Monthly Archives: March 2006

“Nothing To Lose But Your Clothes”: taking on an editorial about stripping

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I don’t always read the weekly Pasadena City College Courier, but I did pick up a copy last Thursday. On page two, I found this "Soapbox" editorial from the opinion editor of the paper, Don Martirez: Deep in Debt? You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Clothes.  It’s a brief piece, encouraging financially strapped PCC students to consider stripping:

According to the Department of Education, "84 percent of black students and 66 percent of Latino students graduate with debt. And 39 percent of all student borrowers graduate with unmanageable levels of debt." This means that about half of the people who graduate from school will never crawl out of debt because they owe too much. Imagine being bankrupt for the rest of your life.

Why not get ahead while you still can, before college ends? This is America for Christs’ sake, the land of the free, and you’re free to make money if you really want to.

You’re young, talented, outgoing, and want to get paid. Stripping isn’t illegal. People are killing and dying for the same thing strippers do every night — and that’s bringing home the bacon… Stripping doesn’t have to be a long-term career move, it could be a short-term gig, a simple means to a goal, something to pay the rent while you’re focusing on school. Student by day, stripping by night — you’d have the time and the money to take the weekends off while being someone’s sexual fantasy.

I read it through a couple of times, and showed it to a few students and a colleague. I asked them if they thought it was satirical; all thought Martirez was quite serious. As one of my colleagues (who teaches English) put it, "If it was meant to be satire, it misses the mark so badly that it can only be treated as hopelessly sincere!"

I thought about ignoring it.  I though about the fact that it’s just a student newspaper, and perhaps we who teach ought to give these budding journalists a break. And then I thought about the huge number of women I’ve known who have worked in the sex industry, many as strippers.  I thought of the nearly-universal stories of despair, addiction, abuse, alienation, and rage.  I got angry.  So I fired off this letter:

Dear Editor:

I was saddened by Don Martirez’s soapbox editorial on stripping in your March 23 issue. 

I’ve been teaching women’s history and gender studies here at PCC for over ten years.  In my classes, where we deal with the history of sex work, I’ve met dozens of students, almost all women, who worked or work in various facets of "this business."  Almost without exception, they describe the world of strip clubs in starkly negative terms.  Though it is true that the financial rewards can be significant, the emotional costs are also profound.  An extraordinary number of women in the "business" are substance abusers; many are unable to "perform" unless they are under the influence.

Martirez repeats an old lie about stripping: that it’s a harmless pastime, perhaps even a public service for the lonely and the horny.  In his distorted vision, strippers go about their work cheerfully and willingly, perhaps even finding the experience empowering.  Men get the visual pleasure of looking at naked women; the women get financial rewards far greater than they could virtually anywhere else given their educational background.  Everyone wins, no one loses.  It’s a seductive lie, but a lie nonetheless.

Ask the wives and the children of the men who are addicted to strip clubs.  Ask the children of the single mothers who strip, mothers who come home at four in the morning, exhausted and ragged if not intoxicated.  Ask the girls who accompany their boyfriends to strip clubs, and try and pretend to like the experience, while inside they wish they had the courage to say how much they would rather be anywhere else.

We want to believe that strippers are well-compensated women who enjoy their work.  We want to believe that men can spend an hour or two staring at strippers gyrating around a pole, and then interact with their girlfriends and other women entirely unaffected by the images implanted in their brain.  We want to believe these things because we don’t want to accept the brutal reality of the sex industry, of which strip clubs have become an increasingly popular and public face.  We want to have our fun and not be troubled by the consequences for absolutely everyone involved.

Martirez is right about one thing: college is increasingly out of reach for all but the wealthiest of students.  But the solution to this crisis is not stripping women literally of their clothes and figuratively of their self-respect.  The energy of the Courier would be far better spent encouraging greater student activism at the state and federal level to bring down the exorbitant cost of higher education.

I expect to take a fair amount of heat from two different camps: certain "pro-sex" feminists who insist that stripping can be empowering and satisfying for many women (they usually don’t know many strippers), and the young randy college-boy types who resent anyone who won’t co-sign the acceptability of indulging in what they mistakenly see as harmless fantasy.

My Christian faith and my pro-feminism both lead me to oppose all forms of commodified sexuality.   My faith tells me that to buy and sell human bodies for sexual purposes distorts the human spirit and robs both parties in the transaction of their dignity; my pro-feminism insists that women’s bodies ought never be seen as commodities for sale.  Feminist sexual expression is always, first and foremost, about choice — and economic necessity and free choice cannot easily coexist.

Rant over.  We’ll see if the Courier prints it.   

Monday notes

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Noted here and there:

‘Twas a busy weekend.  Like so many others, I’m honoring the passing of Buck Owens.  I’ll admit, I didn’t grow up on him — I first started listening to Buck after he was referenced in a Dwight Yoakam song.  This makes me uncool, I know, but I did grow to love that "west coast" country sound of his.

I’m interested to know how many Americans successfully picked George Mason, UCLA, Florida, and LSU in their men’s final four. I did pick UCLA correctly, but the other three are stunners.  At this point, I’m predicting UCLA over Florida in the final, but wouldn’t be surprised if the Patriots beat the Tigers a week from tonight either.

I’m surprised by Oklahoma’s loss in the women’s tournament — Courtney Paris just seemed so unstoppably dominant to me.  I’m rooting for the Tennessee Vols now.  But please, sweet Jesus, not UConn again.

I’m grateful to Inside Higher Ed for linking to Friday’s post on student crushes.  It’s worth another 1000 visitors a day at least; if you came here from IHE, welcome!

Thanks to Feministe, I learned that this blog has been listed at About.com as one of the "Top Ten Blogs on Civil Liberties and Women’s Rights".  In addition to Feministe, Feministing, Alas, and The Happy Feminist were selected.  Mysteriously, Pandagon was not.  The list was put together by writer and activist Tom Head, who says such kind things about this blog that I am going to (as ever, immodestly) repeat them:

Male feminist bloggers want to be Hugo when they grow up. He has both an intuitive understanding of feminist values and an intuitive understanding of how to try to humbly live into those values as a heterosexual white man–dealing as much with the business of day-to-day life, and the day-to-day values and relationships that give it meaning, as he does with policy issues. And with rational humility, but without a hint of self-mortification, he makes it all look easy.

Matilde the chinchilla sends kisses to Tom.

And of course, the big story in Los Angeles wasn’t the Bruins beating Memphis. It was the massive demonstration for immigrant rights held on Saturday in downtown.  We weren’t there; I was on the El Prieto trail when the march began, and was at Pilates class when it ended.  (Then again, I only found out about it early Saturday morning before heading out for a run.)  I’ve posted about immigration before, and recommend this piece from Maia at Alas, A Blog.  She makes the old  point that if capital is going to be free (something NAFTA has accomplished) then labor too must be free.  If money can move effortlessly across borders, than human capital must be allowed to do the same.  Whatever standard you use, human capital and cash must be treated by the same set of rules. 

For different perspectives from two L.A. Christians whom I respect, read what Rudy and Christy have to say.

I’m going to quote what I wrote last year, because my feelings have not changed an iota:

"In general, we Christians are called to follow the laws of the secular state.  We are to render obedience to Caesar, save in those instances when Caesar’s imperatives conflict directly with God’s call to radical, biblical, universal justice.  Civil disobedience has a place, after all; I am convinced that Christians are called to be disobedient to the state when the state demands that we treat folks differently based upon their immigration status. 

But those of us who hire the undocumented must be very careful not to exploit them financially.  After all, giant corporations regularly hire "illegal aliens", not out of biblical compassion but out of a desire to save money by hiring vulnerable, non-union labor.   Having hired many, many day laborers over the years to help with everything from moving to landscaping to very minor construction, I’ve always made sure to pay wages that are well above the minimum.   (I’ve never hired anyone for under $20 an hour, frankly, and I’ve often paid more.  Indeed, I try to pay day laborers what I think I would pay someone whose name I got from the Yellow Pages, though that is often tough to gauge.) 

I know that many of the men I’ve hired are sending money home to Mexico, Central, and South America.   Our church has an ongoing, long-term mission project in a small Sinaloa town near the Pacific.  On my visits there, I’ve seen the tremendous good that the money sent home by those working in America has brought about.  (When I visited my fiancee’s family last year in rural northeastern Colombia, I saw the same enormous benefits that remittances from America had provided.)  When I hire a day laborer, and pay him well, I’m not merely enabling him to eat; I’m helping to support an entire community.  And as a Christian, I believe I am called to love a Latin American community every bit as much as one here in the United States.   Yes, my salary is paid by taxes — but villages in Mexico and Colombia survive on the money I pay to their sons and daughters here.  Is it not contradictory to the gospel to prefer one’s own people to those who live abroad? "

Some thoughts on teaching and student crushes

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I’m thinking this morning about students and crushes.  (Actually, I’m also thinking about UCLA basketball, my boxing footwork, pacifism, the health of one of my youth group teens, my wife’s smile, and my chinchilla, but those are not subjects for the blog today.  Oh, and I still want a diet Coke very badly.  Is Lent half over yet?)

Recently, I heard from one of my former students, "Darren."  He took my class back when I was a new prof, in the mid-1990s.  He eventually finished his degree, got his master’s, and is now himself an adjunct at several Los Angeles-area community colleges (PCC is not one of them).  Darren and I email every once in a while, and I got a note from him a couple of weeks ago that’s been on my mind.  Here’s some of what he wrote, which I’ve edited a wee bit:

Hugo, I love teaching, and I really believe I am supposed to be doing this.  But I’m becoming aware of a problem I have, and I think it may be one you had too: student crushes.  I’ve got a few women in a few of my classes who have crushes on me, and one or two of them have been flirting with me pretty heavily.  I try and have good boundaries with them, because I’m only an adjunct. I don’t want to lose my job, and besides, I do very much want to be a professional in and out of the classroom.  But it’s so hard, because outside of the classroom I’m so shy with women.  Inside the classroom, I feel so desirable and powerful. 

My question is this, Hugo: how did you or do you keep this from going to your head?  How do you keep yourself from paying special attention to the ones who make it so obvious that they like you/want you?  Any advice you can give me would be awesome.

I have Darren’s permission to address this on the blog. (Also, let me add three things: Darren is 31,single, and his name isn’t really Darren.)

I’ve already emailed Darren back, and I didn’t save what I wrote.  But he’s had me thinking about how it is that we who teach can best think about the crushes our students will get on us.

First off, before this starts to sound like a narcissistic rant about how "crushable" a teacher I am, let me be very clear that I’ve rarely met a genuinely talented prof of either sex who wasn’t the object of desire from at least a few students.   A truly effective teacher will often be the object of desire, regardless of what he or she looks like.  Student crushes, I am convinced, are less about the physical attractiveness of the professor and more about that professor’s passion, certainty, and competence.  Those three attributes are, for lack of a better word, intensely sexy for many people!

When I was an undergrad at Cal, I had a crush on a fellow student named Tiffany.  Tiffany saw me as just a friend, however, in one of those all-too-common scenarios that most of us know plenty about.  But Tiffany had a massive crush on one of her anthropology professors.  He was in his late forties, and while he was reasonably fit for his age, no one would mistake him for a sex symbol.  He wore earth tones (which didn’t suit him); he was balding and perhaps 5’6".  But I was in his class too, and I have to admit, he was mesmerizing.   He had passion for his subject, he was a gifted lecturer, he had a sense of humor, and he struck the perfect balance between self-deprecation and arrogance.  (I’ve always thought that’s a tough needle to thread, and I find myself striving for it often.)  Tiffany was in love with Professor P, and I eventually admitted I could see why.  I asked her one day what she wanted from him, and she told me:

It’s not about sex, really.  It’s that I want to be inside his head. I want to be near him, I want him to talk to me for hours, I want him to focus just on me and I want to sit next to him and soak up everything about him.

"Oh", I said.  I didn’t get it.

But after thirteen years of teaching, I get it.  Students get crushes on me from time to time, just as they do on "Darren" and "Professor P."  Occasionally, some of those crushes have a specific romantic agenda.  When I was single, I sometimes (not often) got asked out at the end of the semester or received other signs of clear interest in pursuing a relationship of some sort.  But the vast majority of crushes were not and are not about actual sexual or romantic desire.  Most are like Tiffany’s crush on Professor P.

If we’re doing our job right, we have the power to change the way a student thinks about himself or herself.  At our best, those of us who love to teach are practiced seducers, Casanovas of the classroom.  But my agenda isn’t about sexual conquest, it’s about creating an interest and a passion where none previously existed. It’s about getting students to want something they didn’t know they wanted!  And when a student has a crush on me, I told Darren, it’s more often than not like Tiffany’s crush on Professor P.  Though some students may sexualize their crushes, what they really want is to continue to feel the way you make them feel: excited, energized, provoked, challenged. 

If we take advantage of student crushes, I told Darren, we make a huge mistake.  We assume that the real interest was in us rather than in how we were able to make our students feel and how we were able to make them think.   The best way, I told Darren, to think about student crushes is to take them as a sign that you’re probably doing your job pretty damn well.  And while age and perceived physical attractiveness may play a small part in encouraging these crushes, the real precipitator is enthusiasm, talent, and an obvious commitment to your students.

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like!   Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves.  They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves.  And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places! That’s what student crushes mean to me.

After I wrote some of this to Darren, he wrote back:

"Hugo, thanks.  But honestly, I’m a little bit crestfallen.  I did want it to be about me! I did want my students to want me, even though I know that that seems so selfish and manipulative.  At the same time, I’m glad to know that you think there’s a healthy function for these things.  Still, I’m a bit chagrined."

I told him I knew how he felt.

A short note on freed hostages and pacifism

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I’m rejoicing this morning in the news that three of the Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers have been freed in Iraq.  The three were freed by a multinational task force of soliders, who found the hostages unguarded.  No shots were fired and no one was hurt during the rescue operation.

Of course, joy in the release of the surviving three is tempered by the sorrow at the murder of a fourth hostage, a Quaker from Virginia, Tom Fox.  And as I celebrate, my inner pacifist finds myself wondering how I would feel if the rescuers had had to shoot the kidnappers.   I’m delighted that the men are all safe, of course, but I could not endorse or support the use of lethal force to free them.  I say that, mind you, in the full knowledge that if one of these men were my father or my brother, I might feel differently.  It’s harder to adhere to one’s pacifist commitments when one’s loved ones are in harm’s way.

It’s the old question that always gets thrown at pacifists: "what would you do if someone threatened your family?"  John Howard Yoder, the greatest Mennonite theologian of the past century, gave the best and most impressive answer to that question, and I recommend his little book to everyone.  I try and reread it fairly often.

Friday Random Ten: the vanishing art of randomness

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Friday Random Ten: seven songs are mine, three are my wife’s.

1.  "Carefree Highway", Gordon Lightfoot
2.  "Unpretty", TLC  (If you thought this was my wife’s song, you’d be wrong)
3. "Furious Angels", Rob Dougan (Have to be in a very specific mood)
4.  "Bad Day", Daniel Powter
5.  "Through the Fire", Chaka Khan
6.  "Ease Your Feet in the Sea", Belle and Sebastian
7.  "Holy Diver", Dio (I sing it to myself while driving)
8.  "Don’t Stop Singing", Helen Reddy  (I loved this song when I was in fifth grade)
9.  "I’m On My Way", Proclaimers
10.  "Tear in Your Hand", Tori Amos  (Another sing in the car song)

Bonus Track:  "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite", REM

A long rant on feminism, the internalized audience, and alcohol

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Sorry, this is going to be long. But I’m not posting again today, so read it in sections if you like.

In women’s history class this week, we’re talking about the birth of the temperance movement and nineteenth-century feminism, as well as the sudden and stunning rise in alcohol consumption that America witnessed as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, access to alcohol was to some extent sex-specific: many taverns excluded all women save prostitutes, and women who may have wanted to drink faced both economic and social barriers to doing so.

I often connect the problem of heavy drinking in the nineteenth century to the drinking and drug use we see among young — and not so young — people today.  Here’s what concerns me: so many of my female students (and even many of my youth group kids) use alcohol and drugs to give them a kind of what might be crassly called  "liquid feminism".  If one key feminist goal is to empower young women to be clear and forthright about their desires, then it’s fairly evident that some young women, more than a few, use alcohol as a tool to overcome their own doubts and fears and insecurities.  And that makes that kind of drinking a feminist issue.

Last November, I wrote about the crushing problem of the "internalized audience."  Let me quote three paragraphs from that long post:

The make-up of the audience varies little from young woman to young woman: mothers and fathers, friends and family members, teachers and pastors and peers.  Each member of the audience has his or her own set of expectations for how the girl ought to behave, and gradually, those expectations have crawled deep into the psyche.  Raised to be acutely sensitive to the wishes and values of others, most young women "internalize the audience" by adolescence if not before…

Thus I’m convinced that one of the most important feminist tasks is helping young — and not so young — women to quiet that internalized audience.  Quieting, mind you, is not the same as dismissing.  All of us, at times, can be comforted and strengthened by the memory of what some loved one or respected person has told us.  On occasion, it’s appropriate to ask:  "What would so-and-so say if they could see me now?  What advice would they give?"  We ought on occasion to consider the wishes and beliefs of our culture, our faith (if we have one) and our parents.  But though these ought to be factors in our decision-making about food, sex,and pleasure, they ought not to be the decisive ones.  Helping young women listen to their own desires, separate from those of the large and loud audience, is a key feminist goal.

To put it another way, I often argue that feminism is about helping young women to find both their authentic "yes" and their authentic "no".  By authentic, I mean that it is congruent with their deepest desires.   And wherever they may ultimately lie, we know this: these "deepest desires" lie beneath the surface longing to please parents and partners.   To put it crudely: many young women will encounter many young men who very much want them to say "yes."  Many of these young women will come from backgrounds where their cultural obligation is to say "no".   So whether she says "yes" or "no", her own desires may well have already been silenced by the overwhelming pressure to please one faction or another in the audience.  She will find it very difficult, it not impossible, to please everyone.

I stand by that post today.

What concerns me as a youth leader and a teacher is the huge number of young women who report using substances to quiet the internalized audience!  What so many teens discover is that alcohol presses — if only temporarily — the "mute" button on all of the competing voices in one’s head.  For some young women, alcohol and drugs enable them to say "yes" to what they really want to say "yes" to but don’t dare while sober; for others, alcohol may allow another’s "yes" to override their own drowned-out "no."  But what so many of my young people report is the consistent use of alcohol and drugs to live a double life: a life where, when "lit" by a drink or five, they are able to feel powerful, decisive, and in control, unhampered by doubt.  As we all know all too well, the consequences of using alcohol and drugs to overcome inhibitions, to become a short-lived "liquid feminist" who says and does what she wants, can often be disastrous.

We live in a culture that puts impossible pressures on so many young women: to be sexy but virginal, demure yet aggressive, autonomous and independent yet pleasing to men, beautiful but effortlessly so.   It’s hard enough for many adults to silence all of these nagging voices in their heads while sober, far more difficult for vulnerable teens and early twenty-somethings.  And chemicals offer such rapid relief, or at least the illusion of rapid relief!  Chemicals reconcile the irreconcilable; chemicals drown out the shouting, arguing, hectoring voices that so many women carry around in their heads every waking second.  And yet those same chemicals bring so much devastation and heartbreak.

One of the things I want for my students and youth groupers of either sex is the confidence to act on their own deep desires — while stone cold sober.  I want them to support each other while they do the work of silencing the nagging internalized audience –  without relying on booze or drugs to suppress those voices.  I have become convinced, in other words, that drinking and drug use is a feminist issue for a wide variety of reasons.  Obviously, intoxication can increase a woman’s risk of being sexually assaulted.  That and that alone makes the topic a vital one for those of us who care about the lives of women and girls.  But more subtly, in our modern culture alcohol and drugs become an escape from doing the overwhelmingly difficult work of figuring out what the hell it is you really want, and then having the courage to give voice to that want.

We’ve got to do more than lecture young women about the dangers of turning to "liquid feminism." If all we feminists and pro-feminists do is give lectures, after all, all we end up becoming is another damn voice in the head — and another reason for a young person to feel she’s not living up to other’s expectations for her!  That’s the last thing I want.  I’m convinced, however, that those of us who care about the next generation of feminists have to confront the issue of drinking and substance abuse among women and girls.  We have to see that it’s fundamentally tragic for our sisters and our daughters (maybe even our wives and mothers) to resort to alcohol and drugs in order to tell us what they really feel and what they really want.  On an individual level, "drinking to silence the voices" is fundamentally at odds with the most basic feminist ideals. 

At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where the nascent American feminist movement first began to organize in a serious way, the delegates issued the famous Declaration of Sentiments.  One of the charges against "mankind" (what we today call the patriarchy) was this:

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Read positively, this first women’s rights manifesto is calling for three things: self-confidence, self-respect, and independence.  As modern feminists, we must be committed, as our fore-mothers in 1848 were committed (most of them, by the way, were firmly in the temperance movement) to instilling in our daughters those three precious attributes. One great enemy of those goals is, I think, the habitual use of substances in order to give the user the false impression that she does in fact have, if only for a moment, self-confidence and independence!  As any recovering alcoholic will tell you, booze lies.  Drugs lie.  And as the inheritors of that legacy of Seneca Falls, one of our goals, as lofty as it may seem, is to remove the tremendous cultural pressures that drive so many of our sisters and daughters to the false promises of liquid feminism.

Thursday Short Poem: Kaufman’s “Lot’s Wife”

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Almost a year ago, I offered this Leslie Goerner poem about Lot’s wife.  ‘Twas a very Christian poem, meditating on the difficulty of letting go of sin.  This week’s poem is on the same story, but from a very different angle.  Margaret Kaufman gives us another side to the story, but ultimately, I’m able to recognize my own human brokenness in both women’s visions of Lot’s wife and her fatal decision to look back.

Read both poems together; they stand together nicely.

Lot’s Wife

They had no time—the just man
hurried across the bridge,
followed God’s magistrate
along the black ridge.

His grieving wife lagged behind
as if she had no will,
arms heavy with useless things,
heart heavier still.

She couldn’t recall if she’d shut the door,
turned off the iron; worse guilt,
she’d left behind the baby pictures,
her mother’s ring, her wedding quilt.

One arm raised as if to gather
her whole life in that embrace,
tears blurring the view,
without much thought she turned her face,

became what she had shed. Who grieves
for this nameless woman, Lot’s reflective wife?
I grieve.
I know holding on can cost a life.

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“An issue of mentorship” –a thought or two about pro-feminist men and their feminist mentors

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In her inimitable style, DarkDaughta (NWS) put up a terrific post yesterday on men in the feminist movement.  An excerpt:

When I think of how unsafe it is for men to make change just in their own lives, relationships, families, when I think of how little boys are reared, inculcated, abused, torn and shredded, their tender insides buffeted and harshly molded to make them perfect patriarchs primed to benefit from the dubitable perks of living as a male in a society that privileges men, my heart and spirit hurt.

It’s good stuff.  Ricia followed up at he place and with this comment at DarkDaughta’s:

i welcome anti-patriarchal men into the fold as ally’s without doubt and in good faith. and (here it comes…) view the hiccups that arise, and are bound to – as an issue of mentorship. so long as all are willing and no further to that.

And this got me thinking about what role women in the feminist movement play in mentoring pro-feminist men.

When I was at Cal in the 1980s, taking my first women’s studies courses, there were no men’s studies courses. I had no pro-feminist male professors.   Thus all of my early mentors were women.  (I mentioned my mother on Monday).  My classmates were mostly women, and in those early years, they mentored me.  I wasn’t a women’s studies major, but I hung out with lots of women who were.  They challenged me and pushed me, but nearly always welcomed me.  And of course, they urged me to work with other men — something  it would take me another decade to do.

Pro-feminist men have a difficult road to walk in relationship to the larger feminist movement.  On the one hand, we are by definition in solidarity with the movement’s goals of justice and equality for our mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, friends and daughters.  We are painfully aware of just how few other men share a public and persistent commitment to feminism.  Almost all of us who do this work have encountered ridicule (or, at best, a kind of studied disregard) from other men for our beliefs and our actions.  But because we are men, ultimately we are socialized differently from our female companions in the movement.  We have privileges they don’t have — and when it comes to certain legacies of what DarkDaughta calls the "patriarchy", we have some unique burdens as well, mostly around the crushing obligations to live up to an elusive masculine ideal.

Women in the movement can tell us their stories of what men have done to them.  They can teach us theory; pro-feminist men’s studies is rooted in feminist analysis.  And feminists can share with us their vision of what they would like men to be.  But sharing with us their goals for men is not the same as modeling for us how to live as pro-feminists!  Pro-feminist men can listen and learn a great deal from our feminist sisters, but they can’t show us by example how to become the men we are called to become. For that, we need role models who live in male flesh and have been acculturated as men.

The number of pro-feminist men who live out their commitments to justice and equality in both public and private is relatively small.  There are few places where men can easily find supportive communities of other men who share both an interest in activism and in personal transformation.  The young guys I know who are struggling to be good feminists in private and public rarely have strong older male mentors whose example is worthy of emulating. 

I cannot begin to express the sense of urgency I feel in my own life as a result!  I’m hardly the only pro-feminist male women’s studies professor — but I’m the only one the vast majority of my students have ever met, and I may be the only self-proclaimed male feminist they will encounter for the next few years.  Thus I feel a special obligation to talk about how I live out my pro-feminism in my private life as well as in my public commitments — largely because I want to show that it is possible to live as a man and resist the dominant cultural messages about what men ought to be.  This is particularly important for someone who describes himself as an evangelical Christian pro-feminist, which puts me in a fairly unique niche.  So I spend a lot of time asking myself, "If my students could see me now, what would they think?  When I’m alone with my wife, or alone with my computer, or hanging out with my running buddies, do my actions and words match what I preach and teach?"  Sometimes, I need to pray a lot for the strength to live with wholeness and congruence! 

(My prayers tend to be profane, passionate, and vaguely incoherent:  "Dear God, grant me the strength to match my language and my life.  Help me not to fuck this up.  And if I do fuck up, Lord, help me to get right back on the path and not wallow in all of that shit.")

I have many male friends today.  But in my feminist walk, I still rely on female colleagues and mentors.  I need my feminist sisters, some younger than myself, to challenge me and and help me to see where I am blind.  I could not do the work I do or live the life I lead without a great deal of regular input and gentle criticism from my feminist allies.  This does not mean that I need to be mothered or directed like a little boy!  It does mean that if I am committed to justice and equality and liberation for women and men, I have to listen to those who share those convictions and those goals. And always, I have to remain teachable.

Nota bene:

I will be enforcing the thread drift rule forcefully  in the comments section.  Do not use the comments below this post to question the whole feminist movement.  Focus on the specific topic of my post, please.

“Lana lacks humility”: a note on sexism and letters of rec

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Boxing lessons continue to go well.  We started work on the upper cut today; doing it with the left is difficult — I can’t quite master the hip movement that accompanies it yet. My body feels completely recovered from the marathon — I’m lucky that I usually can get back to my normal exercise routine in 48-72 hours after a long race.  Some folks have told me that’s a sign of good conditioning, while others grumble that it means I didn’t push myself hard enough.  I worry, at times, that it’s the latter.  But I was in a suitable amount of anguish in the latter stages of Sunday’s LA Marathon, and though I was slow, I did make a reasonable effort.

Anyhow, a student named "Lana" came to see me yesterday.  Lana took a couple of my classes last year, and distinguished herself as a truly outstanding student.  Lana immigrated to this country from Russia just a few years ago in her early teens, but her mastery of English has become nearly flawless and her accent is only slight.  She’s applying for transfer to a couple of very fine colleges, and asked me to write a letter of recommendation.  I wrote a glowing and enthusiastic one.

Lana came to seem me yesterday about another professor’s letter of rec.  One of my colleagues in another department wrote a letter praising Lana’s abilities, but after a brief recitation of her accomplishments and intelligence, added, "Unfortunately, Lana lacks humility."  He gave Lana a copy of the letter — after having mailed the originals off to the schools to which she is applying.

Lana was understandably upset, and wanted to talk about several things.  Was it appropriate, she wondered, for this professor to put this in his letter?  Should she write him a note about it?  And perhaps equally important, did I think that what he said was true?

By the time Lana was done telling me the story, I was quite cross with my colleague.  First of all, the issue of "humility" itself, which seemed charged with sexism and ethnic bias.  Lana is about 20.  She’s an immigrant from a family that came here with virtually nothing not so many years ago.  She’s also a young woman, and she’s ambitious and eager to succeed.  She’s not a grade-grubber; she earned her As easily.  But she’s got big dreams and she’s not shy about sharing them when prompted to do so.  She will raise her hand to ask questions, will challenge a professor with whom she disagrees (she took me on more than once!)

My colleague, like myself, is a middle-aged white native-born Christian male with tenure.  His views on politics are notoriously conservative, as are, apparently, his views on young women and their deportment.  What he calls "lack of humility" is code for what I’m fairly confident he sees as Lana’s unfeminine ambition, her willingness to speak up for herself, her eagerness for a better and more prosperous life for herself and her family.  (She’s also Russian, and without getting into ethnic stereotypes, I can say — having had a whole mess of wonderful students from that society — that theirs is definitely not a culture in which modesty and quiet self-deprecation are celebrated virtues for either sex!)  I cannot imagine that my colleague would have written the same comment about a male student.  I suspect, though I admit I have no evidence for this, that if he writing about "Dmitri" instead of "Lana", he might praise him as "driven and outspoken and ambitious".

So I told Lana I didn’t think she "lacked humility" in any meaningful or important sense. I also told her that I felt it was a whoppingly inappropriate comment to put in an academic letter of recommendation.  She’s not applying for a job as an etiquette teacher; she’s applying to competitive colleges where she wants to earn a degree in business.  Even if she did lack humility, I told her its absence will likely prove an asset to her in her future professional work!

I haven’t decided yet whether to confront my colleague. If we were friends, I’d be on him in two seconds flat (after, of course, getting Lana’s permission to discuss the matter with him.)  Yesterday, I wrote about my penchant for politeness — and while it’s true I value civility, if someone’s upset one of "my kids" (either a student at PCC or a teen at All Saints), I’ll be in the offender’s face lickety-split.  But Lana expressed no interest in having me talk to him, and I don’t know him well at all.  Besides, the damage, such as it is, has already been done.  I did my best to reassure Lana that I believed in her unconditionally, and that I believe that most college admissions officers will not take the line about humility seriously.

On a related note, I always tell a student up front if I can’t write a glowing letter of recommendation.  If I’ve got reason to doubt a student’s character or academic potential, I tell them as soon as they ask me to write a letter.  That way, they can decide in advance whether or not they want me to be one of their recommenders.  I also always give a copy of the letter to my student, even if he or she has waived access to it.  I don’t ever say things behind people’s backs I wouldn’t say to their faces, and that goes for evaluations as well as for private gossip.  I think that’s a good rule for my colleagues to consider.