Monthly Archives: November 2004

10Ks, faux bisexuality, and a battle over lyrics.

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I’m back from a 10K run down in San Gabriel.  I haven’t done a 10K in almost five years  I never really enjoyed short races, as I always felt that the pain of the “kick” at the end was worse than the pain of finishing a marathon or an ultra.  I’m built for endurance, not speed.  (And I always hated doing speedwork on a track.  12x 400M workouts, 8x800M workouts, and those awful mile repeats.  Never again.)

Since we are doing a trail marathon a week from today, we took the 10K easy, running at what is called a “zone pace.”  To run at a zone pace means that you are working hard, but can still carry on a full conversation throughout.  It’s an old psychological tool to talk during races — it tends to frustrate and annoy the runners around you, who are usually working too hard to talk.  I confess, though mine is not a compettive personality, I do enjoy  “psyching out” other runners.  My friend Sharon and I finished together; she won the women’s race overall and I placed 2nd among 35-39 year-old males.  (It turned out there were only four men IN that age group today, of course!)

Last night’s dance at All Saints (see this post)  was lightly attended, but went well.   An elegant stewardship event took place almost simultaneously  upstairs on our lawn while the teens congregated in our subterranean social hall.

As far as I was concerned, the music was undanceable.  This didn’t stop some from trying out the forbidden “freaking”, though we dealt with it with good humor.  One of our fine new youth ministers carried a large bible (something not often seen at All Saints), and  when physical contact seemed excessive, he would make a great show of leaping on to the dance floor, wedging the Scriptures between the bodies of the offending pair.  He did it with grace and humor, and made his point.

It has almost always been acceptable for girls to dance together.  It has almost never been acceptable for boys to do the same thing.  But I note that in recent years, how girls interact with each other has changed.  Sometime in the mid to late-90s, adolescents seemed to discover a kind of “faux bisexual chic.”  I don’t know where it came from, but it has persisted and made its way down to the relatively young. 

What does this “faux bi chic” look like?  An example from last night:  three girls who are not regulars at our church arrived; two had beaux who are All Saints boys.  Their boyfriends, however, seemed more interested in playing with the turntable equipment than in dancing.  The girls seemed bored, and went off to dance together.  But they didn’t just dance — they began to caress each other with abandon, rub against each other, come close to kissing each other on the mouths.  As they did so, they kept looking back at their boys at the DJ post, wanting to make sure that they had the rapt attention of the fellas.  Naturally, they did.  The boys all but had their tongues out of their mouths, but were remaining passive observers.  The display was just innocent enough so that we didn’t have to pry girls apart with the bible — but it was depressingly typical.

My sources tell me that it has become much more common for girls to “make out” with each other at teenage parties.  For some of these girls, there may be a genuine attraction — or at least real curiosity — about other women.   But for most of the young women with whom I have discussed this, it seems to be about attracting and arousing the men around them.  Pretending to fool around with other girls allows them to demonstrate their sexuality without fearing being labelled as a “slut”, as the label “bi” carries little if any  stigma for the girls with whom I work.  (The same cannot be said for boys, of course.)   What bothers me is that it seems to be less about young women exploring and claiming their sexuality and more about developing a strategy for attracting and pleasing men by appealing to a classic straight male fantasy.  That’s not only not empowering, it’s offensive!  It ‘s another way in which the sexuality of the young is distorted and exploited.  And it is a caricature of authentic bisexual and lesbian relationships.

I think we have a topic for next Wednesday night’s  youth group!  We’ve also printed out the lyrics to some of the rap songs that we played last night.   We will ask them to read this  aloud, and then this, and then this.  (Lyrics are explicit and offensive, you are forewarned.)  I’ve got a pretty good idea that the kids will try and laugh it off at first.  But maybe after they are forced to read aloud what they dance to, we might get somewhere. 

Our youth minister is also going to play for them the new U2 single, Vertigo.  And then we’ll read those lyrics.

Oh — and please see all the new photos of Matilde in my photo album!

 

Briefly noted

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Search terms folks have used to find this blog today:

Hugo Hefner  (love it, it came from Swedish Google)

Older Virgins
chinchilla slang (Oh, Matilde speaks perfect castellano — no slang)

pics of women in traditional Muslim veils
gay abstinence

the meaning of chloe
sexual mores east indian women


All since midnight.

Read about Opal the anti-instinctual cat (with pictures) at Jenell’s blog.

Amanda has some solid thoughts about Kinsey and sex research; I need to go and see the new movie soon.  (After all, I continue to use his stuff in many classes.  And no, thank you, I don’t need flaming comments from my dear brethren on the right about how Kinsey has supposedly been debunked.)

I am quoted several times in an article in today’s PCC paper on tattoos and branding.

And though it’s been on my blogroll for a while, I want to call your attention to Feminist Mormon Housewives; You’ll visit for the title, but stay for some good writing and some honest insight into a world very different from the one in which many of my readers live.

Oh, and did you want some Friday chinchilla blogging?  Of course.  Here she is again getting some love from her mama.  Click to enlarge:

P1010197


Christian unity and division; some predictions

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Today’s LA TImes has this story: Evangelicals Want Faith Rewarded.  Excerpt:

Christian evangelicals provided much of the passion and manpower for
President Bush’s reelection. But even as they celebrate his victory,
many of the movement’s leaders are experiencing post-election anxiety,
worried that their strong support for the president might not translate
into the instant influence they expected.

They are flexing
their muscles to block Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), an abortion rights
supporter, from a Senate leadership post overseeing judicial nomination
debates — but Specter appears likely to get the job. They want a
clear-cut ban on same-sex marriage, but Bush’s newly stated support for
civil unions makes them wonder how strongly the president will back
their efforts.

The nervousness stands in contrast to the rejoicing that took place
after Bush won by a wider margin than many expected. He benefited from
a heavy turnout among conservative Catholics and Protestant
evangelicals.

Bob Jones III, president of the Christian conservative Bob Jones
University in South Carolina, recently urged Bush to purge moderates
from the White House.

"If you have weaklings around you who do
not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," Jones said in a
letter to Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner
and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because
they despise your Christ."

(In the penultimate paragraph, shouldn’t BJU — as I was taught to call it, with vulgar implications — be described as "the conservative Christian" university rather than "Christian conservative" university? )

If there is one thing that folks on the secular left don’t get, it’s how genuinely fractured the so-called religious right invariably becomes when it starts to become politically successful.  Liberals would do well lto remember that so-called religious conservatives are hardly monolithic.  Traditional Roman Catholics and Fundamental Baptists are uneasy allies at best.  (After all, BJU remains famously anti-Catholic, with a history of referring to the pope as the anti-Christ.)  Even among Protestants, there are bitter divisions, especially between the so-called Reformed churches (strict Calvinists) and the fastest growing group on the religious right, Pentecostals. 

But George W. Bush, like Reagan before him, has managed to hold conservative Christians together by avoiding any significant hint that he has the sort of precise theology that might get him in trouble with one faction or another.  Yes, he’s technically a Methodist — but he is so far to the right of that mainstream denomination that it is hard to find much that is distinctively Wesleyan about his religious world view.  Not only has he made overtures to conservative Catholics, Mormons and  Protestants, he has reminded them all of the old maxim: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."    Compared to militant homosexuals, what are doctrinal differences over the authority of the papacy, total depravity, and the gifts of the spirit?

American evangelicals tend to have little sense of their own history.  A great many of them have at best a superficial theology.  I say that with respect — but I’ve been to enough "reader-response" bible studies to know what passes for theological analysis in most circles.  ("Reader response" means that the only level of analysis applied to the text is how it makes the reader or listener "feel" when they encounter the Word.)   Relatively few pastors in conservative churches preach denominational distinctives anymore.   Folks won’t sit still for sermons that distinguish consubstantation from transubstantiation.   Folks at conservative Reform churches don’t seem to get many sermons about the distinction between Calvinism and the "Arminian heresy".  And with the exception of the fine BJU folks, even the most conservative Protestant leaders rarely openly condemn the papacy any longer.

The growth of non-denominational mega-churches has helped this trend, but so too has the culture war.   Similar positions on social issues have brought historic enemies closer together.   President Bush, building on Reagan’s success in the 1980s, has forged a remarkable coalition based on a powerful desire to end abortion and prevent social innovations like same-sex marriage.  But as a liberal Christian whose views on these issues tend to diverge from my brethren on the right, I wonder how long this coalition will hold together in the face of its great triumph on November 2.  I confess that my hope is that many conservative Christians have had their expectations raised unreasonably high — and I confess that I hope that for them,  a second Bush term will be marked by frustration and disillusionment.

On a more positive note, I hope that the more responsible elements of American evangelicalism will press the case that war, poverty, and environmental protection are also moral issues.  There are signs that this is already underway.  The National Association of Evangelicals (an umbrella group with millions of members) last month issued a report urging greater civic engagement for Christians.  One of the authors of the report, progressive evangelical Ron Sider, is quoted thus:

The declaration calls evangelicals to a biblically
balanced concern that reflects the full range of God’s concerns for the
well-being of marriage, the family, the sanctity of human life, justice
for the poor, care for creation, peace, freedom and racial justice. No
longer dare one accuse evangelicals of being ‘one-issue’ voters focused
exclusively on one or two issues.

Well, amen, Ron.  But I can tell you right now what Bob Jones thinks of that.

What we will discover in the second Bush term are, I think, three things:

1. The unity of the religious right will begin to show signs of fragmentation, as the hard-liners grow disillusioned with the relatively slow pace of the Bush Administration in implementing a truly radical agenda.

2.  Mainstream and progressive evangelical leaders will have at least some success in broadening a Christian political agenda to include issues like poverty, racial justice, and care for creation.  That success will then further alienate those who see morality as essentially sexual in nature.

3.  With the "threat" of same-sex marriage looming less large, we may see a reawakened care for distinctiveness on the religious right.  In particular, tension between Catholics and evangelical Protestants may be exacerbated, as well as tension between these groups on one hand and Mormons and Pentecostals on the other.  As a Christian, I am grieved by division in the body of Christ.  As a progressive, I see real potential for the left in those divisions.

And I do think we need more sermons on real heresies.  Not sexual ones, the fun ones: patripassional modalism, tongues, pre-trib/mid-trb/post-trib raptures, limited atonement, that sort of thing…  Let’s get the body stirred up!

Straight man, gay bar

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This is not a particularly profound post.

I’ve been thinking about dancing and gay bars.  Fear not, gentle readers, my fiancee’s trip abroad has not predicated a dramatic announcement about my orientation.  But in the comments below my freaking post, Amy and Zuzu both mentioned a fondness for going to gay clubs.  As Zuzu put it:

I’m fine with freaking with gay men because I know they’re not going to be getting ideas about my dancing with them being a permission slip for aggressive sexual behavior. In that context, it’s fun.

I don’t go out dancing much these days.  (One reason is the distance running: early long runs mean early bedtimes.)  But back in the early to mid-1990s, I did go out almost every weekend.   My friends (of both sexes) and I generally went to gay clubs in West Hollywood.  My female friends liked the clubs for the same reason that Zuzu mentioned; I liked them because I always felt more relaxed.  Dealing with men hitting on me was never a problem — and from what I could tell, gay men in gay clubs were infinitely less aggressive and rude than straight men in straight clubs.  Or perhaps I just wasn’t anyone’s type!

Of course, I’ve spent much of my life around gay men and lesbians.  With the exception of my father and some older cousins, my chief male role models in my adolescence were gay men who worked in the community theatre where I spent every minute of my free time.  These men had loved me and made me feel safe, given me tips on everything from dating to more effectively projecting my voice.  (It goes without saying that none ever treated me with anything other than superb boundaries.)  So when I started going to gay clubs in college, I always felt safe and welcomed, even as a heterosexual man.

But to be entirely honest, what I also enjoyed in these clubs was how free the women I was with clearly felt.  So often, in the predatory enviroment of places frequented by straight men, I could feel my female friends "on their guard" — and often, I felt myself becoming quite protective.  (This protectiveness was almost always welcomed.)  I didn’t have to do that around gay men.  That was quite a relief.

When I tell stories like this, I often get asked "Did you ever wonder, Hugo, about yourself when you were growing up?"  Did you ever think you might be gay?"  In all honesty, absolutely not.  As safe as I felt around gay men and lesbians as a child, a teen, and a young adult, I always somehow knew that on one basic level, I was "different."  My heterosexuality has been clear to me all my life, since I was a small child — and something so powerful and basic and innate could not, in my experience, be shaped or swayed by any amount of exposure to those whose desires were different. 

A quick note on Veteran’s Day

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Not much to post about this Veteran’s Day.  With the day off, I’ve got a bike ride planned for the morning, grading in the afternoon, and a run at dusk.  (I’m starting to taper for the November 20 Saddleback Marathon, so the distances involved today will be quite modest.)

It’s hard for me to blog about Veteran’s Day.  I’m quite confident that others are doing so far more effectively than I; Annika chose to post the "band of brothers" speech from Henry V, which can move even a latte-sipping, bike shorts-wearing, sushi-eating, NPR-listening Episcopalian blue-state liberal to tears.

What I am thinking about is this: within a year or two, my classes will surely be filled with young veterans.  I’ve already had four or five young men who served in Iraq last year; the numbers will surely go up.  For countless ex-GIs and Marines, the community college is the first stop when they return to civilian life.  (In the early to mid-70s, they say, PCC was a veritable haven for Vietnam vets.)  I am looking forward to meeting these young men and young women, to hearing their stories and learning from their perspectives.  It’s easy for me to be angered by war — but I have a healthy respect for those who, often against their will, go off to to fight.  I haven’t done what they have done.

On the other hand, I don’t think less of myself because I was never a veteran.  When Shakespeare writes:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day…

I can say, no, my manhood is not contingent upon the willingness to take other human life!  I will not denigrate the character of those young men and women, mostly from less fortunate circumstances than my own, who chose military service.    But while I honor their sacrifice, they are not my heroes.  My heroes are those like my friends in Christian Peacemaker Teams and the Mennonite Mission Network, who go into the same damn places our Marines and GIs go — but they go unarmed save for faith.  If I regret anything, it is that I wasn’t a missionary.

Thursday Short Poem: Neruda’s To the Foot from its Child

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Some of the poems I pick for poetry Thursday are fairly obscure, some are oft-anthologized.  Today’s falls into the latter category.  I’m not a huge fan of Pablo Neruda; for whatever reason, most of what he wrote leaves me cold.  This poem, which is fairly well-known, is one magnificent exception.  Like many of the verses I post here, it tends to make me cry.

To the Foot from Its Child

The child’s foot doesn’t know yet that it’s a foot,
and wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

But then stones and pieces of glass,
streets, ladders,
and the paths of the hard earth
go on teaching the foot that it can’t fly,
that it can’t be round fruit on a branch.
The child’s foot then
was overcome, it fell
in the battle,
was a prisoner,
condemned to live in a shoe.

Gradually, without light,
it started to know the world in its own way,
without knowing the other foot, shut in,
exploring life like a blindman.

These soft nails
of quartz, in a bunch,
hardened, changed into
opaque matter, into hard horn,
and the small petals of the child
got crushed, unbalanced,
took the form of eyeless reptiles,
worms’ triangular heads.
And then they grew calluses,
they were covered
with tiny volcanoes
of death, unacceptable
hardenings.

But this blind thing walked
without respite, without stopping
hour after hour,
one foot and then the other,
now a man’s
or a woman’s,
above,
below,
through fields, through mines,
through department stores and ministries,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot laboured with its shoe,
it hardly took time
to be naked in love or in sleep,
it walked, they walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and knew nothing,
because there everything was dark,
it didn’t know that it had ceased being a foot,
if they had buried it so that it could fly
or so that it could
become an apple.

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Freakin’ at All Saints

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Looking at my calendar for the week, I note that I have volunteered to chaperone a senior high dance at All Saints this Friday night.  When I first started doing youth work at the church, I chaperoned quite a few dances.  My schedule has changed in the last year or so, and my fiancee and I have other commitments on Friday nights.  But this Friday, with my beloved out of town, I shall be one of a handful of adults monitoring the goings-on in our subterranean social hall.

Youth dances at All Saints go back farther than anyone on staff can remember.  They have always proved wildly popular, and though we charge very little to get in, nonetheless usually end up generating a small profit for our youth council.  Our senior high youth are allowed to bring their friends who don’t attend All Saints, though we try to discourage folks from just wandering in off the street.  In years past, we have had a regular contingent of teens from nearby Lake Avenue, an evangelical mega-church that discourages dancing.  We also have had kids wander in from the impressively sized Pasadena Nazarene, which like other congregations in that denomination, also frowns upon dancing.  I’d by lying if I said we didn’t take a wee bit of pleasure in attracting teens from more conservative churches!

On the other hand, our famous liberalism at All Saints can be carried too far.  I remember the first dance I chaperoned four years ago.  Almost without exception, the kids insisted on playing rap music.  Our teens come from a variety of backgrounds, but rap seems — by far — their consensus choice for dance music.  At one point, the teen DJ (one of our kids) played three Eminem songs in a row, to the evident delight of the gyrating adolescents.  I had no quarrel with the music, even though I have little fondness for rap.  (At my high school dances, we had live bands, not DJs; they played lots and lots of 70s rock.  I remember that the principal of my high school was very upset when one band did a particularly fine cover of the Eric Clapton classic, "Cocaine."  And yes, we  danced to it, along with covers of songs by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, Styx, and my beloved Journey.)

But I did have a huge problem with the dancing.  At that first All Saints dance, I had been taking money at the door for the first hour, and finally switched with another adult who was monitoring the dance floor.  When I got a look at what was going on, my jaw dropped.  I saw a veritable ocean of frosh and sophomore girls, all with their backs to their male partners, grinding their butts into the crotches of the boys.  Most of the boys had their hands on the girls’ hips; one or two more aggressive fellows were sliding their hands up and down their partners’ torsoes.  Periodically, one of the girls would turn, face her partner, and begin to hump his outstretched leg in a fashion that reminded me of a libidinous dachsund.  I was flabbergasted. 

I turned to one of the senior girls who was standing next to me; she had helped organize the dance.  She whispered in my ear over the throbbing music "It’s okay, Hugo.  It’s just freaking."  Of course, I didn’t hear the word as "freaking" — the first time she said it.  I heard something else, and my head began to hurt.  In my era, we called it "dirty dancing", and it was strictly forbidden at high school social events.  (We were allowed to drape ourselves over each other for slow songs, but one did not rub one’s crotch against anyone and one’s hands did not go below one’s partner’s waist.)

Our full-time youth minister at the time — who no longer works for All Saints — was happily pouring soft drinks a few feet from the dance floor, utterly unfazed by what was happening inches from him.  I managed to pull him aside, and yell in his ear: "Shouldn’t we do something?"  He looked at me quizzically:  "Something about what?"  "That!", I shouted, gesturing at the dance floor.  The youth minister looked immediately concerned.  "Is someone drinking?", he asked.  "No, no, I mean the dancing."  He looked again, turned back to me, shrugged his shoulders, and said "Oh, that’s the way they do it now."

Clearly, Hugo was all alone in his outrage.  It was incredibly disconcerting.  Here I was, convinced that I was still in some sense "hip" at 33 or 34, and I had apparently just encountered — for the first time — my inner conservative.  (Deep in the heart of every liberal man, there surely lurks a powerful moralistic censoriousness.  It tends to appear around the same time he feels emotionally and spiritually responsible for the young and the vulnerable.)  But without any support from the staff, I could hardly impose my wishes on a teeming teenage throng.  I spent the rest of the dance watching the faces of the kids on the floor, wondering what they were thinking, wondering how comfortable they were.

At our next youth group meeting the following Wednesday, I asked the kids to explain their dancing to me.  I made it into a bit of a joke, playing the part (I don’t have to try hard) of an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t "get it."  The kids explained that there was — in their minds — nothing sexual about "freaking."  "It’s just the way we dance now; it doesn’t mean anything."  I pressed them as much as I could: "Are you sure you don’t see anything sexual about rubbing your pelvises together?"  Several of them laughed at me indulgently, and shook their heads. 

But the conversation soon turned more serious.  One 10th grade girl, whom I had seen on the dance floor for almost the entire time the previous Friday, raised her hand and began to talk.   I’ll call her Cassie, though that wasn’t her name.  Cassie said something like this:

You know, it does make me uncomfortable.  But this is what guys expect now.  If you won’t "freak" with them, they’ll go find some girl who will.   Once one girl lets a guy touch her, all the other guys expect the same thing — and all the girls start to feel the same pressure.  It really bothers me, but I really like dancing so I guess I put up with it.

What followed was some very candid discussion.  Not all of the girls agreed with Cassie, but most did.  Several of the boys were bewildered and a bit frustrated.  Most of them had no intention of forcing themselves on to their dance partners, but they did enjoy what was happening immensely and assumed that that enjoyment was reciprocated.   But one boy announced that he too felt pressure to freak — not by the girls, but by the other guys.  This fellow, I’ll call him Bryan, said something like this:

You know, I just want to dance — but the other guys give you a hard time if you don’t freak with a girl. It’s like I’m expected to try to get as much as I can, or I’m not cool.

The discussion ate up the better part of an hour.  Finally, with some nudging from me and a couple of other volunteers, we got the kids to design their own "dance code" for future events.  Here’s the rule they came up with: no touching another person’s body anywhere that you are legally required to cover in public with any part of your body. Hugging was fine.  Slow dancing, fine.  Hands on buttocks; crotches on thighs — not fine.  We asked the kids if they would be willing to police themselves, or if they thought they needed some help from adult chaperones.  Reluctantly, they asked for help.

The rule held up well for a while, but I’ve heard that lately, it’s been honored more in the breach than in the observance.  This will be my first dance at All Saints since 2002; I’ll report.

In the end, I do think dancing is healthy and exciting for kids.  I know full well that hormones and sexual chemistry are a huge part of that excitement, and I don’t have a problem with that.  (Our conservative neighboring churches do have a problem with it — and they hope to solve the problem by not allowing dancing at all.  But that just pushes the problem off church grounds.)  I do think that if a church is going to sponsor dances — as we have and will continue to do — we have an obligation to create a place where teens can relax and enjoy themselves without having to compete with one another to demonstrate sexual sophistication.  We have to give them the freedom to delight in each other while simultaneously giving them freedom from overwhelming sexual pressure. 

Oh, and for the record, I have never danced at a church dance.  But if I can get the DJ to put on Journey’s "Wheel In the Sky" or Foreigner’s "Hot Blooded", that might change…

Some thoughts on values

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Lauren at Feministe asked last week the following question:

Define, as seen by the left:

  1. Morals.
  2. Culture of life.
  3. Values.

A number of excellent responses in Feministe’s comments section, and Lynn has a fine post of her own on the subject here.

On Morals, Lynn writes: Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison, and "as you have done it unto the least of these, you did it for me." Letting justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. Acting justly and loving mercy and walking humbly with my God.

Progressive Christians really do love Amos and Micah.  I would add the following:

Morality involves a frequent willingness to critically examine one’s own public and private behavior in the light of one’s spiritual and political commitments.  While internal contradictions are part of the human condition, moral conviction is linked to the belief that one’s actions and one’s beliefs should be congruent.  It’s not enough to do justice in the marketplace if one doesn’t do it in the bedroom.   

We on the left are good at identifying morality with external issues like justice — the right is correct in pointing out that one’s private behavior also matters.  That doesn’t mean we on the left should adopt the right’s censorious attitude towards human sexuality!  Rather, we need to advocate for an explicit ethic of "erotic justice" to make the case that full inclusion for gays and lesbians is a moral and spiritual imperative.

Culture of Life: Lynn writes People’s worth doesn’t depend on their usefulness, or their independence, or their resemblance to us.   I like that.  I don’t expect the Democratic Party to adopt a "consistent-life" ethic in the near future, though one can dream and pray.  But we on the left need to keep making the case that to be "pro-life" must mean more than valuing humans only at the earliest and most advanced stages of existence!  I’ll gladly defend the embryos in the lab and the child in the womb — but the children of Fallujah are surely every bit as valuable.   There is no biblical evidence that abortion is a greater offense to God than war, unless one takes immense liberties with portions of Isaiah and Psalm 139.   I’ll quote at length from the consistent life website:

In the current debates over welfare and immigration (including education, day care, medical care, and Head Start), everyone’s rights seem to be paramount except those of children. The public rhetoric would lead one to believe that only adults have rights and that children have rights only derivatively from the social, economic, racial, or national rights of the parents to whom they have been fortunate or "unfortunate" to be born. How does a caring society come to portioning out the most basic needs of children (education, medical care, nutrition, early childhood development) based on the economic, social, or racial indicators of their parents? The other nations of the developed world long ago took children out of the public debate and assured them of basic life necessities irrespective of the status of their parents. France is a stunningly successful example.

If the fascination with the abstract rights of individuals were consistently applied, innocent children would have the first pick of society’s resources. Unfortunately, the status of children, whether born or unborn, in these debates only points up the selective inconsistency with which individual rights are insisted upon. Whose rights could be so paramount that the rights of growing children, innocent by all definitions, should be sacrificed to protect them?

Values: Though conservatives love to lampoon its excesses, the values of tolerance and inclusivity are vital to our contemporary lives and our global future.  Tolerance does not mean an acceptance of injustice, cruelty, or exploitation; it does mean a recognition that different individuals and different cultures have radically different — and perhaps equally valid –approaches to the question of how to order one’s private and public life.  We need to make clear that an appreciation for diversity in sexual and cultural matters is crucial for the survival of a civilized society.  We need to state emphatically that honoring minority opinion (in whatever form it takes) is an essential value.

I would add that I regard humility in spiritual, sexual, political, and cultural matters to be a very high value.  Whether in the public square or in our homes, I think nothing is more important than considering the possibility that we may be wrong about everything we hold dear.   Humility is not the absence  of moral conviction — it is the recognition that too much certainty in the mind and the heart of fallible humans is invariably unwise and dangerous. When I find myself on the verge of launching into a self-righteous tirade, I try and remind myself of Oliver Cromwell’s great line:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Cromwell was directing that to others;  a healthy progressive faith ought always direct that inwardly.

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Monday afternoon odds and ends

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Some random Monday notes:

…My fiancee is out of town for the week, travelling abroad with a friend.   Matilde the chinchilla and I both miss her very much.  This morning, while I had Matty out for her "morning time" in the bedroom (I read from my psalter and the LA Times), she kept standing on her hind legs by the door, looking quizzically at the handle, waiting for her "mom" to walk through.  Fortunately, my beloved phoned just before I put Matilde back in her cage, and our girl was able to listen to her mother’s voice for a moment.  She indicated her excitement by nibbling the antenna on the cordless handset.

…In other Matilde news, we have taken to giving her a tablespoon of organic raw oatmeal three times a week.  She loves it, and it — along with her hay cubes –helps her constipation.  (Chinchillas are notorious for their delicate digestive tracts.)

…I am rejoicing in Paula Radcliffe’s fine win in yesterday’s New York Marathon.

…I’ve been moved by these two posts from Astarte and Amanda, and recommend them highly.

…I attended a "stewardship tea" at All Saints yesterday afternoon.  Tea, finger sandwiches, harp music, and pledge cards; an authentic Anglican afternoon indeed.   I suspect that the disastrous election results may help make this a banner year for our stewardship team — what better way to "fight the right" than increasing one’s giving to the flagship church of progressive Episcopalianism?  I did indeed pledge more for 2005 than I had intended to, motivated by a moving morning service (featuring Mozart’s Requiem) and by no fewer than seven small watercress sandwiches.

…I’m feeling a most un-Christlike urge to go on a shopping spree.  I told myself I wasn’t going to be buying new clothes again this year, given my recent extravagances.  Lately, I’ve been obsessed with jeans.  I have eight pairs in my closet in heavy rotation, but I want more.   In all colors.  And here’s a true confession: three of the pairs I own are women’s jeans (from Lucky and Diesel).  Whatever it is about my build, they tend to fit me better, if I can find them long enough.

…Of course, I need to purge my closet before I can buy one more item to put in it.  Wouldn’t my beloved be thrilled if she came home to find out that I had gotten rid of all of those things I haven’t worn since the first Clinton Administration?

Britney, Nerve Magazine, and the body as commodity

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Every once in a while, someone sends me a link to something they know will infuriate me.  A kind soul sent me a link to this short piece from the op-ed section of Nerve, which seems to be a "hipper than thou" dating site for sexually aware urban 20-somethings.  Entitled "When you lose your virginity, how do you break it to your fans?", it opines:

The Alicia Keyses, Norah Joneses and Hilary Duffs of the pop world love bragging in high-minded empowerment-speak about how they "respect themselves" too much to "whore around" or "dress like hos." Frankly, we’re getting sick of all these smug virgins. First of all, teenage girls who feign asexuality are just plain lying. If it’s not totally fake to begin with (Britney), it’s fake later (Brooke Shields) and then it’s hard to be all, Hey, everyone, I’m not a virgin anymore; sex is great! And have that be acceptable. Once you’ve created the virgin-whore dichotomy, and testified that you stand with God and Country and your Maidenhood, you’ve really painting yourself into a corner.
    Let’s consider the possibility that it’s right and proper for nineteen-year-old girls to act a little whorish, and that enthusiastically showing off their perfect bodies is what they should be doing at that age. It lets them be honest about the fact that they’re sexual beings and eases the transition to womanhood. Not to mention the fact that using their sexuality makes these girls empoweringly rich — and having money empowers women a hell of a lot more than chastity.

Normally, I would let this one pass.  I wish that this were satire, but it clearly isn’t.  Where to begin?  As usual, I have a "yes" and a "no" to the Nerve piece.

"Yes" first:

I do agree that we know entirely too much about the personal lives of pop stars.  I don’t think society needs to know when Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson first had sex.  It’s unfair to these very young women to make their intimate lives the subject of intense scrutiny.  Yes, many of these stars have welcomed and encouraged that scrutiny — but the fact that someone barely out of girlhood invites us to stare at her (literally and figuratively) does not alleviate our responsibility to avert our eyes.  I’ve started to watch a couple of Britney’s recent videos, and have been forced to look away.

Here comes the "no."

The Nerve editors write:

    Let’s consider the possibility that it’s right and proper for nineteen-year-old girls to act a little whorish, and that enthusiastically showing off their perfect bodies is what they should be doing at that age.

Okay, I considered the possibility.  Possibility dismissed.  Even if I did think that displaying one’s body could be construed as empowering, I would be angry at the fact that only those deemed to have "perfect" forms should be allowed to "show off."  Every damn day I see what ideals of perfection do to the minds and psyches of junior high, high school, and college-aged young women.  I know perfectly well that so many of them gaze intently at magazines and videos, studying the images of these young stars, comparing themselves to what they see and invariably feeling as if that in their own human imperfections, they have fallen well short of the mark.  The more freedom Britney and Cristina and the rest of them have to display their bodies, the less freedom from insecurity and self-loathing countless young women have.  (And I have real questions about how much genuine freedom Britney really has to make these decisions, egged on as she no doubt is by those who stand to profit from her ever-edgier and tawdrier public image.)

And then, the offensive conclusion:

…using their sexuality makes these girls empoweringly rich — and having money empowers women a hell of a lot more than chastity.

The Nerve folks are trying to have it both ways, and it won’t wash.  It’s no secret that sex sells.  But empowering?  Forget it.  A tiny number of women will make real money with their sexuality.  Most of them will have to do a good deal more than merely display their bodies in order to do so.  And while some of them may end up feeling empowered, many more will end up feeling exploited and used.  Even those who delight in the power their sexuality gives them will find out that that power begins to diminish rapidly as their age.  What is sexually alluring on a 22 year-old becomes pathetic and embarrassing on a 42 year-old.  In a culture that fetishizes youth, women who derive satisfaction from being objects of desire will find that life after 30 (or 40, or 50) offers far fewer "opportunities for empowerment."  Nothing could be less feminist than to disempower the 99% of the female population that is not between 15-25 with a "perfect body."

Last of all, I want to touch on what Nerve’s editors use to begin their argument:

First of all, teenage girls who feign asexuality are just plain lying.

Perhaps.  But our friends at Nerve have made the mistake of confusing "chastity" with "asexuality."  Those are two very different kettles of fish!  I don’t think most teenage girls are asexual.  Raging hormones are hardly limited to the male of the species.   At the same time, I don’t think that displaying one’s body is evidence of sexual confidence.   There’s a huge difference between having a rambunctious libido on the one hand and craving attention and validation on the other.   Nerve seems to confuse the two. 

At its worst, traditional culture (what we used to call "patriarchy") teaches women that their sexuality is the property of their husbands.  A good woman’s emotional and sexual satisfaction ought to be contingent on the joy she brings to others.  Though surely "contingent happiness" is a right and proper part of the human condition, women also need to be encouraged to pursue pleasure and fulfillment for their own sake. 

Our contemporary pop culture offers, as far as I’m concerned, the same damn message.  Women’s bodies no longer belong to their husbands, however — now they are the property of society at large.  Never before have so many had such visual (and sometimes physical) access to women’s flesh.  Young women today grow up expecting to be judged and scrutinized by men and other women alike.  They see early on that displaying skin gets them attention.  Some choose not to do so, others are not allowed to do so, but everyone is keenly aware of the power of sexuality.  It’s just that that power is still contingent on the responses and reactions of others.    And that’s not authentic power — that’s manipulativeness masquerading as empowerment.

Our stories tell us that our ancestors saw virginity as something to be prized.  Indeed, an intact hymen had, at least at times, real cash value.  Today, we value other parts of women’s bodies more.  But we still view women’s bodies as commodities.  In the semi-mythic past, husbands and fathers may have dickered over a bride’s value, largely ignoring her desires.  Today, the folks at Nerve encourage young women to sell their own bodies, market their own flesh, take the power away from their fathers.  But until we completely break the connection between women’s flesh and women’s real value, we haven’t gotten anywhere.  Prizing perfect breasts and sculpted cheekbones is as oppressive to women as prizing an intact hymen.   

We need to teach our daughters that their bodies are theirs — theirs to delight in, theirs to care for, theirs to give — or not to give — pleasure and life to others. 

Sigh.  Off to grade papers, re-read a chapter of Iron John for my men and masculinity class, and get more caffeine.