Monthly Archives: January 2007

Abstinence, sex education, rape, desire, and who ought to be wearing the millstone

Posted on by

This week, many in the feminist blogosphere have been addressing the subject of date rape and sex education, primarily in response to this article in the American Prospect that ran a couple of days ago. The point of Courtney Martin’s piece is that an absence of sex education (particularly in the age of an abstinence-only message) increases the possibility that acquaintance rapes will happen on college campuses:

The lack of public, comprehensive, and complex sex education in this country contributes to this toxic sexual culture on most college campuses. The abstinence-only sex education that most young men and women receive does not teach them how to articulate their own sexual needs and respect those articulated by their partners. Teens who are merely told “Just don’t do it” are lacking more than an anatomy lesson or information on contraceptive choices. They are also missing out on essential communication skills and life-saving knowledge about sex and power. Which is bad news for teenagers in our paradoxically hyper-sexual and hyper-conservative contemporary America who are in desperate need of wise mentorship.

Though many feminists have responded and responded well, I wanted to write today as both a feminist and an evangelical. My faith tells me that sexuality is one of God’s great gifts; my own experience tells me that it can bring joy and heartbreak; my pro-feminism is keenly aware of how easily it can be misused. And as a Christian feminist, I am grieved that the unwillingness of the church (I use the term in its broadest sense) to talk frankly about sexuality has unwittingly created an environment that threatens the safety and the dignity of our young people.

The contemporary evangelical movement is rightly critical of many aspects of our hyper-sexuaalized culture. Christians are right to be troubled by the crass commercialization of sex, and they are right to speak out against the severing of sexual activity from loving, enduring relationships. Most serious and thoughtful Christians respect the tremendous power of sex: we honor the pleasure it brings, and we are awed by its power to overwhelm our senses and fill us with physical, emotional, even spiritual delight. It is no accident that even the unbelievers among us cry out “Oh God!” so often at orgasm; it’s a recognition of an transcendent quality of sex at its best.

But too often, Christians, particularly evangelicals, have been more concerned with preventing pre-marital sexual activity than we have been with encouraging honest and open dialogue. We imagine that if we can somehow keep our boys and girls in a sexual deep freeze until their wedding nights, the sex that follows will be mutually satisfying, blissful, and honoring to God. Too often, we assume that issues of consent are only important for the “sinfully promiscuous”, rather than for believers as well. But as we all know, marriage is no guarantor of mutuality, and the “Yes!” of the wedding day is not a “Yes” to every future sexual act that a spouse might want.

Christians are divided about pre-marital sex, of course. The mainstream evangelical position is that genital sexual activity is to be saved for heterosexual marriage, though substantial minorities of serious, devout Christians argue for a more inclusive understanding. But we ought not to continue to make the mistake that we have been making, which is to see all pre-marital sex as equally sinful and thus equally worthy of condemnation.

Surely, from the standpoint of a youth pastor or a loving parent, God’s “best” for their son or daughter might be that they wait until marriage to have intercourse. But as we’re told over and over again, we ought never let the “best be the enemy of the good.” From that same standpoint of pastor or parent, assume your child is having sex before marriage. Wouldn’t we all want our son or daughter in a safe, loving relationship rather than in an abusive one? Wherever there is love and mutuality, there is at least some reflection of God, even if it isn’t the best; wherever there is abuse and violation, there is surely profound sin.

The tragedy of abstinence-only education is that it fails to draw meaningful distinctions about non-marital sexual activity. It lumps together acquaintance rape with a loving, consensual relationship. It obstinately refuses to distinguish between random promiscuity and a committed, monogamous dating relationship. The abstinence-only crowd simply cries “all sin is equally sinful”, which grossly distorts theology. While it is true that all sin represents “separation from God”, not all sins separate us an equal distance away. Sins of malice, according to church tradition, are always worse than sins of desire (see our old boy Aquinas for that!) Sins that deny the dignity of the other (which is what rape always does) are inherently malicious; sins that honor that dignity (and honor can exist in a pre-marital relationship) are at worst sins of concupiscence, which is not nearly as serious a sign of separation from God.

In my circle of Christian friends, many of whom are youth leaders, we have a widely divergent set of views on sexuality. Some insist that sex is rightly only confined to the marriage bed; others (such as myself) believe in a more inclusive, broader understanding of sexual possibility outside of heterosexual marriage. But those of us who love young people, who work to feed them as Christ asked us to, who dream dreams for them and wrap our arms around them and worry about them even as we know that they aren’t really ours at all — for us, to a man and a woman, we want them to have joy. We want them to be safe. And we acknowledge that simply teaching kids to “wait” or “just say no” doesn’t do anything to equip them to cope with their own sexual desires and those of their peers.

When I first blogged about teaching sex ed at All Saints Church, I got an angry email from a conservative Christan reader. He quoted that passage that shows up in all the synoptic gospels about what ought to happen to those who cause the little ones to stumble. And I said to him, as charitably as I could, what I say to my “abstinence-only” friends: It is you who are causing the young to stumble. By refusing to acknowledge any possibility for healthy, blessed sexual expression outside of marriage, by refusing to equip our precious young people with the tools to talk about their hopes, fears, and desires, you teach them shame. You teach them silence. And you make them vulnerable, both before and after marriage, to abuse. Better the millstone for you indeed, my friends.

Friday Random Ten: Randomness redux

Posted on by

It’s been ages since there’s been a Friday Random Ten. No one missed them, I’m sure.

Still, #1 was one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands of the early to mid-’90s; #7 has broken my heart for nigh on twenty years now, and #2 remains one of my favorite break-up tracks. (Actually, there’s a break-up theme at work here in many of these).

In any event, I have no excuse for #9.

1. “Bittersweet”, Big Head Todd and the Monsters
2. “Sail On”, The Commodores
3. “I Bid You Goodnight”, Aaron Neville
4. “Good Intentions”, Toad the Wet Sprocket
5. “I Loved the Summer of Hate”, The Men they Couldn’t Hang
6. “These Thousand Hills”, Third Day
7. “When Ye Go Away”, The Waterboys
8. “Fool”, Shakira
9. “Dream Warriors”, Dokken
10. “Down in a Hole”, Alice in Chains

Bonus Track: “Halos and Horns”, Dolly Parton

My classmate is a grandfather, and a note on the passing of a beloved priest

Posted on by

I’ve been thinking about my childhood and early adolescence quite a bit this week, for two reasons.

I’ve gotten back in touch with an old friend from my elementary school days; he and I took theater classes together and played together 30 years ago. He’s living up in San Francisco now, and in our catch-up email noted that as of the last month, he is a grandfather. Just as he was getting out of high school, he fathered a daughter; his daughter, now in her early twenties, has just given birth to her first child. While I acknowledge that there are no doubt many grandparents out there younger than I, my friend is the first of my childhood companions and classmates to reach this status. It’s a bit of a shock, really, as I am only now seriously considering the prospect of fatherhood for the first time!

In my family and in my social circle now, older parents are the norm. My father had my younger sisters when he was in his mid-forties; other uncles and cousins didn’t have their first children until they were at least that age, and one very dear relative of mine finally got around to reproducing at fifty-five. And increasingly in my family, we see that women too are having babies in their late thirties and well into their forties. In my generation, no one of either sex even gets around to children until they’ve reached the fourth decade of life (and in my case, it will surely be the fifth.) This does mean that most of us won’t be at the weddings of our grandchildren — but it also means that most of us have far more wisdom and patience to bring to the table. At least, that is my hope.

My mother sent me a link to yesterday’s obituary in my hometown paper of Father Peter Farmer, an enormously influential figure in my childhood and early adolescence. Father Farmer was the headmaster of All Saints Episcopal Day School in Carmel Valley (to which my atheist parents enthusiastically sent me for a year or two.) I knew him better from my teenage years. During my one disastrous prep school year at York, he was the school’s chaplain and my Bible Studies teacher. I remembered him from my primary grade experiences at All Saints, but I confess that during my one and only year at York, I was a thorn in the good father’s side. I’ve written about my “getting kicked out of prep school” story here.

During my brief period at York, I secretly loved my Bible Study class with Father Farmer. I never let him know it, of course; at thirteen, I was an atheist so militant that I might have made Madalyn Murray O’Hair wince. I was combative and disrespectful; I oscillated between what I hoped was sharp wit and glowering silence. I was a royal pain in the ass, famous for refusing to pass the peace during our occasional mandatory chapel services. I am well aware that I exasperated a famously patient man.

After I was kicked out of York (for both behavioral and academic reasons), I got a long and kind hand-written note from Father Farmer. It was the sort of thing one would expect a chaplain to write a boy dismissed in disgrace; lots of stuff about how in our darkest moments, we can find peace and hope and the chance for new beginnings. It meant the world to me, however, because I knew so well that I had treated him shabbily and disrespectfully, and in the moment of my fall, he had reached out to this awkward, hostile, churlish boy. In some ways, his humility and gentleness and genuine concern for me presaged my return to the church years later. He certainly planted a seed that eventually flowered.

I am glad that I wrote him back; indeed, I wrote him several times over the next few years. The last time I wrote to him was when I graduated from Cal in 1989 and started grad school. I was anxious for him to know that I had turned myself around, and, if truth be told, I wanted him to pass along to his colleagues on the York School staff that they had been wrong about me. I had had no contact with him these past eighteen years.

Father Farmer was an old-school Episcopal priest. I don’t think I even knew his first name for years; he was simply “Father Farmer” to all of us. All the priests I know today, both at All Saints Pasadena and elsewhere, are on a first-name basis with their entire congregation, including small children. The few Episcopal priests I occasionally encounter today who still insist on being called “father” use it as an identifying badge to signify that they hold traditionalist theological and political views. In the diocese of Los Angeles, led by a bishop who insistst that everyone call him “Jon”, a priest who wanted to style himself “father” would be seen as eccentric at best and dangerously reactionary at worst.

Father Farmer, much to my mother’s annoyance, was famously opposed to the ordination of women. The first women were ordained in the Episcopal Church just over thirty years ago, while I was at All Saints School in Carmel Valley. Father Farmer led a small group of local conservative Anglicans in a period of fasting and prayer to protest the decision of the national church to permit what he seemed to see as a heretical innovation. It was surely not his best moment, and I don’t know if in later years he reconciled himself to a more inclusive gospel and a more diverse priesthood.

I do know he was very kind to a boy who had not been kind to him. And as one who has come home to the church, come home to Christ, I am so grateful for the lessons he taught me long before I was willing to listen.

Thursday Short Poem: Griffin’s “Old Men”

Posted on by

I like this Walter Griffin poem very much. I’ve rarely had occasion to use laundromats; only after my first divorce was I a regular patron for a few weeks. In later years, when singleness struck and I had lost another Maytag or Kenmore in a divorce, I splurged for “fluff and fold.” But the fumbling with soap and coins and the anxious worrying about whether the change will run out before the clothes are dry — this I know.

Lord willing, I will never be the old man in the laundromat. But this haunts me all the same.

Old Men and Laundromats

After the initial terror of
laying out your clothes in front
of everyone, it’s where to put
the money, the clothes before
water or the detergent first
or in between the clothes.
Your fingers find the quarters,
slip them into slots, push and

listen to the water, vaguely familiar,
like your heart between the covers
at night or with your head in the
surf when you were a child. Then
sitting down to watch your drawers
circling in suds inside the belly
of the machine, in this place you
are so afraid to come to; where

people will know how human
you are, that you have to wash
your underwear out in front of
strangers, where the water is hot
and women laugh, folding their
clothes so knowingly inside the
launderette that reminds you
of someplace else. And my

God, there are the dryers moving
so fast, lids closed. Any germs
will die in all that heat, or so they
say. And you grab your laundry as
soon as the spinning stops and run
outside with your clothes still hot
and wrinkled, dropping things,
always forgetting something.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Another post on marriage, social policy, choice and necessity

Posted on by

The first Carnival of the Feminists of ’07 is up at Girlistic. Please have a visit.

Others are responding to the New York Times article about the decline in marriage. My post yesterday is below, here’s Figleaf’s and Amanda’s.

Amanda does a fine job of fisking the lamentable Mona Charen’s brief response to the report at National Review. Charen wrote of the decline in marriage:

The New York Times cheerleads for social trends that may make some upper West Side New York women happier, but leaves children, and most other women in America, far worse off.

Now, here’s where I break with both Amanda and Charen. Unlike Amanda, I am a cheerleader for marriage because I see the tremendous possibilities the institution still has to serve, as I’ve said again and again, as a vehicle for mutual personal growth. Actually, to be fair, my attachment is less to marriage itself and more to the idea of enduring monogamous commitment. Whether that commitment is formalized or not is less important than whether it is made in the first place, and whether the two people making that commitment are willing to challenge each other and sacrifice together.

But as passionate as I am about marriage, I dislike the conservative embrace of the institution as a solution for serious social problems. The conservative formula, made clear by everyone from Maggie Gallagher to Wade Horn to Warren Farrell to Mona Charen, is this: with the decline in marriage, the obligation of the state to care for its most vulnerable citizens has increased. If couples would only marry and stay together, if women would only learn to endure once again the infidelities and petty cruelties of their spouses, then we could further cut the social spending that supports single parent (read: single women) households. If wives would go back to dutifully caring for their own (and their husbands’) aging relatives, we wouldn’t have to spend so much on Medicare and Social Security. How great and glorious it would be, the right fantasizes, if we could transfer the social costs of caring for the vulnerable away from the public and back on to the shoulders of wives and mothers!

Marriage, for many social conservatives, is less a choice than it is a collective responsibility. Only by marrying — and delaying sex and reproduction until marriage — can the poor and the aspiring middle class hope to rise up the socio-economic ladder. “Don’t ask the state to replace a husband”, the right sneers, because the right continues to be enchanted by the fantasy of the family as both the primary source of women’s happiness and the sole source of her economic stability.

One reason why my feminism and my vague socialism mesh together is because I am so interested in seeing family bonds become less obligatory for own survival. When people agree collectively to provide for the common welfare, when we fully fund child-rearing and education, when we see the broader community as responsible for offering opportunity to all, then we liberate everyone to have relationships that are based on affection, based on choice, and based on the desire for personal growth. Perhaps it’s my own upper-middle class male myopia, but real love and neediness strike me as fundamentally incompatible. While we will all have our moments of vulnerability where we long for the care of our loved ones (infancy, old age, sickness), I am convinced that the healthiest society is one where the burden of providing that care is shared by the state as well as by the family. (Most child and elder care, historically, has been done by women. It may be joyous work at times, but it can be dull and painful and exhausting as well.)

Many of my feminist colleagues rightly distrust marriage because of what it has meant for women for centuries. Many of my conservative friends celebrate marriage because they see it as part of God’s plan for our lives and because they view it as a panacea for innumerable social ills. I am familiar with both arguments, and accept that both have their merits. I love marriage and I love being married. But it was only after three divorces that I found the right marriage, and it was only after breaking commitments and promises that I learned how to keep them. I would suggest that marriage, done right and entered into freely, offers to many the opportunity for great joy and growth and comfort. I do believe, unlike some of my friends, in the redemptive possibilities within lifelong monogamy. But I shudder at the idea of using marriage as a tool to address serious social problems.

Holding up marriage as a vehicle for personal growth is one thing. Holding up marriage as a vehicle into the middle class is quite another. Those who advocate the latter are usually those most eager to cut the social spending that allows women (and men) to move up the ladder without having to rely on potentially abusive or loveless marriages. And when I read the sort of rhetoric I read regularly from the Mona Charens and the Maggie Gallaghers, I’m reminded of why I’m still a progressive Democrat!

When the village accepts its responsibility to raise children and care for the vulnerable, then everyone (not merely the prosperous) can afford to explore marriage as a personal choice rather than as a necessity for survival. And though it may be thoroughly ahistorical to say so, I find little possibility for growth, redemption, and joy in what is forced.

Why divorced men remarry more often than divorced women: a preliminary reflection

Posted on by

Lots of folks are discussing this New York Times article; it announces that for the first time, more than half of adult American women are living without a spouse.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000…

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

Bold emphasis is mine. The evidence is clear that divorced men are more willing to remarry, and I find that fascinating. (Lord knows, I’ve contributed to that statistic!) For years, we’ve heard that marriage tends to benefit men more than women; the old saying was that single women lived longer than married women, but married men lived longer than single ones. (No doubt someone can point to census bureau statistics to tell me if that remains true in this country.) But real benefits and perceived benefits are not always the same thing, and the greater willingness of men to remarry after a divorce fascinates me.

I suspect that one reason that men are more likely to remarry is, frankly, the distribution of household labor. In a world where women are still doing the “second shift” of housework on top of their jobs, it would make sense that a newly divorced woman would be extremely reluctant to walk right back into the same sort of situation from which she just extricated herself. On the other hand, a newly single man trying to sort out the mysteries of shopping and laundry might well be eager to find a new partner to “share” the burden of keeping him dressed and fed. One would have thought we’d be past this by now, that modern egalitarian marriages would involve equal amounts of effort and labor, both in and out of the home, by both partners. But the striking statistical eagerness of divorced men to remarry, and the equally striking statistical eagerness of many divorced women not to do so, suggests that things may not have improved as much as we would like.

But I think there’s more to this than housework. I’m going to catch it from all sides for saying this, but I’m convinced that one reason that so many divorced women are so reluctant to remarry (and so many women unwilling to marry in the first place) is that frankly, marriage doesn’t seem to be a very appealing deal for most women. And one of the reasons why marriage seems unappealing is that the sacrifices of marriage are many, and the benefits increasingly few — especially considering that an extraordinary number of men may not be worth marrying!

Mind you, I’m aware that saying “more women would surely marry if more men were worth the trouble” has anti-feminist implications. I’m wary of revisiting the problematic thesis that “feminism is rooted in a profound disappointment in men.” But surely, the reluctance of so many women to marry or remarry might also have something to do with the men they are choosing not to wed! No, it’s not all about men; there are many outstanding reasons not to marry that have nothing to do with the caliber of available husbands. But surely, there are many women who are unmarried who might consider marriage if they met the right man, but for whatever reason, don’t seem to be finding him.

In a world where women have access to education and income, it’s axiomatic that men need to bring more to the table than their ability to provide. Our desirability as husbands is increasingly linked to our ability to provide enduring emotional, sexual, romantic, and spiritual satisfaction; our relational skills now matter more than our earning potential. Those of us who are fierce defenders of marriage argue that true fulfillment can be found with just one other person — but we must also accept that in our world, where increasing prosperity has made lifelong singleness or serial monogamy more feasible than ever, the case for marriage is less and less compelling. The only way to shift that, I think, is to create a world where folks see the emotional benefits of marriage as outweighing all the potential negatives. And that’s going to require some changes, and from the statistical evidence, it may mean more change on the part of men.

I’m not sure marriage is for everyone. For me, it’s a vehicle for personal transformation and growth, a crucible in which one’s own selfishness gets melted down, a refiner’s fire that purifies. I like that sort of thing, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve gotten married again and again because I’m relentlessly optimistic, relentlessly hopeful, relentlessly committed to growth. And while much growth can happen in solitude, and much growth can happen in extended families and communities of friends, I am convinced that my own particular growth can best be achieved through marriage. I’m in a happy, challenging, joyous, purifying marriage today. It’s a hell of a lot of work and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

But I do note that the last I heard, none of my three ex-wives had remarried. That says something.

The Daily Mail is the Daily Mail, again

Posted on by

The Daily Mail (one loses left-wing credentials merely by linking to it) has an article up this week on the mystery of mutual attraction (h/t to Liberal Debutante).

There’s some interesting stuff in the piece, particularly about the tendency some have to seek out partners who most resemble them, and the tendency of others to seek out their opposites. I’ve always been adamant that I don’t have a “type”, but am, like most people, fascinated by those who do seem to be drawn to the same sorts of people over and over again.

This, however, was a jaw-dropper:

It is possible that one of the causes of the autism epidemic is the growing tendency for successful men to marry and have children with powerful, assertive “masculine brain” females.

It’s left completely unexplained in the article, a wayward paragraph without even a scintilla of evidence. How long before the anti-feminists get a hold of it, wave it about, and claim that women’s liberation is responsibile for the rise in autism cases? If only bright men would marry timid women, they’d have healthier kids, etcetera… sigh.

A few random notes, and another in the “older men/younger women” series

Posted on by

On this holiday MLK Monday, I note that 2007 marks 39 years since the great civil rights leader was slain. He was 39 when he was killed, so the space since his passing now matches the span of his all-too-short life. In the last few months, I note, I have “passed” Dr. King; as of last autumn, I am now older than he was when he was slain.

A glorious but very chilly run this morning. Lots of frozen patches on the mountain, and no access to water in my usual spots — the pipes had frozen!

My wife and I were up in Santa Barbara last night; saw my sister, who writes about and participates in the local arts scene, dancing in this production. I freely admit to not “getting” most modern dance, though out of family loyalty, I am willing to be a loyal patron. When I was growing up, the term “middle-brow” was used to condemn those who preferred their art safe and unchallenging. But after decades around what is supposed to be avant-garde, I confess that I am a cultural philistine when it comes to music and dance. I don’t get most modern dance, and I don’t get John Cage. (I’m a bit more adventurous with visual art; I do have a passion for Rothko and Kandinsky.) Still, we had a good time.

And congrats to the Pasadena City College Lancers women’s basketball team, the only undefeated team in California.

Anyhoo…

One of my good buddies from the boxing gym had a date this weekend. He’s a year or two my junior, and he went out to dinner with an 18 year-old gal whom he met when she waited on his table at a local restaurant. He knows my views on older men dating younger women (see the various posts in that category on the sidebar), and I have not hesitated to take him to task (with good humor) for this. Ours is a relationship that can withstand some serious disagreements.

My friend said something I hear a lot from my peers who want to date women half their age: “You know, she seems very mature for her age. She’s not like other eighteen year-olds.” I hear this constantly from those who want to defend the practice of going out with much younger women; while they are often happy to concede that most women still in late adolescence ought to be off-limits, they invariably suggest that the one in whom they happen to be interested is an exception to the rule. “She’s an old soul”; “She’s very wise”; “Guys her own age don’t interest her.”

I’m not about to suggest that some young women aren’t more “grown-up” than their peers. As many, many young women who have commented on my previous posts have lamented, they find the guys in their own peer group to be immature, unchallenging, unattractive. They often report feeling alienated from peers of both sexes, claiming to have felt “more comfortable around adults” for years. In other words, they feel themselves to be exceptions to otherwise sensible rules. Their longing for someone older, whom they imagine will share their interests and offer them more opportunities to grow and learn, is understandable. What is less understandable is that so many older men rely on the young woman’s self-described exceptionalism to justify a sexual or romantic relationship with her.

Newsflash, folks: most bright, sensitive adolescents go through periods where they feel profoundly at odds with the majority of their peers. They are unmoved by the concerns of boys and girls their own age; what fascinates other kids bores these more thoughtful ones. They see their peers as vapid and shallow (they are occasionally right), and they imagine (alas, often wrongly) that older folks (often older men in particular) are more interesting, more sensitive, better-equipped for relationship. I’ve worked with enough teenagers to have met dozens and dozens of young men and women who are ardently convinced that they are exceptional, perhaps even unique. And though they are usually smarter than the average bear, their sense of their own inner maturity is frequently exaggerated. And a wise older person, be he a teacher or a prospective partner, can’t take these protestations of emotional sophistication at face value!

Of course, my buddy has his own corollary to all of this. A bit younger than I am, on the cusp of his late thirties, he is adamant that he is “younger” than his chronological age. He enjoys clubbing as much as he did a decade ago, for example. He sees his peer group (I’m a prime example he says) as increasingly made up of the “settled”. Though he talks of wanting to get married and have kids “someday”, he’s still in no hurry — and he’s eager to avoid dating women for whom enduring commitment is part of their near-term plans. His sense of himself as still young, playful, and promising leads him to his own sense of exceptionalism. Just as the gal he took out on Saturday night isn’t “typical”, he too sees himself as having little in common with his own chronological age. While other men our age don’t keep up on the latest music or the hippest clubs, for example, he’s on top of these things; it makes “sense”, he claims, for him to spend his time with much younger women.

I’ve given him my standard stump speech about the fact that women our age will challenge him to grow, while starry-eyed gals barely out of adolescence will be more likely to believe his bull. Like most men I challenge on this one, he protests indignantly that he’s up for any challenge, and that a “really exceptional eighteen year-old” can push him just as hard as a woman twice that age. I’m quite confident he genuinely believes what he’s saying. But the fact that he’s being sincere doesn’t mean he isn’t deceiving himself. And his self-deception keeps him from facing the fact that chronological age imposes obligations on us all: the call to transform and grow is not optional, it is not given merely to the few.

One of the things that bothers me so much about those who defend older-men/younger women relationships is that these folks insist on seeing themselves as unusual exceptions to some fairly hard and fast rules about the trajectory of our lives. A man in his late thirties flattering himself with the conceit that he’s still a youngster, or a frustrated, curious, young woman in her late teens who feels like a wise old soul, both are confident that they are unique, or nearly so. Their sense of being different means that conventional wisdom — which, for reasons I’ve gone over again and again, warns against older men dating women in their late teens and early twenties — ought not apply to them.

It’s a free country for those who are of age, of course, and my friend is allowed to date a girl born the year Ronald Reagan left the presidency if he chooses. I’m going to be his buddy either way; I don’t make my affection conditional on the politics or lifestyle choices of my family or friends. But I’ve heard protests like his — and those of the gal he’s dating — more than once. And from what I’ve seen over and over, what spending time together will eventually teach them both is that they are each less exceptional than they had imagined. Whether they come to that realization with or without concomitant heartache remains to be seen. But while she who cannot remember the first Gulf War has reason to be foolish, he who is old enough to remember the Iran Hostage Crisis has no such excuse.

“Glorious Me”: A link, and some short reflections on male and female body anxiety

Posted on by

Zuzu has a post up this morning: Wonderful, Glorious, Me. She writes:

Let me try to open up the floor to give us a chance to do something together.

We’re conditioned, particularly as women, to be self-deprecating, to not take up space, to not revel in our bodies and ourselves. We can get 150 comments in a thread about when we realized that we were aware our bodies weren’t up to snuff; let’s see how many we can generate praising ourselves.

Your mission: list at least five things you love about your body and yourself. Five is the floor; you can always do more. And no self-deprecation! No offsetting a compliment with a dig.

Great idea. If you’re a woman, please visit and consider contributing.

The thread is, I sense (perhaps wrongly) women-only. It’s not as if men don’t have body anxiety! But in our culture, as intense and incapacitating as male fears about their own flesh can be, it’s worth acknowledging that women still are held to a higher standard. Men are allowed to deviate dramatically from the physical ideal and still enjoy recognition; women (with a very few exceptions) aren’t.

For what it’s worth, the male anxiety I see in myself and in my peers is qualitatively different from what I see in many of my female friends. I hang out a lot with men who run and work out quite competitively. There’s a tremendous collective concern about our bodies; there’s a fair amount of subtle preening and worry. But at the same time, we voice those concerns differently. We talk about acts, not about aesthetics. For example, my running buddies and I can talk endlessly about split times and heart rates. We worry about our aging, and about whether our bodies can still run a 10K under 40 minutes or a marathon under 3:15 or whatever the threshold of the moment happens to be.

It’s a classically masculine anxiety: the sense that the body is a “performance machine” threatened by sloth and by ageing, always in need of vigilant monitoring. Of course, many of us (I know this well from unguarded conversations) are worried about how we look; we do compare ourselves to the men on the cover of the fitness magazines. But unless very comfortable, we tend to cloak our fears in concern about performance rather than aesthetics. A desire to be faster, after all, is evidence of athletic ambition — a desire for a more beautiful body is evidence of an unbecomingly feminine vanity. It’s a masculine moral calculus that elevates the body doing to a higher position than the body appearing.

It’s silly, and ultimately indefensible. Our physical achievements on the gym and on the track don’t make us better husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons anymore than our sister’s breast enhancements make her a better human being. Its all culturally reinforced fear and vanity, but it’s worth noting that it often operates differently for both men and women.

UPDATE: The thread is not female-only.

Second UPDATE: The comment thread here is for those who identify as feminists or feminist-friendly only. I’m tired of having a few men’s rights advocate trolls hijack the discussion. Comments that are anti-feminist will be deleted without discussion. This will not be a policy in all my threads, but in this one, yes. I’m adopting the Alas, A Blog, policy — a bit late, but it’s the right thing to do.

A note on Beckham and American soccer

Posted on by

One thing I don’t like about teaching in the winter intersession: I am in the classroom so much that I have very little blogging time whilst at school. Fridays, of course, are “errand days”, and today I have all of fifteen minutes in which to blog. This doesn’t lead to very interesting posts!

I am happy with the news that David Beckham is coming to Los Angeles. No, I have never been much of a fan of his. Yes, I do follow English (and Scottish) soccer passionately. I support a variety of British clubs: Newcastle United in the English Premiership, Celtic in the Scottish Premiership, and Exeter City in the conference. I watch the Fox Soccer Channel when I can, and catch my share of tape-delayed European matches. I’m already excited for this year’s “Copa America” tournament, and will of course root for Colombia, my mother-in-law’s native land. But for all that interest in the beautiful game, I have very little interest in the MLS. The last time I went to a professional club soccer match in Los Angeles was a few years ago, when Manchester United played an exhibition against a Mexican side. I don’t even know who the current MLS cup holders are, though I suppose I could google and find out. Watching on television, the quality of the play simply isn’t as strong as what I see from first, or even second-rate European sides.

I am a big fan of college soccer, both men’s and women’s; but that’s almost a completely different game.

But I am eager to see the popularity of soccer in America increase, and eager to see it increase beyond its largely Latino fan base. Obviously, no one man — particularly not a footballer on the downslope of his career — can turn a nation of NASCAR and NFL fans into enthusiastic fans of what the rest of the world calls football. But I’ve long marveled that the millions of kids involved in youth soccer in this country don’t turn into serious fans of the game as adults. If Beckham, who if nothing else remains the master of the set piece, has even half the impact his backers promise he will have, it will be nothing but good.

Will I wear a Galaxy jersey? With the exception of a t-shirt touting the UVA women’s team, I own no kit that identifies me as a fan of American soccer. I have various items associated with English and Colombian (Atletico Nacional) sides, of course. I’m not sure I’ll wear a Beckham Galaxy shirt, but we might finally be motivated to make the short drive over to Carson to watch his new team play.

But it will be years and years before the level of play in the MLS comes even vaguely close to that of the Premiership. Until then, I’ll watch the English squads on cable, rooting for the Magpies with all my heart, and rooting against the satanic trifecta of Man U, Chelsea, and Arsenal.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged