Monthly Archives: April 2005

Daughters and fathers, girls and men

Posted on by

I’m not in the habit of quoting from advice columns.  Still, I do read them regularly, and Carolyn Hax of "Tell Me About It" is perhaps my favorite these days.  I was struck by this one that appeared in today’s Times, but which I can only find online here:

Dear Carolyn: I’m a 15-year-old girl and have a twin brother. I really love my Dad, but he has little interest in doing things with me. He spends lots of time with my brother every weekend, taking him to ballgames and playing golf and tennis with him, and they go on camping trips in the summer, but he never invites me. I recently got up the courage to tell him that I would sometimes like to be included, but he said that a father and son need bonding time, and that I should be spending more "mother/daughter" time with my mother.

I’m really more interested in doing the kinds of things my Dad and brother do together, and my mother is not interested in them. And we do spend plenty of "mother/daughter" time anyway. He is a good father, and I don’t think he understands how much this hurts. My brother has all kinds of souvenirs in our room from the things they have done together, which are a constant reminder to me. How can I make my Dad understand that spending time together is just as important to me as it is to my brother? — Left Out

Hax doesn’t say it, so I will:  this man needs to get in touch with the wonderful Dads and Daughters.  Pronto.

In my dual roles as gender-studies professor and youth leader, I’m a great advocate of adult men (fathers and others) spending time with boys.   Here is where I am in complete agreement with the Men’s Rights Advocates; indeed, a belief in the importance of good fathers and strong adult male mentors in boys’ lives is one of the few points that can unite the entire men’s movement.  "Left Out" has a father who seems to have embraced that part of his job, her dad even uses the phrase "bonding time" to describe what he and his son are doing together.   The assumption, which "Left Out" rejects, is that this kind of bonding is most important between parents and their children of the same sex.

To some extent, this attitude carries over into youth group work.  I’ve often worried that I’m being unfair in the amount of time and availability I have for the guys at All Saints compared to their female peers.  For example, I’m willing to give my cell phone number out to any boy who asks for it.  (And I’ve had to stress, many a time, that they are NOT to call after 9:00PM, a point some have a hard time grasping!) I’ve got a couple of guys with whom I meet (alone) semi-regularly for lunch or coffee.  Except in emergencies, I don’t give that number out to girls, nor do I meet with them alone.  Some of this is in keeping with church policy, some of this a result of boundaries that I have in place because they just seem to "make sense."

As I’ve written before, we live in a culture that, with some justification, distrusts adult men who want to spend time with adolescent girls.  (I suppose in the wake of recent scandals, we are beginning to distrust men who want to spend time with any child, regardless of sex.)  As a youth leader, it’s easy for me to justify spending more time with the boys because, I sometimes assume, they are more in need of a male role model than their female counterparts.  I know I’m sometimes guilty of the very kind of gender essentialism that "Left Out" rejects when she writes:  I’m really more interested in doing the kinds of things my Dad and brother do together..

Spending time with youth can’t be a zero-sum game — we can’t assume that just because boys desperately need male role models that young girls don’t.   Somehow, we in youth work have to find a way to balance the need for public accountability and safety with the very important goal of having safe, strong, loving men play active roles in the lives of girls.

Obviously, youth leaders and fathers have different roles in the lives of young people.   No matter how devoted we in youth work are, we are no substitute for good and loving parents.  But just like fathers and mothers, we have an obligation to nurture and care for all of our kids, not just those who share our sex.  In a world where adult men are regularly viewed as predatory or odd for wanting to work with young folks of any gender, the justification for keeping the "men with the boys" and the "women with the girls" may be difficult to sustain.  I’m not saying that we ought to treat boys and girls identically.  Male youth leaders should, obviously,  still sleep in the boys’ cabin, not with the girls. (Though in a church that has more than one gay male youth leader, that policy has made at least one parent I know rather uncomfortable!)  But we cannot allow our fears to outweigh our responsibility to care for all of our children, and we must be careful to avoid a gender essentialism that minimizes the importance of fathers and other adult men in the lives of young women.

Thursday Short Poem: Larkin’s “Next, Please”

Posted on by

I’ve had a couple of Phillip Larkin poems up on Short Poem Thursday; this is one of my favorites.  I remember, years ago, sitting in a therapist’s office and suddenly saying "I’ve lived my whole life oscillating between hope and disappointment."  That realization was shattering, and as good an inspiration to change as any I’ve found.  Still, when I fall back into old patterns of thinking, I’m much like the folks in this poem, watching from the bluff, saying "next, please."

Next, Please

Always too eager for the future,
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching, every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are!
And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Five things meme

Posted on by

From both Camassia and Candied Ginger, a fun meme:  name five things that are overrated by the people you hang out with.  (Or, things that most of your friends enjoy that mystify you.) Here’s mine:

1. Jazz.  I grew up listening to folk and classical music (from my mother and father, respectively.)  Sophomore year, college, I had a roommate who loved John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Dave Brubeck.  Perhaps thanks to him, I developed a deep and abiding dislike for jazz.  I don’t understand it.  I can’t hum it.  I don’t like music I can’t hum.

2.  Cats.  I know that many folks to whom I link — and many of my friends — are cat lovers.  I don’t hate them, but I don’t love them.  I have watched too many a cat torture too many an adorable rodent.  As a devoted fan of mice, rats, chinchillas, degus, rabbits and birds, I have a hard time loving those who prey upon them.

3.  Harry Potter.  Read one book.  It was nice, but no Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings.

4.  Arguing politics.  When I was a kid, I loved to debate.  Now, I hate it.  I’m the one at the family dinner table who, when things get heated over abortion or whatnot, interrupts the conversation to ask how cousin so-and-so’s marriage is working out.  (I find that family gossip tends to be the best way of derailing an argument.)

5.  Avocados and artichokes.   I know, I’m a native Californian.  I can’t stand either of them, so help me.

Male privilege, rumors, harassment, and grad school

Posted on by

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria linked to this post from Crazy Ph.D: Sex, Collegiality, and the Academic Conference.  Reading it brought back memories of just how powerful my male privilege was in grad school.  Dr. Crazy writes about many things in her post, but especially about the complex and dangerous interplay between sexuality and power when one is a young, female graduate student.  She relates some real incidents from her past (in safe, oblique terms), and then muses:

The point here, though, is that I think as a woman and a feminist and an academic it’s difficult to know what to do. Because the likelihood is that at some point or another one will be propositioned, or at the very least pursued in a way that is not professional. And any response can have potentially negative consequences, not only in relation to the person who propositions one but in relation to the ways that other people react. For example, I TA’d for a professor who is married to Famous Important Scholar in my field. She got her job at the university where I did my Ph.D. in no small part due to the fact that she is married to FIS. And, to top this off, she had been FIS’s graduate student. Do you know how much I respect her – even though she has a great book and is not an idiot? NOT AT ALL. I feel like she is where she is because of who she’s f*cking. And to me, that’s not playing by the rules. I don’t think she deserves the job she’s got, and I think it’s bullsh*t in this job market that somebody would get a job in that fashion.

And then:

…I fear that if I introduce myself to an Important Man that somehow I’m going to be read as trying to use the fact that I’m young, attractive, whatever to trick him into some sort of professional assistance. Or maybe I’m afraid that I do use my appearance/age in that way, and I think it’s wrong?

Good questions.

UCLA has one of the largest — if not the largest — history graduate programs in the country.  My first year of grad school (1989), I was one of fifteen medievalists chasing the Ph.D.  We were almost all white, but evenly divided between men and women.  Since I also did a field in early modern Europe, I spent lots of time hanging out with "early modernists", who were disproportionately female.  Over the years, as we sat in seminars together and studied medieval paleography together and TA’d together, we became a fairly tight-knit bunch.  And I saw first-hand how many of my female colleagues in grad school struggled with the issues that Dr. Crazy outlined.

Like most grad students, I hero-worshipped the Famous Important Scholars in my field.  (I wrote about that here.)  Until I opted at the last minute to do a field in medieval philosophy with Marilyn Adams, all of my mentors were men.  It goes without saying that there was never any sexual tension with any of these FiSs!   These men often met privately with me — with their office doors closed.  I was glad the doors were closed, as I did not want my fellow grad students hearing me confess my own fears and doubts about my intellectual abilities (something I shared with alarming regularity).  I also didn’t want anyone to hear a certain (now retired) paleographer lament my ignorance of early monastic manuscript hand. 

But I never, ever, worried that I would be "hit on" by any of these men.  I worshipped them.  I followed them around.  I hung on their every word.  I read their books and articles assiduously.  And I knew that when they looked at me, they were looking at Hugo — not at my breasts or my legs.  I was relieved when they shut the office door,  because that meant that I could have some one-on-one time with these men whom I so admired and for whose praise I was so hungry.

Would that my female colleagues had all had the same experience!   One young woman in my same year (I’ll call her Stacy) formed a close relationship with a much older professor of mine (long since retired, I’ll call him Professor Y.)   In the early 1990s, Stacy and I both served as his research assistants.  (He had lots of grant money, happily enough).   Professor Y was divorced.  Stacy did not have a boyfriend.  Stacy and I both worked closely with Professor Y.  As often happens, we didn’t just do research with him.  We went to lunch with him.  We went to the car wash with him (heck, I TOOK his car to the car wash twice.)  And because we were working on different projects for Professor Y, Stacy and I rarely met with him simultaneously.

No one ever suggested that Professor Y and I were having an affair.  When other students saw Professor Y and me having coffee and a danish together on campus, no one — to my knowledge — questioned why he and I were spending time alone together.  The same was not true for Stacy.  The rumors started early, and were vicious.  Someone reported seeing them leave campus together in his car.  Others said they saw them walking together, leaning against each other, in the sculpture garden.   What I could do safely with Professor Y, Stacy couldn’t — not without becoming the subject of nasty innuendo.  When Stacy was given a coveted TAship the following year (so was I, for the record), many folks questioned whether she had legitimately earned it.  Stacy heard these rumors, and was hurt by them.  Personally, I think she had a huge intellectual crush on Y.  Then again, I suppose I did too.  I don’t think they were sleeping together, but I suppose I’ll never know.  What I do know is that the rumors were part of what contributed to Stacy dropping out of grad school after receiving her master’s degree. 

In the early modern field, there was a very famous specialist in Italian renaissance history.  He had quite a reputation as a lecher.  At one time, one of our graduate advisers regularly warned incoming female early modernists against working with him, despite his stellar publishing record.  I spent a quarter as his research assistant, and found him an unpleasant, exasperatingly unclear taskmaster.  Any thoughts I had of doing a minor field in Renaissance history vanished after 10 weeks working for him.  But the worst I had to endure was his perpetual tardiness and his abrupt personality.   I knew two women in the early modern program who claimed that he had propositioned them.  There were rumors that other women had had affairs with him.  No one formally complained, even though by the early 1990s, everyone knew about sexual harassment procedures.

I talked to one of the women who had been propositioned by this Renaissance man.  She told me that she was afraid that if she filed a sexual harassment complaint, all of her other male professors would shun her.  "They’ll be so afraid I’ll charge them, they won’t work with me", she said.   In the intimate world of grad student-professor relationships, a reputation as someone who files charges would be the kiss of death for her career.  I wish I could I have assured her that things would be otherwise, but I suspect she was right.

There’s no question that my maleness smoothed my graduate school career.  My male mentors would have had little trouble seeing me as younger (perhaps slightly more neurotic) versions of themselves.   I could go out to lunch with them and meet behind closed doors with them, safe in the knowledge that the attention I would receive was purely intellectual and professional in nature.  I was free not only from unwanted sexualization, I was free from the gossip of my colleagues.   That kind of freedom gave me a confidence that carried me through the long years of grad school all the way up to completing my Ph.D. 

Remembering Dianne Knippers

Posted on by

It is customary to be gracious when one’s political adversaries pass.  I learned today that Dianne Knippers died yesterday, far too young, of cancer.  She was president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a group that fought against progressive developments in mainline Protestant denominations (especially the Episcopal Church USA). 

Hers was one of those names I invariably saw cited in the "other side’s" news releases.  I am very sorry to get one of those same releases and learn of her passing.  May she rest in peace, and may her family be comforted. 

Benedict XVI

Posted on by

I’m honestly surprised the cardinals have chosen Ratzinger to be the next pope.  I knew he was the favorite going in, but I also knew that the conclave had a history of making surprising, unexpected choices.  To pick the favorite on the fourth ballot on the second day was not what I had anticipated at all. 

Conservative Catholic intellectuals — the sort who agree with everything in First Things — must be on cloud nine today.

I just spoke with a colleague of mine, an older man who was once a Catholic priest but left three decades ago.  "Shocking… disgraceful… I can’t believe it", he said.  "What will I say to my Protestant and Jewish friends?"   He’s not as troubled by the new Benedict XVI’s conservative theology as much as he is by his assertion that non-Catholic churches are, in a very real sense, "deficient."  It was Ratzinger who wrote Dominus Iesus (2000), that has this troubling line:

If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.

Still, Ratzinger is a remarkable intellectual force.  The church has chosen a bright and able theologian to be its leader, and presuming that his health holds, we can expect a significant and interesting output in terms of papal encyclicals over the next few years. 

But he was not the man I was hoping for, even if my middle name is Benedict.

Never making it to Boston

Posted on by

I took an extra day away from the computer and from school yesterday.  It was actually nice to not blog for a bit.  But classes have resumed, and I am back in my office on this early Tuesday morning, bleary-eyed but ready for the day.  I’ve got a lecture on the history of women’s fashion magazines at 8:50; the fall of the Roman Republic at 10:25, and the conservative reaction after Napoleon’s defeat at 1:00PM.

Yesterday was the Boston Marathon.  I wasn’t there, of course.  I’ve never run it, though Lord knows, I’ve tried to get there.  It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to follow the goings-on on Patriot’s Day Monday without some considerable heartache.

In 1998-99, I tried three times to qualify for Boston.   As most folks know, Boston is not open to anyone.  To enter the race, you have to run a "qualifying time" at another marathon no more than eighteen months prior to the particular Boston in which you wish to compete.  The qualifying times are graded by age and sex, and for men under 35 (which I was in the late ’90s), the qualifying time was 3:10.

I came closest at the 1999 Pittsburgh Marathon.  I trained for this race for five months.   I made the decision to hire an "online coach", and worked with Art Liberman, a fellow based about of South Carolina (who had once coached my cousin’s cross-country team at the College of Charleston).  For over a year, Art and I talked twice weekly on the phone.  He gave me workouts, and I did them.  Dutifully.  I wholeheartedly recommend Art’s coaching — it was magnificently helpful, and worth every penny.

In the past, my "longest long runs" in training had been 20 miles; for Pittsburgh, I took myself up to 23 miles twice.  (A tactic that I can recommend, by the way.)  I also did an enormous amount of speedwork, something that Art insisted upon.  Every Wednesday morning for five months I went to the track at Cal Tech, and by myself, ran the assigned workouts.  (My least favorite, by far, were the 800 meter repeats.  My crowning achievement was when I did 10 of them, all under 3 minutes each.)  It was brutally tiring, but exhilarating.  I was still new to running, and enchanted by the way that the hard training was transforming my body.

On May 2,1999, I fell two minutes, fifty-two seconds short at Pittsburgh.  I ran a 3:13:51 on an unseasonably warm day.   For the first eighteen miles of the race, I had felt confident that I could break 3:10.   But by mile 18, I was struggling so much that I realized that to maintain my current pace would have increased the chance of collapse.  I remember that it occurred to me that Boston wasn’t worth my health, and I slowed.  I set a "backup goal" of breaking 3:15, and cruised on in in the final miles, even briefly stopping to walk.

It was only after the race was over, when I had returned to my hotel room, that the reality of "falling short" hit me.  I was very hard on myself.   Had I given up too easily?  Don’t great athletes push themselves over the brink in order to achieve their goals?  Had I lacked the requisite mental toughness to get the job done?  I called Art. I called my family and friends.  I took myself out for a cheese steak (I’ve never had one in Philly, but I can report the ones in Pittsburgh are mighty fine), and I came to the conclusion that 3:13 was going to be perfectly okay.  Hugo did not have to qualify for Boston in order to prove anything, I decided.

I tried again to qualify for Boston that autumn.  I ran the ’99 Silicon Valley Marathon, and this time, went out too fast. I tried to run a 3:05, and after posting a 1:32 opening half, hit the wall at mile twenty and had to stagger home in a time of 3:29.  I couldn’t even use the excuse of the heat, as I had at Pittsburgh, to explain my poor performance.  I remember crying as I drove away from the race, unable to comprehend that I had fallen short of my goal twice in one year.

I had a number of friends who ran the 2000 Boston Marathon, the one I was "supposed" to be at.  I followed their progress on the internet, and tried not to be immensely envious that they were there.  A few months before that race, a buddy who works for a Boston-affiliated charity told me he could get me an "exempted entry" into the marathon.  (Charities use these to give to donors, an exempted entry means you don’t have to meet the qualifying time.)  I turned him down politely.  If I was going to ever run Boston, I would run it as a qualified athlete — or not at all.

I’m almost 38, and my qualifying time has dropped to 3:15.  I am fairly certain that I could run a 3:15 if I were willing to train as I did years ago.  But frankly, I’m not.  I saw what I was like when I was a single-minded running devotee, and it wasn’t an appealing picture.  At a chaotic time in my life, 65-mile weeks and loads of speedwork gave me structure.  Today, by God’s grace, I’ve got too many other things to do to give that kind of time to running.  When I run in San Diego on June 4, I’ll settle for anything under four hours.  I’m just not interested in pushing myself to the limit to find out how fast I can run. 

I’ve realized that trying to qualify for Boston was, at least to some extent, about trying to prove my manhood all over again.  As someone who wasn’t athletic as a kid, I’ll be the first to confess that I had felt deeply insecure about my own physical abilities for years.   I now understand that one of the reasons I wanted Boston was because qualifying for that race would have been a way of repudiating the ghosts of my youth, the ones that told me that I was fat, slow and clumsy.  I wanted to be able to hold up Boston as evidence that I was not who I had feared that I was for so many years.  It would be tangible proof that I had achieved something elusive and difficult.   In that sense, it was perhaps a blessing that I never qualified, as it forced me to accept the futility of using these endurance events to make a statement to the world about my own masculinity.

But I’d be lying if I said that yesterday, as I followed the Boston Marathon on the internet and radio, I wasn’t still just a wee bit wistful.

Britney and Bethany

Posted on by

I’ve been thinking a bit today about Britney Spears.  As the whole world knows by now, Britney is pregnant, and is probably at least three months along.  (According to Kabbalah, which Britney studies, it’s considered spiritually unwise to announce a pregnancy before 90 days after conception.  Frankly, regardless of what anyone studies or believes, that’s probably a sensible restriction, given the chance of miscarriage and so forth.)

According to a survey in next month’s Parents magazine (done before the announcement of Britney’s pregnancy), 53% of parents thought that Spears and her husband, Kevin Federline, should wait longer before having children.   (Am I the only one who thinks it in bad taste for a nationally respected parenting magazine to allow its readers to weigh in on others intensely personal decisions about when to have a child?)

Here’s where I part from at least many of my feminist colleagues. I’m not at all troubled by women having children young.  As I’ve posted before, I’m a huge fan of young Bethany and Sam Torode.  Bethany, who became a mother at nineteen, has written three marvelous essays that I often assign:

The Largest Career of All (2000)
Confessions of a Teenage Mom (2001)
Finding the Center (2002)

What Bethany wrote in the middle article has relevance for Britney and her critics:

When a couple decides to get married and start having kids — and how
many they have — is nobody’s business but theirs and God’s, which is a
reminder I need as often as anyone else. But I do feel a need to
challenge the dominant trend of our age toward putting off
responsibilities and prolonging adolescence.

Preach it, sis.

It was only recently that being a teenager became synonymous with being
too young to make big decisions about marriage and children. Some of my
favorite books are the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery.
In these beloved books, Anne attains what is the modern day equivalent
of a college education, becomes a full-time schoolteacher, and starts
to teach herself Latin and Greek — by age 16. Her friends, also
teenagers, start marrying and having babies right out of school. Yet
none of this is depicted as unusual — Anne is only a
slightly-above-average teenage woman 100 years ago. Today, Anne would
be hailed as a genius and her friends would be considered mature far
beyond their years (or else stupid for "giving up their independence"
so early).

Now of course, women in the world of Anne of Green Gables had fewer choices than Bethany Torode or Britney Spears do. But Torode is right to suggest that we in the feminist community make a factual error and a spiritual mistake when we suggest that early marriage and early motherhood were always foisted onto women against their will.  When we push relentlessly for women to delay motherhood and childbirth, we may slight the very real desires of very real young women who very truly value marriage and motherhood above all else.

Torode thinks that more young women should consider early marriage and motherhood:

Yes, I am among those contributing to the teen pregnancy rate (she wrote at nineteen). I would
encourage other responsible young Christians in their late teens and
early twenties to do the same. Women, these are the best years of your
life to have a baby (ages 18-to-27 are when your body is at its peak
for childbearing, and having your first child during these years
significantly reduces your risk of breast cancer). Men, why not channel
your youth and energy into something with profound eternal value?

I’m not prepared to go as far as Bethany does and recommend early marriage and parenthood to all young men and women.   I don’t believe we are called to parenthood. I’m not even sure that all of us are called to monogamous marriage, though I remain convinced that monogamous marriage is a powerful vehicle for both personal growth and societal stability.  I am convinced, however, that we who really believe in honoring the bodies and spirits and minds of young women ought to applaud the Bethanys and the Britneys for valuing marriage and motherhood over the countless other choices that they could have made instead.

I don’t know what kind of mother Britney Spears will be.  Frankly, I’m not a fan of her music.  I watched one of her recent videos not long ago (My Prerogative, I think) with my youth group kids, and was embarrassed.  I had to look away from the screen.  But I also know full well that at least for some, pregnancy and parenthood have a way of radically refocusing our values.  And because I am aware of how much influence Britney continues to have on young women, I am praying that she will throw herself, heart and body and soul, into her marriage and into motherhood.   Obviously, her first concern ought to be for herself and her little family.  But I suspect she knows the influence she has.  I’ve never heard a pregnancy discussed so eagerly by teenagers as this one.   How Britney handles these next few months will, like it or not, resonate with a great many girls across this country, many of whom adore her despite the media’s sneers.  Here’s hoping and praying that it’s a safe and healthy pregnancy, a healthy and happy child, and that Britney can be known in due course as a very different kind of role model.

Oh, and read a great post from Bethany about sugar lust here.  I’ll have to blog that sometime soon.

“We’ve got to”

Posted on by

For any number of reasons (mostly having to do with my devotion to Cal), I’m not a fan of the national champions of college football, the local USC Trojans.  I do however respect the tremendous job head coach Pete Carroll has done since being hired in 2001.  This past week has not been one of his finer hours.

The Times reported a few days ago that Trojan flanker Steve Smith and his teammate, Dominique Byrd, had had a fight that ended with Smith suffering a broken jaw.  Here’s how the paper reported it:

Smith said the incident began while he was playing a game against Byrd, to whom he had owed money for about a month.

"I put more money down and I lost the game, and I took it back
before the game was over," Smith said. "And then we were like, ‘Man,
well, we’re going to have to fight. It was so stupid."

Smith said the two players left the room where they were playing and went downstairs.


"I was like, ‘You know Byrd … I really don’t want to fight you,’ " Smith said. "He was like, ‘Nah, we’ve got to.’ So I swung."

Smith said Byrd tackled him and the players exchanged a few more punches before Smith left and returned to his apartment.

Smith said he later gave Byrd $200.

The bold emphasis is mine.  I love that exchange between these two fellows:  "I don’t really want to fight you."  "Nah, we’ve got to."   As a  gender studies prof, I’m struck by the "we’ve got to."  What ancient rule, transmitted from man to man from generation to generation, taught Dominique Byrd that he had no choice but to fight his good friend?  (By the way, am I the only one who read this account and instantly thought of Mark Twain’s famous account in Tom Sawyer of the fight between his protagonist and a nameless boy: In an instant both boys were
rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like
cats; and for the space of a minute they tugged and tore
at each other’s hair and clothes, punched and scratched
each other’s nose, and covered themselves with dust
and glory.)

I’ve known young men like Byrd and Smith.  Though they would not put it in these terms, they are rigid, even slavish, adherents to a code of masculine conduct that suggests that honor can be redeemed through violence.  Somehow, a financial debt could be repaid — or at least cancelled — by a willingness to trade blows.  It’s a little bit funny, a little bit sad, and just a little bit chilling to see this ancient ethic still alive and well in 21st century Los Angeles.  I’m just glad that it was only fists that were involved.  And I’m glad that Byrd and Smith recognized, even as they were engaged in the fight, just how stupid what they were doing truly was.

What annoyed me — and annoyed sportswriter TJ SImers in today’s Times — was Coach Carroll’s cavalier response:


Carroll said he was not worried about how the incident might be perceived.

"The way these guys battle and they do stuff, they live together,
there’s going to be issues," Carroll said. "Did you ever fight with
your brother? … I’m sorry that somebody got hurt but other than that
it’s not a big deal. They’re fine about it."

The problem is, coach, that that "boys wil be boys" attitude isn’t just used to condone fisticuffs between teammates; it’s used to justify violence against women.   Carroll’s reference to the "ways these guys battle" seems to suggest that it’s understandable if the sanctioned violence on the field spills over into their private lives.   It’s no accident that the same Times story also briefly mentions cornerback Eric Wright, who is under investigation for rape.  Sexual assault, as feminists mention axiomatically, is an act of violence.  And all violence after the whistle blows and outside the lines of the football field must be unequivocally condemned by those adults in leadership positions.

After being berated by Simers, I’m happy to say that Carroll has modified his stance:

"This isn’t being taken lightly," Carroll said. "The players are
embarrassed, and the program is embarrassed. These are not actions
representative of what we’re all about here. We need to represent
ourselves in a much better fashion in all ways."

The proof will be in the disciplinary response the next time something like this happens.  Because there will be a next time.