Monthly Archives: May 2006

The Adventures of Carrie Giver

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About a week ago, a company called TR Rose Associates sent me something I’d never gotten in the mail before: a comic book.  It’s called The Adventures of Carrie Giver and it’s a fun, informative, magnificently illustrated piece of political advocacy.  Carrie Giver = "caregiver", and the comic book campaign is a remarkably clever tool for drawing attention to the vital issue of uncompensated care-giving in this country.  Here’s the blurb:

TR Rose Associates, Inc. is unveiling America’s first true female super-hero since Wonder Woman. Conceived for the Caregiver Credit Campaign, the new heroine will set the nation abuzz, challenging ideas about mothers and other caregivers in our political, social, and economic life. Our feminist career heroine will have politicians and hairdressers, women and girls, hardhats and female executives, right along with caregivers re-thinking personal and social policy, including Social Security. Carrie Giver will be kicking butt in the name of hundreds of millions of people, especially mothers, who give care to the young and old alike each and every day.

The goal of the Caregiver Credit Campaign is simple — to get the already extant Child Tax Credit converted to a" Caregiver Tax Credit to cover care of adults and children: anyone who gives care to everyone who needs it in families of blood or choice."  It’s an admirable goal, and in a world where women are the primary uncompensated caregivers, it’s a vital — if oft-overlooked — feminist issue.  More on the strategy here.

You can buy the comic book for only $3.95 here.  I learned more about care-giving and public policy in fifteen minutes reading the Adventures of Carrie Giver than I thought possible.  The artwork is compelling, the "adventures" entertaining, the policy information provocative, challenging, and easily digestible.  And lord knows, this issue matters more than the virtually any other, and it receives far too little attention.

Please consider buying the comic, visiting the Caregiver Credit Campaign website, and getting involved!

Tuesday night notes and links: three fun photos, some good art, and a poem that made me cry

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It’s a quiet Tuesday night here on the home front; a rare night for me to relax at home and putter.  I’ve got some serious posts coming up later this week on everything from lesbians in women’s sports to encouraging young men to challenge sexism amongst their peers, but I’m not in the mood for anything serious tonight.

Some notes and links:

I’ve got three new, very special photos of Matilde up in this album.  Check out this one of her in full descent or this one of her in full dust bath flip.  And, since yesterday was my birthday and the second anniversary of Matilde’s near-death experience, consider making a tax-deductible donation to her charity.   Exciting news about our work coming soon!

Lynn has a good post up about women, visuality, beefcake, and porn.  It touches on many issues I’ve been dealing with, and asks some interesting questions.  Please be civil when commenting over there.

Slate magazine linked to my post this morning on politics and virtue.  Both evil_fizz and Glenn Sacks sent me notes to let me know about it, and I’m grateful to both of them.

One of my most memorable and talented students in recent years, Courtney Raney, is an artist, and I’ve been meaning to link to her website.  Check out some of what she’s done here and here; it’s terrific.

If there’s a male blogger in the blogosphere on whom I have the famous massive blog crush, it’s surely Chris Clarke.  He shares with me a passion for justice and a love for the hills of the East Bay Area in Northern California.  He’s ten times the writer I’ll ever be. He put up a poem this past weekend about a baby squirrel he found. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking piece about the choice between sentimental interference with nature on behalf of one little creature, and respect for the harsh but wise choices of the natural ecosystem.  At the end of the poem, Chris does what I would not have done.  When I first read it, I wept, and I cursed him.  When I read it a second time, I nodded my head and honored him for his courage, his humanity and his humble recognition of our rightful powerlessness. 

Enough for tonight.  I’m going to watch some WNBA (Storm vs. Comets) on ESPN2 and try and figure out who the heck to vote for in the California Democratic primary for secretary of state and lieutenant governor.  I welcome suggestions from those who know more about these things than I.

Some thoughts on politics and virtue

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At Feministe, I find three links this morning.  The first is to a New York Times article about the Clintons and the state of their extraordinarily public marriage.  The second is from the very popular progressive blogger Atrios, who is irked that the press is not delving in to the private lives of prospective Republican candidates for president in 2008.  Atrios offers a fantasy version of a New York Times article on the likes of Rudy Giulani and Sen. George Allen.  A third bit of snark comes from Matt at MyDD, and it deals with the rumors surrounding the marriage of Jeb Bush.

I agree with Jill, Atrios, and Matt about this: the amount of attention devoted to the Clintons and the details of their marriage has been grotesquely disproportionate.  Since 1992, the media has asked, in ways subtle and overt, whether theirs is truly a marriage of love, convenience, or some strange combination of the two.  I’ve had plenty of moments where I’ve felt exasperation with both Bill and Hillary, but I’ve never ceased to feel that they are both, to paraphrase Lear, far "more sinned against than sinning."  The Times article, even though it is fairly friendly to the former First Couple, continues this now fourteen year-old practice of obsessively analyzing what is, in the end, a deeply private relationship.

Though I understand (or hope) that Atrios and Matt are being facetious with their pieces on George Allen and Jeb Bush, I wince whenever rumors about the private lives of public figures are circulated.  Yes, I understand that it’s frustrating to see the Clintons dissected while others get an apparently free pass; I remember that my disappointment in Bill’s behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal was matched by my exasperation at the hypocrisy of many of those who criticized him.  But the fact that the media is unfair doesn’t mean that we need to even the score by exposing the shortcomings, betrayals and embarrassments of other public figures, even those on the far right of the political spectrum.

I am adamant that we should all strive to match our public pronouncements with our public behavior.  I’m big on having coherence between language and life; I’m big on the importance of living ethically in all aspects of one’s existence.  Integrity is important in the bedroom and the boardroom.  I’m someone who in the past fell woefully short of the standard; for years my private life was chaotic, my actions selfish, my words deceitful.  I live very differently today, and I know how hard — and yet how essential — it is to transform one’s life.

My faith tells me that we are all called to live lives of justice and integrity.  But my experience tells me that at one time or another, most of us will fall well short of our own ideals.  People cheat, people take drugs, people lie and steal.    This includes politicians, who after all, are merely reflections of the people who elect them.  While I hope that everyone continues to strive for integrity, I’m not horrified to discover that folks I like, admire, and voted for fall short of that mark.  When I vote for president, I’m voting to elect a new Caesar, a new leader of the things of this fallen world.  He or she is not, in my mind, supposed to be a moral exemplar.  I’d rather my politicians be faithful spouses, but their sexual behavior is not my concern, and it shouldn’t be the concern of the broader culture.

Though living with integrity is vital, failing to live with integrity in one area of one’s life doesn’t mean that one will fail in every other area.  It’s possible to be deceitful in one’s marriage but yet honest in one’s business dealings; it’s possible to be a rotten husband but a kind and inspiring teacher.  We are complicated creatures, we humans, and we are almost all paragons of inconsistency! This doesn’t excuse infidelity or hypocrisy — but I think we need to accept that a certain degree of contradictoriness and complexity is part and parcel of our broken human condition.

In 2008, I won’t vote for the candidate who has the best marriage.  I won’t be automatically voting for the candidate who has the fewest personal faults.  I’ll be voting for the candidate who shows the greatest commitment to the communal values I believe in, and I’m wise enough to know it’s possible to be committed to values in one area of one’s life while falling tragically short in another.   For those of us who are on a journey of faith and transformation, we should all be working towards radical integrity in every area of our lives.  But while we are hard on ourselves, we must be gentle with others — even our elected leaders.  We are all works in progress, we all have our skeletons in the closet (or dancing on the front lawn).  America doesn’t need paragons of private virtue as much as it needs skilled architects of public policy. It would be swell if we could have both in one man or one woman, but if we can’t, I’ll pick the latter.

More on men, women, hazing, and why we should avert our gaze

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Third post of this birthday day.

I’ve posted both here and at Inside Higher Ed on the brouhaha over women’s sports teams and hazing. I’d like to revisit two other aspects of the issue.

On Friday, Jill linked to this dreadful Kathryn Jean Lopez essay at National Review Online.  Lopez reacts to the news that Catholic University of America’s women’s lacrosse team has also had its hazing rituals revealed in online photos:

Young men shouldn’t be getting sloppy drunk and doing childish things and paying for a stripper. But young women really shouldn’t. There is something more disconcerting about the latter—and it is even more disturbing that we won’t all have that reaction. It’s not beyond the call of duty for women to encourage men to be gentlemen. It’s women’s work.   (Bold is mine)

Jill takes that apart very well, but I’m going to add my two cents.

The notion that women ought to hold themselves to a higher standard than men is a profoundly upsetting one to those of us who care deeply about issues of faith, feminism, and gender.  Jill, and other articulate feminists, rightly point out that making young women responsible for civilizing men is a cruel burden to impose on women.  But of course, what’s also so infuriating is the implication that men can’t be civilized and restrained without the active intervention of women.

A key thrust of the pro-feminist men’s movement (a movement to which I happily belong) is to empower men to escape the "myth of male weakness" (the notion that at their core, men are sex-crazed brutes who need women to soothe, nurture, and restrain us.)  In my life, one of the most liberating discoveries of all was the discovery that I could control my actions, and I could challenge other men in all-male settings to hold themselves accountable.  It’s a fine thing indeed to discover that possessing a penis (even an erect one) does not vitiate the ability to reason, nor does a rush of testosterone automatically override compassion and common sense!

The CUA lacrosse team hired a male stripper (photos are on the internet to prove it).  So too did the Duke men’s lacrosse team, with infamous results.  But the two actions aren’t comparable, largely because of the enormously reduced threat to a male stripper as opposed to his female coutnerpart.  Zuzu writes below Jill’s post:

The dynamic is very different than when you have a bunch of men hiring a female stripper. There’s no expectation of sexual acts with the stripper for a little extra cash, for example, and the fun is in being naughty with your friends and letting loose for once, with no men around but the bouncers and the stripper. There’s no real menace, because no matter how much they’re whooping and hollering and drinking, women aren’t going to, say, gang-rape a male stripper. Even if he does a little lap-dance type of thing for you, the goal is not for you to get off; the goal is for you to have fun (and for your friends to have fun watching you).

That’s exactly right. I don’t want anyone hiring strippers, period.  But I’m not going to pretend that what the CUA women’s lacrosse team did is remotely equivalent to what the Duke men’s team.  Zuzu’s right: women don’t rape male strippers.  The man may take off his clothes for money, but he can be reasonably certain he won’t be forcibly violated.  And though some women may respond sexually to his gyrations, the real pleasure for most young women in hiring a man to strip is in the role reversal.   Look at the faces of men watching a woman strip — the men look hungry.  Look at the faces of women watching a man strip — they’re contorted with often hysterical laughter.  There’s often a sordid, deadly seriousness beneath the raucousness when a group of men watch a naked woman dance for them; there’s usually a kind of embarrassed silliness among the women when a man in a thong cavorts in front of them.

Lopez has it exactly backwards.  While I don’t want any college team stripping or hiring strippers as part of an initiation ritual or celebration, I think that it’s far worse when men do so. It’s not that I hold men to a higher standard — it’s that the threat of potential violence and violation is infinitely greater to a female stripper with a male audience than with a male stripper in front of a female audience.  Young men worthy of carrying the name of their university on their chests or backs ought to know this well enough, and college administrators — and conservative pundits — would do well to keep this in mind.

I also want to reiterate my strong feeling that we shouldn’t be looking at the photos circulating on the internet from these parties.  Inside Higher Ed (as well as most other websites and many national papers) already linked to the site, and thus I mentioned it in the version of the post I wrote for that webpage.  But I’m not linking to any of the pictures here.  I’ve seen a few of them — once. And there are numerous photos available on the web and linked to by major publications that I have avoided viewing.  And I am adamant that I think we should all avert our gaze from these photos.  The people who snapped these pictures of young people in various states of undress and intoxication did upload them to various photo-sharing communities.  But they never intended the photos to be discussed, analyzed, and quite possibly drooled over by millions of folks across the country.

Of course the young people involved should have known better.  Yet I suspect that many of the young women involved in the most noteworthy of the hazing incidents,that of the Northwestern soccer team, had no way of stopping the photos from being taken.  (When you’re being hazed, how do you tell the juniors and seniors who are running the show not to take a picture of you drunk and in your underwear?)  But even if they put the photos up there deliberately and intentionally, even if they want us to look, we still shouldn’t.

I wrote in February that I gave up my Myspace account for many reasons, not the least of which that I thought it was inappropriate that I be exposed to the (frequently) revealing and embarrassing photos that teenagers post of themselves on that site.   I understand the temptation that young people feel to share their amusing, silly, and mildly shocking pictures with their friends and the broader world.  But I know full well that what one considers funny and daring when one is 18 and smashed may be humiliating and painful at 28 — or heck, even the next day when sobriety arrives with a brutal reality check.  Those of us who ARE old enough to know better must do more than simply shake our heads and bemoan the poor judgment of "kids these days."  Yes, we need to mentor and counsel and supervise.  But we also need to avert our eyes, both out of a healthy and loving respect for the young people involved as well as out of a sense of what is healthy and good for us to see. I don’t need to see a photo of some eighteen year-old soccer player giving a drunken lap dance in her bra and panties — and I’m pretty damn sure that given the time to reflect on it, she doesn’t want the likes of me to see that picture either.  Out of respect for both of us, I’m not going there.

And yeah, I don’t think of any of you should be going there either.

Harvey’s birthday too

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May 22 is my birthday, but of course I share it with plenty of famous folks (Lawrence Olivier, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and so forth).  But one person with whom I am particularly proud to share it is the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in America.   Had he not been assassinated in 1978, Harvey would be 76 today.

Next to Star Wars (which I saw countless times as a kid), the film I have seen more often than any other (at least thirty times) is The Times of Harvey Milk, which won the 1984 Academy Award for Best Documentary.  I always show it in my gay and lesbian history class, and of course, I showed the first part of it this afternoon — the first time I’ve managed to do so on Milk’s birthday. 

Only three students in the class had even heard of Harvey Milk before my lecture on him last week and the showing of the documentary today.  Every movement has its martyrs, but while almost all students know the names Malcolm and Martin, far too few young queer students even know the name (much less the story) of this extraordinarily important figure. The Time magazine profile is here. 

Movements need heroes, and kids need to know the names of their heroes.  This is why I am so strongly supportive of SB 1437, currently in the California state assembly, to require the mention of gay and lesbian history in the public schools and in state textbooks.   All of us need to know who Martin was, who Malcolm was, who Cesar Chavez was; all of us need to learn about Susan B. Anthony.  But we also need to learn about Harvey.   Gay and lesbian students need heroes, and the rest of us need to understand that Queer History is a vital part of the American story. 

Names like Karl Ulrichs, Henry Gerber, Donald Webster Cory, Harry Hay, Phyllis Lyon, Barbara Gittings, Del Martin, Evelyn Hooker, Frank Kameny, Elaine Nobel are entirely ignored by our textbooks.   How many readers know even three of these names?   Even one of them? All are vital figures in gay and lesbian history, and their stories are virtually unknown.

I may have seen the Times of Harvey Milk thirty-plus times, but showing it today, I teared up again as I always do.  For Harvey’s sake, let’s get this bill through.

The birthday post; thoughts on turning 39

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Last week, I posted about hazing and women’s sports teams; a longer version of that post is now up at Inside Higher Education.  Some folks there don’t buy my insistence that while the degrading sort of hazing we saw at Northwestern and elsewhere is indefensible, certain kinds of challenging initiation rituals can be enormously positive in the lives of college students.  Anyhow, put your comments over there.

Today is my 39th birthday.  I think it was Jack Benny who always joked about being 39 over and over again; perhaps I ought to say "Today I turn 39 for the first time!"  I won’t do much to celebrate today; I got up at 4:30AM to go to boxing class and I’ll be on campus until almost 9:00 tonight, teaching four classes over the course of the day.  But I know that at the end of it all, I’ll be heading home to my beloved wife and beloved chinchilla, and all will be well.

Turning 39 also marks the beginning of my fortieth year of life (as my family reminded me this weekend several times.)   Today I can say that I am enormously grateful to be enjoying the process of getting older! Yes, I am keenly aware that my body has changed a great deal in my thirties.  I’ve gained weight (though I was a bit too skinny anyway a decade ago).  I’ve got loads of wrinkles, with more and more appearing almost monthly.  I do lots of running outdoors in wind and sun, and even the best protection can’t protect my face against the elements.  My skin is starting to look, well, weathered.  (I go to the dermatologist regularly, and she burns tiny basal cell cancers off my face, chest, and back on every visit.)  I’ve also noticed that my eyesight is going; I wonder if I’m going to need bifocals soon.

Looking through the roster of professors in the social sciences division here at Pasadena City College, I notice that almost half of our full-time faculty have less seniority than I.  Until recently, I was the "baby" of the department — but now I have a number of colleagues who are considerably younger than myself.  I find myself turning into one of the "old fogies" who sits in division meetings and talk about administrators and professors long since retired, all while newer hires listen with patient smiles on their faces. 

It goes without saying that I am now much older than my students.  When I came here, I was 26 — young, passionate, insecure, idealistic.  I was hungry to make a difference, but also hungry for validation from those who were only just my juniors.  Today, I am old enough to be the father of most of "my kids."  That changes how I see them, of course!  In just the last year or two, strongly paternal feelings have crept into my teaching and mentoring — feelings that certainly didn’t exist a decade or so ago.  Back then, I wanted to be the "young, hot, cool" professor.  I milked that image for all it was worth for a long time!  Now, I’m not so young, not so hot, and far less interested in being cool. 

I’m much more patient now.  Though I confess I can still get a little snappy with students (if you text-message in my class, my wrath will not be entirely concealed), I’m far less mercurial and volcanic than I was in my earlier teaching days.   Rude, lazy, and unimaginative students (one always has a few) make me less angry than they used to.  I don’t take their failures and their poor manners as personal affronts any more.  It’s not that I’ve ceased to care about their lives, however.  Indeed, I find that as I grow older, I am far more able to care than I ever was. 

Frankly, in my first few years of teaching, the question I always asked myself was "What do they think of me?" (Thank God "rate my professors" didn’t exist back in the early to mid-90s!)  Today, the question I ask myself is "What more can I do to help them learn?"  I’ve become less focused on my delivery, as it were, and far more focused on my students’ reception of what it is that I’m saying. I’m not as loud as I was a decade ago, and I’m far less likely to climb on tables (something I did with great regularity in the 1990s).  Back then, I was as much a performer as a teacher; my eagerness for attention frequently trumping my commitment to cover the syllabus effectively.

Getting older is not without its tribulations.  Watching my parents struggle with health crises (something my family is dealing with now) has been tremendously painful.   In my family, my generation is now "sandwiched" between small children who cry out for our care and our parents who, increasingly, are leaning upon us for many different kinds of support.  That’s bittersweet, and indeed, often more bitter than sweet. 

But all things considered, I’m thrilled to be the age I am.  The phrase "I feel comfortable in my skin" is overused, but I can’t help but say it a lot these days because it’s so right.  As I’ve shared on this blog, in my youth (which lasted well into my twenties) I didn’t love my flesh. I struggled with a serious eating disorder and exercise addiction; I was a self-mutilator who landed in the hospital many a time; I went through three brief and unhappy marriages and three painful divorces in remarkable succession.  Yes, a religious conversion did turn my life around.   So too did finding the woman who is now my wife.   And heck, thousands of dollars worth of therapy didn’t hurt!  I worked hard for the peace I have now.  But that peace is also a function of the aging process. 

Yes, the wrinkles have come.   Yes, the pounds have come.   Yes, the eyesight has weakened and the muscles take longer to recover from a brutal run.  But, but, but — with all of these things has also come peace and self-acceptance and an infinitely greater capacity to love myself and, as a result, to love others more boldly and effectively.  I love standing on the precipice of 40, learning, as men my age should,

to close softly
The doors to rooms (I) will not be
Coming back to.

(Donald Justice, Men at Forty)

I’ve closed so many doors these past few years.  And so many others have opened up as a consequence.

The lie of everlasting novelty: a different take on the case against porn

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Normally at this hour on a Friday, I’d be at boxing class.  My trainer has called in sick, however, so I’ll sneak in a post before getting on with the day.

There’s a good post up at Feminist Mormon Housewives this week about women married to porn users.  I read it in conjunction with an email I received from a man I’ll call "Billy".   Here’s an excerpt from what Billy wrote:

Neverland is a complete fantasy, however it is based on children’s natural desire for freedom and autonomy, as well as people in generals desire to avoid the pains of adulthood and/or revert to childhood. Candyland is a silly fantasy, but its based on our understandable love of candy and sweet things. Romance novels and movies may not be the most accurate portrayals of relationships, but they are based on what women find desireable in romantic interactions. Likewise, whatever else can be said about pornography, it is a symbol, a representation, of mens deepest erotic desires, wishes, attractions, and fantasies. Now, some fantasies/wishes/desires of some men, which are represented by some porn, are innately violent and misogynistic. Note the use of the word some, SOME AND ONLY SOME. However, porn does symbolise male erotic natures which I consider to be… well….. natural!  And some elements may not be caveman natural, but at least they have nothing directly to do with hurting women, and they can be natural in the sense that they are a powerful part of a guys erotic makeup, for lack of better words. And this leads to why anti-porn sentiment has me so disturbed.

Just what is the erotic nature of the ideal feminist man? Where exactly is the line between healthy positive sexual attraction and pleasure and hurting womankind?

I realize that many of my most effective arguments against porn use have been couched in explicitly Christian terms.   That’s not surprising, given my faith commitments, but those arguments aren’t going to carry any weight with non-Christians like Billy, whose letter makes clear that he does consider himself a feminist man — but one who regularly uses and enjoys pornography.  Billy also makes it clear that he is single, which makes him different from the husbands described in the FMH post to which I linked above.  And he asks a thoughtful question — why shouldn’t a single, pro-feminist man use pornography?

I’ve made the case time and again that the porn industry is destructive to women, that while a few performers achieve wealth and success from the work, most end up embittered and alienated.  No, I’m not interested in trading anecdotes or competing studies.  In fact, I don’t want to focus on this aspect of anti-porn arguments at all.

Rather, I’d like to talk solely about the impact of porn use on the men who use it.  (Pace, dear readers, I know there are plenty of women who use porn.  Not the topic of this post.)  Billy claims, as do many men, that in some sense porn captures something "natural" about men’s erotic nature, presumably the desire to look at lots and lots of naked women.  And I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with Billy!  I’m not a biologist or a psychologist, but it seems perfectly plausible to me that the desire to look at lots and lots of naked women isn’t just a function of culture, but may also be a function of physiology. 

But so what?  Lots of things are natural — and natural is not, despite the claim of some health food stores, invariably a synonym for "good."  It’s natural for us to defecate on ourselves; using the toilet is a learned behavior that involves controlling an instinctive urge.  I think we’re all deeply grateful to have learned to control this natural instinct.  I’m not interested in suggesting that feminist men shouldn’t want to look at porn; I’m suggesting that he should overcome what may be for him a very basic instinct.  In other words, what makes a man a pro-feminist is not the absence of desire, but his commitment to work to redirect that desire.

Ultimately, the great tragedy of porn is that it teaches the men who use it to pursue "everlasting novelty."  Ask any man who uses porn — does he want to see the same pictures over and over again of the same women?  No.  If looking at one beautiful naked woman was enough, Playboy could put out one issue a decade.  Internet porn sites could update annually instead of daily.  But as most porn users admit, what was an intense turn-on the first time quickly becomes stale and boring.  The seductiveness of internet porn in particular is that some brand new woman, one you’ve never seen before, is just one or two clicks away on your computer. 

The pursuit of everlasting novelty is the enemy of actual relationship.  Real relationships are built on a very different premise from porn — the notion that what is really sexy is not "new skin" but radical connection with one other person.  Porn says that happiness is found by having the same experience over and over again with lots of different women; true eros says that happiness is found by having different experiences over and over again with the same person.

We are creatures of habit, Billy.  Everything we do trains our bodies, trains our minds.  Using porn as a single man may seem a very different thing from using it as a husband.  But when you do find a relationship, Billy,  do you imagine you will seamlessly transition from a fantasy world to the very human, beautiful yet flawed and familiar reality of your girlfriend or wife?   You’ll know that countless naked bodies in an infinite number of poses are only a few quick clicks away.  Their demands are few (perhaps your credit card), their youth eternal, their willingness to expose themselves to you unconditional.  The chances that you will be able to effortlessly leave behind years and years of porn use for the far more challenging (though ultimately far more rewarding) reality of sex with an actual partner are, frankly, minimal.  Ask the wives who are quite ready and willing to be intimate with their husbands, but their husbands are more interested in the endlessly novel images on their computer screen.

To be a pro-feminist man, I submit, is to see women as precious and valuable rather than disposable.  But if your porn use is like that of most men I’ve known, it’s the endless pursuit of the new and the previously unseen.  The old images get archived, the old magazines stacked away to be glanced at in the future.  Many men build impressive porn collections, but they do so for the thrill of acquiring so many women — not because the same old images retain their power to arouse indefinitely.  And though you will surely claim that there’s a difference between the images in magazines or on the ‘net and real life women, I’m not at all sure that’s clear to all aspects of your consciousness.  My experience, and the experience of countless other men, has been that the use of porn leaves one less able to truly see the humanity of real-life women.  It’s simply not easy to transition from hours of fantasizing and masturbating at one new image after another to actual relationship, even if it’s only friendship with a co-worker or classmate.

Yes, I think porn does real damage to the women who work in the industry.   Yes, I think porn use is antithetical to the most basic Christian understanding of sexuality.  But I also think a case can be made that porn damages the consciousness and warps the generous humanity of pro-feminist men.  Whether it’s a natural or culturally conditioned instinct to want to stare at so many pictures and movies of so very many women is irrelevant.  What matters is the lesson that porn (be it Playboy or something far harder) always teaches: someone new is always coming, and the new and previously unseen is always, always, always more exciting than the old and the familiar.  That’s a message about women’s disposibility that goes right to the core, and it is a message that is diametrically opposed to the feminist insistence that women are valuable.

Here’s an experiment I offer to young men who insist on using porn.  Try using just one image, one photo, for a month.  See if you don’t get bored quickly.  See if you don’t find yourself craving the new and the unknown.  My hunch is that what turned you on last week will have lost its power by Memorial Day!   Consider what that longing for novelty will mean for your future relationships.

Though I have problems, as a Christian, with masturbation, I think from a secular feminist standpoint that there’s a real distinction between masturbation with and without porn.  If you find the former too dull and inspiring, what does that tell you about your sexuality?  Surely your dependence on an unending supply of new images should give you pause.  Is your imagination so barren, your arousal so contingent on the culture, that you need a broadband connection and a furtive trip to the newsstand to feel something real?

Can you be a feminist man and use porn?  Well, why not?  I mean heck, I insisted at the beginning of this week that I could be a feminist man and rejoice that my wife had become Mrs. Schwyzer!  Having insisted on big-tent feminism on Monday, I’d be a hypocrite to insist on an exclusive definition on Friday.   Trying to live out a feminist life is hard work; it’s about letting go of old habits, it’s about challenging social norms about the "natural" and the "normal", it’s about a commitment not only to real equality but to a world where women are truly seen and not merely gazed at.  None of us lives this life perfectly every day, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t always strive to be better, more consistent, more effective at reconciling our language, our life, our libidos.

Friday Random Ten: randomness returns at last

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It has been ages since I’ve put up a Friday Random Ten.  Here’s this week’s selection:

1.  "Somewhere over the Rainbow", Israel Kamakawio’ole
2.  "Massachusetts", Bee Gees
3.  "Fix You", Coldplay
4.  "One in a Million", Guns n’ Roses
5.  "The End of the Party", English Beat
6.   "China", Tori Amos
7. "To Turn You On", Roxy Music
8.  "The Promised Land", Bruce Springsteen
9.  "I Wanna Get Next to You", Rose Royce
10.  "Don’t Bother", Shakira  (Okay, it didn’t really come up randomly, but it’s my favorite new song)

“I’m disappointed in you, Hugo”: more navel-gazing

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The fall-out from Monday’s post about last names continues.  I’ve gotten almost 100 comments on the post, almost all of them negative. I’ve also received private emails from six different regular readers, all taking issue with the argument I constructed to defend the notion that it could be a "feminist choice" for a woman to take her husband’s last name.

I appreciate that so many folks feel that they can openly and sharply disagree with me. I’m glad that so many have written to me. Frankly, I feel honored that they consider me worthy of their time.  It’s also a clear indication of just how "out of character" and surprising that post appeared.  I’m going to take some time to reflect on what I’ve heard this week before I address the subject again.  Though I remain delighted that my wife took my last name, I need to do more to consider how I can reconcile that delight with my pro-feminism — and whether or not I need to.

Reading through both the comments and the letters, one word appears more often than any other: "disappointing."   In one way or another, a dozen people have expressed to me that they are deeply disappointed by my stance and by my poorly reasoned, sexist arguments.  And of course, that word has the greatest power to shake me and get my attention.  Like many people, I’d much rather have someone say "I despise you" than "I’m disappointed in you."  I have never liked letting people down, though I’ve done plenty of it in my life.  There’s something acutely painful about knowing that you’ve dropped in someone’s estimation, or, worse, that you’ve led them to question whether or not the other things you say and teach are really valid.

In my personal, professional, and blogging life I do set myself up as a role model.  The blog is called Hugo Schwyzer for a reason — it’s about me, my life, my work, my views.   In everything I write, I try and connect what I believe to how I live.  If there’s one expression I use at least once a month, it’s "matching one’s language to one’s life."  I make no secret of a complicated and turbulent past.  I make no secret of the fact that I came to Christ as an adult, and that only in recent years have I gained the strength to live out my feminism in my actions as well as in my words.  I share all of this because I believe that both feminism and Christianity are ways of life more than they are systems of belief.  As a professor and a youth leader and a blogger, I’m trying to win people over to a certain set of views about faith, sexuality, gender roles, integrity, and so forth.  And I know that in order to be convincing, I have to show folks that I’m living out what I’m professing.  Young people in particular are quick to sniff out hypocrisy — and I owe it to them to do everything I can to avoid living a double life that contradicts my public pronouncements.

I tie my language and my life together publicly for a couple of reasons.  The first is obvious — it helps to make what I’m saying more believable.  Second of all, of course, I have a certain need "to be seen".  I’ve always sought validation in my life, and for much of my youth, sought it in very unhealthy ways.  Teaching and youth work and blogging give me an opportunity to get that validation in far healthier ways that do not involve deception or manipulation. And third of all, I appreciate the fact that living at least a modestly public life helps keep me on the "straight and narrow."  I am acutely conscious, even when alone, of how it is that I claim to live.    Though I live with far fewer temptations today than I did even a few years ago, thoughts of how disappointed others would be if I "fell" are a powerful reinforcement to stay on the path!

The great danger in all of this is grandiosity.  So often in this work, I’m told that what I’m doing matters!  So often, folks tell me that they’ve been inspired by me — and of course, I can’t help but find that immensely gratifying.  And though I always try and point towards God as the real source of any goodness that appears in me, I confess I sometimes succumb to the dark temptation to believe that I’ve done all this by myself. 

This is especially true around issues of pro-feminism.  I am certainly not the only pro-feminist man in the blogosphere, or even the only pro-feminist evangelical in the blogosphere.  (I think I’m the only pro-feminist evangelical who teaches gay and lesbian studies and advises Campus Crusade for Christ, however.) But for better or for worse, I’ve been really adamant about the importance of men becoming involved in feminist work,and I’ve linked my own story explicitly to pro-feminism.  And so when I say or do something that seems utterly at odds with all that has gone beforehand, I let people down.  I disappoint people who had relied upon me to be consistent about resisting sexism and tradition.  And I can’t help but be affected by that disappointment.

Today in my women’s history class, we had "all-female day."  Most semesters, I have one day each with my male and female students.  (All-male day is next Tuesday.)  We do it late in the semester, and it’s a chance to talk informally about the course in a single-sex environment (though of course, I’m still in the room as a man on all-women’s day).  I give the students on each day a chance to ask me any questions they like.  Today, as on other such days in the past, there was an intense curiosity to know how I got to be a pro-feminist, and how it is that I actually match my language and my life.  I wrote in March that I sometimes get the "please be real" response from my students and from kids in my youth group.  That’s a pressure I do a great deal to invite, but also one that I have to be careful with.

Experiences like the fall-out from Monday’s post remind me of how dangerous it is for me to set myself up to be "super feminist Christian man." It’s a mixture of narcissism, evangelical zeal, and the huge desire to be an agent of change in the lives of other people.  I’ve got to remember that I am still human, still flawed, and still prone to contradictions.  In my words and actions, I am going to surprise and disappoint folks.  I’ve got to acknowledge that to some extent, that’s part of the human condition.  I’ve also got to do what I can to become even more consistent, even more compassionate, even more determined to eradicate sexism and sin from my own life. I’ve got to balance a zealous desire to imitate Christ with a humble acceptance of my own brokenness and need for grace.  That’s an ancient and difficult balance to strike.  But for my sake, and the sake of those who rely on me, I need to keep at it.

Returning to an old course on dysfunctional families

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In the fall of 2006, I’ll be returning (for the first time in five years) to a course I love.  Back in 1998, inspired by a conversation with my mother, I decided to develop and teach a course on "The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition."  I worked quickly to pull together a syllabus, and taught it for the first time (under the rubric of Humanities, which allows us to teach anything we like) in the spring semester of 1999.

I have long been a huge fan of pop psychologist John Bradshaw.  He’s the fellow normally given credit for championing the notion of the "inner child", an important concept now widely ridiculed.  His bestselling books on family dynamics, shame, and love contain a certain amount of hokum — but also some tremendously valuable tools for understanding ourselves, our upbringing, and the possibility of healing.

I decided to use Bradshaw’s wonderful, controversial, and oft-maligned On the Family as the basic text for the course.  I then added the Book of Genesis, Euripides’s Medea, Hamlet, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the syllabus.  After one semester, I dropped Hamlet and replaced it with Ibsen’s The Doll’s House.  I invited my students to read the opening book of the bible along with these three classic plays from different times and places in Western culture — all through the perspective of a modern understanding of family dynamics. 

On the one hand, the course was a huge hit from the first time I taught it.  On the other hand, I knew perfectly well that it was — and is — whoppingly anachronistic and reductionist to use the work of a pop psychologist to reinterpret four masterworks of Western civilization.  From  a faith perspective, it’s understandably dicey to have students earnestly discussing the role of alcoholism and family secrecy in the story of Noah’s drunkenness and the responses of his sons!

Yet "looking for dysfunction" in these four texts became a fun and intriguing game for my students to play.  They read with far greater enthusiasm than they might otherwise have done.  They also did the valuable emotional work of connecting what they were reading to their own family narratives.  And though some of my colleagues were and are appalled by it, I was proud of the way we were able to tie together the intellectual and the therapeutic in the same classroom.  Trust me, the students had plenty to write and plenty to read; the fact that they were called upon to do so much personal reflection on their own families does not mean that the course lacked academic rigor.

My parents are both retired professors.  My brother is a professor.  They disagree with me about teaching much of the time, particularly when I insist — as I do when teaching this course — that personal emotional growth ought to be a key expectation for every student.  One of the things I love about gender studies/humanities classes is that they offer the opportunity to reach both the head and the heart in an academic setting.  It makes some folks apoplectic when I suggest that good teaching (at least in this field) operates as much on an emotional as on an intellectual level.  I’ve been told, oh, a thousand times that I deliberately and shamelessly blur the line between the therapeutic talk show and the classroom — particularly with this course.  Rather than deny the charge, I’ll say that I’m darned proud to create courses that try to blend together the journey of intellectual inquiry with that of inner psychological — and perhaps, spiritual — development.  For me, that’s the essence of good teaching.

I stopped teaching this class in 2001.  One reason was that a good friend of mine, a professional psychologist, was horrified that I took John Bradshaw so seriously.  Bradshaw, she said, was not only not a reputable researcher, he was also woefully ethnocentric.  In his "WASPy" view of the family, my friend said, intense loyalty to family at the expense of personal autonomy will always be interpreted as dysfunctional.  His goal of helping his clients/patients/audience reach autonomy and independence was utterly at odds with non-Western understandings of the purpose of the family.  She convinced me that I would be doing a disservice to my students (most of whom are from Latino and Asian backgrounds)if I continued to promote the Bradshaw interpretation.

I also stopped teaching the course so I could develop my courses on gay and lesbian history and men and masculinity, which I’ve been trading off the last five years.  But though those subjects are immensely important to me, I feel compelled to return once again to the subject of the dysfunctional family and our Western heritage.  My psychologist friend’s criticisms are not without merit — but then again, Bradshaw’s understanding of the family isn’t without significant merit either.  A course like this can offer students insight into themselves, their families, and some significant masterworks of the past three millenia.  It’s a heck of a lot of fun to teach, too.

Am I qualified to teach it?  Well, that’s the beauty of teaching "Humanities" courses that are inter-disciplinary. It allows those of us who wish to do so to step outside of our areas of professional expertise.  And though I am neither a psychologist or a literature professor by training, I’ve got enough confidence in my general preparation to be able to pull something like this off once again.

Hubris on my part?  No doubt.  Challenging fun for all?  I’m convinced of it.

For those interested, the course will be offered under Humanities 1 on Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 1:35-3:10PM.