Monthly Archives: July 2007

A note on being Hugo, one which contains a small Harry Potter spoiler

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I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, and though I saw the first film in a theater and the second film on a long Emirates flight, I haven’t been keeping up with the movie versions either. I’ve got no objection to the Potter books on artistic or theological grounds, and mine is not an aversion rooted in snobbery. It’s just that I can always think of something else I’d rather read.

That said, I’ve heard from several people this weekend who excitedly report that in the epilogue to the final story, two central characters end up married with children — and they name their son “Hugo.” One young man I work with came running up to me on Saturday to inquire what my name “really means”, convinced that there was some deep symbolism embodied in Rowling’s choice. My name, depending on which source text you use, means “bright” or (I like this better) “bright mind.” This revelation seemed deeply satisfying to the sixteen year-old who was querying me, and he went off quite pleased.

I was named for my father’s side of the family. “Hugo” was my father’s father’s father. He came from a family of Moravian Jews who had thoroughly assimilated, and thus he and his brothers all had these very Germanic names (Berthold and Ludwig were other choices). “Benedict”, my middle name, comes from the first name of another great-great-grandfather. (My brother, Philip Arthur, was named for my mother’s side of the family).

I grew up hating my name. The teasing started early; some of my readers will be old enough to remember the character “Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces” (a seemingly innocuous title that became a painful burden). One group of insipid children in third grade came up with the inspired “Hugo’s a go-go” (not that they really knew what go-go dancing entailed), and that monicker lasted throughout elementary school. I can remember wishing, at age ten or so, that I had been named “Mike”. That was by far the most popular boys’ name in my school, and it seemed just the sort of name that would act as a magical coat of protection against all sorts of insults. Once, while on the school bus, I tried to tell a new boy that my name was Mike, just to “try out” the new title; I was overheard and my deceit was greeted with cheerful howls of derision.

I began to appreciate my name in high school, largely because in my adolescence I began to value the very things I had been so ashamed of in my childhood. Where at nine or ten I had longed to fit in with all the other boys, at fifteen and sixteen I delghted in my uniqueness. I didn’t meet another Hugo until I was a seventeen year-old high school senior; I encoutered him at the California state Model UN convention. He was Hispanic, and when he introduced himself, asked “How did a white guy end up with a name like Hugo?” I was about to ask him a similar question; we had each assumed that Hugo belonged to a specific language group and were a bit thrown to discover that there are versions of Hugo in most Western European tongues.

I’ve met Dutch Hugos, Swedish Hugos, English Hugos and — by now — a great number of Hugos from Spanish-speaking families. Venezuala’s Chavez, with his infamy, has given the name a sinister touch (or, in the eyes of the fringe global left, a certain Fidelisque cachet). What I haven’t met yet is an American-born Hugo who doesn’t come out of a Hispanic background. I’ve corresponded with one or two, but haven’t yet met in person.

There is pleasure in an unusual name, though it is a pleasure I had to learn to love. I like knowing today that if I hear someone yell “Hugo” in a crowd, it is almost invariably for me. Yelling “Juan” or “Michael” (or, these days, “Hunter” or “Dylan”) often leads only to confusion. I like that I am easy to google, unlike my good friend Jennifer Brown or my dear colleague Steve Richards. The names that my wife and I have tentatively discussed for our future children, should the Lord bless us in that regard, will be kept secret until after the small ones arrive. But I can say that most of our options are indeed unusual. I fully expect my future son or daughter to go through a stage where they wish they had been named “Emily” or “Daniel” instead of the far more unusual name they’ve been given.

I like to scan the popular baby names provided by the Social Security Administration. My operating rule is that no child ought to be given a name from the top 50. Obviously, names go in and out of fashion; the current trend for boys’ names seems to be to mine the Old Testament, and for girls it seems trendy to turn to the likes of Jane Austen for inspiration. I didn’t know any “Avas” or “Jacobs” in my youth, and it seems that names like Lisa or Troy (which were hugely popular among those of us born in the mid-to-late ’60s) have all but vanished. But while one cannot predict long-term trends, one can predict what will be popular on elementary school rosters a few years from now. And it seems wise and good and right to pick with an eye towards the unusual, the ancient, the meaning-filled. Even if such a choice will lead a child to curse her parents when she is nine, she will surely rejoice in what is nearly uniquely hers when she is older.

I am a very happy Hugo Benedict.

Friday Random Ten: music for a restless taper

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My wife and I share a great love for Mahalia, though #3 is the only song I have on my Itunes (it’s my favorite.) In the 1990s, I listened to Liz Phair constantly, and now don’t seem to do so as much, but my fondness isn’t entirely gone. #4 was on the radio a lot when I first came back to Christ and gave up a host of destructive behaviors, and it was a signature song for that first year of recovery. #1 and #9 are, as I’ve mentioned before, favorite theme songs from an earlier time, when the behaviors I gave up in the late ’90s were what sustained me. And of course, if you’ve never heard of the Wailin’ Jennys or the Weepies or my newest discovery, Sarah Buxton, check them out.

1. “Don’t Follow”, Alice in Chains
2. “World Spins Madly On”, The Weepies
3. “Thy Will Be Done”, Mahalia Jackson
4. “Your Life is Now”, John Mellencamp
5. “Leap of Innocence”, Liz Phair
6. “Darling Nikki”, Prince
7. “My Antonia”, Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews
8. “The Mighty Quinn”, Ian and Sylvia
9. “I’ve Loved These Days”, Billy Joel
10. “Firecracker”, Wailin’ Jennys

Bonus Track: “Stupid Boy”, Sarah Buxton

Not just consent but enthusiasm: some notes on college sex workshops and stoplights

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The thread below this post has gotten sidetracked in a variety of typical ways. Noumena wrote:

How to not get raped’ workshops are legion and often mandatory for new college students, but I’ve never heard of a `how not to become a rapist’ workshop, to say nothing of `having a healthy sex life at college on your own terms’.

And I mentioned that I’ve facilitated a variety of workshops that deal with these issues, though not with those titles. One workshop I helped design years ago, and which I would love to do again, was something we called “Consent and Beyond”. Originally growing out of the work of Peer Sexuality Outreach at Cal, the workshop was designed to create honest discussion about how young people can communicate more effectively about desire, boundaries, limits, and, of course, consent.

Most boys, for example, get the “no means no” message pretty loud and clear in high school and college workshops. It’s a worthy if basic message, and one well worth repeating over and over again. But as anyone who works around young people and sexuality will tell you, in and of itself a “no means no” reminder is woefully insufficient. Many of the young men and women I work with, for example, talk to me of what I’ve come to call the “stoplight” phenomenon. Traffic signals, of course, have three colors: red for stop, yellow for caution, green for go. Good drivers are taught to stop on “red”, which functions as a “no”. But of course, even at the busiest urban intersections, no light stays red indefinitely. If you wait long enough at a stoplight, every red will become green. And when all we do is teach young men that “no means stop” when it comes to sexual boundaries, we often send them the message that if they just wait long enough (or pester, push, nag, beg, play passive-aggressive games) they’ll get the “green light” they’re so hungry for. Good “sexual boundaries workshops” go beyond the “no means no” message. Specifically, we look at the ways in which many men will accept a “no” as a “yellow light” rather than a red, assuming that if they simply keep up unrelenting pressure (often abetted by alcohol or exhaustion) they’ll get the permission they seek.

Part of being a good man, I teach, is not being a relentless advocate for your own pleasure. Part of being a good sexual partner is not using a variety of psychological (and chemical) tactics to turn the red light to green, to turn the “no” into a “yes”, or even worse, to simply wait until the young woman has grown tired of saying “no” and falls into a resigned silence. This is all part of the “how not to be a rapist” workshop. And while one hears anecdotal stories of young women persistently pressuring male partners for sex, all of the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of the pressure is uni-directional, from boys towards girls.

The message that needs to be repeated over and over again is this one: true consent is never tacit, it is never silent. Too many young men become date rapists by confusing silence with a clear, verbal affirmation. “No means no”, but with folks you don’t know well, you need to presume that silence (especially when accompanied by physical passivity) is also a loud, clear, shout-it-from-the-flippin’-rooftops, “NO!” How many women have had sex they didn’t desire with men they didn’t want simply because they were too tired of fighting, too tired of resisting, too eager to just have it over with?

A dangerous line I sometimes use: “The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”. It’s dangerous because it’s shocking, and of course, it’s dangerous because it twists the purely legal meaning of the term “rape.” But from the standpoint of one who cares desperately about the well-being of young people, my goal in offering workshops like these is not merely to prevent sexual assault that meets the legal standard of a criminal act. My goal is to prevent that, of course, but to also offer shy and uncertain young people tools to prevent them from having bad sex characterized by obligation, confusion, and detached resignation. I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober “Hell, yes!” is, in the end, just a “no” in another form.

That sets the bar pretty darned high. But given the consequences of unwanted sex to the body and the heart and the mind and the soul, given the potential for sex to be life-affirming and ecstatic, our young people deserve to have the bar set just that high.

Three links: Now Four

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More later, but I note that I’ve been rotten about linking to good posts lately. Here’s some of the goodness you ought to check out in your abundant free time:

Jeff at Feminist Allies on Living with Feminist Anger Towards Men.

Jendi Reiter on solitude and faith in Why Church?

Sarah on marriage, growing up Catholic and leaning to the Nazarenes with Taking Things Off Old Pedestals.

And then, read Lynn on interpreting the newest statistics about teen sex.

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Thursday Short Poem: Cavafy’s “Body, Remember”

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This C.P. Cavafy classic was a favorite of mine a few years ago. As those of us who once — briefly — took simple pleasure in being the object of others’ desire know, ageing is not without its anxieties. There’s a deeply narcissistic comfort here. It’s not a Christian poem by any means, but it reads familiar.

Body, Remember

Body, remember not only how much you were loved
not only the beds you lay on.
but also those desires glowing openly
in eyes that looked at you,
trembling for you in voices-
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it’s all finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too-how they glowed,
remember, in eyes that looked at you,
remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices.

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Girl talk, depression, and culturally conditioned rivalry

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As a volunteer youth minister, I was very interested to read this in my morning paper: Girl talk linked to depression, anxiety. It opens:

Constant venting over crushes, popularity or other personal problems may lead to anxiety and depression in girls — but not in boys, according to new research.

A study of 813 students ages 8 to 15 found that excessive discussions and rumination about problems strengthened friendships for both sexes, but those tighter bonds came at a cost for girls.

The study appears in this month’s issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.

Lead author Amanda Rose, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said the results might reflect a cultural tendency among girls to blame themselves when they aren’t invited to parties or when boys don’t call back.

“The more they talk about it, the more depressed and anxious they feel,” she said.

The findings add a cautionary note to the perennial advice to the young that they should share their problems rather than bottle them up.

“Talking about problems is a good thing, but too much talk is too much of a good thing,” Rose said.

I don’t spend much time working with younger kids (say, those in the 8-12 range). I have spent a great deal of time volunteering with both boys and girls in early-to-mid adolescence; if there’s one age group I spend more time with than any other it’s high school frosh, who are usually around 13-15.

I’m no expert in adolescent psychology, but the study does “ring true”. It’s certainly not the case that those girls who are the most consistently verbal and open about their feelings are always the emotionally healthiest. My concern, however, is about the reaction of adults to this study. The last thing that we need is moms and dads deciding, having skimmed an article or heard a television report, that their daughters need to spend less time talking to their friends and more time bottling up their feelings! Even more worrisome is the thought that some parents and teachers might overtly or covertly discourage girls from approaching them with their anxieties and doubts for fear that providing a listening ear will only worsen the problem.

One popular trend these days is to focus heavily on the “boy crisis”; pop psychologists (and men’s rights advocates) have loudly complained that we’ve spent too much time collectively worrying about girls, and not enough about boys. These advocates for boys are often convinced that love, time, and resources are part of a zero-sum game, and that the trend of the 1990s (epitomized by Mary Pipher’s colossally influential Reviving Ophelia) towards focusing on girls was misplaced and led to boys’ needs being systematically ignored. Boys, these folks argue, are actually much more at risk of low self-esteem today than girls.

But the study reported today suggests that peer support systems are still less effective for many girls than for boys:

Researchers first looked at whether depression or anxiety increased the likelihood that students would obsessively discuss their problems. They found that boys and girls with emotional difficulties were more likely to ruminate about their troubles.

Researchers then examined the effect of rumination on students’ emotional well-being and friendships.

Boys reported no change in feelings of anxiety or depression, but girls said they felt worse.

Since the boys in this study were already self-identified as depressed or anxious, their tendency to report that they didn’t feel worse as a result of discussing their problem can’t be attributable to a masculine desire to appear strong and impervious to psychic pain. Rather, it seems clear that something about the way in which “girl-talk” functions among the young serves to exacerbate rather than relieve many emotional problems.

In my own youth, I struggled with both an eating disorder and chronic self-mutilation. I often found myself in support groups for those who suffered with similar issues; typically, I was (as a male) very much in a minority. I also was often the oldest person in the group, as my anorectic and self-mutilating behavior peaked in my early twenties rather than in my early-to-mid-teens, like many young women. And in these groups, I saw quickly how vital it was to have all discussion moderated by either a therapist or a mature fellow sufferer who had a lot of recovery. Unmoderated, discussion about dieting or cutting quickly turned competitive; a girl would say something like “Yeah, I’m not doing so good, I only ate a banana yesterday.” You could count on having another girl say seconds later, “Yeah, me too, I only drank water and diet coke yesterday.” The subtle one-”upwomanship” often left many of the young women in the group even more depressed and alienated, and it took good and aggressive therapists to keep things positive. (This was back before the proliferation of the “pro-ana” sites on the web that offer “support” to those who are competitively anorexic or self-mutilating.)

As feminists, we need to recognize that the way in which girls talk to each other about their bodies or emotions is heavily influenced by a culture that encourages bitter female rivalry. We know that anxiety about body image and boys begins well before physical puberty, and that that anxiety is shaped in ways that emphasize competition with other girls. This rivalry is much stronger among girls than among boys. This doesn’t mean boys don’t compete, it means that their competition is far more limited. Boys tend to compete only about sports and grades and (later) real or imagined prowess with the other sex; girls compete over their appearance, and it seems, over their very identities.

To get a sense of this, listen to how girls use the word “hate” much more frequently to describe other women whom they envy. “She’s so pretty and skinny, I just hate her!” is a fairly common phrase to hear from fifteen-year old girls. When was the last time you heard a teen boy say of a peer, “He’s so handsome, I hate him” or “Peyton Manning is such a great quarterback, I just hate him”? (Boys may hate the star of the opposing team, but they are much less likely to loathe the lad who’s leading their own squad.) Intra-female conversation among teen girls is much more likely to be self-deprecating than that among boys, and it’s also far more likely to include disparaging remarks about the appearance or identity of perceived rivals.

It’s not the case that girls are “naturally” more introspective, or more filled with self-doubt, or are more cruel than their brothers. But because we inculcate in girls an absolutely impossible, unattainable ideal of physical and emotional perfection at such an early age, we set many young women up both for self-loathing and for hostility towards their female peers. It’s little wonder, then, that this study finds that talking about anxiety and depression isn’t as helpful for girls as it is for boys. It is a sign that those of us who care about young people need to be particularly attuned to the lack of resources that young girls have for safe and healthy opportunities to talk. Safe and healthy, by definition, means an uncompetitive environment, and it means providing them with understanding listeners whom these girls will not perceive as either judges or rivals.

The Winsome Vegan: some long thoughts about judgment, ethics, family dinners and “Hell’s Kitchen”

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I don’t watch a lot of television, but last night made a happy exception: the last few innings of the championship match of the world cup of softball and back-to-back episodes of “Hell’s Kitchen.” I’m still unhappy about the decision of the Olympic Committee to take softball out of the Games starting in 2012. (Sure, the USA’s women are absolutely dominant. But Manchester United is pretty darned dominant in the Premiership too, and that doesn’t mean that the likes of Sunderland don’t get excited about playing them. Softball ranks just behind American college football and soccer as my favorite team sport to watch, so I’m biased.)

Even when I ate meat, I was never what you’d consider to be a “foodie.” As I’ve written before, in my pre-vegan bachelor days, I could consist for days, even weeks, on food-related products purchased at the local 7-11. Being vegan does force me to be more thoughtful about what I’m eating, but it’s a thoughtfulness born more of necessity rather than pleasure. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my food, I do. But I’ve never had much interest in contemplating exciting new meals. Cooking shows — at least the sort where you are shown how to make something — are stunningly dull.

I do like fashion, and care much more about clothing than food. Hence, I do enjoy “Project Runway.” But I can’t explain why I’m so fond of “Top Chef” and the positively sadistic “Hell’s Kitchen”. Perhaps I just like watching people who are passionate about what they do struggling to perform under intense pressure. I know I’m at my best under pressure, and perhaps it’s empathy born of experience in other areas of life that makes the competitors on these shows so interesting to me. Lord knows, it’s not the food that they’re actually making.

And this brings me back to veganism. In the last four or five months that I have been much more strictly and actively vegan, I’ve been acutely conscious of my own dangerous tendency towards self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is the pit into which many adult converts tend to fall, and those of us who have “prodigal son” narratives (in my case involving a decade and a half worth of drugs, alcohol, multiple divorces and a lot of very unhealthy sexual acting-out) are all the more likely to become tiresomely prudish as we move to amend our way of life. Of course, in our zeal to promote the new “clean livin’” we’ve just discovered, we end up alienating everyone around us. I know I’ve slipped into the role of the prig many times, and as I grow in Christ, I’m all the more determined to not let that censoriousness characterize my thinking or my words about other people’s behavior.

At the same time, when it comes to veganism and animal rights, it’s hard. As someone who does believe that all sentient beings — not just humans — do have inalienable rights to life and dignity, it’s often difficult to find a way to live in loving community with those who find that view preposterous and silly. Watching “Hell’s Kitchen” last night, I saw one group of chefs preparing “bacon-wrapped rabbit” as a special dish. Looking at the strips of bacon wrapped around the little chunks of rabbit, I thought about the animals from which those morsels came. I thought about the hogs I’ve been around and the rabbits I’ve played with. (Lest you think I’m a purely urban vegan, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life on ranches and farms. I grew up around 4-H and FFA and have been to countless livestock shows and auctions. I’m not an urban sentimentalist totally ignorant of the realities of farm life.) I thought about the capacity of pigs to nurture and to protect, and the clear and obvious ability of rabbits to experience fear and pain and pleasure. And in order to continue watching the show, I had to shut down that part of me that wanted to scream “How dare you!” at the aspiring chefs.

I have vegan acquaintances who won’t go to family holidays where meat is served. I know some vegans who have severed all of their close ties with those who continue to eat animal products. They find it too painful to sit at family meals while those whom they love consume the flesh of creatures equally deserving of protection and care. I’m far too committed to my friends and family, far too interested in far too many different types of people to ever cut myself off from someone over their dietary choices.

With my family, we’ve reached a clear understanding. When we come home for family holidays (such as at Easter this year), we’ll bring our own food. No one will beg us to try “just one little bite” of ham or omelette. In turn, we won’t begin to hector our loved ones with the usual lines: “Do you have any idea how that was made? Would you be willing to eat it if you saw how that animal was slaughtered?” My wife and I not only sit next to meat-eaters, we even help in preparing dishes filled with animal product (as at the Fourth of July, where I spent over an hour cranking out ice cream I would never taste). We’ve made a conscious decision to strike a balance between our desire for loving, harmonious relationship with our families and our own commitment to no longer consume animals in any form.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, the meat eaters around me feel as if they’re being silently rebuked. As they slice their steaks and I spoon in my quinoa and broccoli, they look uncomfortable. I make a conscious effort not to stare at their food, I don’t make disgusted expressions, I don’t use passive-aggressive tactics to communicate disapproval. Nevertheless, I see some folks getting antsy. Often, they’ll ask if I’m “okay” with what they’re eating; I’m always careful to be reassuring.

At the same time, my veganism is not a value-neutral lifestyle choice. Being a feminist and being anti-racist isn’t morally equivalent with being a misogynist bigot. Those of us who fight for justice for women and ethnic minorities want to change hearts and minds and behaviors; we want men to stop abusing women, we want full inclusion for people of color in every aspect of public life. Most of us draw a distinction between someone who says “having toast with peanut butter in the morning is better than having cornflakes, and you can’t judge me for that view” and someone who says “raping women is something I prefer to not raping them, and you can’t judge me.” The latter involves tremendous harm to living beings whose lives have innate value, and so we feel comfortable and right in judging it. So if I believe that pigs and rabbits and cows have a similar innate value to that of a human being, am I not contradicting myself if I reassure my meat-eating friends that they’re “okay with me” when I would never offer that same reassurance to a rapist or a racist?

Yes, I do want a world where we’ve minimized the suffering of sentient creatures. I do want a world where we are all surviving and thriving on a plant-based diet, and I am eager to play a role in helping to create the economic systems and the policies that can make veganism as affordable and pleasurable and easy as carniverousness. The cost to the earth (in terms of water and protein, for example) to “factory farm” cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry is colossal and likely unsustainable. The cost in physical suffering is unspeakable, and I do wish those who eat meat would, at the least, imagine the face of the creature whose thighs or hindquarters they are eating. There can be no virtue in deliberate, willfull denial.

At the same time, I’m aware we live in a world trapped in the famous tension between the Already and the Not Yet. I am Already aware, at least I trust I am, of what it is God is calling me to be. I am Already convinced that I am called, and indeed, we all are called, to eat and drink and drive and make love and buy morally. I am Already convinced that to follow Christ is to live a life of courage and radical compassion; I am Already convinced that to live as an authentic feminist is to see that the exploitation of other living creatures for my pleasure is fundamentally unethical. I am Not Yet at the place where I can live this life perfectly, without the occasional small compromises that expose me and others to the charge of hypocrisy. I am Not Yet at the place where I can make the case for Christian feminist veganism without coming across, at least to many, as a charlatan or a fraud or a deluded prude swept up in religious enthusiasm.

So I’ll keep on keepin’ on; that means being cheerful about an undressed salad at an elegant restaurant while those around me nosh on chateaubriand. That means being unapologetic about animal rights while being warm, engaging, and non-judgmental with those who are unwilling to consider my position to be practical or desirable.

And it means I’m gonna work on another book proposal one of these days. Working title: “The Winsome Vegan: How to Live Cruelty-Free and Love those Who Don’t”.

Nezua on friendship in a time of bitterness

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The best post I’ve read all month is over at Feministe, and it’s from guest poster Nezua: Love is Revolutionary (the Threat of Friendship). It’s a very long, superbly written and compelling essay on the ways in which engaging in political dialogue (particularly in cyberspace) makes us dangerously prone to “othering” (seeing those who disagree with us as embodiments of the very evils against which we struggle).

I feel expansive and at peace, when I can listen to a fellow human being with a different kind of intent. Where I remember that the person in front of me may be just like me. Too often, instead of using the facelessness of online dialogue to strip away those visual and aural cues that might make someone Otherly and thus more easily identify with them, we use the anonymous, dissociated vehicle of online text to dehumanize; to strip the message of worth or heart or meaning so that we can pounce or perhaps just to rouse the negative energy buzz.

Sometimes people talk to me certain ways in threads and I say to myself Where are these people? Who are they? Because they only seem to exist online. I do not meet them in my life walking about. I have lived and grown up in a number of places, and for almost forty years and in city, country, and suburb—and I have never seen a conversation in a room progress, on a regular basis, into people rising up, shouting, leering, screaming, getting high on mob fever, dropping cruel and indiscriminate barbs. That’s jail behavior, if anything. But in everyday life and society? I do not run into people spitting invective or insult at me in our disagreements during the course of a day or in their very first statements to me being utterly and blatantly unfeeling. Nope. It does not happen

Nezua (who is moving towards Chris Clarke territory as potential blog-crush material) writes at his own place as well at Feministe: the Unapologetic Mexican. They very title makes it clear that his defense of friendship and kindness isn’t just another well-meaning but clueless attempt by the privileged to silence the legitimate anger of the marginalized and the oppressed. What I find so engaging about Nezua is that he is committed to the notion that kindness and forgiveness and friendship ought to be priorities even for those who are doing the hardest work in the trenches, fighting for social justice and global transformation. And let’s be honest: when well-meaning white folk say “Love your enemies” it often rings hollow; when those whose life experience has given them far more enemies than I will ever know, whose sense of disenfranchisement is more visceral than I can understand, when the likes of these speak of dignity and kindness it carries considerably more weight.

More on the erotics of teaching: a response to William Deresiewicz

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Several people (three counts as several in my book) sent me links this past week to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: Love On Campus. It’s an interesting and lengthy rumination about the ubiquity of the “lecherous English professor type” in popular film and literature; it’s also an examination of the role of sexuality in teaching.
It’s a subject in which I have some considerable interest.

Much of Deresiewicz says is, I think, fairly accurate:

Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I wanted to have brain sex with him.”

I like the Yeats quote, which I confess I didn’t know before. And his anecdote about his teaching assistant matches what I remember hearing about student crushes from my friend Tiffany back when I was an undergraduate (something I wrote about here.) If we’re doing our job, we are lighting fires — and when and if student arousal appears to be directed our way, we redirect it towards the subject and away from ourselves. Deresiewicz overlooks, however, the possibility that student attraction towards their best professors is less about the subject (or the professor himself), but rather about the student’s sense of their own potential to which their teacher is helping them to awaken. It’s a small but not insignificant distinction.

I also appreciate immensely this Yale professor’s acknowledgement that good teaching often flourishes in the less prestigious corners of academe (such as two-year colleges like my own):

In fact, kids who have had fewer educational advantages before they get to college are often more eager to learn and more ready to have their deepest convictions overturned than their more fortunate peers. And it is often away from the elite schools — where a single-minded focus on research plus a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering are the necessary tickets to success — that true teaching most flourishes.

He’ll get an “amen” from me there. Yet despite considerable agreement with good Professor Deresiewicz, I found myself troubled by other aspects of his piece. This bit about consensual relationships policies left me spluttering:

Professors are the surrogate parents that parents hand their children over to, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction evokes. But long before the baby boomers’ offspring started to reach college, the feminist campaign against sexual harassment — most effective in academia, the institution most responsive to feminist concerns — had turned universities into the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in American society, especially when it comes to relations between professors and undergraduates.

“The specter of the sexually predatory academic”? Specters generally are unreal phantasms that we fear irrationally. There is nothing spectral about predatory instructors (overwhelmingly male) who seduce (or in their distorted justifications, allow themselves to be seduced) by much younger (overwhelmingly female) students. The stereotype of the professor who crosses sexual boundaries he ought not to cross is hardly a figment of the literary or cinematic imagination. Sexual affairs between students and teachers that involve at best a colossal power imbalance and at worse deeply destructive exploitation are all too real, and Deresiewicz’s dismissal of that reality is disingenuous. Referring to “specters” invites us to think that those who pursue lecherous professors are on “witch hunts”. And yet witchcraft isn’t a real threat, and most accused at Salem and elsewhere were not real practitioners of the dark arts. The transgressions of amorous academics are all too real, and it’s a serious error to pretend otherwise. In his eagerness to insist that good teaching has an erotic element, which I think it does, Deresiwicz downplays the reality that many professors have a hard time distinguishing between “lighting an intellectual fire” and foolish, irresponsible seduction.

But with that significant quibble aside, it’s really a fine meditation on teaching and eros. And his penultimate paragraph elicited from me an enthusiastic “Hell, yes!”

Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

Bold emphasis mine.

All the more reason why we “Casanovas of the classroom” ought not to fear the regulations that seek to protect our students from the advances of our colleagues, whether those advances be fervently wished for or not.

All manner of things will be well

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I’m home briefly between errands, a lunch date and a coffee date. When I can’t work out, I feel compelled to fill my social calendar as much as possible. If I can’t indulge my endorphin addiction, I can at least meet with folks who help me indulge my ENFP need for conversation. I’m counting on being past the contagious stage.

I’ve got this feeling of awe today, the sort I’ve had in the past right before God does something unexpected and surprising in my life. It’s a strange mix of anticipation, nervousness, gratitude — and the absolute certainty that no matter what, no matter what, it will all turn out for the good.