Alas and alack, the blog is going on a short hiatus. I’ll be busy (and for the most part, away from a computer) between today and Easter Sunday.
Look for blogging to resume on Monday, April 9. Until then, visit blogs on my revolving blog-roll or check out the various categories in my archives.
A joyous Pesach, Holy Week, and Final Four to all.
One of the fairly consistent exercises that I give to both my women’s studies students — and to the girls in my high school youth group — is to begin to monitor how often that they say “yes” when they would rather say “no.” (I’ve posted about this before, but jeepers, I can’t find my own stuff in my archives any more.)
I’m not talking about learning to say no to drugs, or sexual pressure, though I’m fully aware that many young women do struggle in those areas. I’m talking about the difficulty of saying “no” to parents and other family members, to good friends, to coaches and teachers and mentors. As I’ve written before (most recently here), far too many of our little sisters and daughters have been raised since birth to be dutiful people-pleasers. Even in the early 21st century, after decades of feminist gains, an extraordinary number of young (and not-so-young) women feel intensely guilty when they say “no” to someone they love.
In the past, I’ve asked my students and youth groupers to keep a “log” of how often they say “yes” when they’d rather say “no” over the course of the week. Some of them actually have developed spread sheets, with columns! (People-pleasing taken to the platinum level!) They list to whom they said yes when they’d rather have said no; they list the request itself; they are encouraged to journal about why they said “yes”, and to speculate what the consequences would have been (both for themselves and the other person) if they had said “no.”
I don’t usually ask them to start practicing saying “no” right away. I find it’s often more effective to get young women to see just how often — and to how many people, and in how many varied circumstances — they say “yes.” Saying “yes” to things we would rather not do is of course part of living in community. But we raise women to find “no” a much more difficult word to say.
Later on, I ask the women to practice turning the “yes” into a “no.” Not to a necessary request (e.g.: “Can you drive me to the hospital?”), but to one that is redolent with another’s sense of entitlement and expectation (like a lazy brother asking to borrow $10, again.) The “no” needs to be said to someone with whom they are in relationship (parent, boyfriend, friend, close co-worker). And the real work begins after the no. The real effort, which is what I want written about, is to work through the guilt that so often accompanies a firm and final “no.”
One old criticism of feminism is that it makes women selfish. One feminist criticism of patriarchal culture is that it demands that women be selfless, endlessly self-sacrificing. Authentic feminism does not seek to sever women from their emotional ties to others, nor does feminism (despite the fantasies of some of its critics) want women to be so radically independent that they live outside of meaningful, mutual relationships. Feminism is not anti-family. Feminism is, however, opposed to a culture of compulsory sacrifice and endless self-denial.
And we start extricating young women from that hateful culture by teaching them to say what was probably their first word. The feminist journey often begins with a soft, firm “no.”
Lots of blogging about white privilege around here lately. Made me think of this poem by Maureen Seaton (who happens to be white, and a professor at the University of Miami). Taxis always stop for me, and I am always “sir”. It is not always so with all of God’s children.
When I Was White
When I was white I came and went, a cycle
of blood and moon and tide, hid nothing
of gun-shape inside me, debated evil
with no one. I said: Bring me something
handsome to eat and they did, that steak butter,
you could spread it on bread. I said: Bring
me taxis. They flew to my side and uttered
“Get in” and “Where to”, just the thing to carry me.
I said: We are all the same No Matter
What. This was my zaniest folly.
I had blinders on the sides of my head
big as real estate, blue as jelly. We
are all the same Underneath, I said,
and you could count the dusty liberals
nodding in deadly agreement, dead
as the Pope, dead as the Nazis, doornail
dead like the sunnies along Lake Michigan
and the poor bastard steadying his pole
ten feet up the beach. Jesus again,
this time with a sweet brown Chuckie B. face,
and I am beside you in the Bargain
Villa on Clark. I’ve traveled decades
through dead seas, I’ve seen my people flap
on their sides as they die of too much shade,
you can count them piling up on the maps
of the world, the unsightly word “equal”
a sticky drool from the Oh of their lips.
I’m having one of those exhausting days. I’m fighting a cold, I still haven’t found my keys, I’m swamped with grading. Chinchilla cages need cleaning, Wednesday night youth group needs leading, and if I don’t get some kind of a workout in, I’m going to feel tempted to have a mini-meltdown.
All day long, I’ve been saying to myself “Hugo, just do the next right thing.” Just the next right thing. The most recent right thing was organic peanut butter on spelt bread.
And I’ve got these bible verses in my head.
Last night I did my regular Tuesday night Pilates workout. I’ve been working out with Stephanie, for my trainer, for nearly two years. Slowly but surely, I’ve gotten more and more advanced.
Pilates is all about training the body’s core. And while I’d spent years doing crunches and side bends, it was only when I started doing Pilates that I began to discover a whole set of muscles that I had never imagined existed. Until 2005, I never knew that we all have something called a “pelvic floor”. I didn’t know about my transverse abdominus, or my psoas. And I certainly didn’t expect my strongest muscles to become those below my navel, above my pubis, and between my pelvic bones. I can say that after a couple of years of serious work, I’ve developed some pretty strong lower abs.
As I was talking with Stephanie last night, we discussed how few men do Pilates (even though Pilates is named for its male founder.) Our conversation turned, and it occurred to me how very few men I know (particularly young men) feel a sense of connection with their own bodies. We are trained in American culture to think of the male body as a performance machine; men evaluate their body’s worth based less on aesthetics than on functionality: does the body have the strength to lift heavy objects? Does the penis perform on command? Men call their arms “guns”; they refer to their penises as “rods” and “pistons” that “screw”. It’s the language of war, of car repair, of carpentry.
Many men are intensely anxious about their bodies. Though an increasing number of men struggle with eating disorders and a culturally imposed pressure to have perfect abs, even more men worry about their sexual performance. We live in a culture of epidemic male anxiety about erectile “dysfunction”; three hours watching commercials during a football game or fifteen minutes reading the ads in the sports section will make it clear that the worry about “getting it up” is nigh on universal among sexually active men. (I posted a bit about erectile dysfunction in May of last year.)
But the paradox is obvious: we live in a society where there exists tremendous male anxiety about sexual performance (as measured by drug company profits alone). At the same time, very few men bother to connect their sexual function with the health, strength, and well-being of the rest of their body. It’s as if they think of the penis as quite literally “standing alone”, like a house without a foundation. And in the rush to seek medical solutions to impotence and poor sexual control (premature ejaculation, weak erections), they ignore the very basic reality that strengthening the muscles of the lower core, particularly the pelvic floor, can have a dramatic and powerful effect on one’s sex life.
There’s a line between candor and gross “TMI” (what my cousin Dinah calls an “over-share”), and I’m not going to cross it in this post. I will say, however, that my sense of myself as a sexual person has been radically reshaped by an intense commitment to Pilates! My wife (who has also beecome an active and advanced Pilates practitioner) has noticed the difference, and our intimate life has deepened and intensified as a consequence. Though we’ve both been athletic for years, like most Americans we didn’t connect our sexual lives to our entire bodies. Too often, we thought of sex as involving primarily the brain, the genitalia, the heart. Committing to Pilates has been revelatory in more ways than one.
My core exercise is running, and as long as my hips and knees hold up, I’ll keep doing that. But I’ve decided to drop the boxing component of my work-out rituals; I’ve been training thrice weekly at a local boxing gym since January 2006. I’ve certainly learned a lot about the sport. But while my upper body is stronger, and my shoulders broader, I can’t say I feel as if I feel fundamentally transformed by the discipline of learning to hit things well. (Heck, I’m pretty ambivalent about hitting things to begin with; my neo-Anabaptist pacifism makes me question the whole world of amateur boxing.) Working out on the “reformer” and on the balls and mats with Stephanie not only tones and shapes me, it teaches me about the profound interconnectedness of my body and my soul.
In developing my core muscles as they’ve never been developed before, I begin to understand that though my body is indeed mortal (as opposed to an eternal soul) it is not(as so many of my brothers believe) a “machine to be maintained.” It is not a bag of bones and muscles and fat that carries my brain around. In my younger years, and even until recently, I had a sense that my body was always betraying me. It would get sick at the least opportune time. It would fail to do as I wanted it to, particularly early on in certain intimate relationships. It would suddenly overwhelm me with its imperious demands for food, sleep, sex. I felt as if I alternately indulged and disciplined my body, as if it was some sort of hyper-active child who needed to be placated, monitored, and periodically spanked.
My spiritual growth, my commitment to doing “deep work” on masculinity and pesonal transformation, my adoption of a vegan diet, and my now two-year long commitment to Pilates are all connected. I’m a fierce (and to many readers, tiresome) proponent of the idea that everything matters. What we put in our mouths matters; what comes out of our mouth matters; how we make love matters; how we spend matters; how we treat our bodies matters. Every action we take, no matter how small, is a vote — it either builds a more just society and helps us become the person we are called to be, or it takes us further away from those goals. Pilates doesn’t make me a more generous person per se; it does teach me (like nothing else) of the profound interconnectedness of my physical, psychological, sexual and even spiritual well-being.
I write from a place of profound privilege. I can afford a vegan diet. I can afford private Pilates training. I am not smugly demanding that others do as I have done. But there are inexpensive alternatives, and I ought to do more on this blog to publicize those. And it’s worth pointing out that we spend a fortune in this country on pharmacological treatments for erectile dysfunction (I know men whose spending on Viagra or Levitra would pay for a number of Pilates classes). Only a fraction of the men pumping these drugs into their system have no alternative. Most cases of erectile dysfunction, particularly in otherwise healthy men, are connected to performance anxiety rather than a genuine organic malfunction. And a huge part of the problem for many, many American men is that they are ignorant of the reality of how their penis works. It rises up from a man’s core, and as I (and anyone else who does serious Pilates or yoga work) can attest, it functions in harmony with the muscles of the lower core and the pelvic floor. The link between strengthening the deep core muscles of the body and enhanced sexual pleasure for both parties in a relationship is obvious and dramatic. And too many men are fundamentally ignorant of this basic physiological truth.
There are some good books out there on male bodies: David Friedman’s fine A Cultural History of the Penis and Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. (I use both in my men and masculinity humanities class — I’ll be teaching it in the fall!) But as I advance as a Pilates student, my own sense of the male body is being transformed. And there’s a need out there for some good writing that synthesizes the wisdom of Pilates (and its companion discipline, yoga) with solid contemporary research on men and masculinity. Most men who lead lives of quiet desperation feel some of that despair because of the perceived failures of their flesh. Reaching them is vital.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted some of the search terms that have led folks to this site. Here are a few, taken verbatim, with parenthetical comments from moi:
why are women such bitches nowdays? (Buddy, you’re reason #1)
how to overcom obstacles in a diverse church (A. learn to spell. B. stop seeing diversity as an obstacle)
should christian men go to water parks (As long as they don’t mind Christian children peeing in the water)
promiscuous or promiscuity or slut or slutty why buy the cow (Vegans don’t have this problem. But bonus points for spelling promiscuous right.)
tuffskins jeans (I got four separate searches for this. Tuffskin jeans in “husky” size were the agony of my childhood.)
male chastity his frustration women correct him (I smell an MRA)
when is touch inappropriate between male pastors and church women (Lots of searches on this topic, phrased in different ways)
what school does hugo schwyzer teach (Scary stalker people! I teach at, uh, Wichita State! No, wait, College of the Siskiyous!)
if my maternal great grandmother was white what percent white do i have (Whiteness is all about attitude. The real question is, how do you feel about Velveeta?)
gender studies land a cat on a hot tin roof (WTF?)
sleeping arrangement hotel boyfriend his kids (Let me recommend more than one room, whatever you decide)
steps to circumcise your own penis yourself (First step: get off the internet and call 911 and get thyself to a locked treatment facility. There’s a good boy.)
chinchillas having sex (Chinchillas don’t wish to have this discussed or photographed. We know it happens, but we don’t talk about it).
recommending sex after circumcision how long to wait (If you’re asking, it’s too soon.)
hugo in korean (Tell me, I want to know!)
And of course, endless numbers of queries for “older men, younger women” and “professor crushes.”
Carl at Young Anabaptist Radicals found several things troubling about my “Dukes don’t emigrate” post last week. He posted a couple of comments below my piece, and then wrote his own lengthy response here.
In my comments section, I had written:
We need to be honest about the mistakes of our ancestors. We also need to see those mistakes in a historical context, and avoid the tendency to mythologize and glamorize those who were the victims of colonization. Cruelty is a human universal, and sin — at least the capacity for sin — is found in every tribe and nation under the sun. Collectively, some have inflicted both more harm (and perhaps more good) than others.
Carl, politely but firmly, found that response wanting:
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard something along the lines of “cruelty is a human universal†from white people as a blanket dismissal of the idea that Euro-American culture might have anything significant to learn from indigenous people. Same goes for the tired bit about “don’t mythologize the victims of colonization.†You don’t have to be a romanticizing, mythologizing, self-hating fool to be willing to simply look at another culture and say, “You know, I value many of the things my ancestors taught me. But I think these folks have some things figured out about how to live on this earth that my ancestors once knew, but lost somewhere along the way.†In my experience, the resistance to this idea is huge – and the cliches in your paragraph are a key piece of that resistance.
That’s fair enough. I’m quite prepared to believe that indigenous groups in the Third World had “ways of seeing” nature and reality that were — and perhaps still are — immensely valuable. I don’t know how well I live out that conviction in my own life, however. Sure, I go to the health food store and stock up on homeopathic, “natural” remedies that were (so the advertisers say) the secrets of indigenous peoples. In recent years, I’ve spent lots of time with my wife’s family in rural Colombia, enjoying their “simpler”, more “pastoral” life. I’m never allowed to do any actual work when I’m on the finca, however. Despite my often sincere attempts to pitch in, my status as a guest (and perhaps, my status as a — comparatively — staggeringly affluent white man) means that despite my protestations, I’m generally waited on and catered to and told to lie in a hammock. Generally, I get a week or two to observe and to witness a different way of being. I come away appreciative for the tremendous hospitality of those who have so little, and filled with gratitude for the extraordinary privileges I have.
I’ve also been on a number of “mission trips” to Mexico, doing the usual things affluent white Christians do down there. Lots of short-term bursts of hard work (hey, I learned how to use a cement mixer in rural Sinaloa a few years ago), lots of prayer, lots of pious and hackneyed sentiment about how we Americans had “so much to learn” from those who “have so little.” Forgive a touch of cynicism, but after you’ve done a couple of these weeks south of the Border with a group of earnest teenagers, it’s hard not to poke a bit of fun. I’m aware, deeply aware, that no matter how much I try to humble myself, I’m still going to be the affluent white man waltzing into an impoverished community for a few days, bringing a bunch of chattering teenagers who come to do just a little bit of work. It’s easy to find oneself slipping into the role of the munificent bwana, filled with self-congratulation because I’ve left behind the air conditioning and the high-thread count sheets for a few days of sweat, dirt, ranchera and frijoles. I do make a sincere effort to avoid that role, but it invariably seems to be thrust upon me. Perhaps I unconsciously insist on playing it.
Carl also deals with the issue of reparations for the “sins of the ancestors”:
Many people talk about privilege and “working for a more equitable society†entirely in the present tense, without any reference to the critical role of accepting _real responsibility_ for the sins of our ancestors. Responsibility in this case means recognizing that we benefit from our ancestors’ sins (i.e. owning slaves, stealing land), and then making things right. This choice has very practical implications. Here in South Dakota, there are plenty of well-meaning white folks who will say, “Yes! Let’s work towards a more equitable society!†The unspoken implication is: become a part of my society, on my terms, and I’ll try to help you get your piece of the pie. There are far fewer white people who are willing to hear Lakota people say “We don’t want your society – we want you to give back the Black Hills that you stole, and then leave us alone.†Doing the latter requires an understanding that the theft of the Black Hills is not ancient history, it’s of critical present-day relevance. Same goes for slavery – it ain’t ancient history, folks. We don’t just need “a more equitable society†– we need to make actual, physical reparations! Until there’s been real recompense, the wounds of the past are still open and bleeding – they are, in fact, the continuing wounds of the present.
I’m not familar with the Lakota struggle (beyond a cursory knowledge from American history classes.) I am curious to know how many of the living Lakota have European ancestry themselves, however. When one is descended from both colonizer and the colonized, isn’t it cherry-picking to identify with only one aspect of your heritage? Isn’t it odd to demand reparations, when that means your mother’s side of the family ends up paying your father’s? Perhaps it isn’t odd at all; I’ll admit I’ve given it remarkably little thought.
As for reparations for slavery and other injustices, fine. On my mother’s side, my ancestors certainly owned slaves. (Though one branch of the family first came to California in the early 1850s, selling their plantation in East Texas and freeing their slaves, following the patriarch’s sudden revelation that slavery was immoral. That’s a feather in our family cap, one we periodically display.) Whatever modest wealth my mother’s side of the family was able to generate was at least in part built on slave labor. Here in California, my great-great grandfather made a living as a lawyer, serving as counsel for the railroads, “foreclosing on widows and orphans”, making money, I acknowledge, on the backs of Chinese laborers. Some of that money (not much) has trickled down to my generation.
Do I feel guilt because my ancestors owned slaves or served as hired legal guns for Southern Pacific? No. Do I admit some of my material benefits may have been connected to those acts of exploitation? Yes. I tithe on what I have and on what I inherit. I vote Democratic and support affirmative action. I am willing to support, with my money and my vote, programs that seek to redress historic inequities. But what else am I supposed to do? Shall I play amateur geneaologist, track down the descendants of slaves my ancestors owned, and send them a check? Shall I demand that we sell the small piece of land my family has owned in the Northern California hills, bought well over a century ago with money derived (in part, not in whole) from the largesse dispensed by the railroads? It was once Ohlone Indian land, and there are no Ohlone left. Shall we find the one or two folks who still have a drop of Ohlone blood, get on our knees, and make a personal and abject apology?
I’m not trying to offend, but I’d like some clear-cut clarification of what is asked of me. I give my first fruits to God and his work. I support government and private programs that seek to offer redress. If you want to raise my taxes to fund a massive reparations program, sure. I’ll write the check gladly. What else is there?
My favorite spot on earth is my family’s ranch in the hills northeast of San Jose. My family has been in those hills since Rutherford B. Hayes was president, and though most of what we once owned has been given to the public park system, a few very small parcels remain in our hands. In our old ranch house, pictures of my great- and great-great and great-great-great grandmothers and fathers hang on the walls and sit upon desks. I love looking at those people I never knew, knowing that they were the ones who crossed the plains in covered wagons, came around the Horn in storm-tossed boats, who longed for something new and bigger and better and different. There is a restlessness in the northern European, WASPy soul; a restlessness I see in my family’s history and in my own life. The longing for the new and the different runs deep in some of us. Call it the “pioneer spirit”. And it is, I fully acknowledge, a mixed legacy. Lord knows, that restlessness runs deep in me.
I love these ancestors of mine. I don’t worship them, but sometimes — as unChristian as it may seem to do so — I talk to them. I walk the hills and canyons of my truest earthly home, and I feel a cloud of witnesses hovering nearby. I talk to old “Albert Alfonso”, who first built the ranch houses. I talk to “aunt Jacqueline”, the family’s near-legendary matriarch. They died before my mother was born, and yet I still feel them to be a part of me, and I feel them most when I am on the land that they loved. Do I judge them perfect, blameless? No. Do I think that the means by which money came into their lives to have been so sordid that it vitiates any other good that they did? Of course not.
Do I know that the land I now call “mine” and “ours” once belonged to a native people, long since wiped from the earth? You bet. Do I grieve that? Yes. But will renouncing my heritage, giving up that land, right an ancient wrong? No. I don’t believe it. Perhaps I don’t want to believe it.
I’ve got an assistant helping to categorize all of my as of yet uncategorized posts. We’re adding new categories constantly, and considering changing the names of some existing ones. (Scroll down for a list of categories on the right-hand sidebar.) I’ve posted so darned much in the past three-plus years, and while some posts could probably be deleted, others ought to be more properly archived.
At what point do we end up with too many categories? Any categories I’m missing? Is the feminism category too damned big? Do sociopaths need their own category? Should I change the spelling of the masturbation and porn categories to avoid getting too many hits from those only seeking out the latter in order to facilitate engaging in the former?
Oh, I’ve added a modesty category too.
A few posts from my old blog got “lost in the shuffle” (particularly posts from late September –mid-October 2005.) I’m reprinting a few of them periodically. Here’s one from October 13, 2005, with most of the text “below the fold”:
Tuesday night, my wife and I were in the Apple store in Old Town Pasadena, picking up iPod accessories. When I handed my credit card over to the young woman behind the counter, she read my name and said “Hey, you teach at PCC.” I admitted that it was so, and we chatted as she rang up the purchase. Jokingly, I asked her why she hadn’t taken any of my courses. I mentioned my courses in Western Civ, as well as Women’s History. As soon as I mentioned the latter class, the gal remarked “Well, I’d never take a class like that. I’m not a feminist. I’m all about being a homemaker, and I don’t like sitting around listening to a bunch of women complain about how unfair the world is.” Continue reading
..and for the first time in memory, I’ve lost my keys, including master keys for various offices on campus. The process of replacing these keys is time-consuming, and in the meantime, I’m likely to drive college security bonkers by calling them to let me in to various rooms. Office hours will be delayed at times, and posting will be more erratic.
This is very tiresome, and it’s all my fault. The temptation to indulge in a little self-pity is remarkably strong this morning, and I want to cop to that openly.