Monthly Archives: April 2005

A brief complaint, and then a long post about Dworkin

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I’m home from a nice long run that mixed both flat asphalt and steep dirt trails together.   While running the latter section, I had another exasperating encounter with mountain bikers, the sort where I have to leap off the trail to avoid getting run over.  I admit, I don’t think bikes belong in the dirt.  My mind is made up: real athletes run on dirt and ride bikes on pavement.   I’ve been involved in many near-misses with mountain bikers, and I’ve seen the terrible erosion their wide tires leave behind on trails.  To be fair, some are very courteous, and I even have a few misguided friends who would rather ride trails than roads.  But when I am in charge of things, I will ban the use of any non-living form of conveyance in state and national parks.  (Don’t even get me started on those who like to ride/drive off-road motorized vehicles.  They rank only slightly above those who pelt chinchillas on the list of my least favorite people.)

Now that I’ve begun this post by being uncharacteristically uncharitable, let me try and redeem myself.  There’s quite a discussion in the comments section under this brief post about Andrea Dworkin.  I think I’d like to expand on something I tried to address yesterday in the comments section about the plurality of viewpoints within feminism.

Whether we’d talking politics or religion, it’s standard form for critics of a given worldview to lump all of its practitioners/believers together.   Whether we’re talking about Democrats or Christians or Los Angelenos or feminists, most of us find it exceedingly convenient to ignore vital distinctions among a given group’s adherents.  I’ve written about this several times in regards to the "men’s movement", trying to make the case that there are many men’s movements.  My Christian readers are well aware that using terms like "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" isn’t very helpful, as there are many different "fundamentalisms" that divide conservative Christians.  (John Macarthur and Benny Hinn are both, in some sense, accurately called fundamentalists, but they have damn all in common beyond a faith in the Lord and a conviction that Scripture is inerrant and infallible.)

So as we reflect on the life and legacy of Andrea Dworkin, it’s important to remember that just as there are many ways of living out Christian faith and living out men’s activism, there are also many feminisms. In February, Amp at Alas, A Blog put up a helpful summary of some of the most important feminisms, and received further help and clarification in the comments section. If you haven’t read his summary yet, do.  Andrea Dworkin is safely located within the general confines of Radical (with a capital "R").   That means that those of us who fall into other feminist camps — Liberal Feminists, Christian Feminists, Socialist Feminists, Marxist Feminists, Equity Feminists — reserve the right to acknowledge her contributions and praise her work without having to agree with every single line she ever wrote!

I wrote last month about Jerry Falwell.  Jerry has been ill lately, though I am happy to say that the most recent reports suggest he has taken a turn for the better.  I’ve been praying for him and thinking about him.  Here’s what I wrote about him last month:

As an evangelical surrounded by folks more liberal on theological and
cultural issues than myself, I find myself constantly lumped together
with him.  (If I had a dollar for every time a non-believer has said,
"Hugo, now you’re sounding like Falwell", I could afford, well, a nice
dinner out for my fiancee and myself.)  I don’t like his style, I don’t
like his politics, and I think he misreads Scripture and gives other
evangelicals a bad name in the public sphere.  But I also recognize
that this embarrassment is, at least partially, my own sinful pride at
work.  I don’t want other folks to think I’m at all like Jerry
Falwell because I think my views are subtler, more compassionate, more
evolved, and frankly, more congruent with the spirit of Christ than
his.  That’s arrogance and hubris, and it’s something I need to cop to
and for which I need to repent.  Paul tells us that the body of Christ is a unit made up of many parts.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don’t need you."
And though it is hard for me to believe sometimes, progressive
Christians cannot say to a Jerry Falwell, we don’t need you.  Sometimes
I have my own uncharitable suspicions as to which part of the body of
Christ Falwell represents, but I know that he and I and our churches
share the same God, often pray the same prayers, and are struggling to
discern divine will in our lives.

If Falwell were to die soon, I’d surely blog him and say some kind words about his ministry and his devotion to the Lord.  The fact that I could praise him as a brother in Christ would not mean that I agreed with everything he ever did or said.  He is my brother in the body, but he is not the same body part.

That’s exactly how I feel about Andrea Dworkin.  I didn’t always agree with what she wrote (I’ve read three of her works cover to cover, and I remember Intercourse best, probably because it came out in 1987, the year I started seriously reading feminist scholarship), but I was always challenged and provoked by it.  My old friend and pastor Scott Richardson always said that when confronted with new ideas he would respond with a "Yes, No, and a Hmm."  The yes is what he could embrace wholeheartedly; the no was what he could reject quickly, and the hmmm was what he had to sit with and reflect upon for a while.  Andrea Dworkin, my sister in the body of feminism, generally left me with a "yes", a "no", and a "hmm".

What I loved about Andrea Dworkin’s writing, where my "yes" to her is,  was her immense empathy and compassion for other human beings, particularly the victims of sexual violence.  So many folks focus on her rhetoric, and miss the tenderness that so clearly undergirded her justified and understandable anger at those who continued to victimize and abuse those about whom she cared so passionately.   She was also a far more generous person — in both her written words and her private life — than we often realize.  One of my favorite conservative women writers, Maggie Gallagher, writes this week in a touching tribute to Andrea:

Yes, I received a gift from Andrea, the
kind of gift which, intellectually speaking, you can receive only from
someone with whom you profoundly disagree. From the opposite ends of
the political spectrum, we had each glimpsed a piece of the same truth.
Against the backdrop of a pornographic Playboy culture that tried to
teach us that sex is just a trivial appetite for pleasure, radical
feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that "sexual intercourse is not
intrinsically banal."

I was not alone! Andrea saw it, too. As I
wrote in "Enemies of Eros": "In sex, persons become male and female,
archetypically, exaggeratedly, painfully so. And to us, corseted in
modern sexual views, femininity appears incompatible with the
personhood of women. … What Dworkin observes is essentially true. Sex
is not an act which takes place merely between bodies. Sex is an act
which defines, alters, imposes on the personhood of those who engage in
it. We wander through the ordinary course of days as persons, desexed,
androgynous, and it is in the sexual act in which we receive
reassurance that we are not persons, after all, but men and women."

And as I later learned, to a lesser
degree, Andrea Dworkin received the same gift from me. Standing in the
local bookstore in Park Slope in Brooklyn (where we both then lived),
she thumbed through my first book. "At last, someone who understands my
writing!" she shrieked excitedly.

Then she, the infamous feminist, invited
me, the unknown young conservative, to tea. I found her soft-spoken,
pale, intellectual, anxious, motherly…

What I would not have given to have been the third as they sat down to tea!  Gallagher knows first-hand what her readers could only sense, that Dworkin’s impassioned rhetoric was always delivered with genuine grace and an unexpected gentleness.

My "no" to Dworkin came with some of her more radical solutions to the problem of the sexual exploitation of women.  She was brilliant at diagnosing the problem, but her prescribed cure seemed far too radical to me.  Despite both my faith and my feminism, I’m simply too much of a liberal in my core to ever see liberation as coming through a restraint on free speech.   She would probably note that as a straight white man, I had little to fear from unregulated speech.  She’d be right.

Somewhere in my abundantly non-existent free time, I’m going to read some more Dworkin this year.  I’ll have some more "yeses", some more "nos", and I’m certain, a great many more "hmmms."  There are many feminisms.  We may be one body, but we are many parts.  Now that she’s gone, those of us within the diverse body of global feminism owe her our tribute and our admiration, even as many of us acknowledge that we did not always agree with — or even understand — much of what it was that she was trying to say.

 

Thursday Short Poem: Rich’s Living in Sin

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On the list of great contemporary feminist poets, Adrienne Rich is
certainly near the top.  I confess I haven’t liked her more recent
stuff as much as her earlier work, but I still do try and keep up with
her considerable output.

This is my favorite of her poems. 

Living in Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

I’m thinking of a young pair I know who’ve just moved in together in
the first blush of love and certainty.  They probably don’t even know
what a milkman is, but in their doubts, I bet they’ll find out what it
is to be "jeered by the minor demons."  That’s a great line.

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Needing a nap

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I’m posting late today.  I spent last night and this morning with my father up in Santa Barbara, where I was born and where he lives. 

I’m too tired to post today.   Please visit some of my links, and know that I’ll be posting tomorrow.  I’ve got a long run to do in the morning, so the "first post" won’t likely be up until around lunchtime.

I need a nap before heading off to the rambunctious All Saints teens tonight.

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Food and breasts, two stories on the body front

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From the "body project front", a few notes.  First off, an interesting op-ed by Karen Stabiner in today’s Los Angeles Times: Girls Want the Media to Shape Up. Excerpt:

Everywhere we look, we see the contradictions of a culture obsessed
with women and weight: Big is beautiful, as long as it’s not too big;
you can’t be too rich or too thin, but please, honey, don’t be
anorexic. Emphatically skinny is still in, but fat has achieved a
certain political correctness; it’s been redefined as a healthy
rejection of the undernourished look. Kirstie Alley boogieing on the
one hand, and Mary-Kate Olsen, a scrawny waif whose thrift store chic
is now being hailed as the new hip style, on the other. Talk about the
great divide.

When it comes to our daughters, the extremes
beget a lot of hysterical hand-wringing — you’d think that teen girls,
as a group, were always eating too much or too little. And yet the
truth is that only about 3% of teen girls have diagnosable eating
disorders, although 15% have a "disordered" attitude about food.
Statistics say between 15% and 30% of adolescent girls are overweight,
depending on the study — but that’s part of a national trend from womb
to tomb, not something that distinguishes our daughters from the rest
of the population.

I think that figure of 15% with disordered attitudes can be misleading.  Compared to other North American studies (Stabiner does not cite her source), the figure also seems low.   "Disordered attitudes" is a medical diagnosis, of course, and excludes those young people who are engaged in dieting behavior that does not pose an immediate risk to their health.  A recent Centers for Disease Control study notes that 43% of the more than 11,000 girls surveyed were on diets, and most of these were in no way clinically overweight.   15% is certainly a number that doesn’t jive with my anecdotal experience as a youth leader.  Virtually all of my girls report at least some dissatisfaction with their bodies, and about half report being on a diet (or some other form of food restriction) at any given time.

Stabiner is relying on carefully chosen language to downplay to the problem, and that is a bit bewildering.  I assume she’s anxious to stop using "victim language" to describe adolescent girls.    After all, the greater the number of young women suffering from disordered eating, the more inevitable it may seem that one’s own daughter will suffer from body dysmorphia or a "food problem."   By downplaying the statistics, Stabiner makes it appear less of a crisis than most folks in the field think it is. 

But despite this, there’s some good stuff in Stabiner’s piece. I gave her an "amen, sister", when I read this, answering the question "What do young women want from the media":

Real girls are harder to portray because they don’t telegraph the easy
emotions, so real girls disappear from the collective consciousness.
But they’re getting tired of being left out of the entertainment
industry’s vocabulary.

What do they want? Complexity. A variety
of images that more accurately reflect the real world, where most girls
are neither too fat nor too thin, but somewhere in the general
in-between, where no one is paying enough attention. (Bold emphasis is mine).

Right on.

On a related front, the battle over silicone breast implants is heating up again.  More than a dozen years after silicone was banned for use in breast augmentation (though it is available in other countries), the FDA is considering approving its use once again.  NOW president Kim Gandy gave this address to the FDA yesterday, urging the ban to be maintained in the interests of women’s health:

The FDA must not allow women to fall victim to the greed of two
companies, Inamed Corp. and Mentor Corp., that want to bring these
implants back to the open market without protecting women’s health. It
is incumbent upon the FDA to side with women, and not big business.
It’s time for the FDA to put science ahead of politics.

FDA regulators now estimate that up to 93 percent of silicone
implants rupture within 10 years. What happens when these implants
rupture and silicone enters a woman’s body? The data provided by Inamed
and Mentor continues to be unimpressive – despite years of clinical
trials, silicone implant manufacturers simply have not provided
regulators with the necessary data.

According to a five-year evaluation of seven mammography centers,
breast implants obscure and greatly reduce the accuracy of mammogram
readings – 55 percent of breast cancers went undetected in women with
breast implants, which is 67 percent greater than in women without
implants.

Yet another concern that has not been fully evaluated is the hazard
to children born to women with silicone breast implants, particularly
breastfeeding infants. Women of childbearing age must know all the
facts before they become pregnant, so they can make informed choices
about getting or keeping breast implants. (Bold emphasis is Hugo’s).

The Mercury News captured this great exchange among several women outside the hearings:

A group of 12 young women opposed to implants wore T-shirts saying, “100 percent all natural.’‘

Arlene Nicole Cummings, 38, of Palm Beach County, Fla., confronted them in the hallway.

“I am offended that you’re saying I’m not natural,” said Cummings, who received saline implants in 1998.

Cummings said if she had them replaced she might opt for silicone.

“Women need choices,” she added.

“Choice?” asked Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization
for Women, who helped coordinate the group. “The choice is to be
sick.”

Ah, choices.  I’m delighted with Gandy’s answer.  Anytime organized feminism moves beyond a robotic commitment to "choice" on every conceivable issue, we’re making progress!   Authentic feminism is about so much more than what one individual woman chooses to do with her body.  It’s about ensuring that women can live free from the pressures of a culture that demand a narrow ideal of beauty.  It’s about a commitment to the health and well-being of all women collectively, not the narcissistic choices of a comparatively affluent few.  I blogged about this last year, and I stand by what I wrote then:

The fact that some women feel personally empowered by cutting up their
bodies (or allowing their bodies to be cut) does not vitiate the
essential horror of the practice. Some feminists are so in love with
the notion of "choice" that they will defend any action a woman takes
to alter her body. But choices are only exercised within a cultural context that decrees that certain choices are better than others.
In this culture where even slight physical imperfections are seen as
barriers to happiness, most young women who choose plastic surgery are
not making a genuinely free choice.

I’m not optimistic that the FDA ban will remain in place, but I’m heartened by the stance that NOW has taken in supporting the continuation of the general prohibition on silicone.   And the exchange between Arlene Cummings and Kim Gandy is really priceless, capturing as it does the distinction between a shallow self-centered feminism and a justice-centered commitment to all  women.

Remembering Andrea Dworkin

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Andrea Dworkin, the legendary (some would say infamous) feminist writer and activist has died at age 59.  Though she died Friday, word seems only to be spreading today. She is survived by her friend and partner of more than a quarter century, gay activist John Stoltenberg.  (He wrote the splendid Refusing to be a Man.)

Dworkin was a hell of a writer.  Her prose was combative, daring, frequently over-the-top.   Hers was an invariably lonely voice.  I know of no other feminist figure more frequently quoted out-of-context.  (The Men’s Rights Advocates loved to pick out isolated sections of her work, though I doubt that many ever read most of her books cover-to-cover.)   Her savage, vigorously polemical style in books like Intercourse,  Letters from a War Zone, and above all, her brilliant Pornography: Men Possessing Women had a colossal impact on the feminist movement from the 1970s to the present day.

Rad Geek has a brief tribute to Dworkin, and happily, a list of links to some of her own posts about Dworkin that include extensive quotations.  This particular post, which clears up the tired old myth that Dworkin thought all heterosexual intercourse was rape, is very valuable.  The gulf between what she really said and what her critics heard was wider than it was for any other public figure of whom I can think.

In June 2000, in an article in the New Statesman, she came forward to say that the previous year, she had been raped in a European hotel room.  Virtually no one believed her.  Even erstwhile allies were troubled by Dworkin’s vagueness with the facts.  As Catherine Bennett wrote in the Guardian:

Offered like this, as
evidence, the article contains so many opacities, begs so many
questions, that it reads almost as if Dworkin wants to be doubted.

Stoltenberg was among those who doubted her as well, apparently:

John looked for any other explanation than rape," Dworkin wrote. "He abandoned me emotionally. Now a year has passed and sometimes he’s with me in his heart and sometimes not"

He was with her to the end, I am happy to say.  In today’s obituary, rightly or wrongly, the Guardian describes Stoltenberg as "her husband."

She will be much missed.  Though one always says of the dead that they were unique, it is safe to say that there was truly only one Andrea Dworkin.  I didn’t always agree with her, but cripes, I loved to read her stuff.  She challenged me and pushed me and made me a better pro-feminist, even when I rolled my eyes at her purple prose.  I’ll give my students something of hers to read soon.

 

Reflections on the “man date”

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Both Jonathan Dresner and a reader named Jack sent me a link to this article in yesterday’s New York Times: "The Man Date."

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a
minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous
between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.

Simply
defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the
crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of
outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining
together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date;
eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man
date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie "Friday Night Lights"
is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

I have to admit that I wanted to be dismissive of the Jennifer Lee article.  Her examples, though geographically and ethnically diverse, do seem to be all upper-middle class urban men –presumably the sort of folks who regard the Times as the "paper of record" to begin with.

But Lee is absolutely right that many men do have a "minefield of unspoken rules" for their own one-on-one interactions.    Most of those rules involve taking measures to avoid giving the impression (to others, or too themselves) that their "man date" might have romantic or sexual undertones:

And thus a simple meal turns into social Stratego. Some men avoid
dinner altogether unless the friend is coming from out of town or has a
specific problem that he wants advice about. Otherwise, grabbing beers
at a bar will do just fine, thank you.

Other men say dinners
may be all right, but never brunch, although a post-hangover meal
taking place during brunch hours is O.K. "The company at that point is
purely secondary," explained Steven Carlson, 29, a public relations
executive in Chicago.

Almost all men agree that beer and hard
alcohol are acceptable man date beverages, but wine is risky. And
sharing a bottle is out of the question. "If a guy wants to get a glass
of wine, that’s O.K.," said Rob Discher, 24, who moved to Washington
from Dallas and has dinner regularly with his male roommate. "But there
is something kind of odd about splitting a bottle of wine with a guy."

(Lee mentions, in passing, the movie "Sideways" as an example of "one long and boozy man date."  Heck, that’s the reason I loved the film so much!  I was moved by what I found to be an immensely touching and accurate portrayal of male friendship, even if the two particular men in the field needed the crutches of women and alcohol in order to justify their time together.)

Lee explains, rightly, that "man dates" were much more common in an earlier period in both American and European history:

Before women were considered men’s equals, some gender historians say,
men routinely confided in and sought advice from one another in ways
they did not do with women, even their wives. Then, these scholars say,
two things changed during the last century: an increased public
awareness of homosexuality created a stigma around male intimacy, and
at the same time women began encroaching on traditionally male spheres,
causing men to become more defensive about notions of masculinity.

The wording of that final clause bothers me.  Why is it women who are always " encroaching"  on male spheres, "causing" men to become defensive?   Why couldn’t Lee have written:  "at the same time, women began entering what had once been exclusively male space.  As they lost their all-male bastions, many men began to feel anxious about their own masculinity."  Folks, women are not the cause of men’s insecurity; unrealistic notions of what it means to be a man are the source of that anxiety.

Still, Lee is absolutely right that it is not as easy as it ought to be for straight men to "date" each other as it ought to be.  I’ve struggled with this myself.  Until recently, I was  hesitant about approaching some of my straight male friends for lunches or dinners, fearing that they might see my desire to "go out" with them as evidence of homosexual interest.  I have no such trouble with my gay male friends, of course.  It’s easier for me to ask a gay man to lunch than it is to ask a straight one.  My gay friends know I’m happily engaged to a woman, but (perhaps surprisingly) my gay friends tend to be much more comfortable with non-sexual male intimacy than my heterosexual buddies.  Lunches and coffee dates at Peet’s are easier that way,

Perhaps because she writes for the rabidly secular Times, Lee leaves out another vital reason straight men date each other:  spiritual fellowship.  Most evangelicals I know (and some Catholics and mainlines as well) are big on the importance of male bonding and accountability.  Groups like Promise Keepers encourage not only large meetings of men, but also one-on-one "dates" (they don’t use that word) for fellowship and the sharing of intimate details of "what’s going on."   When evangelical men get together, in my experience they aren’t going to spend much time discussing sports.  More than most, the spiritually mature Christian men are quick to get to the real point:  "How’s your walk (relationship with Christ) going?"  "How’s your marriage?"  "Are you struggling with temptation in any area?"  Boom, straight to the heart of the issue without beating around the bush.

Of course, Christian conservative men have their own conscious or unconscious homophobia with which to contend.  Rather than saying "I’m going to meet my friend Bill for brunch", we might say "I’m going to be get together with my ‘accountability partner’ Bill."  "Accountability partner" sounds workmanlike; there’s little if any undertone of sexuality and femininity.

My friend "Clive" and I get together regularly for lunches and breakfasts.  Thanks to our schedules, we often have very early (6:00AM) breakfasts during the week at a local diner.  We’re both believers, so we begin our meals with prayer.  We don’t ever go "dutch" (something Lee suggests men on "man dates" generally do.)  Instead, we take turns treating the other.  We have a rule:  "He who pays, prays."  The guy who says grace picks up the tab.  It’s fair and easy and avoids the ridiculousness of haggling over the bill.  "Clive" and I talk about faith, politics and theology.  We also talk about our relationships — he’s married — and about his kids.  Sometimes, we discuss Matilde.  There are few things he doesn’t know about me, and I’m fairly confident that that’s mutual.  We generally shake hands to say hello and we hug to say goodbye.  It works for us, and has for about four years now.

Despite these minor problems, Lee’s article is a savvy one.  I especially identified with a Jeffrey Toohig, whom Lee describes as dividing his male friends into two groups:

"good friends who I go out one on one with, and guys I go out with and we have beers and wings."

No question, I’ve got guys in both categories.  (Oh, I don’t eat "wings", of course, but you get the picture.)

If I were to look at the myriad ways in which my life has improved in the past decade or so, I would say that few things have meant more to me than the "getting and keeping" of several good male friends.  Years ago, all my close friends were women.  Today, outside of my relationship with my fiancee, I am far more likely to rely on other men for emotional and spiritual support.  That’s been an immensely beneficial shift in my life, one that has not come easily or quickly.  But I shudder to think where I’d be without these fellows today. 

It’s spring break this week.   I’ve got lots of grading to do, and want to make sure to get in plenty of time on the roads.  But I’ve  also got a "man date’ for brunch tomorrow morning, another for Thursday breakfast, and a third for Friday lunch.

Bike shorts, the pope, and burning private papers

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I’m home from the car dealership.  Inge (I named my Solara after an Austrian great-aunt of mine) is feeling much better with her mirror restored to working order.   I will do a better job of backing out of the garage, I promise!

I threw my bike in the car on the way, and was able to get in a nice ride in the hills while they worked on the Toyota.  I stopped off to get some food on the way back to the dealership and forgot that most folks will stare when men wander around in public in tight-fitting bike shorts and jerseys.  At my favorite taco stand on North Fair Oaks (where I stopped for lunch) a little boy said very loudly, "Mama, I can see his thingie!"  Great.  Just great.  I write posts extolling modesty, and yet I seem to have caused a scene at "La Estrella" this morning and frightened small children.   I guess that’s what I get for once again falling off the vegetarian bandwagon.

Russell Fox has a terrific post up about the Pope and leftist politics.  It’s a long one, but a worthy read.  I liked this bit very much:

No, for this man (JPII) , democracy and freedom were basically a means, important primarily because of what they make possible:
the realization of a spiritual, meaning-full, non-materialistic
culture, and that means a culture that never treats human beings as
merely "material"–no matter if they are young or old, rich or poor, or
for that matter, a condemned murderer, an enemy soldier, in a
persistent vegetative state or even a fetus. For a great many
conservatives in America today, a (unfortunately usually quite partial)
attachment to these spiritual absolutes is common, but the ability to
make it part of a socio-economic and cultural argument is lacking…

Preach it, brother Russell. 

Jonathan Dresner, my fellow Cliopatriarch, is a bit troubled by the pope’s desire to have his personal notes destroyed:

…as an historian, I have deeply mixed feelings about this: as an
historical figure, the late Pope’s personal papers could be extremely
valuable sources for answering questions we haven’t even considered
asking yet. It saddens me — and piques my curiosity — as an
historian, to see such valuable materials intentionally destroyed. This
isn’t an accident, a side effect of war, archival degradation or
deaccession, theft, etc. It’s a deliberate closing of avenues of
investigation and understanding. On the other hand…  I
respect the desire to be remembered for public works and words, without
the added complications and ambiguities that private papers and drafts
could instill.

Jonathan puts it perfectly.  I’d love to read his private papers, for just those reasons.  At the same time, I know how easy it is for one’s personal, unedited musings to be misconstrued.    In my work as a medievalist, of course, I never encountered diaries or journals or private notes; I dealt with the Calendar of Close Rolls and other crown documents.  As a gender historian, however, I am aware of how complex and dangerous a task it is to reconstruct a life from personal papers.  (I always think of how controversial the work of one of my heroes, Lillian Faderman has been — especially when she argues that women living more than a century ago can accurately be called "lesbian" based upon tantalizing fragments in personal letters and diaries.)

In my home office, I have my private journals that date back to my college years.  I wrote things in those journals that I would never want revealed to the outside world.  I would never want my children to read them, much less an historian (should my life ever merit professional interest).  Though there is much within their pages that reveals how I became who I am, these little volumes are mainly filled with embarrassing self-obsession and a whole litany of unpleasant and tawdry stories rendered in painful detail!

Every so often, I make a resolution to destroy all these journals.  I know I must do so before I have children old enough to read them.  I rarely, if ever, glance through them anymore.  I don’t dwell these days on who I’ve been and where I’ve been and who was with me at the time.   But yet, I can’t quite seem to bring myself to toss them, or burn them.  Part of me claims it’s the historian in me, but that’s a professional excuse.  I know that there is little good that can come of having these old documents lingering around, but part of me still wants to cling to them for just a little while longer.  Somehow, part of me wants to hold on to the man who I was, even if the accounts of what that man did and thought are painful and humiliating.  Cicero said,  "There is pleasure in the calm remembrance of a past sorrow".  He was right.  But I’m not sure it’s always a healthy pleasure.  I think the time to dump or burn the journals is coming soon. 

I think it needs to happen before I marry my fiancee later this year.

Quick rejoicing

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It’s a busy morning.  I’ve got to take my Toyota in to the dealership to have the passenger-side mirror replaced.  Something about me backing out of the garage, and smacking the wall as I did so…

I can report my great relief that at least for now, Gov. Schwarzenegger has dropped his plan to tinker with the pension system for state employees.  This is wonderful news for those of us who work as teachers, firefighters, cops, and so forth, and is also a sign that reports of the death of public-sector unions are greatly exaggerated.    Though I am not yet 38, as of this July I will have 11 years of service  in the California State Teachers Retirement System.  Though I have some small other savings, I am counting on STRS to provide the bulk of my retirement income when I step down from the profession in about another 25 years or so.   I know very little about the stock market, and have little interest in learning, and the idea of giving up a defined benefit plan to face the vagaries of individualized investing has little appeal for me. 

For the record, teachers in California contribute 8% of their salaries to STRS; their districts match those contributions.  It would be absurd to say we’re getting a "free ride" from the taxpayers; we simply ask to reap the benefits of both a lifetime of moderately compensated public service and our own payments in to the system.

More later, if I have time.  Great discussion, by the way, under here.

Random notes on running, rating, and revisiting a favorite and controversial course

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Some random notes:

I.  Despite the terrible conditions of local trails, it looks like we’ll be running the San Gabriel Mountains 50K again this year; it’s now scheduled for June 18th.  I’ll be running it two weeks after the San Diego Rock n’ Roll marathon, and my hope is that it won’t finish the way it did last year, with Hugo dry-heaving on the pavement and needing an IV.  I’m also going to try and do this new race in August.

II.  This morning, I overheard a bunch of my colleagues discussing the merits of the Rate my Professors website.  One suggested that the college ought to officially discourage our students from using it; another suggested the opposite, that professors ought to ask their students to go on line — anonymously — and rate them.  That might, it was suggested, provide a broader base of valuable and instant feedback to instructors.  Clearly, these sites remain divisive. 

I remain conflicted about such sites.  Now that I’m tenured, I only get evaluated every third year.   That’s a privilege of tenure, of course, but it means I miss out on what might be valuable responses to my teaching.  When I was first teaching, before I was tenured in 1998, I relied heavily on written evaluations to shape my teaching.  The praise was precious and validating, but the criticisms were often immensely helpful as well.  No question, it made me a better teacher.  Though I think there’s a lot of silliness and bile associated with Rate my Professors, I often wish I were evaluated more often.  I guess I miss both the plaudits and the brickbats.  (Of course, I could make up my own anonymous evaluation forms and ask my students to use them.)  And I’ll continue to ponder the wisdom of openly asking students to give us honest and anonymous feedback on our teaching on RMP.

III.  I’ve submitted my course description for my fall special topics course.  For the first time in three years, I’ll be teaching my Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History class.  Much has happened since I last taught it in the fall of 2002: Lawrence v. Texas; Massachusetts; Gavin Newsom; the elections of 2004; Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.  All that needs to be covered, as do the older stories of Henry Gerber, Harry Hay, Elaine Nobel, Harvey Milk,Anita Bryant, Magnus Hirschfeld, the Daughters of Bilitis, the origins of butch-femme culture in 1940s bars, Urningism and inversion, bears and twinks, and the Mattachine Society.

For folks who want to sign up, it will be taught as History 24F: Special Topics in United States History, and it will be offered on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:35-3:10PM.

Marriage, Faith, and Enchantment: reflections on “Soft Patriarchs”

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On and off over the past month, I’ve been making my way through W. Bradley Wilcox’s Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Husbands and Fathers.   It’s gotten quite a bit of attention this year from conservative Christians and family sociologists. 

I confess, for someone who wasn’t trained formally as a sociologist/psychologist, the statistical analyses are a bit baffling.  What, I wonder, am I to do with a table called "Odds Ratios from Logistic Regressions on Theological Conservatism of Married Men with Children".  I mean, I think I might be interested in the data, if only I could learn how to interpret it.  As a lover of Auden, I have honored too well his warning:  Do not sit with statisticians, or commit a social science!

Anyhoo, what I can understand of Wilcox’s work is fascinating.  Wilcox is a Christian social conservative teaching sociology at the University of Virginia.  "Soft Patriarchs" is gently non-polemical, but the rest of his work is not.  Check out this article he wrote for Touchstone Magazine earlier this year: The Facts of Life and Marriage:  Social Science and the Vindication of Christian Moral Teaching.  I’ll get to that article another time.

In his book, Wilcox compares the views of mainline and evangelical Protestant men on issues such as marriage, fatherhood, the feminist movement, premarital sex, and divorce.  He also examines and contrasts the parenting and "husbanding" styles of these men, with some remarkable conclusions.  Here are a few things that struck me:

Theologically conservative fathers are… more likely to spank their children than are theological liberals and moderates. 

I could have guessed that.  But how ’bout this:

Married fathers who are theologically conservative are more likely to praise and hug their children very often than fathers who are not.

Or this:

…conservative Protestant fathers are less likely to yell at their children than mainline Protestant fathers.

Wilcox theorizes that since the 1970s, religious conservatives in this country have done a remarkably good job of instilling what he calls "neotraditional" attitudes towards marriage and parenting among their male followers.  The "traditional" aspect includes the persistent view that male and female "spheres" ought to be at least somewhat separate, and in many denominations, that the man is the "head" of the household.  The "neo" part lies in the fact that much of the language of secular family psychology has been adopted by evangelical conservatives, often with beneficial results.  After all,  James Dobson, the head of the enormously important –and very conservative — Focus on the Family, doesn’t have a theological degree; he has a Ph.D. in child development from right here at USC.  Wilcox describes Dobson thus:

…this leading Christian family expert seems to think that the best answer to the challenges that beset contemporary marriage is a more expressive (male) ethic centered around positive emotion work.  Dobson devotes comparatively little attention to the role of faith and virtue in fostering good marriages.

Groups like Promise Keepers have emphasized the importance of being a loving husband and a devoted father over the demands of career.  The evangelical magazine "New Man" regularly runs articles for evangelical Protestant men on how to improve their family relationships.  (See this touching story about a Dad taking his child off to kindergarten in this month’s issue.)

This "neotraditionalism" shows up in Wilcox’s findings around household chores.  (In this regard, he plays great tribute to the pioneering work of Arlie Hochschild.) This might well be expected:

…conservative Protestant married men with children perform a slightly smaller share of household labor than their unaffiliated peers… mainline Protestant married men with children perform a slightly larger share…

Yup, that’s we Episcopalians, folding laundry.

But Wilcox notes that there’s more to the story of domestic relations than the division of labor.  He has a large section entitled Wives’ Reports that Household Labor is Appreciated. He notes that the wives of theological conservatives may end up doing more of the work, but they feel more appreciated for it:

…the family-centered theologically conservative worldview promoted by conservative Protestant institutions seems to be linked to higher displays of gratitude for household labor among married men with children.

Men in these families may have what Wilcox calls "symbolic patriarchy", but as he puts it, they have paid for it with "the currency of heightened levels of emotion work."  Here’s an excerpt from his conclusion:

Churchgoing conservative Protestant men are "soft patriarchs."  Contrary to the assertions of feminists, many family scholars, and public critics, these men cannot be unfairly described as "abusive" and "authoritarian" family men wedded to "stereotypical forms of masculinity."  They outpace mainline Protestant and unaffiliated family men in their emotional and practical dedication to their children and their wives…

In sum, then conservative Protestantism clearly has played a role in slowing the gender revolution; nevertheless, given its attentiveness to the emotional domain of family life, its role has been a curious one in that the women most affected by its traditional influence seem to be enchanted, rather than alienated, by their encounter with this family strategy.

Enchanted rather than alienated.  Comments, folks?

As always, let me conclude this in personal terms.  The fact that I did laundry and dishes did not end up saving any one of my three failed marriages.  Raised with at least some feminist principles, I always made an effort to take on household chores — with mixed success, I might add.  I am not suggesting that in my future marriage I intend to do less work; indeed, I am learning how to cook more and more interesting meals all the time.  But I have learned the hard way that "positive emotion work" is more essential than a scrupulously equal division of household labor.  And I am grateful that much of what I have been learning about what it will take to be a good and devoted husband in this final marriage has come from some unexpected and surprising sources, including the teachings and experiences of married men far more conservative and traditional than myself.