Monthly Archives: July 2008

Ideological die-offs?

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Is it just me, or are we having an unusual die-off among famous right-wingers in this country? William F. Buckley, Jesse Helms, Tony Snow, Trisha Buckley Bozell, Charlton Heston, and — if we go back a year — Jerry Falwell, all dead recently.

My guess: they all wanted to die while a Republican was still president.

Of course, we went through a rough patch for feminists a while back, when we lost Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Anzaldua, Betty Friedan and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the space of about eighteen months. Do the great ones buy the farm in clusters?

Maybe these ideological die-offs happen in strange evolutionary waves.

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“The Good Divorce”: prioritizing justice over unity, and the recognition that the Anglican Communion has run its course

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It’s been a very long time since I’ve blogged about the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. Not so long ago, my spiritual life was centered at All Saints Church in Pasadena, where I served on the vestry and worked for many years as a youth volunteer. My faith journey, as it so often has, uprooted me from the comfort zone of that large and dynamic parish a little over a year ago. But I remain, in some sense, an Anglican.

The Communion is in turmoil. (A great collection of articles, written from a nearly-neutral perspective, can be found here.) Battles over the ordination of women (a fight that goes back more than thirty years), the consecration of women bishops, and over homosexuality in the church have hit a boiling point this summer. As has been widely reported, a loose coalition of conservative Anglicans (financed by disaffected traditionalists in the First World, but led by prelates from the Third) held a meeting last month in Jerusalem to plan a strategy for an “alternative” Communion. Other bishops are gathering in England this summer for the decennial Lambeth Conference under the auspices of the titular head of the Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The good Archbishop is besieged from all sides.

The most impressive church in the whole Anglican Communion, and perhaps the world, is to me the glorious Durham Cathedral. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the role of the prince bishops of Durham in the Anglo-Scottish wars, and spent much time in this loveliest of northeastern English cities. I never tired of visiting the stunning and majestic cathedral. The successor to my beloved medieval warrior bishops is the great N.T. Wright, author of a number of important works of popular theology and a leading evangelical voice within the church. I admire Bishop Tom, as he is known, and envy him his spectacular accomodations and his winsome writing style. I don’t share his traditional views on homosexuality, but have great respect for him regardless. Continue reading →

Phone confusion

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I’ve been in the same office, with the same desk and the same bookshelves, since I joined Pasadena City College full-time in 1994. Fourteen years ago next month, when I moved into room C313, I inherited the cheap plastic Ericsson phone that my predecessor had used; it dated from the mid-1980s. It had two lines easily reached by pressing a button. Another button to retrieve voicemail. And one to put a caller on hold, but that broke around the same time we started bombing Afghanistan.

Much has happened in my life since I came to PCC full-time, in the same summer that OJ went for his famous drive in a white Bronco. My first ex-wife and I talked on that phone. I planned three weddings (to wives two, three, and four) at least in part on that phone. And over the years, I’ve had four or five different office computers and a few different printers. I’ve had three different office chairs. I’ve shared my two-person office with five different colleagues since 1994. And though I’ve done some extraordinary things in that office, had some extraordinary conversations, finished a dissertation and written nearly a third of all my blog posts in room C313, I’ve always had the same phone.

This morning, I came to work and saw a brand new Nortel device (Nortel has been redoing the campus network this summer) on my desk. Lots of features that I don’t understand. It took me five minutes to find a dial tone. I have no idea how to access my voice mail. No handbook was left, so I’m planning on keeping the damn thing around for decoration until I work up the energy to ask someone to show me how to use it.

In the meantime, don’t call me on my office line. And I miss my filthy and battered Ericsson phone, through which I uttered so much that was interesting and inane for so long.

Against anxiety: of Full Frontal Feminism, the vapid recklessness of youth, and the reminder of the salutary effects of dirt

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I wrote a post last November about the very positive reception my students had given to Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti’s immensely popular and useful primer and polemic.

Now that I’ve assigned the book to several different classes, I’ve had a chance to collect a wider variety of reactions. Happily, the responses of my students to Valenti’s text remain uniformly positive, or very nearly so. And perhaps not surprisingly, one particular section of FFF continues to elicit the most impassioned reactions. In November 2007, I quoted this short section:

I’ve had more than a couple of embarrassing moments in my life and sexual history — but isn’t that what makes us who we are? Do we really have to be on point and thinking politics all the time? Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re young is just part of getting to the good stuff.

That resonated with my students then, and it resonates now. I had some great in-class discussions about this particular passage in my spring class, and got some marvelous journal responses as well. And the real meaning of those three sentences is deeper than may first appear. One of the most salient of Jessica Valenti’s points is that the dominant narrative, the one that suggests that poor choices in puberty (particularly poor sexual choices made by girls) will “ruin your life”, is largely a false one. Continue reading →

Hubert Schwyzer Quartet Update

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Scott Craig at Westmont College kindly sent me a link to this press release: Newly-Crafted Instruments Resonate Well. It begins:

The Hubert Schwyzer Quartet, a unique ensemble of instruments commissioned by Westmont, is taking shape under the hands of master violin maker James Wimmer at his workshop in Santa Barbara. Named for a former UC Santa Barbara philosophy professor and cellist, the quartet will be used by Westmont faculty and students during the school year and loaned to the Music Academy of the West in the summer months.

You can see pictures here.

The whole family is very eager to hear the first music produced by the quartet that will bear my father’s name in perpetuity. When you think about what lasts and endures, few human-made things are still useable centuries after they were made. Good instruments, however, can remain playable for three or four hundred years if well cared for. Dedicating a string quartet in someone’s memory, in a sense, is more lasting than getting their name up on a building.

We are still fund-raising for Westmont and its music program. You can, if you choose, give here; note Schwyzer Quartet in the gift designation area.

Blue book essays and the Martha Complex: on time management, test-taking, and letting go of perfectionism

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I’m grading summer midterms today, with an eye to passing them back Monday. I gave all three of my summer classes their midterms on Tuesday. In each class, including my women’s history course, the midterm was designed to take ninety minutes. Within that time, students were to answer two out of three essay questions within their blue books.

Yesterday, after my 25B (Women in American Society) class, two of my students asked to meet with me briefly. Both young women were very concerned that they each had done poorly on the exam for the same reason, namely that they had spent too much time answering the first question leaving themselves little time for the second. I gave them my standard spiel about the importance of time management, and reminded them that no matter how poorly they had done on the midterm, a strong final exam could go a long way towards lifting their course grade.

But we also talked briefly about perfectionism. For years, I’ve given the same classic exams: “blue book” essays, with students required to complete two prompts within a given period of time. Each essay is worth 50 points. And I’ve noted that my female students, particularly the very bright ones, often have a great deal of trouble managing their time effectively. Part of the trick of doing well on these exams is learning to let go of the perfectionist desire to write one flawless essay. Spending the full class period crafting one beautiful, elegant paper will earn the student a poor grade. One “50″ (a perfect score) and one “0″ is an F grade; two “35s” will earn a C.

There’s a method to this madness, and its rooted in more than a desire to inflict upon my students the same testing techniques that were inflicted on me. Learning how to write well under time pressure is an important, even vital academic skill. From a pedagogical standpoint, we can debate whether or not that’s as useful a skill as some academics imagine it to be. But there’s little doubt that my students, as they transfer on to four-year institutions, will continue to be exposed to tests that evaluate their competence at writing effectively under time pressure. And as long as these tests are given at places like UCLA, I have an obligation to prepare my students for those exams.

But there’s another purpose too, one that ties in to feminist work. I’ve written a lot about the “Martha Complex”: the relentless pressure that so many young women feel to be “perfect” in every area of their lives. This perfectionism shows up in disordered eating of course, but it also shows up in the tendency of many of the best and brightest to overload themselves with work, volunteer activities, and family obligations. Classic symptoms of the Martha Complex include near-constant anxiety and exhaustion. Not surprisingly, those with the Martha Complex feel a huge pressure to do well on exams. So knowing this, why do I offer the particular sort of tests that I do? Continue reading →

Self-awareness good, navel-gazing bad: some thoughts on men, accountability, and the lesson of Kyle Payne

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Cara, Jill, Belledame, Renegade Evolution and Jeff are just a few of the feminist bloggers to take on the disturbing story of Kyle Payne, a progressive feminist blogger and anti-pornography activist in Iowa. According to the Iowa Independent:

An Iowa blogger who claimed to use activism and education to promote “a more just and life-affirming culture of sexuality” for women, especially those women who have been victims of sexual violence, has pleaded guilty to photographing and filming a college student’s breasts without her consent.

Kyle D. Payne, 22 of Ida Grove, presented his guilty plea Monday in Iowa District Court for Buena Vista County. He agreed he was guilty of felony attempted burglary in the second degree and two counts of invasion of privacy, a serious misdemeanor.

At the time of the incident, Payne had been employed by Buena Vista University as a dormitory resident adviser. Police reports indicate that while attending to an intoxicated and unconscious female student, Payne reportedly assaulted and photographed her. The guilty plea entered Monday did not include assault charges. Tips received by police and campus security following the incident led to a 10-month investigation that resulted in Payne’s arrest in February.

There are other allegations on some of the blogs that Payne had child pornography on his computer as well, though I haven’t been able to find any substantiation — if anyone has more info on that aspect of this case, please include it in the comments.

It’s always immensely disheartening when any advocate for social justice is discovered living a life in contradiction to his or her professed values. In my initial comments on the subject at Jill’s, I wrongly implied that there was something particularly troubling about a “male feminist” betraying his commitments. I noted how angry I was that a young man who shares the same passion for sexual equality that I do had done such a thing, and I worried — and indeed still do worry — about the negative impact Kyle Payne’s appalling behavior will have on the public perception of feminist men. Some of the commenters on the thread pointed out that my concern was at least partly misplaced; Kyle’s real victim was the woman he attacked, and worrying about the impact on progressive men distorts the real impact of his actions. I think that’s right. Continue reading →

“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict

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It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.

At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.

But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”

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I posted this classic back in 2004, but it’s always good for a reprint. I’ve gotten a few such queries from absent students recently, and this Tom Wayman offering is the best riposte to what is, perhaps, the most idiotic and irritating question a student can ever ask.

Did I Miss Anything?

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything, I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place

And you weren’t here

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