Monthly Archives: September 2004

All in agreement on prostitution, right? (UPDATED)

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I’m optimistic that I’ve found it: an issue about which all of my 23 regular readers can agree! Feminists and Christian conservatives alike (not that those are mutually exclusive categories in Hugo’s world) can come together on the subject of punishing U.S. servicemen who visit overseas prostitutes. (Hat tip for all of this to Stuart Buck).

According to a Yahoo news blurb:

In recent years, “women and girls are being forced into prostitution for a clientele consisting largely of military services members, government contractors and international peacekeepers” in places like South Korea and the Balkans, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J), said Tuesday at a Capitol Hill forum on Pentagon anti-trafficking efforts.

Defense officials have drafted an amendment to the manual on courts-martial that would make it an offense for U.S. troops to use the services of prostitutes, said Charles Abell, a Pentagon undersecretary for personnel and readiness.

If approved, that would make it a military offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to have contact with a prostitute, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, an Abell spokeswoman said later. The draft rule is open to 60 days public comment after being published in the Federal Register, she said.

Calloo callay, o frabjous day! I love it when I get a chance to cross party lines and stand with my Republican brethren like Chris Smith. On this issue, I’m with him 100%.

There’s a terrific longer piece on the subject in this week’s Christianity Today. Entitled “We’re Still Supporting Slavery”, it’s by Preston Jones, a retired Navy man and now a college prof. Here are some key excerpts:

I went to South Korea with the U.S. Navy. All I heard about before arriving there was that it had great and inexpensive hookers, many of whom (I learned) were transported to Pusan from Seoul to accommodate an aircraft carrier’s thousands. That’s called trafficking.

Trafficking in humans is not new, though it is evil, and in a just world the leaders who have let it go on decade after decade would be put on trial. The drunken deeds of America’s unwitting freckle-faces in the brothels of Bangkok are bad enough. The willful refusal among the powerful to acknowledge that each year American troops pump millions of dollars into Asia’s vicious skin trade is criminal.

Readers might have noticed that anti-Americanism is on the rise. One of the causes of this in Asia—in Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, and Okinawa—is that up to now the U.S. military has done almost nothing to prevent or slow the growth of an industry that treats poor Asian girls (and some boys) as expendable.

Preach it, brother Jones! He laments:

For the law to be effective, a fundamental shift in the moral culture of the Navy would be necessary. That may be possible, though the long-standing eye-winks of high-ranking officers, the open encouragement of senior enlisted men, and the silence of chaplains have over the years created a sense that, by right, young men in uniform from Nebraska, Maine, and California should have easy access to the bodies of girls and young women from Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Somewhere I have a file of notes I have received from editors at conservative political magazines, from military officers, and from spokesmen at family values organizations. The notes make for depressing reading and usually revolve around a few themes: American troops did not invent prostitution and this kind of thing exists elsewhere in the world. Boys will be boys. Six months at sea is a long time. Japanese men are worse. Criticizing the military is un-American. We don’t really care.

The bold emphasis is mine.

While it is possible to construct feminist arguments for legalizing prostitution in wealthy countries (where prostitutes could have legal and medical protections), no one I know in the feminist community believes prostitution in the Third World to be anything other than profoundly exploitative. As a feminist, the sexual trafficking of women and young girls outrages me because it involves such profound degradation of the human person. Prostitution is an extreme form of objectification and degradation, and is incompatible with seeing girls and women as people.

As someone who is an advocate for men, I am always enraged by the “boys will be boys” defense. (Also known as the “all men are dogs” defense). I know what it is to live as a man, and I know damn well that even young men in all-male environments are biologically and psychologically capable of sufficient self-restraint so as not to abuse their sisters! The fact that so many young men are encouraged not to exhibit that self-restraint (and the compassion that must undergird it) is a tragedy for men and for women. Real men never exploit other human beings for their own pleasure. Real manhood — not puerilty — is accompanied by a mature sexuality that doesn’t wound.

As a Christian, I am deeply saddened by what this means for everyone involved. Prostitution is the furthest thing from a victimless crime. The women involved are psychologically brutalized. Their families frequently ostracize them or humiliate them. Meanwhile, the men involved are deeply affected, usually by having their humanity blunted. The wives and girlfriends of these “johns” are betrayed in a deeply intimate way that cannot help but leave lasting and painful scars. Prostitution represents a profound failure of our obligation to see Christ in one another.

As an American (you’ll almost never see me write that), it’s a terrible embarrassment. “To whom much is given, of whom much is expected.” Our service personnel abroad represent us; the lowliest PFC or sailor is an ambassador for the rest of us. There is no question that any claims we make of moral superiority as a nation will be, in the eyes of the world, tied to the personal behavior of our young folks in uniform. Young American men who visit hookers abroad are providing Al-Qaeda with a PR bonanza.

I assume the best thing to do is to write your congressperson, your senator, and the Defense Department, voicing strong support for this new measure. And for those who have friends and sons and brothers and lovers and husbands abroad — ask them the questions you don’t want to ask. Push them. Hold them accountable. Every man has it within him to see women as human beings, no matter his environment or his libido.

Surely, we can all agree on this.

UPDATE: I ought to have linked to the fine folks at ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children). Here’s their statement on the military issue:

ECPAT-USA’s military campaign aims to end the U.S. military’s role in sustaining the prostitution industry worldwide. ECPAT-USA is working in coalition with women’s organizations and churches on this issue.

Although ECPAT-USA generally focuses on child prostitution, the military campaign seeks to end the commercial sexual exploitation of both women and children around military bases because the same factors that victimize children also contribute to women’s involvement in the sex industry.

All forms of military prostitution–whether with women or children, with trafficked persons or voluntary migrants–are exploitative and endanger the health, safety and morale of all involved parties, including the military personnel who purchase sex.

Bless their work.

Oh, and for the record: I have to admit that “prostitution” is one of the most difficult words for me to spell. Too many vowels mingling with too many “t”s.

Thursday short poem: Jeffers’ Carmel Point

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Before the Thursday short poem, two bits of happy news from two folks far to my right: XRLQ is about to become a father, and in the midst of these joyous and turbulent preparations, found time to alert me that the Angry Clam (late and lamented) has returned to guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications. The great mystery is why I have such fondness for a small number of conservatives. Actually, it’s no mystery at all. They write real good, and I’m a sucker for articulate, clear prose — even if the substance of that prose is positively noxious!

I grew up in Carmel, famous as the home of one of California’s greatest poets, Robinson Jeffers. His rock tower home he built with his bare hands is half a mile from my mother’s house, and I walked by it almost daily as a child. I was incredibly fortunate to grow up in such a beautiful place, and as a lover of my hometown and poetry, it was only natural that I would grow up loving Jeffers. Indeed, a small copy of his selected poems is my oldest book of poetry. (Jeffers has no Cal connection; he actually graduated with a BA from Occidental and did grad work at USC). He’s often falsely characterized as a misanthrope, raging against civilization and Christianity, but that’s never how I’ve read him. I expect to put up a few of his poems over the next few months, but this is one of my favorites of his shorter ones. If you read it closely, it might echo some of the themes of my post earlier this week on white folks in a changing California.

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

It’s not a conventionally Christian world view, that. But those last few lines are among my favorite in literature, and when I am home in Carmel and running out to Point Lobos at dawn, I usually say them to myself at least once.

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Masculinity and the failure of the men’s rights movement -UPDATED

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Okay, true confession time: if there’s one group that really still gets under my skin, it’s anti-feminist “men’s rights activists.” In the comments below this post, a fellow named Jeff JP wrote:

You say, “I’m not hard on men because I am filled with self-loathing.”

With all due respect, I just don’t believe that. The very fact that you use terms like “predators” and the incredibly overused, misused, and abused “patriarchs” suggests to me that there’s really something else going on here.

Furthermore, the gaggle of feminist groupies who hang out here is also telling. Sorry, pal, but I just do not believe it.

If you want to be a feminist, fine. That’s your right. However, feminism has by and large been discredited as an anti-male hate movement, so don’t be so surprised when men don’t warm up to that.

I mean, it’s not a particularly profane or nasty comment — I’ve read much worse and been unfazed by it. Why do commenters like Jeff JP (and a few others) get to me? Simple: my first reaction is to see guys like him as (not so subtly) questioning my manhood! I’ve done years of work around my own sense of myself as a man, and have grown infinitely more comfortable in my own skin. I’ve been called a sissy, a queer, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, “pussy-whipped” and worse from the moment I first started working on gender issues almost two decades ago. Most of the time, it rolls off my back. But every once in a while, it gets to me.

True confession: my very first impulse with men who do this is to be reactive, stoop to their level, and defend my masculinity. “You want to question my cojones, buddy? Let’s do a 20 mile round trip race to the top of Mt. Wilson and back, you so-and-so, and I’ll show you who’s a man!” It’s embarrassing, but the first thing I want to do is re-establish my manly credentials by suggesting some variation on a boyish pissing contest! Really, I have to laugh at myself.

Fortunately, I don’t actually let myself react that way. Instead, I pause, think things through, and usually (if particularly irked) pray for the person who has enraged me. That usually allows me to return to a calm civility in short order. I don’t know if the women who were so casually dismissed as my “feminist groupies” won’t still want to respond!

But the men’s rights movement bothers me for other reasons that have nothing to do with my own insecurities, such as they may or may not be. I’ve blogged about them before, in a brief summary of the broader men’s movement. Jeff JP put up some of their links in his comments, and I’ll repeat them here:

National Coalition of Free Men
Warren Farrell.Com
GlennSacks.Com
Dads’ Rights

And many, many more.

The first of these, the NCFM, has a philosophical premise that sounds appealing and valuable: freeing men from restrictive gender roles that have damaged them. In their mission statement, the National Coalition says that they want to free men from the following:

…From the tendency to evaluate themselves and each other by the degree to which they meet an impossible ideal.
…From conditioned competitiveness and the fear of sharing failures, anxieties and disappointments with one another.
…From a mistrust of their feelings and instincts and an over reliance on logical thought processes.
…From the notion that violent action confirms and enhances their manliness.
…From a relative ignorance of their bodily functions and disdain for their body’s warning signals.
…From the pressure to be what they are not in preparation for their success role.
…From an over reliance on their jobs for a sense of identity.
…From the social barriers and pressures which stand in the way of their establishing close emotional friendships with other men.
…From the inclination to turn their wives into permission giving mother figures.
…From the need to prove their worthiness as protectors and providers.
…From feelings of inadequacy in matters of child care and child rearing.
…From feelings which inhibit them from developing a closer more emotional relationship with their children

Well, heavens to Betsy, that sounds good to me. Indeed, these “freedoms from” are part and parcel of the “pro-feminist” men’s movement for which I have a good deal more sympathy, represented by Men Can Stop Rape and NOMAS. Unlearning violence, developing healthy intimacy with other men, overcoming workaholism — it all sounds terrific. But where the men’s rights movement falls flat on its face is when it chooses to see feminists not as allies, but as opponents. Here are some other things the NCFM wants to free men from:

…From preoccupation with sexual technique and from imperatives to concentrate on satisfying their partners sexually, seemingly at the expense of their own sexual pleasure.
…From divorce laws which presume the naturally superior capabilities of women to care for children and which stereotype men as wallets.
…From harsher treatment under law for criminal violations than the treatment accorded to women in matters of arrest, conviction and sentencing.
…From the notion that as a class they oppress women any more than women as a class oppress them, or than society in general oppresses both sexes through stereotyping.

I bet lots of women are fascinated to know that millions of men are miserable, dutifully denying themselves sexual pleasure in order to concentrate on satisfying their partners. Who knew?

But seriously, it’s the last of these statements that is the most patently offensive: an insistence that men’s victimization is equal to women’s victimization. It’s the staggering blindness to male privilege that is so damn galling. It’s a gross misunderstanding of history and of culture. (By the way, let me applaud Ampersand’s list of our male privileges; it can be found here).

The problem with the men’s rights movement is that they confuse men’s unhappiness with oppression. They assume that if men were in control, they would be happy, because patriarchal oppressors ought to be happy. Therefore, if a man isn’t happy, he isn’t oppressing. Newsflash, folks: Just because you don’t know you’re privileged doesn’t mean you’re not. Just because there are aspects of your power and privilege that you find alienating and burdensome doesn’t mean that you are any less a beneficiary of an oppressive system! Both men and women do need liberation from rigid, traditional, gender roles. The difference is that collectively, men are the architects of the system while women are merely forced to live within it.

Let me quote from Christopher Kilmartin’s fine textbook, The Masculine Self:

“(Profeminist men and mytho-poetic men’s advocates) see men’s oppression as an internalized quality that is changed through self exploration… the men’s rights movement sees oppression as a socially pervasive sexism against men, who will continue to be victimized unless something is done about it.”

The men’s rights movement gives men the luxury of self-righteous indignation; the pro-feminist men’s movement forces men to recognize their own role in both their own oppression and that of the women in their lives. The men’s rights movement feeds on anger; the pro-feminist men’s movement on a sense of profound responsiblity to our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives and lovers as well as to ourselves.

I know where I stand. And Jeff, I’d still like to go for a run with you. No racing or chest-beating, I promise!

UPDATE: Trish Wilson has this great post about NCFM from 2003. The NCFM has a history of opposing government funding for battered women’s shelters, claiming that to fund such shelters for women is sexist. Here’s what they say about state funding for women’s shelters in Minnesota:

We insist that this egregiously sexist law be struck down in its entirety, at which time the Minnesota State Legislature can begin a new process and an entirely new approach to addressing the social problem of domestic violence — an approach that utterly discounts and discredits the old “women good, men bad” model and forthrightly recognizes instead that domestic violence is a shared problem between men and women.

Yes, domestic violence is a shared problem between men and women. Murder is also a shared problem between the victim and the killer, but that doesn’t make the differences between the two any less stark.

More on Democrats and Religion

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Thanks to Kendall Harmon, I came across this Rod Dreher piece on Beliefnet: “Are the Democrats Anti-Religion? How the media’s reporting on the Religious Right keeps it from seeing the story of the Secular Left.” It’s the same predictable, inaccurate, and infuriating canard that the Democratic Party is entirely beholden to folks who are militantly secular. Here are three paragraphs I want to poke at:

Until relatively recently, both major parties were of similar mind on issues of personal morality. Then came the 1972 Democratic Convention, at which secularists–defined as agnostics, atheists, and those who seldom or never attend religious services–seized control and nominated George McGovern. Prior to that year, neither party had many secularists among its delegates. Democratic delegates were split between religious and moral traditionalists on one side, and secularists on the other. They fought over moral issues: abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality, the family.

But in what Bolce and De Maio call a “secularist putsch,” the non-believers triumphed, giving us what Richard Nixon mocked as the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” and instigating–with help from the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973–the long march of religious and moral conservatives to the GOP, which became the party of traditionalists by default.

By 1992, the parties had become thoroughly polarized around religious orientation. Only 20 percent of white Democratic delegates (N.B., this secular-religious antagonism is a white voter phenomenon, the authors say) went to religious services at least once a month, while over three times that number of white Republican delegates did.

One key bit of honesty on Dreher’s part: in the first of these paragraphs, he correctly identifies “women’s rights” as a moral issue separate from that of abortion. If his implication is that the Democrats support women’s rights while Republicans oppose them, that’s a happy and candid admission. Any conservatives out there want to take a stab at what Dreher meant there?

But then Dreher rewrites a bit of history. There were plenty of evangelicals in the Party in 1972, pushing a radical political and economic agenda.

One of the leading evangelical thinkers of our time is Richard Mouw, a man I am proud to call a friend and the president of Pasadena’s own Fuller Seminary. He stunned a lot of folks back in 1972 when he became a leading figure in Evangelicals for… McGovern! As Mouw writes, issues like the Vietnam War, racism, and poverty were every bit as much moral and spiritual issues as abortion and homosexuality.

The evangelical white left has always been small. The 20% number that Dreher cites above sounds about right — but there’s a heck of a difference between 20% and 0%, and it serves conservative rhetoric to blur that distinction. There are Mennonites and Quakers and Episcopalians and socially concerned Catholics and evangelicals in the Democratic Party. They often disagree about homosexuality and abortion, but they are in agreement that on issues of justice, poverty, and peace the Democratic Party, however flawed, is at least marginally closer to biblical morality than the GOP.

Dreher apparently doesn’t know a lot of black folks. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but I know two things about African-Americans: they are, statistically, very observant Christians — and they give 90% of their votes to the Democratic Party. Contrary to patronizing Republican rhetoric, this is not because they are misled by the likes of Al Sharpton, nor is it merely a historical loyalty. Black folks deserve a hell of a lot more credit than white conservatives tend to give them! (Has Dreher ever worshipped in a black church?) His article completely ignores the reality of black Democratic Christians. After all, to acknowledge the existence and vitality of that community would undermine his entire point!

Moral issues are not merely “pelvic” issues. It is a deceitful misunderstanding of Scripture to suggest that sexual morality deserves primacy of place over issues of peace and justice. This is not to say that Scripture has nothing to say about sex — it does indeed — but sexual morality is merely one aspect of a larger set of issues that are properly called “morals.”

Look, I’d love to see a Consistent-Life political party do well, but I don’t expect it will come. In the meantime, I know as a believer that if I choose to vote (and as my Mennonite friends make clear, not all believers so choose), I must vote putting moral issues first. Poverty is a moral issue. War is a moral issue. Justice and inclusion are moral issues. And yes, sexual matters are moral issues. Weighing them all in the balance, I find myself more than a bit disenchanted with both parties. But on careful and prayerful reflection, I realize that the best and most moral vote I can cast under the circumstances will indeed be for John Kerry and the Democratic Party.

I respect my friends who have come to a different decision. So many people dear to me are voting for George W.! I trust that they have made that decision thoughtfully and prayerfully, and I am grateful that most of them believe that though Hugo may be wrong, he’s voting for Kerry based on moral convictions. To Rod Dreher, folks like me are an invisible, irrelevant, tiny minority. But he’s wrong on his history, and he’s wrong on the facts.

Links and pouty white people

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When it rains, it pours. I’m late to the story, but fellow Pasadena blogger Rudy Carrasco (whose son Sam is fighting leukemia) now is driving around in a rental van; his 36-week pregnant wife Kafi was driving the family van when it was totalled in an intersection last week. The baby is due any minute, and Kafi and Micah (the one about to be born) are fine. Sam continues his fight against cancer, and Rudy is exhausted. Rudy is, however, throwing out the first pitch at Dodger Stadium tomorrow night. If you go to his site, you can donate to help either the Carrasco family or to assist the kids at Rudy’s Harambee center get tickets for the aforementioned game. I made a donation via Paypal, and sent prayers as well.

Jenell Paris has a review-cum-vignette about a Tony Orlando concert that may be her best post yet.

Father Jake has some excellent insider analysis on rebel parishes in the Episcopal Church.

Brian has a modest proposal for Oregon voters: defend traditional marriage.

Telford Work preached the welcoming sermon at Westmont College this past weekend.

Yesterday’s LA Times had this fascinating piece: Pouty White People, by Gregory Rodriguez. It begins:

Once known as the land of futurists and dreamers, California is increasingly home to pessimists. Often nostalgic, newspaper commentators, novelists, journalists and social critics issue jeremiads about paradise lost and the coming dystopia. California has always had its share of apocalyptic prophets, but these voices are no longer cries in the wilderness; they reflect a growing public mood in the once Golden State.

There is a racial dimension to all the gloominess. The downbeat outlook is in large part driven by Anglos, the state’s largest minority. Although they enjoy the highest per capita income and are significantly more likely to own a home than any other group, Anglos appear to be suffering from a bad case of “declinism.”

Tell me about it. Did Rodriguez interview my family? It goes on:

A majority of Anglos clearly believe that their best days in the state are behind them.

One explanation for what is happening is what journalist David Whitman calls the “I’m OK, you’re not” phenomenon. Anglos have less faith in the future of today’s immigrants than the immigrants have for themselves. Over a generation, immigrants from Asia and particularly Latin America have changed not only the cultural landscape but also the state’s image of itself.

The newcomers have punctured the idea of California as a middle-class utopia. They are associated with high rates of poverty, density, diversity and social ills reminiscent of New York City and Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Whites don’t easily identify with the aspirations of these emergent groups.

Bold emphasis is mine. That is absolutely dead on.

The student body at PCC is only 20% white. A very high number of our students are still (in the current parlance) “English Language Learners”. The writing and cognitive skills that many of our students bring to the classroom are dismal. Even in the eleven years I’ve been teaching, I can see a notable decline.

But so many of my students have such an amazing work ethic! They work full-time, go to school, and push themselves much harder than I could ever have imagined. And they really, really believe that a community college education is a stepping-stone to their dreams. Though they are often cynical about government, they are heartbreakingly idealistic about the American dream and their ability to achieve it. They will have the house and the lawn and the nice car. They don’t know how, but they know that if they work hard, it will come. And if it doesn’t come for them, it will come for their children.

On my mother’s side, two great-great grandfathers and one great-great-great grandfather came to California for the Gold Rush. They came from Germany and Illinois and England (the last by way of New Zealand.) They came to a nearly empty place that was not yet a state. None found gold; all three found prosperity in one way or another. The one from Illinois (the great-great-great) brought ten children with him; they could only afford to send the youngest to college. That youngest was my great-great grandfather; he graduated from the College of the Pacific (the early version of UOP) before the University of California was founded. In other words, theirs was a large family that dreamed big, worked hard, and used a college education to climb to affluence.

I’m not a superior person because my ancestors came here so long ago. And I know what the California dream did for my family. My grandfather was a teacher in the public schools. My father taught at UC; my mother at a community college. I am called not only to be a teacher, but to be a California teacher. I want for my students what my ancestors found: possibility, prosperity, and a uniquely tolerant, open, comfortable way of life. I don’t know how that will happen in this over-crowded place, but I have no choice to believe that it will.

I still love this smoggy, dry, hot, often dystopian place. I cannot imagine being anywhere else. On Saturday, I ran with some friends up in the Angeles Forest on some remote trails north of La Canada; we saw deer and rabbits and bear scat and no humans for miles around. On Sunday, my fiancee and I rode our bikes from Pasadena down to Dodger Stadium and home through Glendale along busy, pot-holed urban thoroughfares.

In the name of my ancestors who found so much here, I have no choice but to struggle on in the classroom. At least for now.

This sixth-generation Californian is as Anglo as can be. (As a historian of medieval Britain, I loathe the fact that Californians use “Anglo” for all white people. It’s like using “Inca” for all Latin Americans.) I’m going to marry the Afro-Colombian/Croatian love of my life, and lord willing, raise children here. And whatever the Times says, this white boy isn’t pouting.

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More on smiling and being tougher on men

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This will be longish.

I confess I have been quite surprised (albeit pleased) by the intense debate taking place in the comments section below Friday’s post on men, women, and smiling. Astarte at Utopian Hell and Amanda at Mousewords have both taken up the topic at their places; go here and here and here. Others have weighed in at length in the comment section; the vast majority of those stopping by have been women. (I keep meaning to post about phrases like “weigh in” and “throw one’s weight around” and “carrying a lot of weight” in our anorexic-celebrating culture. Another time).

Anyhow, I think the discussion has been absolutely terrific, and I am quite grateful. On the question of whether it is “safe” for women to smile at men they don’t know, I’m not prepared to offer anything like a definitive answer. As has been made clear in the comments section, friendliness appears differently to different people based upon their age, culture, background and personal experiences. In our society, each woman will have to assess her own comfort level and make choices accordingly.

I’ve been told several times that I’m “harder” on men on this blog than I am on women. I don’t think that’s true on every issue, but I am certain that it is around issues relating to gender and sexuality. No, it’s not political correctness on my part (though I am one of those old guard liberal types who still thinks of “being PC” as a term of approbation rather than opprobrium). Nor is it an old-fashioned WASPY gentlemanliness coming through. No, I’m “harder” on men for one single solitary reason:

Men aren’t hard enough on each other.

Even in the blogosphere, it seems that men are more likely to display “gender solidarity” with each other when it comes to issues of sexuality and male behavior. We live in a culture that discourages men from critiquing other men’s choices and actions — and at the same time, we live in a culture where young girls and grown women are encouraged to analyze, dissect, and frequently criticize their sisters. When a young man walks into my classroom wearing a sexy outfit, to pick an obvious example, I don’t have boys whispering to each other “Who does he think he is?” (Admittedly, what I’m saying here tends to be truer for heterosexual men). I see the “lack of sisterhood” doing tremendous damage to women’s lives, even as I see a “cult of homosocial silence” protecting men.

Men can be ruthless to each other when it comes to questions of effeminacy and masculinity. But few men indeed will stand up to a sexist brother and say, “dude, the way you talk about women ain’t cool.” When listening to a male friend recount a one-night stand where alcohol played a part in decision making, few guys will say, “Are you sure she consented? Are you sure you didn’t rape her?” Obviously, I’m dealing in generalities here — but while exceptions are always welcome and even noteworthy, generalities are useful in telling us how a significant majority of young men think, act, and live.

The point is this: men have to hold each other accountable. Until we’ve “cleaned our own house”, we have no right to give direction to our sisters. Do women have specks in their eyes? Damn right. But we can’t point out the dimensions of those specks until we deal with the massive logs protruding from our corneas. (I know, mixing phallic and biblical imagery isn’t cool, but I did it anyway.) In practical terms, that means I have no right to say to a woman “Smile!” until I have done everything in my power to make it physically and emotionally safe for her to do so. (I’m not sure that even then, I’d have that right.) A tall order? Not at all.

I don’t think of women as precious little angels who have been the victims of nasty bad men. I don’t have women up on a pedestal. Women can be cruel, petty, jealous; they can be strong, decisive, lustful and aggressive; they can be intellectual, philosophical, and above all, self-sufficient. I’m quite aware that my sisters are, to put it plainly, people. I know plenty of women who have done truly cruel and unfair things to the men in their lives. But I know damned well that what men have done to women in the past and in the present, individually and collectively, has been far worse.

It is not enough for men to say: “But I’m not a rapist, so I’m not part of the problem.” Many men, especially in high school and college, live in “rape culture.” For example, staying silent while your male friends get women drunk at a party in the hopes of reducing their inhibitions makes you complicit in date rape, brother. That may seem harsh, but the fact is that the most important thing men can do to change the culture is to continue to challenge each other. We do a great job of challenging each other athletically, economically, and professionally. We must do that in terms of how we interact with women.

It is axiomatic that young men respond well to challenges set for them by older men. (Watch what countless boys in high school do to please their coaches; watch what Marine recruits do for their drill sergeants.) We’ve got to start doing that around gender issues! (One local high school cross-country coach I know as a running buddy is very good at doing that with his boys. He teaches them about aerobic efficiency and respecting women at the same time. But he’s the exception, sad to say.) So when a younger guy expresses to me his frustration at women who won’t smile at him, I first affirm his frustration, and then gently ask him if he is doing everything he can to make the world safer for women to smile. I ask him to examine not only his own attitudes and behaviors, but those of his friends as well.

Obviously, there are men’s organizations that do this kind of “challenging” very well. Let me finish this post by plugging the folks at Men Can Stop Rape. In January 2002, I went through one of their three-day trainings with men’s activists from all over the country. It was an incredible experience, and if you ever find yourself able to spend a weekend in D.C. (where they are based), I recommend the experience highly.

So I’ll say it one more time: I’m not hard on men because I am filled with self-loathing. I’m not hard on men because I’m getting back at the bullies from grade school. I’m not hard on men because I’m gay, or because this male pro-feminist guise is a slick way to pick up women. I’m hard on men because I believe that men can, individually and collectively, radically transform the way they view and treat women. Men need to be encouraged to do this work by other men, not just their mothers and their sisters. They need to see other men living out lives of justice. They need to see men who are neither patriarchs or predators, but who are nonetheless strong, reliable, and profoundly masculine. And they need men like that to hold them accountable.

“Guilty until Proven Innocent”

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I’m in an academically nostalgic mood this morning.

Many years ago, I sat both frustrated and excited through my first Women’s Studies class at Berkeley. I was one of perhaps four men in a class of thirty, and I was (shock of all shocks) among the most vocal. I remember one morning blurting out something like the following:

Why is it that men are always guilty until proven innocent? I know there are some “bad guys” out there, but it is incredibly hurtful to me that women won’t smile at me in the hallways or on the street because they have lumped me in with all the others! I get so tired of paying the price — in terms of women’s mistrust — for other men’s failures and betrayals and bad behavior. Why can’t women see what a good guy I am?

It was the sort of day where everyone was sharing personal stuff. I was 19 and lonely, but I was also eager to “get” feminism because I believed it was my duty to do so. More importantly, I believed that there was something there for me within feminism — something I could learn that would make me a happier person. But so far, all I was feeling was guilty and angry.

I am happy to report that no one verbally attacked me for my outburst. But the women in the class, led by the professor, helped me to see several things I wasn’t able or willing yet to see.

First of all, the obvious point is that women’s intuition, while not entirely the stuff of myth, is not so powerful that it can automatically separate “good guys” from the bad. No woman can walk down the street and as she passes a man, know with certainty that he isn’t a threat. Given the high incidence of rape and assault and harassment and other forms of mistreatment, a woman would be a fool to leave herself continually vulnerable. The old adage “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” seems to apply here. When a simple smile is so frequently misunderstood and construed as a sexual invitation, American women generally do have to operate on the assumption that men are guilty until proven innocent. (I blogged on that “guilty until innocent” theme once before, in a different context.)

As I heard this, I acknowledged that I couldn’t ask women to have radar detectors to sense my harmlessness. So, I asked “What can I do? How can I – as a man — help this situation?”

The answers I got have been with me for nigh on eighteen years. The most important thing I can do is hold myself and other men accountable. When I’m hanging with the guys, and one of them cat-calls a girl and I say nothing, I am as guilty as he is. When I’m hanging with the guys, and leering at my classmates in miniskirts, I am part of the problem. It’s not enough for men to be kind and thoughtful with the women in their lives, they must exemplify that kindness and sympathy for women even when they are in an all-male environment. The acid test of a male pro-feminist is how he interacts with other men when there are no women around. Any man can “talk the talk”, and maybe even “walk the walk” in front of his mother, sister, girlfriend, wife. Can he do it with his buddies present? That’s the question. And you can’t be part of the solution until you do that.

I was floored when I heard that, because like so many young men, I was guilty of that “double life.” Sweet and sensitive with women (at least, trying to be sensitive); crass and boorish with my fellow males. I assumed that the closeness with men I desired so much required that I surrender my feminist and egalitarian principles; how else could I bond with guys if we didn’t act like pigs? Isn’t that just what guys do? (Check out a great story on this subject of confronting guys at the splendid XYONLINE site.)

It is not easy to confront other men. To do so is to violate sacred rules of masculinity in our culture, and indeed, as I posted below, to risk the accusation of effeminacy and homosexuality. Actually, for many years in the early 1990s, I only had male friends who were gay for this very reason. They didn’t seem as hung up on masculinity issues as straight guys, and, more importantly, how could a gay man question my masculinity? (That’s a tough one to admit, but heck, it’s God’s truth today.)

I have a number of straight men friends today. I’m having lunch with one in a few minutes, actually. But it’s taken years to “match my language and my life” around other heterosexual men. One huge help in doing so was beginning to work with youth groups. I knew that if I were to work with high school boys, I had to be accountable to God and to the principles I embrace as never before. These boys have helped me enormously on my journey to wholeness.

Now that I teach courses on gender, I often run into fellows in my classes who sound a lot like I did when I was 19. They are angry and frustrated at being “guilty until proven innocent.” I empathize with them publicly, and then I tell them what I was told. I challenge them to do that hard work with other men. Indeed, I tell them over and over again something I believe down to my core:

The single most important thing a man can do if he wants to be a feminist is to practice feminism with other men. If he can do that, he’s well on his way on his journey to justice.

Off to lunch with Steve.

Norman Cantor, and some quick thoughts on grad school memories

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Norman Cantor, one of the most controversial and celebrated American medievalists of the past half century has died at age 74. His Civilization of the Middle Ages was a classic from the moment it appeared forty years ago, and remains in print to this day (in a revised edition).

He was reviled by many for his 1991 expose of the lives of other great medievalists, Inventing the Middle Ages. In particular, his treatment of Ernst Kantorowicz (the dean of medieval political theory) scandalized many in the field. Cantor suggested that Kantorowicz was an “impeccable Nazi”, something for which he never provided evidence.

For my first three years of graduate school at UCLA, my primary mentor was the late Robert Benson, who had been a friend and student of Kantorowicz. Had he lived, he would have been my dissertation chair. It was Robert Benson who steered me towards my doctoral work on medieval bishops (something I have never blogged about, but oddly still near and dear to my heart). Benson’s The Bishop Elect (alas, now out of print) was influenced by Kantorowicz’s magisterial The King’s Two Bodies, published in 1956 and still very much in print. Those two books were the most important works I read in my early graduate school career.

Benson and Cantor were of similar age, and had known each other well. My mentor (who died in 1995) was heartbroken and infuriated by Cantor’s betrayal of his master and the unproven insinuations of Nazism and anti-Semitism. (Robert Benson was Jewish, of course, as was Cantor). I remember that when Cantor’s book came out in 1991, Profesor Benson was apoplectic. A letter that Benson wrote to the New York Review of Books condemning Cantor for his cruel lies is found here.

If you’ve ever been a grad student and studied with someone you admired and revered and lionized, you know how easy it is to take on their own prejudices! Though the roots of the Cantor-Benson-Kantorowicz clash were in the 1940s and 50s, I found myself taking on my adviser’s sense of outrage and betrayal. I actually refused to read Cantor after that, and even (I do confess it), told one of my former students not to take a course from Cantor at NYU (where he taught until 1999). My student wisely ignored my advice, and was actually enrolled in the last undergraduate course he taught. She reported him to have been a lovely man, which may well have been true.

When I read Cantor’s obit this morning, it brought back so many memories of my early grad school days at UCLA. In our little ivory tower world, we worked on paleography and medieval Latin, and spoke of Gratian’s Decretum the way others speak of the Harry Potter books. We were all young, all eager to prove ourselves to these men who were our advisers and our mentors, who dispensed wisdom and TA-ships and their own prejudices. The love of a student for his first grad school mentor is a strange and passionate thing. I’ve never forgotten it. And even now, as I type this, in the back of my mind I am worried about what Robert Louis Benson, dead these nine years, would say as he read my little post about Cantor’s passing.

Among other things, he would say that previous sentence ought not to have been begun with an “and”.

Jimmy, Jimmy…

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Jonathan Dresner brought this to my attention on Tuesday: Jimmy Swaggart, giving a sermon this past weekend, said this about gays and lesbians:

I’m trying to find the correct name for it . . . this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. . . . I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.

Eugene Volokh challenges those of who know Jesus as Lord:

… it seems to me that decent Christians ought to condemn this defender of murder, who publicly says that he’d violate the Ten Commandments when someone “looks at [him]” the wrong way, while purporting to preach God’s word and lead Christian congregations. Tell us, at least, that this supposed Christian — who was once one of the nation’s leading evangelists, until he was tripped up by another of the Commandments — doesn’t speak for you.

Okay, here goes: Jesus is my Savior, Jimmy don’t speak for me. Perhaps I shall put that to music. (And yes, mother dear, the “don’t” is an affectation.)

David Batstone at the essential Sojourners magazine is organizing an email protest, read more about it here.

What grabs me about Swaggart’s stupid, unChristian remarks is the masculine braggadocio that undergirds them. We live in a culture in which men, even now, grow up terrified of one thing above all else: being exposed as weak, a “sissy”, a “faggot.” (It goes without saying that our culture cannot distinguish between femininity and male homosexuality.) On school playgrounds across the country, expressing one’s contempt and hatred for homosexuals is thus the sine qua non of coming of age for young men. Gay activists in the 1970s, taking a term of opprobrium and turning it on its head, coined the phrase “fear of faggotry”, which drives the point home in a nicely alliterative way.

In our hyper-masculine culture, young boys wound each other with taunts of gayness. No word can inflame the self-righteous indignation of most young boys the way “fag” or “queer” or “homo” can. “Fat” doesn’t hurt the same way. “Ugly” doesn’t hurt the same way. (I don’t hear a lot of little girls calling each other “dykes” as insults; if my readers have different information, please provide). When I was a kid, I would hear older boys talk about what they would do to a gay man if they saw him:

“I’d beat him up!”, one boy would proudly proclaim.

“Nah, I’d kill him, he doesn’t deserve to live”, another would sagely add.

Our most popular playground game? A simple game of tackling called “Smear the Queer.”

I remember the football coaches at my high school — adult males, mind you — calling their players faggots. “You tackle like a queer, Richards”, one would yell; “Beat his faggoty ass”, another grown man would yell at his defensive line as they closed in on a running back. No one said a word of complaint. For a male to speak up against this hyper-homophobic culture would be to reveal his own queerness. Most adult male teachers I knew were a bit in awe of the football coaches — and this was California, not Texas. Most carried their own memories of being called “faggot” with them. Women did often complain about rough language, and were either ignored or patronized.

I don’t think Jimmy Swaggart really would kill a gay man who approached him. (Perhaps I’m just being optimistic). When I read his words, I harkened back to countless similar, idiotic declarations I heard on the playgrounds of my youth. I confess that out of my own desperate desire to be accepted, when I was in elementary school or junior high, I played “smear the queer” and used homophobic slurs with abandon, so eager was I not to be cast out and rejected by my peers. Like Jimmy, I didn’t want to kill gays, I just wanted to prove my own masculinity — something about which I, like most guys that age, was in considerable doubt about!

Some of us grow up to become strong men comfortable in our own skins, rejoicing in our own sexuality, unafraid of warm associations with our gay brothers. Some of us don’t. What I heard last week from Swaggart’s pulpit was the cry of the insecure adolescent male. It doesn’t excuse it. Not in an adult man, and especially not in a man who claims to be anointed as a preacher of the Word.

I’m praying for Jimmy this morning. And for all queer folk who have been the victims of violence, verbal, physical, and emotional. And my dear sweet God, I repent for all that I have said and done to try and show others that I, Hugo, was a “real man.”