Monthly Archives: December 2008

Resolutions

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As we say goodbye to 2008, let me wish everyone a happy 2009.

I do do New Year’s Resolutions, though I don’t always keep them. Here are three of mine for the year to come:

1. Grow comfortable with exercising less often. Most people resolve to exercise more, but I’ve had the opposite problem more often than not. Exercise is good, but not at the expense of other obligations. If I can work out four or five days a week, with only one of those workouts longer than two hours, I’ll still be fit but will have more time for others. And as long as I can control my anxiety about getting out of shape, I’ll make major progress.

2. Fritter away less time on Facebook.

3. Be better at friendship maintenance.

Feel free to share your resolutions in the comments.

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Jesse, Jeff, and the always wince-inducing Dennis Prager

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Dennis Prager, who often writes about family values, is notorious for dressing up ugly misogyny in the guise of deep spiritual and psychological concern for women. He’s outdone himself at the end of the year, however, with two particularly lamentable pieces: When a Woman isn’t in the Mood (part one) and When a Woman isn’t in the Mood (part two).

Fortunately, Prager’s appalling views receive the careful fisking they deserve from two splendid pro-feminist men. Here’s Jesse Taylor’s post, and here’s Jeff Fecke’s. (Cap tap for the former to Sarah.) Both Jeff and Jesse have a lot of sensible things to say about men, women, sex and relationships, deconstructing the three odious lies that Prager peddles: one, that the “I will” of the wedding day binds a woman to relieve her husband’s needs regardless of her own feelings; two, that women are, at their core, less libidinous than men; three, that men are uninterested in and incapable of deep emotional connection. Read both posts.

I’ve written about marriage and sexual obligation a few times: here, here and here. Jesse and Jeff write from secular pro-feminist perspectives, and I write from a slightly more theologically-tinged viewpoint, but we’re all on the same page.

“Turning down the volume on KHGO”: reflections on overcoming a personality disorder

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A couple of years ago, I put up this post about overcoming my own mental illness. In particular, I wrote in response to this post by the Happy Feminist about her relationship with her narcissistic father.

In my years in and around the mental health system, I was consistently diagnosed not with depression but with a personality disorder. More precisely, I was regularly described (by several psychiatrists) as having “cluster b” personality disorders: Narcissistic, Antisocial, and everyone’s favorite, Borderline. Based on the traditional criteria, I hit each and every one of the criteria for the last of these, and many of the crucial ones for the first two. From late adolescence until the cusp of thirty, as I cycled in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals, these diagnoses were offered again and again. And in my 2006 post, I talked in general terms about my recovery, conversion, and transformation. But I didn’t get much into specifics.

I’ve corresponded a bit with Jan at Planetjan, who has written quite a bit about dealing with folks with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (See her first, second, and third excellent pieces.) She wrote something that stirred me up a bit, for understandable reasons:

How is a personality disorder different from mental illness? I had a hard time initially wrapping my head around this one. A mental illness (schizophrenia being the most widely known) can be treated, with varying degrees of success, with medications or cognitive therapy. Most mental illnesses are caused by brain cell synaptic disruptions, most of which are believed to be genetic in origin. I have friends who are bipolar and as long as they take their meds, any symptoms subside and they feel and act relatively “normal.” Mental illnesses typically present themselves in late adolescence or early adulthood. The onset of the mental illness is often sudden and profound. A mental illness descends over a person’s personality like a heavy wool blanket feels on an already warm summer night.

A personality disorder, on the other hand, is all pervasive. The DSM-IV describes a personality disorder as “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectation of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.”

With mental illness, a person’s personality is blanketed, or suffocated, by the onset of the mental illness. But the personality of someone with a personality disorder is virtually interwoven into every fiber of that blanket. Unravel the blanket and you unravel their personality.

So someone doesn’t have a personality disorder; they ARE the personality disorder. These personality traits are so deeply ingrained that they defy change.

Bold emphasis mine.

I’ve heard this distinction between mental illness and personality disorders before, of course, though rarely so succinctly expressed. And of course, it brings me up short. Looking at my life narrative, three possibilities suggest themselves as a response to her position (widely but not universally held by the psychiatric profession) that personality disorders “defy change”:

1. Despite being diagnosed with cluster B disorders again and again over more than a decade by a number of doctors, perhaps I never really had a personality disorder — the shrinks were wrong. I just met a whole bunch of the diagnostic criteria, but not the disorders themselves.

2. The diagnoses were correct in the first place, and I’m fooling myself — and a lot of other people — when I claim that I have “overcome” the pernicious influence of these disorders on my psyche and my life. I may have gotten better at disguising the NPD and the Borderline characteristics of my identity, but they still dominate my identity at its very foundation.

3. Jan, and a great many doctors, are wrong. Personality disorders, as powerful as they are, can be overcome.

I want to believe #3, and most of the time, I do believe #3. I seldom give much credence to #1, largely because of the preponderance of evidence over a fairly significant period of time. I do worry, less and less as I grow older, about #2. The fear that I am broken, “maimed from the start” by an aspect of my identity that can be hidden but never erased, comes up occasionally. I know that I have aspects of my personality which continue to meet the diagnostic criteria for at least some of the named disorders, even if I do what I imagine is a very credible job of keeping them from becoming manifest and obvious to others. Continue reading →

Two more cents on Rick Warren

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The New Year is almost upon us, but there is yet time for a post or two in 2008. My wife and I have had a busy but happy Christmas season so far. We’re starting to make progress on our movie-going; basing our decisions on major award nominations, we see three-quarters of the films we will see all year in the period between Christmas day and the Super Bowl. I’ve already praised “Milk” here on the blog, and offer now enthusiastic endorsements for “Slumdog Millionaire” and the breathtaking, heartbreaking “The Wrestler.”

Almost everyone else has weighed in on Barack Obama’s decision to invite Rick Warren to give the invocation at the January 20 inauguration. I have little to add to the many voices that have spoken on the subject, save to say that I remain both frustrated and bemused by the mutual incomprehension that emerges at moments like this between secular progressives and more conservative elements in the country. It’s a gulf that Obama himself has promised, over and over again, to bridge. Bridge-builders will invariably arouse animosity from those who derive satisfaction from staying on their side of the fixed chasm that exists between the two sides in the culture wars. The wisdom of the Warren selection, from Obama’s perspective, may be that it serves to demonstrate his Solomonic remove from partisanship. The left is infuriated by Warren’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage; many on the right are infuriated by the imprimatur that his invocation will give to Obama’s presidential agenda.

It is axiomatic that religious conservatives often have trouble grasping the various distinctions that divide the left. The right-winger who rails against “feminists” doesn’t know a “Marxist feminist” from a “liberal feminist” from a “radical feminist”, and probably isn’t clear on which “wave” women of Hillary Clinton’s generation belong to. It is also axiomatic that most progressives tend to see the religious right as monolithic. Theological divides (such as the famous one between Pentecostals and Southern Baptists which exploded in the PTL scandal two decades ago) often seem arcane and insignificant to those who don’t come from Christian backgrounds. As a result, both sides — if we can speak of there being only two — in the culture war caricature and misunderstand each other. (And my goodness, we don’t help ourselves with the shop talk. With feet in both camps, I may be reasonably comfortable talking about both “perfomative heteronormativity” and “supralapsarianism”, but really, it all gets a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated!)

Many folks on the left may not fully understand the degree to which Rick Warren is viewed with suspicion by the religious right. Indeed, as many commenters have pointed out, it’s not accurate to call Warren “right-wing” at all. He has, time and again, explicitly rejected the adversarial politics of an older generation of Christian conservatives (represented by the late Jerry Falwell and Jim Dobson). While remaining in the right-wing camp on issues such as abortion and marriage, Warren has consciously de-centered the purely sexual issues from his message. He has been willing to talk about AIDS, poverty and environmental degradation, making clear that his vision of Christian involvement in public life involves more than an obsession with pelvic morality. Many of the older generation of conservative American evangelicals, the sort who see the fight against abortion and gay marriage as “first among equals” in the struggle to remake America, are exasperated, even enraged by what they see as Warren’s willingness to grant moral equivalence to other issues.

It is also axiomatic that partisans are invariably disappointed by the presidents whom they successfully elect. Read old issues of National Review and Human Events from the 1980s; far from being a constant conservative darling, Ronald Reagan regularly aroused ire from the hard right during his administration. Similarly, the left will be frustrated by Obama time and again, chiefly because the gap between the promise and the possible always widens after inauguration day. But one particular way in which the left will be frustrated is by Obama’s dead serious commitment to healing rather than exacerbating the cultural divide that has so occupied this country. Choosing the immensely popular and affable Rick Warren, who is as close to a genuine centrist* as the evangelical movement has these days, is a signal of this eagerness to build consensus rather than increase division.

The GLBTQ movement is right to be frustrated by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and to have a progressive president select a supporter of that initiative to give an inaugural invocation stings. Like it or not, we can assume that Obama meant it when he said he believed marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples; it was wishful thinking that led some in the movement to assume that his words to that effect were only political posturing. As a result, the movement needs to push forward on the marriage issue at the state and judicial levels, and look to the Obama Administration for leadership on other issues. And there are other issues, ranging from protection against discrimination to greater funding for AIDS treatment to revisiting the unworkable and outdated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Marriage equality will happen, but the nation’s 44th president has made clear that on this issue, he will be a follower rather than a leader.

*If the (white) evangelical right includes the like of Dobson, Richard Land, and John Macarthur, and the (white) evangelical left includes the like of Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, then it’s safe to say that Rick Warren represents a middle ground on a wide variety of theological and political issues.

On “O du Fröhliche” (again)

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My favorite Christmas carol is the one which comes into my head every year at this time: “O du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.

But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.

That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.

I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 44, miss mine this Christmas.

It’s a fine carol.

Merry Christmas.

Seeing Milk, teaching Milk, celebrating Milk

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Yesterday afternoon, I gave my last exam of the year; my History 24F (Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History) class drew the lucky (or unlucky) slot of being my “final final”. After the test was done, I went with those students who were able to join us for an early evening showing of “Milk” at a nearby theater. They’ve been a particularly wonderful group this term, and I wanted to take in this important film as a class. (Thanks are due to Laemmle theaters, for selling me discount group tickets, and to Stephanie and Taylor, two of my students who work there.)

If I hadn’t wanted to see it for the first time with my GLBTQ class, I would surely have gone to see “Milk” as soon as I could have; I waited impatiently for last night, knowing that it would be so much better to take it in in the company of so many young people whom I love and admire. I was not disappointed.

Much has already been written about the film, and about Sean Penn’s magnificent portrayal of Harvey Milk. The supporting cast — especially Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and James Brolin — is superb, with nearly every actor bearing an uncanny resemblance to his or her real-life counterpart. And though I had shuddered when I heard that Gus Van Sant was directing this film, as I normally don’t enjoy his style, I loved this movie. Just as another director I don’t like much, Spike Lee, was able to get out of his own way and produce the brilliant and near-perfect “X”, so too Van Sant never gave us the sense that we were supposed to sit back and watch his genius at work. He gave us a wonderful, deeply moving, timely and immensely inspiring film.

Let me say, of course, that everyone who has not seen “The Times of Harvey Milk”, the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary about Harvey, ought to see that. Van Sant clearly drew inspiration from that film (and some archival footage as well), and it helped strengthen the picture. I’ve shown “The Times of Harvey Milk” to many classes over the years, and could probably recite most of the film by heart. (Now that I think about it, there are perhaps no other films ever made — documentary or otherwise — I’ve seen as often!)

Like a great many people, I feel as if I have a personal stake in the story of Harvey Milk. I was eleven years old, and in the sixth grade at Carmel Middle School, when he and George Moscone were assassinated. I had heard of Moscone; my family, living on the Monterey Peninsula, had many connections to what all my life we have called simply “the City.” I only vaguely knew who Harvey was; I was an unusually politically aware eleven year-old, however, and had done some precinct walking against Proposition 6. (As the movie shows, Prop. 6 was the measure that was defeated in November 1978 that would have banned gays and lesbians from serving as teachers). Harvey had led the fight against Prop 6, and as a result, I knew his name, but somehow hadn’t grasped that he was a San Francisco Supervisor. Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”

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The traditional pre-Christmas poem is always this AA Milne classic. For the sixth consecutive year, it’s up on the blog. I will recite it to my children for as long as I live, just as my mother has recited to me from my earliest remembered Decembers.

But hey, it’s a bit longer than some of the others, so it’s tucked below the cut. Continue reading →

Top Ten Feminist Achievements, 2008

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Jen Nedeau posts today the Top Ten Moments in Feminism of 2008. Many good things, but I’m especially fond of her #4, which notes that unmarried women went for Obama by a staggering 70-29 margin, in some states tipping the election to the Democrat.

Of course, I like me my top ten lists too, and Jen invited others to join the fun. Here are my “Top Ten Moments in Feminism of 2008″. I could have included several things from Jen’s excellent list, but in the interest of breadth of responses, here goes.

1. Electoral gains for women across the country, including the New Hampshire senate, where for the first time in American history, a state legislature now has a majority of women.

2. The Church of England, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, endorsed the idea of women bishops for the first time this summer.

3. FIFA held the first-ever U-17 Women’s World Cup in New Zealand; North Korea brought home the coveted trophy. At last in 2008, women and men now have complete age-group championship parity through the international FIFA structure.

4. Linda Sanchez, Democrat of Orange County, California, becomes the first “unwed mother” to serve in Congress. (The baby won’t be born until 2009, but the 39 year-old Sanchez won re-election after her “out-of-wedlock” pregnancy became public knowledge.)

5. For all you crazy Anabaptists out there, 2008 saw the first woman ordained as pastor in the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, perhaps the most important regional conference in the Mennonite Church USA (of which I was once a member).

6. The reviews on Babeland’s new “Sasi” vibrator suggest that, well, something very special has arrived in the world of what used to be called “marital aids.” No one needs to hear this old boy’s opinion, but my “better-informed sources” tell me marvelous things.

7. Danica Patrick won her first Indy Car race, becoming the first woman to win on that prestigious motor racing tour.

8. The two biggest cooking shows on American television, “Top Chef” and “Hell’s Kitchen”, each had female winners for the first time.

9. In both Rwanda and Spain, women moved into the majority of cabinet positions in government — the first time women had held the majority of cabinet positions in any democracy.

10. Rachel Maddow (whom I adore) becomes the first openly lesbian host of a prime-time television news program.

Feel free to do your own top tens!

Rejecting the narrative of male sexual indispensability

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One of my former youth group kids came to talk to me last week after reading last week’s post about sexual identity. Louisa, 19 years old, has been “out” as a lesbian since she was in ninth grade, and has been with her girlfriend for two years now.

Louisa is in love with her gal. But lately, she finds herself questioning her self-identification as a lesbian. Though she describes having always hated the label “bisexual” for what she saw as its “wishy-washiness”, she talked about her growing curiosity about what it would be like to be (sexually, if not romantically) with a man. Louisa has never done more than simple kissing with a guy, and she finds herself wondering whether she ought to “try something” with a man just to find out what it’s like. She admits she’s been driving her girlfriend crazy with this hemming and hawing about having an experience with a fellow. But her curiosity, more so than her libido (though she’s savvy enough to know that those two are often enmeshed) is causing her to be, in her words, “mildly obsessed” with knowing what it’s like to be sexual with a man.

Louisa has taken my gay and lesbian studies class. She has read her Adrienne Rich; she knows about the reality (not just the theory) of growing up in a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality.” And she knows very well that if she were with a man, she might feel far less psychological pressure to experiment with a woman. “We don’t make straight women prove their straightness by having sex with girls”, Louisa said, “so why do I feel so compelled to ‘prove’ I’m lesbian by trying something with a guy? It’s like I feel I have to earn my queer credentials.”

Louisa, who has known me since she was 13, wanted one thing from our conversation last week, and it’s something I don’t know if I was able to give to her. She wanted help discerning whether this fascination with trying “it” (specifically, losing her heterosexual virginity) was something rooted in her own psyche or whether it was a response to the dominant cultural narrative. I pointed out the obvious — that for most of those, those two things (“natural” or “inherent” longings on the one hand and the socially-conditioned ones on the other) are incredibly difficult to separate. A lot of us spend a great deal of time working through this process of discernment; it’s one of the toughest tasks of young adulthood, and not a task everyone succeeds in completing. But the fact that it’s difficult doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Clearly, most of us believe that our internal “bundle of desires” has innate and cultural-constructed elements. For example, we might say that for someone like Louisa, an attraction to women is largely innate while her attraction to partners who have dark eyes and like anime is largely conditioned. Continue reading →

Obama’s Green Team: Grade B so far, but still incomplete

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President-elect Obama has rounded out his cabinet with the announcement this week of appointees for the departments of the Interior, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

I’m not a single-issue voter, but I certainly elevate the environment to a place of primus inter pares when it comes to the factors I weigh in selecting a candidate for whom to vote. And while the line-up which Obama has presented is not without its flaws, at first glance it seems like a good group. Of course, in the aftermath of the disastrous Bush Administration’s environmental policies (particularly at Energy and Interior) almost anything would look like a whopping improvement. Though like most progressives, I would have preferred Raul Grijalva of Arizona at Interior (rather than the apparent nominee, Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado), I don’t see anyone unacceptable in the lot.

I’m still waiting for the post I care most about: Agriculture Secretary. Considering that animal agriculture produces more carbon emissions than all the jets in the sky, it’s screamingly obvious that agriculture and environmental policy are closely intertwined. Given the coming battles over genetically-modified foods, crop diversity, water policy, animal rights, farm worker rights and so forth, it’s clear that the Ag Secretary will be one of (if not the most) vital players in advancing a progressive agenda on the domestic front. I’m happy to say the Nation agrees with me today!

So far, I give Obama’s environmental team a B. Depending upon whom he selects at Agriculture, that final mark could move up or down one full grade. I know it’s too much to expect Gene Baur, but Michael Pollan would send me over the moon. On the other hand, if Obama picks someone in the pocket of Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, or Hormel — then the chance of progress for workers, consumers, the earth and its creatures is much reduced.