Monthly Archives: January 2009

Guest posting at FMH on marriage, Malachi, and self-soothing

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Lisa, one of the administrators at Feminist Mormon Housewives, kindly asked me for a guest post this month; the popular home to some of the best commentary on the intersection of faith and feminism is having “Manuary” with guest male bloggers. My post is up today, continuing (from a more explicitly Christian perspective) some of what I’ve written lately about men, marriage, disparate desire and self-soothing.

The basic point I make is summed up at the end:

Marriage was not always meant to be easy. To be married is to be in the crucible of the refiner’s fire. And paradoxically, we are never more in that fire than when we are in a marriage without sexual heat. When we grasp that, we are well on our way.

The R Word

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My former student, Hilary, is now a women’s studies major — and she has a blog. She puts up her own poetry, and yesterday, offered up The R Word. Though it’s a public blog, I checked in with her before I linked to it, but it deserves a wider audience. As we head towards V-Day, the annual intensive focus on violence against women, it’s all the more appropriate that we do as she implores, and name the thing that is so hard to name.

January 17

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Regular posting returns Tuesday.

Fifteen years ago this morning, at 4:31, millions of Southern Californians were shaken awake by the great Northridge temblor. At the time, I was spending the night at my then-fiancée Sara’s apartment. (Sara became wife #2). She lived on the border of Brentwood and Santa Monica, in an area which was reasonably hard-hit by the quake. I remember being awoken by the shaking, and that moment, so familiar to long-time Californians, of wondering whether this one was worth getting up and going to stand in the doorway. As the shaking intensified, Sara and I leapt up and went to brace ourselves; as we got to the doorway, the shaking seemed to increase exponentially. We saw books flying, and the TV set crashing to the floor, exploding with a pop. Dishes and glasses and picture frames came down throughout her two-bedroom, 1930s-era flat. And my God, the roar — the sheer noise of the event was unlike anything else. Though we’d gone to bed fighting, we clutched each other, and shouted — at the same time — “I love you!” There was a very real sense that this “might be it.”

But it wasn’t it. The quake subsided. We spent the next few hours helping elderly neighbors and calling friends; the power was out but, as so often is the case even in severe shakers, the landlines came back remarkably quickly. And despite the damage and the losses, what I remember best about January 17, 1994 (Martin Luther King day) was the spirit of cameraderie that animated the whole city. If I, a child of the Central Coast who had come south reluctantly, had any lingering doubts that real community could be had in this town, those doubts disappeared for good in the aftershock-infused hours that followed the main shaker. Though I moved to Los Angeles in 1989 for graduate school, I date the beginning of my deep acceptance of this megalopolis from that remarkable, terrifying, tragic, and in so many ways exhilarating day.

My family lost a great deal in the 1906 San Francisco quake; a gorgeous home on Russian Hill was burned. We are old hands, or so we like to think, at the most quintessentially Californian of natural disasters. But though they may serve to bond the fortunate and insured survivors together, the hell earthquakes unleash on the most vulnerable among us tempers any satisfaction I have in having lived through quite a few. But they will continue to come, we know that much, and what I felt fifteen years ago this morning I — and my children, and my children’s children — will likely feel again.

In any case, I marked the anniversary by reviewing our chinchilla evacuation plan. A brief and amusing emergency drill was conducted, to the consternation of some and the merriment of others.

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From Carter to Obama: watching an inauguration in class

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The first presidential election I remember was in 1976; I walked precincts with my mother for Carter-Mondale, and stayed up later than my usual bedtime on election night to listen to the returns on the radio. Two and a half months later, I came to school on a chilly Carmel morning and watched the inauguration of the 39th president; my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Douglas, had the television on in the classroom. It was the first time I’d seen a live news event in class, and I was gripped. We watched the swearing-in, Carter’s speech, and parts of the inaugural parade. I remember that my classmates were unusually attentive, perhaps out of fascination with the political spectacle, or perhaps focused on the novelty of having the TV on at school.

Next Tuesday morning, I will meet with my History 1A class at 8:00AM sharp. I’ll lecture for about forty minutes, and then suggest that everyone troop down to Sexson Auditorium (which seats nearly 1000 people and is our largest room at Pasadena City College) for a group viewing of the inauguration. Rather remarkably, it will be the first inauguration I’ve watched live on television since 1977; in 1981, my eighth grade teacher at York School turned on the radio but not the TV. I don’t remember where I was in 1985 for the second Reagan inaugural; I was hungover and in bed for the first Bush inaugural in 1989. At the moment Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, I was meeting with my dissertation adviser. I was insufficiently interested in the second of his swearings-in, and out of disappointment and pique I deliberately found other things to do both times George W. Bush went through the prescribed investiture. But I am eager — and many of my students are eager — to see Barack Obama sworn in. A couple of folks in the 1A class had emailed me earlier in the week, expressing their hope that I would adjust the class schedule so we could watch the great event.

Since joining the PCC faculty in 1993, I’ve only turned on a television for a live event twice before. The first time was in October 1995, when I sat with my class to watch the verdict delivered in the OJ Simpson trial. I still remember the gasps at the acquittal, and the starkly varied reactions (largely along racial lines) among my students. And of course, I turned on the television on September 11, 2001, wanting to offer a comforting presence for my classes, knowing that some of the younger and more vulnerable ones would want to take in the horrifying images with a calm adult in their midst. Next Tuesday will be the third live TV event I’ve watched with students, and it will surely be a happier spectacle than the previous two.

Friday Random Ten: saying goodbye to 43 edition

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Lots of good stuff for this, the last FRT of the Bush presidency. It’s a genuinely random 10 the shuffle on iTunes produced, but I suppose that a case can be made that several of these songs have W. themes.

I make no apologies for loving #10, though the first 9 line up better with the genres I normally focus on. And the bonus track, as always, is the non-randomly chosen song that has been in my head most this week. I never liked the Seattle sound much, but while I had little time for Nirvana, I was always fond of Alice in Chains and the doomed and charismatic Layne Staley. Ryan Adams offers a faithful and strong cover of what, for me, is the quintessential early ’90s grunge classic. It’s very fine.

And though I like the Jimmy Martin version better, Del and the boys do a good job with #7.

1. “Dancing Barefoot”, Patti Smith
2. “Welfare Music”, John Hiatt
3. “Johnny 99″, Bruce Springsteen
4. “You’ll Always Be”, Oh Susanna
5. “Water and Stone”, Catie Curtis
6. “Biko”, Peter Gabriel
7. “My Lord Keeps a Record”, Del McCoury Band
8. “No Time to Cry”, Iris Dement
9. “I Am a Rock”, Simon and Garfunkel
10. “Umbrella”, Rihanna

Bonus Track: “Down in a Hole”, Ryan Adams

Of getting naked, and getting naked: of truth-telling, vulnerability, sex work, and the right to a past

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After yesterday’s post in the continuing series of posts on the subject of disclosing one’s sexual past to a partner, I got an email from a woman who is a regular reader and a Facebook friend. She writes:

My question comes from your “exclusivity” post. I’m wondering, if in a similar vein, how one should go about in terms of discussing such information such as having nude photographs taken, working as an exotic dancer, etc?

It’s a good question, and there are a couple of different queries buried within it. First of all, the issue of nude photos has changed enormously since the advent of the digital camera and the internet. Back in “my day”, it was difficult to get naked amateur pictures developed; many developers would simply throw away any film (including the negatives) that they judged obscene. I recall that a number of my friends, valuing their privacy, took Polaroids as a result of this longing for discretion and a permanent reminder of either nakedness or a specific sexual encounter. Today, with film more or less a thing of the past, it’s much easier to take — and more ominously, easier to send — naked photos of oneself. A couple of years ago, one of my youth group “kids”, then aged 16, took a topless photo of herself standing in front of her bathroom mirror, and e-mailed it to a boy she “thought” was her boyfriend. He shared the picture with friends, and the miracle of technology meant that half her school saw the photo. (At the time that one of my co-volunteers and I counseled her, we never realized that in some jurisdictions, this teen could have been charged with sending child pornography. She was, thankfully, never in legal trouble, but her humiliation endured.)

I don’t know what percentage of young people today take naked pictures of themselves and their friends with digital cameras. I imagine quite a few do, and that promises to delete the photos are as unreliable as similar promises about burning love letters were in the past. One waits for, oh, about 2025, when a Supreme Court nominee is forced to withdraw his or her name from consideration after nude pictures and a salacious college Myspace profile are uncovered by zealous journalists. And then, by 2045 or so, the ubiquity of these pictures and the cyber-indiscretions of the once-young will be so commonplace that this sort of thing will not be a disqualifier for high office. So, bottom line, I don’t think that the existence of amateur naked photos is going to remain a serious issue for years to come. What was once shocking will very quickly become banal, as is the way of most things.

That said, I don’t think my reader was writing about the topless photos one takes of oneself in the mirror with the trusty Canon SuperShot. She’s writing, I suspect, about whether to tell a new partner about one’s past experience of getting paid to pose nude, or to strip for money, or to do other things that would fall into the broad category of “sex work.” And that’s a much trickier question. Continue reading →

Thursday (not so) Short Poem and a note: Sexton’s “Rapunzel”

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This is a much longer poem than I would normally post. But I wrote on Tuesday about “older women, younger men”, and was reminded of a story told by one of my mentees.

When Kat was a high school senior, she had an affair with one of her English teachers, a woman in her mid-forties, more than twenty-five years her senior. The relationship did not turn physically sexual until Kat turned 18 just a few weeks before graduation. The affair continued for the better part of Kat’s first year at PCC, until Kat had the courage to break it off. I gave Kat a copy of this poem not long after she came to talk me about the relationship she’d had with her teacher, largely because the first time I heard the story, I instantly thought of the opening lines. Kat ended it up sending to her ex-lover with a rather curt note.

Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets, was at the height of her powers (and on the edge of madness) when she wrote “Transformations”, her interpretation of various classic fairy tales. Her take on Rapunzel resonated with Kat for obvious reasons — and it’s worth putting up here, despite its length. It’s all below the fold. Continue reading →

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Exclusivity, not rarity: further thoughts on the “number” and the richness bequeathed by a “past”

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In July 2005, I wrote a long post entitled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Right to a Private History”. I wrote about dealing with one’s own — and one’s partner’s — sexual past in a relationship, and the importance of not allowing one’s consciousness to obsess on what one’s current lover has or hasn’t done. I took an especially strong tack against the habit, common among the insecure and the young (particularly, but not exclusively males) of nagging to be told “the number” of previous partners. I wrote:

On the subject of one’s sexual past, I’ve become a great believer that no one should ever ask or answer the question “So, how many people have you slept with?” (Let me clarify: I don’t mean one shouldn’t tell one’s good friends, just not one’s partner.) Answering a request to reveal one’s number rarely turns out well, especially for women. For more conservative (and insecure) men, any number higher than “zero” will be too high; whether it’s five or fifty or five hundred, she may pay a high price for answering truthfully! To be fair, some women are also going to be unnerved by what they may regard as an “inappropriately high” number. The only rational response to such a query from a current or prospective partner is a gentle, loving “Tell me why you really want to know, and tell me what you’re going to do with this information once you have it.

I stand by those words today. I wrote in 2005 from the perspective of a man about to be married to his fourth wife, a man with a colorful history and a penchant for frankness who has (nota bene) never come close to disclosing his number on this blog, a site on which he discloses so much else. And I honestly have no idea where my wife’s number stands. And I thought again about that post, and about this topic, because of a comment Antigone made below Monday’s post on kissing:

There is nothing that I’ve done with my husband that I haven’t done with someone else. I don’t have anything that is “For One Person Only”; and yet, I don’t feel like my intimacy with him is lacking in any way.

I think we cross-over too many ideals from property, including rarity makes something more valuable.

That resonated with me yesterday, and got me thinking about the distinction between “rarity” and “exclusivity”. Like most feminists, I’m disgusted by the way in which the abstinence movement employs images of chewed gum or wilted roses to describe a woman with sexual experience. I’m infuriated by the tactic — employed by my fellow Christians who ought to know their New Testament better — of “slut-shaming” by suggesting that a girl or a woman (much less often a man) who has had pre-marital sex has lost her value. We are not cars; we don’t depreciate when driven off the lot. But these tactics work to create anxiety and shame in many young (and not-so-young) people. And these tactics are based on, as Antigone suggests, the misuse of the property model, a model that suggests that the less often something has been handled or used, the more “rarely” it has been seen or touched, the more valuable it is. We no longer treat women as legal property of their husbands, but we do employ property-based thinking when it comes to sex. Continue reading →

Five years of blogging

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Happy 5th blog-iversary to me. This blog began on January 13, 2004, and was hosted at Typepad from that date until November 2006. It’s been here at the dedicated hugoschwyzer.net site since that time. All the archives for the last 60 months are available on the right. Design credit goes to Lauren of FauxRealTho.

This is the 2,561st post I’ve written. I am quite confident that not a soul besides myself has read each and every one.

And let me say, having had this blog has been a joy and a challenge and a comfort for lo, this wonderful past half-decade.

Thanks for reading.

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Older woman, younger man, and a crush misinterpreted: a response to Luke

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My most popular posts, in terms of repeat visits and search engine queries, have to do with age-disparate affairs and student crushes. Generally, I write about older men, younger women relationships. But sometimes, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot.

I got an email a few days ago from “Luke”. Luke is 22, and just finished up an undergraduate degree in sociology at a mid-size and prestigious eastern university. For the last two years, Luke has been mentored by a female professor in her early fifties, a woman he has admired tremendously and from whom he has learnt a great deal. His professor is divorced and lives alone, and at the end of last semester, he was invited over (by himself) to her house. Pleased to be able to spend some quality time with his mentor, he eagerly agreed to visit.

Luke’s mentor offered him drinks (he is of age), and then propositioned him, telling him in fairly explicit terms how attracted to him she was. Luke made his excuses and left. As might be expected, he’s fairly shaken up about it:

I feel like it changed things,
but I don’t know how to be honest and deal directly with her. Honestly I am
anxious and saddened. I also feel guilty about it because as strange as it
seems to me, I started to develop quasi-romantic feelings for her midway
through the semester. Those feelings were oddly innocent (like a feeling of
tingling), but they were there. Something like: I had the strange compulsion to
hug her one moment after school (which I didn’t do). But we talked about these
kinds of things and I was frank with her… but withheld the cookies of sex
from her. So I feel like I arrested a natural progression of where things were going, and I also
feel like my mentor will resent me for it, at least at first. Even the first time I went over her house, I thought to myself as I got ready to go, ‘woah!… this kinda feels like a date…. hmmm, weird.. . . . . . Oh, well!”

My question is how do I continue this relationship
professionally while taking into account that I was propositioned; no I do not
want to take her up on the offer. She is actually a very cool, unique, and laid back lady,
and I take after her. I don’t want to condemn her for what she did. She was
tempted (I guess?), and I am an adult legally. But this relationship is not an
equal one. How could it be? She’s as old as my mom.

I suppose the first point to make is the most essential one: our skewed perceptions about male and female sexuality lead us to see older women, younger men relationships very differently than the reverse. With some considerable justification, we see women as having considerably more potential to be victimized and harassed than we do men; we see men as having considerably more potential to victimize and harass than we do women. And of course, when we look at statistics around rape, assault, and harassment, those perceptions are validated by the evidence. But we make a mistake when we confuse a patriarchal power structure that privileges men over women with the notion that each individual man always has power over each individual woman. And we make an even graver mistake when we deny that men — not just young boys, but grown men — can be victimized by asymmetrical sexual relationships. Continue reading →