Monthly Archives: July 2008

Needing a break: on hiatus until August 29

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I need a hiatus. Today is July 29, and I plan to return to blogging 31 days from today, on August 29.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of my blogging career, though the archives from my first five months of posting are, alas, lost in the floating ephemera of cyberspace. My preserved archives (which can be viewed by clicking on the tabs at right) go back to January 2004. Again, thanks are due to the wonderful Lauren of Feministe and Faux Real Tho for doing amazing work to create this blog and collate a great many posts. I’ve written close to 2500 posts which I’ve stuck into more than 100 categories. No single person, including myself, has to my knowledge read them all. I’m not suggesting that that’s a great loss.

As many long-time bloggers have pointed out, blogging can come to feel like work. Sometimes, it is exciting work — but other times, it is unpaid drudgery. Most of us notice that our “stats” rise (in terms of number of readers) as long as we post regularly, and the fear quickly develops that if we don’t stay active, our fickle readers will leave us, never to return. Chasing readership is tiring sometimes. It’s not what I do for a living, after all. This summer, blogging has felt like work.

In the last nine months or so, I’ve gotten involved in several bruising battles within the wider progressive/feminist blogosphere. A number of bloggers took temporary breaks from the ‘sphere, so exhausted and disheartened were they. Most returned within a few weeks or months. I realize now that I ought, perhaps, to have taken a break as well. It’s only been recently that I’ve figured out how disconsolate I was as a result of some of these exchanges. Losing the respect and “cyber-friendship” of people I admired has taken a greater toll than I imagined. A very large number of people who once linked to me now no longer do. It’s not other people’s job to make me feel good, but it was painful and upsetting in ways that took me, oh, about four or five months to figure out. Sometimes my verbal dexterity covers up a heart that is very slow to process. (The darned ENFP/Gemini thing.)

I love blogging. It has changed my life. I intend to return to it at the end of next month, and be a regular blogger through the fall. But I think that for those of us who blog a lot (and I’ve averaged nearly ten posts per week for five years), taking at least two months off a year is probably a good thing.

I have some traveling to do in August, and lots of thinking to do. When I come back to the blog, I want to come back with a renewed commitment to eradicating the worst of my writing habits. The tendency towards sanctimoniousness runs deep; it’s one of my worst defects of character. I don’t doubt for a second that I can write with power as well as with humility, but the pompousness is so damn reflexive, so seemingly natural…

In any case, I’ll see you all on August 29.

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Pundits, pastors, and bloggers: of anger, culpability, and the Unitarian shooting in Tennessee

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Sometimes, I make fun of Unitarians. I have many Unitarian Universalists in my family, and have more or less grown up on the fringes of UU culture. My father, step-mother, and sisters are deeply committed Unitarians and have been active in the society for years. My father’s memorial service was held at the Unitarian church where he, uh, didn’t quite worship but did sing enthusiastically. The Unitarians have a long history of commitment to social justice, of commitment to radical inclusion, of commitment to interfaith dialogue. Above all, they are the best and kindest of universalists, sure that in the end, the ocean refuses no river. I honor them for that.

Yesterday, a gunman opened fire at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. Two church members were killed before the deranged gunman was tackled and taken into custody. One of the two dead parishioners stood in the path of the attacker’s shotgun, protecting others with his body.

Today’s reports reveal that the assailant targeted the Unitarians for their liberal views.

One of my regular readers — and a Facebook friend — is Sarah, a student at Tennessee and a member of the church. She was not there yesterday, and is well, though badly shaken. She and all her community are in my thoughts and prayers. Continue reading →

Primates on limits

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The 2008 Lambeth Conference in England enters its final week, and it is still unclear whether the worldwide Anglican Communion will hold together. I blogged my thoughts ten days ago. Many sites are covering the conference; check out Episcopal Life, the Guardian, Integrity USA’s, or Kendall Harmon’s.

Fights over women bishops and same-sex marriage are getting most of the coverage, but I’m relieved that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself is still willing to focus on other, perhaps even more vital issues. In Saturday’s Guardian, Rowan Williams offers a terrific reflection: A New Spiritual Politics of Limits. The archbishop writes:

We live in a world of finite space and finite resource. Endless trajectories of growth are not realistic; and our own rising “oceans” of food and fuel prices are a stark reminder that scarcity is not someone else’s problem in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

Somehow, conventional political discourse has not dealt with this very successfully. Time was when part of the wisdom of conservative politics was about limits, realism, adjusting to certain givens in the social and material environment, and moderating expectations. Unfortunately, this proved all too often to be a way of recommending the disadvantaged to accept their fate; and progressive politics was thus frequently allied to a passionate belief in endless possibilities of self-improvement and more sophisticated control of the environment. You have only to think of the utopian aspirations of the French Revolution or of the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

And when a drained and abused environment takes its revenge, we seem often very confused. Rather bizarrely, the environmental family of issues is seen in some quarters as a sort of liberal conspiracy, another turn of the screw for liberal guilt, and therefore to be treated with the same robust scorn as all other fashionable and self-indulgent moralising. But at the same time, a progressive politics still finds it very hard to let go of its legacy. If emancipation and the advance of human capacity don’t simply mean economic growth without limit, what do they mean?

Excellent question, and I appreciate the dig at so-called “conservatives” who are, in practice and in theory, anything but when it comes to their attitude towards conservation for the good of our planet and all the life upon it.

The Archbishop wrote in response to something raised by the Bishop of Polynesia: rising ocean levels are, within a short time, going to make much of his island-chain diocese uninhabitable. In that light, some of the quarreling over pelvic morality seems, well, self-indulgent at best and shamelessly irresponsible at worst. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church USA raised this same issue in her Easter Sermon this year. Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote:

We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors. We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives. We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space. When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

And all God’s creatures said, Amen!

Christians are fond of saying things like “God will provide.” And yes, as a believer, I trust that God will provide. But we make a huge theological error when we confuse divine provision with carte blanche to exploit the earth and its creatures. Scripture grants humans dominion over the earth — but to exercise dominion is to be, literally, like the Lord. When God gave Adam and Eve stewardship over all of creation, it was in order that they might love and cherish it with the same intensity and care that He showed and shows for His creatures. And when we fail to exercise “just dominion”, we fail to honor the God who commended this earth and all of its creatures to our care.

Archbishop Williams concludes:

Contrary to what some would say, religious belief is in significant measure a way of acknowledging limits that are shared by all human beings – the limits involved in bodily dependence on a friendly environment, and in the fact of death. Faith proposes that finding your way within these limits (including awareness of death) is how we lead lives that have some claim to rationality and – to use the religious word – grace.

That’s a message desperately needed.

“Bowflex Boy” and Kristy McNichol: desire, celebrity, and the sexiness of earthy reality: UPDATED

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There’s been an interesting discussion going on beneath this post at Feministe. As part of a riposte to some rather silly criticism of Third Wave, sex-positive feminism, Jill last week put up a number of pictures of hot shirtless men. (It’s reasonably work-safe to visit.)

Some commenters (both men and women) criticized the decision to put up the photos. They asked the usual questions: isn’t it reflective of a double standard if we denounce men for objectifying a narrow range of beautiful women, while celebrating when a feminist woman posts pictures of handsome, ripped, relatively young men? Isn’t it problematic to celebrate a narrow ideal when we live in a culture in which body dysmorphia and self-loathing is rising dramatically in the male population?

Jill responds to the criticism in this comment. When the question of poor male self-image is raised, some commenters leap in to make the perfectly legitimate case that all things considered, women today suffer far more from a culture that fetishizes a very narrow notion of perfection. That’s true enough, but the damage done to young men by our contemporary ideal of the “cut, be-sixpacked” physique is very real.

But this post is not an attempt to revive some sort of suffering Olympics discussion about male v. female body image issues. Rather, I’ve been thinking about something I learned twenty years ago about desire, the ideal, and insecurity. In college, I lived for a while in a co-op on the northside of the Berkeley campus. There were 37 of us in the house, nearly as many women as men. One of my best female friends in the house lived in a “single”, and I often visited with her in her room. (I had a triple for most of my time in the co-op). Debbie had a huge poster on her wall — an ad for the “Bowflex Man.” If you remember the ’80s, you remember the ad. I’ve done a Google image search, and can’t find it, but the picture is indelibly carved on my brain. A young, dark-haired man is pulling off his shirt, lifting his arms over his shoulders. His body beneath is tanned and spectacularly toned. A Bowflex machine is in the background. Half the dorm rooms on campus seemed to have this picture up; it was more popular than that college staple, Robert Doisneau’s kissing Parisian street couple. Here’s the picture: Bowflex Boy

Anyhow, Debbie had this picture in her room, over her bed. At one point, Debbie and I made a brief attempt at a romantic relationship. It lasted only a few weeks before we realized we were better off as friends. But I remember that when I was naked in her bed the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of masculine perfection just inches away. I was not terribly out of shape in college, but in both color and texture was a bit doughy around my middle. I certainly wasn’t “Bow-flex boy”. And after we had finished fooling around, as we lay in her very narrow single bed, I made a rather joking, obviously insecure remark. It’s been more than twenty years, so I don’t remember exactly how I put it, but it was something like “I can’t believe you want to be with me when you’ve got this guy to look at.” Continue reading →

Five most embarrassing songs meme

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Jill had a meme up the other day: list the five most embarrassing songs you’ve got on your Ipod. There are both aesthetic and political reasons to be embarrassed, I suppose. At one time or another I downloaded each of these, and a couple have made it on to Friday Random Tens (which will return in September). #5 presents perhaps the greatest assault on good taste among these songs, while #4 is to be lamented for its appalling worldview. But they are all still on my Ipod, and I play them from time to time.

1. “Betty Davis Eyes”, Kim Carnes
2. “Rhythm of the Night”, DeBarge
3. “This is the New Sh*t”, Marilyn Manson
4. “One in a Million”, Guns n’ Roses
5. “Make Me Lose Control”, Eric Carmen

Bonus Embarrassment: “All Cried Out”, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
I love this song.

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Unattainable perfection versus the attainable good: of cruelty, veganism, and the lamentable Wesley J. Smith

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I’ve debated, over the last forty-eight hours, whether it was worth responding to this risible National Review article (is that a redundancy, I wonder?): Veganism is Murder. Wesley J. Smith, who is apparently writing a book about the animal rights movement, opines:

Listening to animal-rights activists bray on about the wrongness of slaughtering animals for food — summarized in their advocacy phrase “meat is murder” — one would think that the choice we have is between a diet in which animals are killed and a strictly vegan diet involving no animal deaths.

But life is never that simple: Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use.

Smith is hardly the first to point this out; indeed, serious environmentalists (Smith is neither) have gently made that case to some of the more naive members of the animal rights community. It’s absolutely true that no respirating, masticating, clothes-wearing consuming human can ever claim that the life they live is entirely free from the stain of death. Plant-based agriculture takes lives. A squirrel on the motorway can be crushed as easily by a Toyota Prius as by a Ford Expedition, and the chemicals released by companies making synthetic shoes can do nearly as much harm as is done by those who use real leather. No thoughtful, educated vegan believes the myth of his or her own absolute personal purity. We know, better than most folks, how complicit each of us is in the ongoing Great Crime that human beings are perpetuating against our fellow creatures. Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Ryan’s “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard”

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Last week, Kay Ryan was named the new poet laureate of the United States, replacing the estimable Charles Simic. In addition to being a fine poet, Ryan is a fellow California community college professor; she teaches English at the College of Marin. I wasn’t very familiar with Ryan’s work before the announcement of her selection, but of what I’ve tracked down, this is my favorite so far.

Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

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“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear”: of Scripture, the Spirit, and Christian sexual ethics

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This is the third post in the Christianity and Sexual Ethics series. Part One is here, part Two here.

I blog as a self-described Christian feminist. I blog about my relationship with Christ, and I also blog in favor of same-sex unions and, in this series, in favor of a sexual ethic that is justice-centered more than law-centered. This means that I get lots of email from readers, who worry that I apparently haven’t read my bible. At least once a week, and often more frequently when I’ve posted on one of these subjects, I get an email in this vein:

“I enjoy your blog but I think you need to look at Scripture again. The Bible prohibits sexual immorality. You are a teacher and a youth minister and you ought to be teaching young people about the importance of purity instead of encouraging them to defile themselves with sin. Please look at the attached passages and see the error of your ways.”

Back in the early days of my blogging career, I got into email arguments with these folks. And of course, I got sucked into the disastrous “proof-texting wars.” Proof-texting, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the bad habit of taking a single passage of the Bible out of context and citing it as “proof” that your particular position is the only legitimate one that a believing Christian can hold. Whatever the subject: pacifism; dietary laws; abortion; the role of women; the possibility of free will or sexuality itself, “proof-texters” from across the ideological and theological spectrum can find quotes that they imagine will serve as their “gotcha” lines.

I’m not a theologian, of course, though I do have an academic background in Christian philosophy. (Thanks in particular to Marilyn Adams, who was on my dissertation committee and literally and figuratively held my hand while leading me through Duns Scotus.) In this post, I’m not going to marshall a series of passages from the Bible to support my position that God’s intent for human sexuality allows for genital expression outside of heterosexual marriage. I’d be quoting out of context, doing the exact same thing that my theological opponents are apt to do. It’s a fun game, but frankly, I’m getting too old to play that. I will, however, use a single passage to frame a short discussion of how it is I think we ought to see Scripture. Continue reading →