Monthly Archives: April 2007

Ms. hits the stands

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The spring issue of Ms. Magazine hits the stands today. After nearly forty years and many editorial changes, it still remains vital, intelligent, essential reading. (How many other folks out there subscribe to both Ms. and First Things?)

There’s an interesting article on “what you can do with a women’s studies degree.” I’m happy to say I’ve inspired quite a few young women (and one or two fellas) to consider a women’s studies major, and a great many of them have asked me that very question. Here’s an answer I’m happy to give them: with a women’s studies degree, you could become president of Harvard. Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman to head this country’s most celebrated university, was formerly the head of the women’s studies department at Penn. You could also end up on a reality show:

Becky Lee is representative of this
new generation. After acquiring a
B.A. in women’s studies from the
University of Michigan in 2000, Lee
went on to law school and then
worked as an advocate for domesticviolence
survivors. While doing this
work, she was approached to audition
for the popular reality TV show
Survivor. Thinking it could serve as a
good platform for her cause, she
joined the cast, and while she found
that most of her statements on domestic
violence got left on the editing
floor, she has used the Survivor experience
to expand her advocacy.

“I came in third and used my
$75,000 prize to found a fund for
domestic-violence prevention with a
special focus on immigrant women
from marginalized communities,” she
says. “Now when I make public appearances
for the show, I talk about
the fund as a way to raise the issue of
domestic violence for mainstream
audiences.”

Cool.

I have an affection for Ms. Magazine. I grew up with it, you see. My mother was an early member of the National Organization for Women and a Ms. subscriber from its inception. I’ve inherited from her an interest in subscribing to lots and lots of magazines (yes, I recycle them.) As a child, I remember that Ms, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books enjoyed prominence on our living room coffee table. I still read the first and last of these, but long ago tired of TNR.

My mother very briefly considered dropping her Ms. subscription when I was about eight, after a front-page article on women’s sexuality caught my eye. It must have been about 1974 or ’75, and my mother was somewhat discomfited when I came to her, innocently waving the magazine, asking, “Mom, what’s an orgasm?” My mother, raised in a generation of feminists who did not see an open and cheerful discussion of the clitoris as essential to women’s liberation, wondered if the Schwyzer family ought to take a break from the magazine for a while. Somehow, I got the idea that Ms. Magazine had things “I wasn’t supposed to read yet”, and thus eagerly sought out copies.

Many of my friends tell me that they pored over their father’s Playboys when they were children, curious to discover what “all the fuss was about.” I didn’t see a Playboy (or any other kind of porn) until I was in the throes of adolescence. But I darn sure studied Ms. Magazine very closely in the mid-’70s, and though much of what I read went right over my head, it surely formed part of my very early sex education. And perhaps it helped make me what I am today.

The system worked for me: more thoughts on Cho Seung-Hui and the response to serious mental illness

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In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings and the revelation that the culprit had been hospitalized in the past for profound depression, the conversation has turned to the various ways we treat mental illness. Some have called for draconian measures. Jill at Feministe provides this quote from someone named Beth:

If you ask me, if we are going to let these crazies run free, not forcing them to be institutionalized, then we need to goddamn well do a better job of protecting the public from them. There’s a reason why they used to be locked up, and it was to protect society. Virginia Tech totally dropped the goddamn ball with this guy; there’s no reason why they should have to educate dangerous people. I know, it’s all about wishy-washy liberal ideals–can’t deny someone with mental illness their “right” to a college education…

I have only occasionally touched on my own battles with mental illness. (See here, here, here, here).

I was first diagnosed with mental illness in college, back in the spring of 1987. After a very violent episode of “cutting”, I was placed on the first of what would be many “5150s”. A 5150 takes its name from the California code that allows 72-hour involuntary “holds” in locked psychiatric facilities for those who are considered a danger to themselves or others. I was 5150ed in April 1987, April 1990, June 1996 (two separate occasions) and June 1998. I was a voluntary admit in June 1989. It totals half-a-dozen stays in locked facilities. (My worst time of the year has always been spring; I tend to be at my lowest between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. I have many theories why, but this ain’t the time.)

I was lucky, so lucky: all the hospitals I was locked up in (both in Berkeley and Los Angeles) were private. They were good places, for the most part. In most I stayed only a few days, but in June 1996 (after two suicide attempts three weeks apart, the second nearly successful) I was placed on an “extended” fourteen-day hold. I talked about my various diagnoses in this post; as I said then I was usually described as having a heavy-duty case of “cluster B’ disorders: Narcissistic, Antisocial, and above all, Borderline Personality Disorder… Doctors frequently added phrases I remember vividly, like “with psychotic features or “prone to micro-psychotic episodes.”

At Feministe, a reader named Psyche wrote:

The real problem is that there aren’t really intermediate states between involuntary commitment (the experience of which, at least the way our mental health systems works now) is comparable to being arrested in terms of humiliation and unpleasantness. Perhaps worse in terms of the dehumanization and total loss of agency. And locked wards in mental hospitals, even the best ones that money can give you access to, are pretty much the last places you want to spend any time, especially if you’re a borderline functional person, you’re surrounded by people who are by and large incapable of sustained social interaction, in an environment with very few distractions, and with no privacy and no control over how you spend your time.

Well, yes and no. Mostly “no.” The locked wards I’ve been on (for, as I said, as long as a few weeks at a time) weren’t Club Med. But they weren’t prisons, either. I’ve spent time in five different locked facilities (I was only hospitalized in one place twice), and I was always thrilled to leave. But while I was there I generally felt safe, cared for. Each time I was locked up, it was after an episode where I had done something so self-destructive that it was obvious to me (and to everyone else) I couldn’t care for myself. Yes, these “psychotic episodes” were brief in my case; I was able to return to functioning (including working on a dissertation and teaching) within a short period of time after release. (I even wrote a paper in one psych ward.) Though I was fortunate in the sense that my illness was more episodic than chronic, I am also clear that all five of the locked wards on which I found myself were places where I got good, competent, even loving care.

I can still remember the faces of the various psych nurses who took care of me. I often ended up in the wards with physical injuries that needed attention (usually cuts or burns); once it seemed likely I had damaged my heart and my kidneys and my liver with one particularly nasty overdose that led to an extensive stay in the ICU before being “released” onto a 5150. (A whole lot of Ritalin and Anafranil and Klonipin, if you’re keeping tabs — quite a cocktail of about 100 pills. I’ve had my stomach pumped three times, and vomited up that charcoal stuff they give you another time or four.) The nurses who took care of me were sometimes loving, sometimes brisk, but always, always, they made me feel safe.

I ate a lot of fruit cocktail (always served in locked wards, it’s a staple.) I made moccasins in occupational therapy. I sat in community meetings with the paranoid schizophrenics and the bipolars in the full bloom of their manic episodes. I read back issues of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Two years apart, I watched England lose two heartbreaking matches (to Germany in Euro ’96 and Argentina in the ’98 World Cup); I was hospitalized for both. I was in a locked ward for Tiananmen Square in 1989, and watched the coverage of Khomeini’s funeral. (I was lucky — most of the wards had cable.) I read all of Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy”; even now, rereading it as I have a couple of times, it brings back those days. And oh my, did I smoke. I had my visitors load me up with packs of Parliaments and Marlboro Reds (and once, a few Djarums.) I haven’t smoked in years, but I puffed away with the best of them every time I went behind the locked doors.

I know I was lucky in many ways. I was a young white, not unattractive male with insurance. I was well-spoken and articulate, and tried always to be polite. (Once, when I was in restraints, I apologized profusely to the nurses who catheterized me, saying that I felt “dreadful” that they had to do this for me.) I was also obviously no danger to anyone other than myself. When I was in Northridge Hospital in 1998, I wandered the halls in Tigger slippers which the staff seemed to find cute and endearing. My illness often made me pathetic, but it rarely made me nasty when I was in the acute stages. (Outside the hospital, I could be very antisocial.)

I was lucky too, in a sense, that when I was “in an episode” my behavior was so bizarre and dangerous that I was instantly 5150ed. Had my illness been less obviously destructive, I might have resisted voluntary hospitalization (something I only consented to once). I know many people struggle with family members who refuse to seek help; I am so fortunate that my disease left me with no illusion that I could function or survive without treatment!

I am grateful that privacy laws kept my condition from Cal when I was an undergrad, UCLA when I was a grad student, and PCC when I was a professor. I can disclose my medical history now because I have been healthy for nigh on nine years, with little fear of the darkness returning. I am very concerned that the reaction to the Cho Seung-Hui situation may lead to calls to deprive those who seek treatment for mental illness of these basic and essential rights. What good would it have done to have me removed from school, fired from my teaching position, held longer than minimally necessary? Am I more of service here where I am or rotting in an institution? After eleven years and six hospitalizations, I might well have been considered a prime candidate for long-term commitment to a mental facility. Blessedly, the system allowed me to return to my life, to my family, to my duties as soon as I was able to do so. In my case, folks, the system really worked.

Medication, intensive therapy (including a couple years of analysis on a couch), growing older, and a Twelve Step program (or three): all of these played vital roles in my recovery. God’s grace allowed me to get still enough to make use of these tools. My story turned out very differently than that of Cho Seung-Hui. But if he is the face of where the system failed, let mine — for those who know me — be the face of where it worked.

Some thoughts on Courtney Martin, young women’s exhaustion, “if/then” thinking and the corporate appropriation of feminist language

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Since I posted yesterday on this excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book, I’ve been thinking more about this one phrase of hers that troubled me:

We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

On the one hand, I recognize the truth here — so many young women do hear the first message as the second. And Martin is right that for a particular generation of feminists — those raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the mothers of today’s young perfectionists — the “you can be anything” message was absolute gospel. But (and I say this not having read the entire book yet, only this excerpt) I’m worried that casual readers might come away with the impression that organized feminism is somehow chiefly to blame for the crushing, exhausting burdens our little sisters now carry in their hearts and in their bodies.

I worry about this interpretation because it’s one I sometimes hear from my more conservative students in my women’s studies course. These young women are keenly aware of the pressure to be thin and beautiful, independent and multi-faceted. Like their sisters, they are often raw and tired and frustrated. But somehow they’ve picked up the impression that feminism is to blame for their exhaustion. They come into the course with a sense of the past (picked up from both the mainstream and conservative media) that is idealized and sanitized. And their sense is that not so long ago (usually, they point to the supposed halcyon days of the 1950s), women had fewer pressures. One young woman wrote in her journal a year or two ago (I remember her words fairly vividly, though this is surely a paraphrase):

I wish I lived fifty years ago. I would then only have to be a wife and a mother. I could be curvy, like Marilyn, instead of super-thin. I wouldn’t have to worry about both a relationship and a career. I wouldn’t have to cope with the mixed message of “love is all you need to be happy” and “don’t rely on a man, stay single and free.” I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to please everybody, instead I could just focus on pleasing my husband and my children. Yes, I would have much less freedom to do things, but I would have so much more freedom from pressure. And maybe this course will prove me wrong, but it seems to me that feminism, by asking us to do everything men do as well as what women do, has made things worse for us.

(By the way, perhaps in honor of FDR, I often talk about “freedom from” and “freedom to” in the context of feminist history. That dyad comes up early in the course, and my students get sick of hearing about it.)

My student — and perhaps Courtney Martin, though I can’t gauge the latter’s intent until I read the whole darned book — makes a serious and common mistake. On the one hand, many young women today have no authentic sense of just how rigid, stifling, and fundamentally unsatisfying domesticity was for millions of American women two generations ago. I give them excerpts from The Feminine Mystique, but many of them remain captivated by the fantasy that a good marriage and healthy children (perhaps with a nice house, white picket fence, and so forth) is all that any woman needs for deep and enduring happiness. While they admit to considerable cynicism about the chances of finding “a good guy”, many of them speak wistfully and nostalgically of a golden age when women could be softer, rounder, and less pressured to perform in the classroom and the boardroom. Trying to convince them that that “golden age” existed only for a privileged and fortunate few is sometimes hard work. Some folks just don’t want their bubbles burst.

I call these students my “if/then” kids, because so many of them say something like “IF I met the right guy, THEN I would consider getting married and staying home with the kids. It’s what I’d really like to do, but I just don’t think I’m likely to find someone. But if I did, then…” If/then thinking depresses me no end, because it seems to suggest that women’s pursuit of independence is only a response to the lack of honorable, decent, reliable men. If/then thinking suggests that “if only more men were reliable and willing to settle down and stay committed, then feminism wouldn’t be necessary.” It suggests that the goals of the women’s movement were developed entirely in response to bad male behavior, and though there is some historic truth to this, the “if/then” analysis completely underestimates what many feminists (including this one) argue is the healthy and perfectly natural desire for women to be self-determining agents in every aspect of their lives.

So back to the point about feminism and pressure. It’s absolutely true that feminists have told young women “You can be whatever you want to be.” It is absolutely true that the feminist movement has opened up extraordinary possibilities for women, possibilities that simply would not otherwise have existed. And it is true that with more choices there comes the inevitable pressure to make a choice; that’s part and parcel of growing up But no feminist I know now or in the past forty years has pushed the “superwoman” complex onto her daughters! That complex is pushed by a variety of decidedly non-feminist forces (big media, the consumer products industry, big fashion) which realized that women’s spending patterns are heavily driven by insecurity. A woman who is happy in her own skin is inclined, all things considered, to spend a good deal less on clothes, make-up, accessories, diet pills, and so forth. Women’s anxiety and corporate profits are clearly, almost inextricably linked at this point.

Feminists did, as Martin says, tell their daughters “You can be all that you want to be.” But it was Vogue and Elle, MTV and the WB that told those same young women, “yes, you can be anything you like, but here’s our narrowly defined, elusive, unobtainable ideal. Come chase it!” The magazines and the televison programs learned that cloaking their marketing in a thin veneer of feminist rhetoric made it exciting, edgy, palatable. And not surprisingly, many young women today feel alienated by the language of female empowerment because for as long as they’ve been alive, that language has been used to sell them something else that is “indispensable”. They confuse authentic feminism, which is desperately concerned with women’s happiness and self-determination, with a corporate culture that skillfully appropriated that language of personal fulfillment merely to increase its own profits. They don’t fully trust the message because the message has been stolen.

It is undeniable that young women are under colossal emotional pressure these days. The guilt about food, the guilt about failing to people-please, the guilt about letting down everyone around them; it’s all crushing. And it’s true that many of these overworked and anxious young women wouldn’t have the same pressure to succeed if there hadn’t been a feminist movement. But the anxiety they feel isn’t rooted in women’s liberation, it’s rooted in young women’s susceptability to the overwhelming pressure from media and market forces, forces that see a bottomless gold mine in the increased buying power of women. But that buying power will only lead to corporate profits if young women can be kept anxious, unsatisfied, and filled with self-loathing.

“We carry the world of guilt” — an excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book

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I’m delighted to promote Courtney Martin’s new book (just published this week), Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, from which a substantial excerpt is available here. Here’s the bit that really grabbed me:

We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers. We carry the world of guilt — center of families, keeper of relationships, caretaker of friends — with a new world of control/ambition — rich, independent, powerful. We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

We must get A’s. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless.

We grow hungrier and hungrier with no clue what we are hungry for. The holes inside of us grow bigger and bigger.

Martin’s got it almost right. (Bold emphasis was mine, by the way.) It jives with what I was trying to say in this post last month about the girls in my high school youth group. Speaking for a generation of supportive, hovering, encouraging parents and teachers, I wrote: we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation.

The one thing I am leery about is Martin’s passing, mild indictment of feminism. At its best, contemporary feminism is more than a “you can have it all” message. It is concerned not only with giving a message of empowerment, but with how our little sisters hear and internalize that message. There is plenty of blame to go around for the current predicament — but I don’t think much needs to be shouldered by feminism.

I can’t wait to read Martin’s book. I do hope her description of the solution is as accurate and compelling as her diagnosis of the problem.

“Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower”: Brad Wilcox and patriarchal religion

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I’ve often mentioned my fondness for the conservative Catholic journal, First Things. I agree with, oh, 5% of what I read within its pages. But my goodness, the quality of the writing is invariably top-notch. Sometimes what I read raises my blood pressure a bit, but that’s not always a bad thing.

The May issue (not fully available online yet) has a short piece by the current boy wonder of the “traditional family” movement, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox. (I reviewed his “Soft Patriarchs” book here.) This month’s article, “As the Family Goes”, predicts (without much regret, I note) that the decline in attendance at liberal, mainline Protestant churches will continue. Wilcox’s theory is moderately interesting: the most reliable church attenders are adults with young children; by focusing on non-traditional families, gays and lesbians, and single folks, the mainline denominations (like my own Episcopal Church) have signed their own demographic death warrants.

Though I disagree strongly with that analysis, that’s not what grabbed me. It’s this zinger that Wilcox drops in:

Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower.

I read that, and choked on a very nice fruit smoothie. I have long railed against the culturally pervasive “myth of male weakness.” (See here, here, here). The myth of male weakness takes many forms, of course: it’s often used to blame women (or their “immodest” clothing) for bad male behavior. If men are weak, then women must be strong, the theory goes — and women must do for men what they can’t or won’t do for themselves, such as setting healthy boundaries. The myth of male weakness is an odious lie, peddled by those who are eager to excuse bad male behavior and to force women into the traditional straitjacket of nurturer and defender of virtue.

But Wilcox takes a different tack. Men, he believes, have “fragile faith” that needs “wifely encouragement to flower.” While the evolutionary biologists (or their popularizers) argue that men are sex-crazed, incapable of initiating restriction without women’s help, Wilcox the sociologist argues that women have to do more than save men from sexual chaos: women also have to nurture our weak spirituality. Wives, apparently, are gardeners; they must tend and prune and fertilize what is small and frail. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife that I am just a little seedling, and that it’s her job to make sure that my relationship with Christ continues to grow! (The image of the gardener — of making things flower — is ubiquitous in the New Testament. But women aren’t the gardeners, God is, and we are all called to equal relationship with our God).

Traditional, orthodox (small “o”) Christianity often collapses on its own contradictions. On the one hand, women are “stronger” than men; men’s faith is “comparatively fragile.” On the other hand, women are supposed to submit to men (but not vice versa), and men alone are to hold the role of pastor. So, to stick with Wilcox’s metaphor, the gardener ought to submit to the headship of the plant. It makes my head hurt.

Patriarchal culture has often tried to appease the women whom it oppresses by reassuring them that “women really are stronger than men.” Women are told, over and over, that “behind every great man is a woman” and that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Women are sometimes even told that they are morally superior to men; while men “need” to exercise overt power in order to feel “like real men”, women can be content with the more subtle powers of the nurturer, the adviser, the mother, the wife, the gardener. Thus in a very real sense, the survival of patriarchal values depends on sustaining the myth of male weakness. The idea that a woman’s role is to complement and nurture (and gently submit) only makes sense if we believe that men are too fragile, too self-destructive, too vulnerable to lust or pride to make healthy, wise, faithful decisions without a woman’s help.

I love my wife. I love that she and I share a vibrant faith in God, and that we are each committed to our individual and mutual transformation. We encourage each other, nurture each other, support each other on the journey we are taking together. Somedays my faith is more fragile, not because I am a man, but because I’m having a hard day. On those days, my wonderful wife bucks me up with her wise words and her warm hugs. On other days, my wife’s certainty grows more frail — and I am there for her, tending to her, standing behind her to offer her my unconditional support.

All of us who believe will be fragile at times. All of us are capable of extraordinary strength. And our chromosomes and our anatomy have nothing to do with it.

Friday Random Ten: busy as a bee edition

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This Friday’s FRT comes along to mark the end of a reasonably productive spring break.

#1 is the song I’ve played most this week (and it includes the memorable lines: she started with us on the back of a horse, just 17 and already divorced…) I will be surprised if any reader — with the possible exception of my brother — recognizes #2, by a radical Marxist 80s outfit from Manchester who almost made it big and left behind one great record. #7 is by one of the great voices of my childhood who still performs in her late seventies; #8 might as well be autobiographical for me and #9 is a less well-known track from a man whom I can only call the “master.” The bonus track is my second favorite U2 song off what is far and away my favorite of their studio albums. (Fascinating story about how the song was made.)

1. “Trapeze”, Patty Griffin (with Emmylou Harris)
2. “Estates”, Easterhouse
3. “Two Pink Lines”, Eric Church
4. “I Remember You”, Steve Earle (also with Emmylou Harris)
5. “Wisemen”, James Blunt
6. “Miami 2017″, Billy Joel
7. “Down by the Riverside”, Odetta
8. “Martyrs and Thieves”, Jennifer Knapp
9. “Kern River”, Merle Haggard
10. “Human Thing”, Be Good Tanyas

Bonus Track: “Elvis Presley and America”, U2

Away for the day…

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First off, I’d like to send out happy birthday greetings to my beloved little brother, 37 this day.

I’ll be away from the computer all day — lots of appointments of the sort that can only be made during a school vacation period. Lots of time in the car, alas, and no time for bloggin’.

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Thursday Short Poem: Sexton’s “Wanting to Die”

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I post this poem with a tiny bit of anxiety. Please, loved ones and friends — this is not a hint on my part as to my future intentions. Nor is it to be construed as relating in any way to this week’s Virginia Tech awfulness.

I am about to be 40, and exactly half a lifetime ago, in April 1987, I injured myself seriously for the first time. Shortly before my 20th birthday, I had my first brush with wanting to die; I had my first experience with a nice long stay on a locked ward. On and off for the next eleven years, until the miracle of 1998, what Sexton calls here “the most unnameable lust” returned again and again.

I haven’t wanted to die in, well, nearly a decade. But as long as I live, I will remember the feeling of despair, of emptiness, and of cold fascination with the tools I might use to complete the task — a task that, thank God, I never finished. This is the best poem I know about that feeling. Anne Sexton is one of my very favorite poets, ranking right up there with Auden, Merwin and Jeffers. I don’t put up much of her stuff: it’s too intimate, too dark, too close to the bone. But in honor of the sheer whopping joy of being alive in this spring of 2007, and in honor of the time the darkness first closed in in the spring of 1987, I offer this poem today.

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the most unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue! –
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year and year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

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