.

No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do.

I thought it important to present these facts at this time — as I have done in the past — because I need to protect the people I love and the causes I believe in. In matters of this nature, exaggeration, half-truths, and rumor often tend to overtake the truth — and I wanted truth to get a head start.

What made me angry about Deal Hudson was that one sentence paragraph: “No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do.” Really, Deal? The girl who dropped out of school after you seduced her doesn’t regret it more? Your wife doesn’t regret it more? It always makes me angry when men say things like this (and it is usually men) because it strikes me as so damn self-centered. The focus is on his regret, not on the damage he did. I don’t know the man, and it may be that he has in fact made more substantive amends to Poppas than either his piece of that in NCR implies. But given the self-centeredness of his National Review post, that doesn’t seem likely.

Of course, when thinking about Deal Hudson the culture warrior, it’s easy to repeat the line about not throwing stones in glass houses. But does having a sinful past mean that one is forever barred from making moral judgments about the lives of others? I don’t think it ought to. We are all sinners in need of grace, though some have sinned in more dramatic and hurtful ways than others. If none of us made ethical judgments for fear of being labelled hypocrites, it would be hard to have any ethical structure to our society whatsoever! But we must make judgments about moral behavior from a place of repentance for our own errors and faults. And when one is publicly criticizing the very sort of behavior in another in which one has previously engaged, one has the ethical obligation to disclose one’s own fault (in general terms) before uttering a single syllable of judgment. In other words, the only way that Deal Hudson could legitimately criticize President Clinton publicly for having had extramarital sex with a subordinate would be to do so subsequent to his own (perhaps non-specific) equally public acknowledgment of his own troubled past.

First day of school, and the “suspicion of one’s own fraudulence”

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It’s the first day of school here at Pasadena City College. Though my first class doesn’t meet until 10:25, I got up just after five this morning, having had a restless night. A quick pre-dawn run settled my nerves temporarily, as did playtime with Matty the chinchilla. But here it is, not yet 9:00AM, and for the umpteenth year in a row, I have butterflies in my stomach about the first day of school.

I’ll be the first to admit, if academia is not the “real world”, then I don’t know what the “real world” is. I began my educational career about 1970 at Santa Barbara’s Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School, and for the past 34 years, each autumn has seen me go off to school with my nerves a-flutter. (Yes, I went straight from high school to college to grad school to teaching full-time — that makes me both fortunate and relatively unusual among my colleagues).

The obvious question is this one: why, after all this time, do I still get so nervous about the first day of school? It’s not stagefright — public speaking has never been a fear of mine. It’s not new material, at least not this year — all four courses I am teaching this fall are courses I have taught in the past. It’s not fear that my students won’t like me — though I do struggle with vanity, it’s not at the root of my jumpiness this morning. All three of these might be small factors at different times, but the core reason for this almost-pleasant state of anxiety is more basic: I still believe that I have the best job in the whole dang world, and I can’t believe they pay me to do it.

Even after all these years of full-time teaching (the last six with tenure), I still expect someone to show up, and with an apologetic and yet officious tone, tell me “We’re sorry, Hugo, we made a mistake hiring you. There was this terrible mix-up, you see; we intended to get someone else.” Though I can assure my readers (all 12 of you) that I did not lie or stretch the truth when I applied for this job, somehow after all this time I still suspect that I “got away with something” when I was hired for this job.

I’ve talked about this with my parents and other colleagues who teach. My father (who taught philosophy for almost forty years at Alberta and UCSB) calls this feeling “the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence”. That phrase seems to sum things up nicely. Whenever I share these feelings, I note that it is often my most talented colleagues, students, and friends who say “Really? That’s how I feel too!” (One of the worst teachers I ever worked with, now thankfully retired, claimed never to feel this way.) I wonder if there isn’t some connection between periodic bouts of self-doubt and the drive to prove one’s self. Actually, that’s silly — I don’t wonder that at all, I know it with total certainty!

But I am happy to say that at this stage of my career, “suspicions of my own fraudulence” are less intense than they were a decade or so ago. The nervous jitters this morning are, in fact, quite pleasant. They’re more like the nerves one gets before a first date, or before taking an exciting trip to an exotic country. Every class I’ve ever taught is different, as the chemistry created by a certain mix of unique people can never be precisely duplicated. One never knows what’s coming, and thus the anticipation is nothing short of delicious.

Anyhow, I promise to blog about other things later this week, but with this chaotic first week, it may be a bit lighter than last week…

UPDATE: Check out what Jenell says so beautifully on a similar subject this morning.

A reader’s note, and some reflections on teaching sex ed in a liberal parish

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Before anything else, go check out what Lynn at Noli Irritare Leones had to say about Scarlet, the new British feminist magazine I posted about last week.

I got an email this morning from a very articulate young man who wishes to remain anonymous, commenting on this post. He wrote:

I guess the main thing I wanted to do is just applaud you for creating a space where people can talk about their sexuality–and especially talk about their sexuality in light of their religious convictions, whatever they are. I especially appreciate this because I’m a young person–well, 25–and I’m still asking a lot of the same questions she was asking, and I think most people are. And I think you’re exactly right that young people looking for guidance want to hear the whole story from their mentors- both ‘this is what I think is best,’ and this is what God asks of us,’ AND, perhaps especially, ‘these are the ways I’ve failed.’

The traditional Christian more of ‘don’t have sex before you get married’ is pretty engrained in our culture, in my opinion, and I continue to be surprised at how much people are both influenced and burdened by it –even people with no big religious commitment. And I think one of the best things the Church can do–whatever version of sex ethics it ends up preaching–is to create a space where people are able to talk about their spirituality and sexuality candidly, and without a sense either of judgement (‘oh, you let your boyfriend go to second base with you, BAD BAD BAD!’) or of prudishness (‘what do you mean, you’ve never done it? what do you have, issues?’). (I think in some ways Alcoholics Anonymous offers a better model for this kind of fellowship than most Christian churches, but anyway…)

Of course, there’s also a tension between church as fellowship and church as teacher of the Gospel. For people who really wholeheartedly believe that pre-marital sex is sinful, the church has a burden to
preach and teach that, ultimately, in some way. But hopefully everybody can at least take a big breath and start doing away with some of the loneliness and shame that characterize so many people’s interior lives relating to sexuality.

Bold emphases are mine.

The writer captures something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I work as a youth minister in a very liberal church that does not teach abstinence as the only appropriate option for the young and the single. In some ways, I think it would be a hell of a lot easier if I did work in such an environment! Though based upon my past, I might feel like a hypocrite, I would have the luxury of teaching a clear and consistent message. I would not have to consider the possibility that one can be simultaneously and without contradiction both a faithful disciple of Jesus and someone who believes that a genuinely Christ-centered ethic can embrace as good and holy genital sexuality in situations other than heterosexual marriage!

I’ve participated in half a dozen round-table discussions on sexuality in the past five years with my fellow youth ministers and lay volunteers at All Saints Pasadena. Not all of us are in exactly the same place in terms of our sexual ethics. But we have always all been in agreement on one thing: we want to equip our young people to make thoughtful, loving, life-affirming decisions; we want them to treat themselves and each other with reverence and respect as children of God. Sex that is abusive, manipulative and coercive is out for us; sex that does not take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and responsibility is also something that we can all agree falls short of the mark. Knowing teenagers, it is very hard to see any high school student being sufficiently mature to handle every possible ramification of genital expression with another human being.

Thus, of course, we don’t have “purity pledges” in the sex education component of our youth program. What we do do is create a forum for honest and intimate discussion. Every year, I spend an evening (often more than one) just hanging out with the boys, talking about things that are far easier to discuss when only guys are present. (And believe me, it gets leavened with lots of gentle — and sometimes bawdy — humor). My female fellow volunteers take the girls off for similar discussions. We try and provide a place for kids to share stories, both from their own experience and from those of their friends and families. We role-play. And yes, we ask the kids to think about what a sexual ethic, “All Saints style” would look like. The kids often disagree — civilly and without any name calling allowed — with each other as to what is “okay” or not. Some of our kids are sexually active; most are not. (Some, of course, may not be telling the truth to us or to each other). But for such a liberal place, a remarkable number of them are surprisingly conservative.

We often let the kids ask the adults any question they like (they can do this anonymously by putting slips of of paper in a basket). The single most common question I’ve heard in the last five years is this one: “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” And then the inevitable follow-up: “Do you wish you had waited?” Every single adult who answers the first question by giving an age under 18 answers the second question with a “yes”. When the kids press for reasons to wait (and many are eager for those reasons), it is at that moment that we can begin to share some of our life experience with them. Mind you, we never get into details — the last thing most kids want is graphic details about sex coming from adults their parents’ age. What they want are stories about feelings, about consequences, about decision-making. And as we tell those stories, we often (intentionally but subtly) can make the case that delaying sexual intercourse can avoid a tremendous amount of hurt and chaos and heartache.

Of course, not a single youth leader with whom I’ve worked has been a virgin. No one waited until marriage. On a purely practical level, that makes it utterly impossible for us to advocate pre-marital abstinence (even if we wanted to) and still retain any legitimacy at all. In some ways, that is one of the shortcomings of leading youth groups in such a liberal church! Few folks who have clung tenaciously to the traditional Christian ethic are left in our parish — and I, for one, consider that unfortunate. It would be nice to be able to share a different narrative with the kids from time to time. Perhaps I can get some nice conservative youth leaders from one of the LA diocese’s new breakaway churches to come and give a guest lecture some time!

Anyhow, enough on this topic. I’ve had a fine 13-miler in the mountains with my friends this morning, and have consumed three Noah’s bagels, four diet Cokes, and two cups of coffee. I am fully and completely ready for my Saturday.

Search terms update

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I know, I’ve got a lot up today, but here’s one more. Check out some of the search terms folks have used just since 11:00AM to come to this blog:

elton john look-a-like (Lord, I hope not)
sex teens dogs (oy veh)
sheryl crow barstow (uh, she lives in Spain now, with Lance)
pepperdine conservative (it is, trust me, it is)
old erotics (oh no, erotic in the plural is very hip in academe, like semiotics, only sexier)
what does rhesa mean (ask her)
jessica cutler blog (not interested)
kerry edwards hug (still on that one, are we?)
affection boys (they need it more than you think)
puberty wrestle with girls wrong (depends on who is doing the wrestling, doesn’t it)
mennonite dress code (news flash: bonnets are optional; ask the Amish)
married women do this twice as much as single men (what? what? I’m dyin’ here!)
tattoos got married (come again?)
Hugo Schwyzer (14 different queries with multiple search engines, including the Google Image search.)
emotionally unavailable women (sorry, none here. I learned my lesson a long time ago.)

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Sex, Candor, and Intergenerational Dialogue

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This one is a long one.

Anyone who has looked through the some fifty-odd blogs to which I link will notice that it’s an eclectic mix, reflecting my interests in everything from Anabaptism to feminism. I read ‘em all regularly.

One person I read regularly is Corianne, at Glamour Girl. Yesterday, she put up a nakedly candid post to which I responded. With her permission, I am reposting some of it here, because it ties into themes that have come up on this blog. Here’s what she wrote:

Let’s Talk About Sex

I have so many questions. I think this is the one and only area in my life that I am completely uncomfortable, afraid and insecure about.

And I’m not sure why.

I cried and cried and cried over the agonizing decision to lose my virginity. My mom thinks it’s her fault; she thinks the old fashioned manner in which I was raised was impossible to follow when times and beliefs were changing so rapidly… the body is no longer sacred to the masses as it was to me.

I was always afraid of sex. Afraid it would hurt, afraid it would change the way people thought of me, afraid that it would change the way I thought of myself. I didn’t want to be dirty; I wanted to be perfect. Sex didn’t make me perfect; sex made me easy and I always prided myself on my complexity and my version of perfection. Sex just complicated my views, so I wanted to stay away. Far, far away.

I remember learning about sex from a video my parents rented for my sister and I when we were around nine years old. I was horrified. I vowed never to have sex again, and couldn’t imagine a day when that could possibly feel good.

I earned the label of a tease early on. My first “real kiss” was in the late eighth grade. He broke up with me in the skating rink parking lot and the boy I would end up losing my virginity beat him up for me. I guess he captured my heart at the same time he defended it.

I felt like I held out for so long. My parents were so proud of me. When I finally did make the leap, I really thought this was the person whom I was really meant to be with, forever and ever. When we broke up, I was devastated. Suicidal, even. I’ve always let people control my emotions, and when I felt like someone didn’t “want” me, it was nearly impossible to pick myself up off the floor.

I am twenty years old, and I have been with 3 people. The first two I was in 2+ year relationships with each (at separate times, don’t worry) and the third…

…well, the third was last weekend.

Don’t ask.

It’s a long story and I don’t know how I feel about it yet. Bottom line, he is my best guy friend and I hope our decision isn’t going to ruin this. I love him a lot, and I’m not sure why I felt like it was ok.

I want to talk about sex. How do you view it? Is it meant to be sacred or casual? Fun or sentimental? Is three people a lot for a twenty year old girl?? How many people is too many? Have the times changed drastically within the past ten years, or am I just incredibly old fashioned in this department?

Why is sex such a scary idea to me?

Here’s some of what I posted in reply:

First of all, Corianne, you are to be commended for being so honest. That’s tremendously impressive.

What has changed in recent years is the intensity of the mixed message given to girls/women your age. You are expected to be both intensely sexual and intensely virtuous. Both your “yes” and your “no” will disappoint others, and you are probably keenly aware of that.

Sex can be scary for many different reasons. One obvious reason is that it leaves us so vulnerable. To put it bluntly, few things should be more intimate than taking a part of another human being inside of yourself. The fact that our culture treats that casually doesn’t lessen the enormity and the wonder of it, or the perfectly natural fear attached to it.

Look, I’ve been married three times and am engaged for the fourth time. I have a long, long history — some aspects of which were pleasurable and others regrettable. What I regret most were the friendships compromised and often ruined by sex. “Friends with benefits” sounds great, but I know few young women indeed who really, really, find that fulfilling in anything more than a superficial way.

For me, I have had to rebuild my life sexually. I now see it as something sacred and special. When I want to show my friends I love them, I hug them. I don’t sexualize my loneliness or my feelings of affection anymore, and that is one thing I used to do all the time.

As far as three being a lot for twenty, I think the whole number thing is a waste of breath. I’ve got friends who are virgins in their 30s, and friends of both sexes whose numbers are well into the triple digits (I kid you not). If you are asking, “Can I be a good person and have slept with three guys?”, the answer is, of course, “yes.” The real question is, what does Corianne want sex to be in her life NOW — and what does she want it to mean when, SOMEDAY, she does choose to make a lifelong commitment to someone.

That’s what I wrote yesterday. Because I’m a professor and 37 years old, I’m not prepared to offer the same degree of radical openness on my blog that Corianne does on hers. Oblique references to a complicated and tumultuous history are as good as it gets here, folks. But I’m grateful for what Corianne wrote because she articulates so well the angst, the uncertainty, and the internal contradictions that surround young folks’ sexual decision-making in this era.

Yeah, advice is cheap –particularly when it is dispensed to folks in cyberspace. At the same time, the blogosphere gives us new opportunities for cross-generational sharing about topics that are difficult to discuss “face-to-face.” The two phrases that Corianne repeats over and over again in her post are “I’m not sure” and “I don’t know why”. Those were two phrases I used repeatedly in my journals when I was her age, writing about very similar topics. In that sense, not much has changed between my generation and hers.

But one thing we who are a bit older than today’s teens and college students don’t do well is listen, really listen, to young people. Part of this is the fault of the young — they are reluctant to disclose anything that can result in condemnation, and they often imagine that their trials and anxieties are unique to their age cohort. But much of it is our fault, we who are a wee bit older; we allow television and other elements of popular culture to inform us as to what young people today are really like. That liberates us from the task of taking a genuine interest in the lives of those to whom we have a responsibility.

Obviously, I feel both a professional and avocational responsibility to work with young adults in high school and college. Not everyone has that same calling. But when someone like Corianne asks the right questions, the kind she asks at the end of her post, we who have lived a bit longer and been where she is have an obligation to answer her as best we can.

Of course, we need to answer from something beyond our experience. We need to provide ethical and moral guidance. For some of us, our sexual morality is fairly absolute: no sex outside of heterosexual marriage, period. There is much to be said, theologically and psychologically, for that position. Others of us feel compelled to offer a more nuanced and relativistic stance. Regardless, we must articulate a standard that we ourselves have had some success in living up to, and we must be willing to disclose those times when we have (in action or in thought) fallen short of whatever ideal it is that we embrace. The fact that we have fallen short of God’s best does not mean that we can’t continue to struggle towards it, nor does it mean that we shouldn’t advocate that others seek it. But we must be realistic about just how difficult it is for most of us to “practice what we preach” over the course of our transition from adolescence to adulthood, and we must be candid about those difficulties when the young ask us tough questions.

I’ll close this long entry with a quotation from a fine old Pasadenan, the late Fuller professor Lewis Smedes, whose Sex for Christians remains a classic:

In any case, what single people are looking for — whether they are adolescent or far beyond — is not, in the first place, a chance to get their hormones satisfied. They are looking for a chance to experience the reality of a personal, trusting, and complete communion. And they have been led to think that sexual intercourse has the most intense promise of providing it…

… sexual intercourse opens trapdoors to the inner cells of our conscience, and legions of little angels (or demons) can fly out to haunt us. There is such abandon, such explosive self-giving, such personal exposure that few people can feel the same toward each other afterward…

It’s still in print, still worth a read.

Women, beauty, and the Olympics

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In her comments on a post below, Kelly asks why I haven’t posted more on the performance of women in the Olympic games. Chastened, I haste to post on the subject.

Over at XX blog, a simple question is asked:

Why are American women kicking ass at the Olympics? The answer is pretty simple: Title IX.

Well, there’s more to it than that, of course (the Chinese women have been terrific without Title IX) but the women at XX are on to a fairly important point. In the thirty-two years since the arrival of Title IX (click here for a brief history of it and the origin of its name), we have seen a veritable revolution in terms of women’s participation in sports at all levels of society, from elementary schools to professional leagues.

What troubles me about the coverage of American women athletes in the Olympic games is fairly obvious: I’ve seen far more coverage of women’s gymnastics and women’s beach volleyball than of anything else. The former sport, for all its aesthetic appeal, presents an intensely traditional vision of one type of woman: the petite pubescent pixie. I am in awe of the amount of skill and effort it takes to be a gymnast, and I honor the artistry of these girls. (Most are girls, after all; with the exception of Svetlana Khorkina of Russia, most of the major competitors this year were under 18). But I wonder if we respond so well to gymnasts because they are so small and unthreatening. Female gymnasts are physically strong without being intimidating; a man can still pick one up easily in his arms. Despite their prowess, there is still something fragile about these athletes, even if that fragility is as much emotional as physical. I think American culture is very, very comfortable with delicate, pretty, fragile, adolescent women. Too comfortable.

Beach volleyball, on the other hand, is a sport played by older women, relatively speaking, in their twenties and thirties. Beach volleyball players are surely magnificent athletes. But it would be be absurd to pretend that the bikinis these women wear aren’t a significant part of the appeal. I can’t say the bikinis appear very functional. After every play where a woman ends up diving into the sand, she gets up tugging and adjusting either her top or her bottom, usually because the latter has hiked up her backside. (The camera angles leave one in little doubt about this). In other words, there’s a lot of flesh on display. Am I saying that a woman cannot be both sexy and a respected competitor? Of course not. But I am grieved by the fact that our broadcasters choose to focus far more heavily on the sexiness than on the athleticism.

Similarly, I’m a huge fan of women’s softball. Next to track and field, it’s my favorite women’s sport at the Olympics. This goes back to when I was first a TA at UCLA, in 1991. In the very first class I taught (Classics 20, an intro to Roman Civilization course), I had two softball players as students. At the time, UCLA was the three-time defending national champion. During the quarter, these two women had to take time off to go and play at the College World Series in Oklahoma City. Because I knew them, I was hooked. I went to several softball games while in grad school, and got to know a few more of those early 1990s Bruin players. So obviously, I paid a lot of attention to this year’s gold-medal winning USA softball team.

But what bothered me was the fact that the promotional materials and the cameras on the field seemed to focus on one player alone: Jennie Finch, the statuesque blonde pitcher from the University of Arizona. (Here’s her website). Finch is a fine pitcher, but she’s not the star of the US women’s team. The hero, this year and in years past, was Lisa Fernandez (a UCLA alumna). Fernandez went 4-0 in these Olympics, while Finch only pitched one game (which she won). Lisa’s website is here. Go ahead, visit both sites. Look at pictures of both women. Maybe it’s the fact that I met Lisa Fernandez when she played for the Bruins, but I’m annoyed that because she isn’t a beauty like Jennie Finch, she isn’t recognized as the clear star of the team.

Overall, let me say that I have enjoyed these Games immensely (and am still waiting eagerly to see how my hero Paula Radcliffe does in the 10,000 meters, coming up within the next hour). But even as I salute the positive strides women have made in American sports in recent years, I am also keenly aware we have a long, long way to go.