Monthly Archives: July 2008

The political, the personal and regulating the minimum BMI for supermodels: another response to John Spragge

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In my post last Friday celebrating the 160th anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments, I quoted this line from that most worthy of feminist documents:

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

I noted that our feminist foremothers at Seneca Falls were not just concerned with the issue of poltical rights and public justice, but with the world of private emotion. These foremothers knew, and knew very well, that a movement that concerns itself only with winning political rights, but not with the emotional well-being of an oppressed class, ends up fighting only half the battle. Hence I wrote, riffing off the lines from the Declaration above:

The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.

John Spragge makes a pair of criticisms below that orignal post, taking issue with my reading of the Declaration and my suggestion that the Seneca Falls conventioneers were willing to make personal concerns a central aspect of their agenda. John writes:

Politics exists to manage the public square, the shared spaces where we meet. But if the same politician promises to make me happy or make me good, we have a problem. Politics stops at my skin.

I certainly am not suggesting we form an Orwellian federal Department of Happiness that ensures that each citizen has a strong sense of well-being. But the fact is that unhappiness of the kind the declaration describes –an abject dependence, a lack of self-respect, a dearth of self-confidence — doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Though some unhappiness may be a result of poor personal decisions, or a result of some sort of familial abuse, or due to organic factors in the brain, a great deal of the kind of unhappiness that the Declaration laments is a direct result of public policies and social mores that treat women very differently from men. Continue reading →

“Elitism”, privilege, and competition: some thoughts on the new Deresiewicz article

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Marian, a periodic reader, sends me a link to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. It was almost exactly a year ago that I responded to another Deresiewicz American Scholar article in this post.

As with his essay on consensual faculty-student relationships, Deresiewicz in his current piece on academic elitism takes a good idea and promptly takes it just one step too far. His basic thesis this time around: an Ivy-league education makes you incapable of connecting with ordinary folks. His first bit of evidence? His own inability to connect with a plumber standing in his kitchen.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this.

I know I’m often accused of making universal applications out of my own experience, but I don’t think even I have done something quite so risible as what Deresiewicz does here. The idea that a first-rate education somehow renders the recipient of that education clueless about the real world is a classic American slur; anti-intellectualism is a potent force in American politics, and has been at least since the Andrew Jackson Administration. It’s disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that some academics who ought to know better find themselves joining the chorus of those who decry the “useless” nature of top-notch higher education.

It’s all too easy to offer counter-anecdotes. Barack Obama went to Harvard Law, for heaven’s sake. There are many criticisms that might be made of him, but an inability to connect with those who were not similarly well-educated is not one of them. And though I’ve never sent a transfer student to Harvard undergrad, I have had former students of mine go on to graduate school at that most famous of American universities. I’ve had exceptional students here at Pasadena City College who have transferred to other Ivies, such as Cornell, Penn, and Columbia. I’ve seen first-generation students from working-class Mexican-American families go “back East” and come home to put the education they received to work within their communities. Most of my colleagues could say the same. Continue reading →

Bumper stickers, license plate frames, and the importance of courteous driving

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On the back of my Volvo, I have a license plate frame that says “Go Vegan.” I’ve never been a big fan of bumper stickers, but I usually have some sort of statement on the frame that surrounds the license. (My front frame is the standard Cal Alumni one, made of faux brass.)

I’m not a bad driver, but having a statement about veganism on my car makes me a better one. I know that there are others out there who connect the political messages on a car with the courtesy (or lack thereof) with which the car is driven. If I’m swerving all over the road and cutting people off, I know that it’s possible that someone will look at my plates, and, cursing under their breath, say “That vegan’s an idiot.” I doubt I’m going to win any converts to a plant-based diet solely by virtue of having this frame on a well-driven car, of course! But I know that when someone with a slogan on their vehicle has been particularly courteous towards me on the road, it affects — if only for a second — my feelings about the politics they’ve endorsed. If, say, someone with an NRA sticker ends up letting me into their lane, and we end up exchanging friendly waves, it helps lessen some of the antipathy I normally have towards the pistol-packing set.

Back when I was first getting sober, twenty years ago, I tooled around town in a beat-up Honda Accord. When I got my first thirty-day chip in my sobriety program (I got far too many of those), I went out and bought a little bumper sticker with the famous triangle inside a circle, symbolizing the Twelve Step program with which I was affiliated. I later got the diamond within a circle, which symbolized another program. I felt as if I was honoring the anonymity of the program while still sending a message; I know that when I was frustrated in traffic, it helped calm me down if I saw another car with one of “our” messages (One Day at a Time, Easy Does It, Live and Let Live) or the Triangle itself. And it helped me drive better, knowing that I was “representing” the program. My first sponsor told me “Your recovery will manifest in your driving”, and I kept that in mind.

So now I’m reppin’ the vegan life with all that it entails. And it carries with it a responsibility to be attentive and courteous.

How do you readers feel about messages on cars? Does how the car is driven connect with how you perceive the message on the bumper sticker or the plate?

“The battery that powers our lives”: more on sex, faith, justice

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This is part two of a three-part series on Christian sexual ethics. Part One is here.

In that first post, I touched a bit on the subject of justice and the importance of reconciling our Christian obligation to “do justice” with our own understanding and practice of sexuality. I’d like to expand a bit on that here.

We’re all aware that there’s more to justice than the law. Many folks — perhaps, particularly, the poor and the marginalized — are keenly aware that legal systems the world over, even the best ones, are frequently unfair in both theory and practice. (Anecdotally, my mother spent one year in law school, at Boalt Hall. In a first-year torts class, she became so upset by something the professor said that she blurted out, to the entire room, “But that’s not just!” The professor smiled and replied, “Miss Moore, justice has nothing to do with the law.” Many of her classmates — including future California governor Pete Wilson — chuckled. My mom was so incensed she left law school, and went on to earn a Ph.D in political philosophy at Cal.) It’s clear, in any case, from both a religious and a secular perspective, that there’s far more to doing justice than remaining scruplously obedient to the law.

Someone who, for example, observes all tax and traffic regulations cannot be said to be “just” for that reason alone. Justice is less about what one fails to do and more about the positive actions one takes. Similarly, someone who — in keeping with what is still a majority position among traditionalist Christians –waits until marriage to have sex cannot be said to be “doing justice” through their private restriction, no matter how laudable it might seem to others. If justice is giving to others what is truly their due, then perhaps it is a form of justice to be obedient to what you perceive to be God’s commands. But in and of itself, it’s woefully insufficient. What makes a sexual relationship just has less to do with whether a couple is heterosexually wed and more to do with the degree of reverence they have for each other. At its core, sexual justice is linked to the recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the other. “Good sex”, to repeat what I said in my last post, is worshipful sex: it honors the gift of pleasure, but also the spark of God inside each of us. To make love to (and with) a partner, in other words, is to honor the aspect of God within them. That can happen inside or outside of marriage. Continue reading →

Early good news

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The first comprehensive poll on Proposition 8 is out today, and it looks good for those of us who support marriage equality. In the Field Poll, 51% of Californians oppose amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage, while 42% favor it. Too soon to pop champagne corks, but as long as Senator Obama can drive a good number of young folks to the polls, it looks like gay marriage is en route to its first ever victory at the ballot box.

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Declaration of Sentiments weekend: a note on the centrality of self-confidence, self-respect, and independence in the great feminist struggle

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This Sunday, July 20, will mark the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Most historians choose to mark the beginning of the organized American feminist movement from this moment, which had its antecedents in the abolitionist and temperance struggles that had begun earlier in the nineteenth century. (Parenthetically, I’m feeling old: it seems like five minutes ago that I was talking to my summer school students about the 150th anniversary. Ten years have flown by.)

The Declaration is elegant, powerful, and beautiful. Modeled in part on the Declaration of Independence, the document sets forth a list of the various ways in which a male dominated society has deprived women of what is naturally theirs, just as Jefferson’s declaration contained a long list of grievances against the British Crown. And though many issues were on the table at the Seneca Falls convention, the document makes clear that three causes, above all others, were of paramount concern:

1. The Right to Vote
2. The Right to Own Property
3. The Right to Education.

None who signed the document in 1848 would live long enough to see all of these rights won, though we can say with some satisfaction that for the vast majority of American women today, what were once distant goals are now common-place reality. But I always point out to my students that the Declaration of Sentiments wasn’t just concerned with winning political rights for women. It was also a call to transform how women thought about themselves. The last of the grievances listed:

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

In other words, three hallmarks of patriarchal and misogynistic culture are a lack of self-confidence, an absence of self-respect, and an unwillingness on the part of women and girls to embrace independence from men. Read positively, our foremothers at Seneca Falls, eight score years ago, saw that real liberation was not merely about providing political, economic, and educational rights for women — though of course, those rights were indispensable. Real liberation had to be internal as well as external. And what the framers of the Declaration knew was that real freedom for women would and could only come when a culture had been created that was as psychologically empowering as it was politically egalitarian.

Winning rights has proven easier than changing cultural values. The popular culture, with its tyrannical insistence on female physical perfection, has undermined the confidence of (by now) several generations of young American women. The pressure to live up to impossibly high familial and societal expectations has robbed just as many of their self-respect. (An old post on “respect” is here). And 160 years after Seneca Falls, after three successive waves of feminism, we still find ourselves combatting cultural forces that promote the most noxious lie of all: that for women, more so than for men, the most profound happiness is always contingent upon a heterosexual relationship that has been blessed with children. We teach women, in countless ways, the lie that dependency is liberation, that true freedom lies in sublimating your own wants to that of another. We still teach far too many women that the pursuit of self-sufficiency is a recipe for loneliness and isolation, and that in order to have meaning and purpose for one’s life, one must be willing to surrender completely to love and its dictates.

Self-confidence, self-respect, and independence (emotional and economic) are vital feminist concerns. It was 160 years ago on Sunday that the framers of the Declaration of Sentiments first centered these three goals in the struggle for women’s freedom. And though the political goals of 21st century feminism have changed quite a bit from those of 1848, the essential struggle for women’s self-confidence, self-respect, and independence continues. The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.

On Sunday, raise a glass to the women (and their many male allies) who came together 160 years ago this weekend to launch a movement whose achievements have transformed our world for the better, and though the struggle may yet be long, whose final victory is assured.

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“Do Me, Do Me Right”: part one (very long) of a four-part series on Christianity and sexual ethics

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This is part one of a three-part series this summer on Christianity and sex. Part Two will look more closely at issues of sexuality and global justice and part Three will look at how to reconcile contemporary sexual ethics with Scripture and tradition.

Christian sexual ethics are much on my mind, on the minds of many of my students and youth group kids, and this summer, very much on the public’s radar as well. Next week, we’ll mark the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s famous Humanae Vitae, the encyclical that declared virtually all forms of contraception to be incompatible with Catholic teaching. In many ways, Humanae Vitae was the first blow struck in the reaction against the liberation movements of the 1960s, and it was the seed for much contemporary conservative thought about the meaning and purpose of our bodies and our lives. From a progressive standpoint, its fortieth anniversary is not cause for celebration. (But in all fairness, if you want to read a fine — but very, very wrong-headed — encomium to Humanae Vitae, visit First Things for this Mary Eberstadt piece.)

And of course, the Anglican Communion is on the verge of major schism this summer over, above all else, the issue of sexuality. A church that survived numerous revisions to the prayer book, a church that bravely embraced contraception way back in the 1930s, a church that largely held together when women began to be ordained in the 1970s, is now at last falling apart over the issue of homosexuality. Tied up in the near-certain schism is the basic disagreement among Christians about what constitutes “ethical sex” in the eyes of God. There seems little chance of a resolution that will both keep the church together and, at the same time, be congruent with how two very different groups of Anglicans see the role of sexuality in our lives.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about (and studying about, and writing about) Christian sexual ethics for many years, since I first took a course on Patristic Theology at Berkeley in 1987. I became a Roman Catholic the following year, and then had a tortuous series of peregrinations that led me to — and through — the Assemblies of God, the Mennonites, and the Episcopalians. (I’m just your average, run of the mill “charismatic Anabaptist Roman Anglican”.) Though I continue to worship at a variety of Christian churches today, I am now involved in the work of the Kabbalah Centre. And of course, I have a Ph.D. in Christian history, though that doctorate focused more on the ethics of war than on the ethics of sex.

I also come to the discussion as a heterosexual man in his forties, four times married, thrice divorced. I come as a college gender studies professor who works closely with Christian and non-Christian students alike, many of whom, I am happy to say, have chosen to see me as their mentor. I come to the discussion as a former Episcopal youth leader, who spent seven years teaching workshops on “Sex, All Saints Style” to high schoolers at the largest Anglican parish west of the Mississippi. So I bring a lot of experience, passion, and yes, baggage, to this subject.

From a theological perspective, though I’ve never been a Methodist, I come to the discussion with a healthy reverence for what’s often known as the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral”: Reason, Experience, Scripture, Tradition. The “Quad” suggests that any understanding of God’s call on our lives needs to rest on those four things. Many Christians from across the theological spectrum have embraced the Quad as a sound method for discerning right thought, right speech, and right action.

So after all that build-up, what am I ready to say about Christianity and sex?

If there’s one core principle I derive from using the “Quad”, it’s this: in the end, God cares more about the content of our sexuality than he does about its form. Traditional Christian sexual ethics are often discussed in the context of what Christians can and can’t do. Modern conservatives will often say things like “the only form of genital contact sanctioned by God is that which happens in a marriage between one husband and one wife.” The implication is clear: if you get the “form” (heterosexual marriage) right, then the sex that follows is licit. If you haven’t got the form right, then sorry, Mabel, sorry, Ernest, you’ve “fallen short of the mark.”

But “form-based” sexual ethics clearly have their problems. For example, it ignores entirely the great likelihood that coercion, disrespect, and force can take place within marriage. The Catholic church did not start condemning marital rape — or even acknowledging that such a concept was possible — until the second half of the twentieth century. Is a situation in which a husband demands sex from his wife against her will somehow more congruent with the spirit of Christ than a situation in which two unmarried people make love with mutual enthusiasm? If you’re a stickler for “form-based ethics”, you bet. For the most traditional of theologians, marital rape is less of a serious sin than homosexuality or pre-marital sex, because form matters more than content. (And when was the last time you heard Focus on the Family put out a series of messages against intra-marital coercion?) Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Hughes’ “Coming Down Through Somerset”

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I know, another poem about animals struck and killed on the roadway. It’s been a theme this past month, after my heartbreaking encounter with a dying rabbit; I’ve already put up Pablo Neruda’s piece. And here’s one from the decidedly unsentimental Ted Hughes, who could write the animal body better than any of his contemporaries. Hughes had a radically different approach to nature, but his love for the wild was immense.

I’ve driven down through Somerset on the back B roads of the southwest. And since I was a little boy, I’ve been giving burials to the dead animals I found on various streets and roadways. I may be an effete suburban liberal, but I have no fear of blood and guts and torn-up bodies. (Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’m scared to handle even dead rattlesnakes.) In the end, love generally conquers squeamishness.

Coming Down Through Somerset

I flash-glimpsed in the headlights — the high moment
Of driving through England — a killed badger
Sprawled with helpless legs. Yet again
Manoeuvred lane-ends, retracked, waited
Out of decency for headlights to die,
Lifted by one warm hindleg in the world-night
A slain badger. August dust-heat. Beautiful,
Beautiful, warm, secret beast. Bedded him
Passenger, bleeding from the nose. Brought him close
Into my life. Now he lies on the beam
Torn from a great building. Beam waiting two years
To be built into new building. Summer coat
Not worth skinning off him. His skeleton — for the future.
Fangs, handsome concealed. Flies, drumming,
Bejewel his transit. Heatwave ushers him hourly
Towards his underworlds. A grim day of flies
And sunbathing. Get rid of that badger.
A night of shrunk rivers, glowing pastures,
Sea-trout shouldering up through trickles. Then the sun again
Waking like a torn-out eye. How strangely
He stays on into the dawn — how quiet
The dark bear-claws, the long frost-tipped guard hairs!
Get rid of that badger today.
And already the flies.
More passionate, bringing their friends. I don’t want
To bury and waste him. Or skin him (it is too late).
Or hack off his head and boil it
To liberate his masterpiece skull. I want him
To stay as he is. Sooty gloss-throated,
With his perfect face. Paws so tired,
Power-body regulated. I want him
To stop time. His strength staying, bulky,
Blocking time. His rankness, his bristling wildness,
His thrillingly painted face.
A badger on my moment of life.
Not years ago, like the others, but now.
I stand
Watching his stillness, like an iron nail
Driven, flush to the head,
Into a yew post. Something has to stay.

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Conferences and a call for support for South End Press

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Things worth announcing:

The Radical Women Conference in San Francisco, October 3-6.

Animal Rights 2008 National Conference in Washington D.C., August 14-18, 2008.

Conference on Gender and Missions in Toronto, sponsored by Christians for Biblical Equality, this coming weekend.

National Conference on Men and Masculinity #33 in Salt Lake City, August 21-23, 2008.

I wish I could be at all four, frankly. I don’t know many folks who would feel comfortable at all four, mind you. But it would make me happy if I could mix and mingle with the good people at each of these important events. Alas, I have other commitments for each of these weekends. But if you can, go.

And please support South End Press. One of the great feminist publishing houses, South End (like Seal, another favorite) is an indispensable home for alternative voices. I’ll be using one book from South End in my women’s studies class this fall, but given the current publishing market, it’s not clear how long Southend can survive. (H/T: Miriam at Feministing.) Today, I joined the Community Supported Publishing Club at South End, and invite you to consider doing so as well. And you get books!

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Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement

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In summer school, the gap between what I want to do and what I have time to do yawns particularly wide. I’m lecturing five hours a day four days a week, and that doesn’t count prep time. I’m not complaining, mind, just sayin’ that it makes it hard to get the blogging in that I would like. I’m trying to work up a longer post on feminist Christian sexual ethics, but that’s going to be delayed for a while.

Just a quick link to an interesting Times story this morning: Trying to Bridge the Grade Divide in L.A. Schools. Hector Becerra’s Column One offering explores the wide (and, some say, rapidly widening) success differential between Latino and Asian students in California high schools. Becerra visits Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, a famous institution with a large percentage of both Asian and Hispanic students, and interviews both teachers and kids about the “achievement gap.” At Lincoln, Asians are 15% of the student body — and 50% of the enrollees in Advanced Placement classes. Virtually all of the students, regardless of race, come from working-class, first-generation immigrant families; socio-economics alone do little to account for the disparity.

Lots of familiar explanations crop up, with differing cultural expectations usually topping the list. Continue reading →