Monthly Archives: February 2009

Oscar Eve Link Love

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Actually, nothing about the Oscars in these links. In case you’re wondering what I’m pulling for tomorrow night:

Best Picture: The Reader
Best Actress: Kate Winslet
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke
Best Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei

I think I’ll get the main actor and actress awards right, but lose the other three. Never mind.

Some Saturday night links:

Jessica issues a stirring rebuke to those who insist on peddling the “hook-up-culture-is-ruining-our-daughters’-lives” myth.

Amanda hits it out of the park with a similar post: “Dangerous Young Women Who Know Themselves.”

Violet Socks on Women’s Rights and Culture — a nice corrective to those who think feminists ought to think twice before criticizing the way non-Western societies treat women.

Amber Rhea on class consciousness.

Jenell Paris, one of my favorite Christian feminists writers in the whole ‘sphere, put up a very insightful series: What Evangelicalism Likes. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

Many years ago, Jenell (who is an anthro prof at Messiah College in Pennsylvania) and I joked we were going to form the North American Evangelical Gender Studies Association (NAEGSA). If you’re a feminist — and your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life — and you were born again of water and spirit — AND you believe gender is largely a social construct rather than a biological or divinely-ordained reality — well, we’ve got a place for ya in our little club.

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Of pink

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Since our daughter Heloise Cerys Raquel came into the world just over three weeks ago, friends and family have been giving us various adorable baby girl outfits. And though we’ve had a few yellow, green, or pale blue items, the overwhelming percentage of blankets and onesies and dresses and shirts and pants we’ve received have been some shade of pink. In our unbiased opinion, Cerys looks marvelous in that color.

I’m often struck by the vehement hostility with which some folks react to pink. For some, it may be a purely aesthetic objection — they just don’t like the shade. For others, it’s the modern association with “traditional” femininity. (As most fashion scholars will tell you, less than a century ago, pink was considered a masculine shade.) Plenty of young women who were both swathed in pink and in sexism as little girls associate pink with the straitjacket of misogynistic cultural expectations. In the minds of some, a young woman’s fondness for rose almost becomes a litmus test for her willingness to live within conventional gender roles. Anyone who has worked with groups of junior high school girls, for example, will know that a mere discussion of the color can lead to rowdy — and occasionally serious — disagreements. I’ve worked with many a gal who went through an “I hate pink” stage; the objections tended to be more political than aesthetic. As they age, most drop all but aesthetic objections to the color. Still, even among adults, I sometimes encounter flashes of genuine hostility to the shade. And I have been asked, more than once, if my wife and I intended to dress Cerys in pink.

Of course, as my friends and students know, I wear pink often. My favorite off-the-rack shirt store is Thomas Pink, though I have green and blue items from that merchant as well. I’ve been wearing pink for more than 25 years, since my high school days in the preppy culture of the early 1980s. I like how the color looks on me, of course, but I also like the subversiveness of the choice to wear it so often. Though pink has waxed and waned as a fashion for men in the past quarter century, I’ve always had pink shirts (polos and long sleeves) as key elements of my wardrobe. And I’ve long enjoyed flouting the convention, common in at least some circles, that pink is an unserious and even de-masculinizing choice for a man to wear.

Pink on a man can mean many things, of course. It can mean “preppiness”, or it can mean a comfort with androgyny. It can even, I’ve been told, be a symbol of a strange kind of classism. One of my exes who didn’t like the color once remarked that she thought that only wealthy (or aspiring-to-be wealthy) men wore pink; her theory was that pink is normally “read” as a feminine color. Therefore, only a man confident of his affluence and of his cultural power would dare to signify his comfort with something so feminizing. “WASPs can afford to wear pink because they don’t need to project obvious masculinity”, she said (or something like that.) She postulated that preppy WASPs know that they already have the culture behind them, protecting them, and therefore they send a certain message about their own power with that willingness to wear the shade. She compared it to the captain of the football team dressing up as a cheerleader for laughs; he can do it because he is such a hyper-masculine icon that he knows no one will seriously dare question his manhood. Someone with less status can’t do it as easily. Or so her theory went. I didn’t think much of it, but I’ve run into others who share similar views.

Anyhow, I love pink — both the soft pastel and the vibrant, aggressive, Miami Beach-on-Easter-Sunday variety. And my daughter, who will grow up with some very strong feminist parents, will grow up with plenty of examples of tough, athletic, and ambitious women. But until such time as she starts making her own clothing preferences known, we will swath her in various shades of rose.

Friday Random Ten: music for new fathers who wear pink

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And the first FRT in a while features new discoveries for me at #1 and #7, my favorite song off the new GNR record, a magnificent Loretta Lynn/Jack White duet, and on the bonus, a song by my beloved Catatonia, featuring the sublime Cerys Matthews (she of the most wonderful name).

1. “Jungle Drum”, Emiliana Torrini
2. “The Everlasting”, Manic Street Preachers
3. “Ootishenia”, Be Good Tanyas
4. “My Favorite Book”, Stars
5. “Portland, Oregon”, Loretta Lynn
6. “For a Dancer”, Jackson Browne
7. “Reasons to Love You”, Meiko
8. “I.R.S.”, Guns n’ Roses
9. “Angels”, BoDeans
10. “Warm and Tender”, Caitlin Cary

Bonus Track: “International Velvet”, Catatonia

A note on Erfolgtraurigkeit, Schopenhauer, and exes (again)

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A few months ago, I put up a long post about how we move on with and without the people from our past: The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow. This week, Amber, who introduced me to the marvelous (if somewhat cobbled together) term Erfolgtraurigkeit (sadness at another’ success) links to a New York Observer story about the frustrations of having an ex-boyfriend suddenly become a much better person after your relationship ends.

I was happy for him, but there was also a little teensy part of me that felt whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is—instead of feeling happy at someone’s misfortune, I felt resentful at someone’s good fortune. Why couldn’t he have gotten his proverbial shit together while we were dating? And, a more uncomfortable thought: Was it somehow my fault? Maybe, I realized, I had seen him as someone who had potential but just needed a little tweaking. But it was sort of annoying that he managed to do all the tweaking after we’d broken up.

It’s the Butterfly Effect: one day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights “playing music” (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.

I like Erfolgtraurigkeit as the opposite of schadenfreude.

I wrote last November:

I don’t know if it’s always been entirely true, but I’ve always assumed that every woman with whom I shared a bed and a life liked me and wished me well. It’s not that I imagine that I am God’s gift to women; far from it. But for whatever reason, I’ve never been the sort of person who imagines that those closest to him secretly dislike him. All of my exes found flaws in me, of course, and most of the time, those infuriating flaws played a part in the end of the relationship. But though they might have been furious with me sometimes, and even said “I hate your guts” once in a while, I always figured that deep down, they wanted nothing but the best for me as I did for them. In most of these relationships, what ended up happening was that the gulf between the “real Hugo” and the “public Hugo” became obvious and eventually overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s had the pleasure of dating and mating with someone who was habitually diagnosed with the standard “cluster b” personality disorder.) It may well be my my old character defect of narcissism rearing its ugly head, but I remain convinced that those whom I loved genuinely and deeply loved me as well, and that even after the relationships ended, their hope and their expectation that I could grow and change endured.

And so today, I do everything I can to pour all of my sexual and romantic energy towards my wife. At the same time, I know that my ability to do so is based on experience as well as grace. I am blessed to have been loved, and loved well, by many people in many ways. Whatever confidence and optimism and resilience seems apparent in my character is a consequence of having certainty that I am loved. Loved by God, first and foremost, and — increasingly — loved by myself. Loved by my wonderful family, of course, and loved too by a series of women who in one way or another tried to build a life with me. I learned from each and every one of them, or so I tend to think; the fact that most lessons had to be repeated several times doesn’t vitiate that truth. Of course, the role of these women was not to make me a better man — they had their own drives, their own motives, and their own equally important lessons to learn. But the byproduct of the love we made and the lives we shared is a series of lessons about how to live, and live well, in this brutal and beautiful world.

I haven’t asked if any of my exes experience Erfolgtraurigkeit, and I’m certainly not going to hunt them down to ask. Were one of them to inquire “Why are you sober and faithful and communicative in your marriage now, when you weren’t any of those things when you were with me?”, I would assure her that my bad behavior was never a response to anything that she did or didn’t do. Every one of my relationships taught me something new, even if the lessons learned did not result in any discernible change in my actions until long after those relationships had ended. And some of the lessons I needed to learn were repeated in a series of relationships until finally the stars aligned and I “got it”. I accept that it might be immensely frustrating to have been the very last one on the list before the “Eureka!” moment.

One of my exes whom I dated on and off for more than a year was a drug addict and an alcoholic. We alternately used together and tried to get sober together, were chronically unfaithful to each other, and couldn’t stay away each other. It was with this woman that I did drugs for the last time and took my last drink; it was with this woman that I tried to take my life — and hers — in a strange and thankfully unsuccessful suicide pact in June 1998. I haven’t seen this ex of mine since I looked over at her in the ER of a hospital where we were being treated for our overdoses. We spoke a few times in the weeks after this disastrous final evening together, but we have had no contact at all in well over a decade. I heard recently through mutual friends that this ex of mine is doing well, finally sober herself, in a relationship, living a good and interesting and productive life on the other side of the country. I was very happy to hear this, though I had and have no interest in resuming contact.

But if I am rigorously honest, there’s just a little bit of me that wants to know if our relationship, for all of its beauty and toxicity, played a role in prolonging her addiction or served (as it did in my case) as a catalyst for transformation. It’s ego, of course, that creates that hope that I was an important and ultimately positive figure in her life. But I know enough to know that not everyone has the same narrative. I tend towards a tenacious optimism as well as a fondness for the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc — and that means that I tend to have, as my linked post above makes clear, a generous slant to my memories of ex-wives and ex-lovers. It ought to be pointed out that that generosity is linked to an ease with forgiveness (ENFPs tend not to carry grudges) and, perhaps most importantly, a recognition that in relationships, I have always been a sinner (to reverse Lear) more often sinning than sinned against! The reality that others may want to blot out any recollection of “what we had” is one of which I am keenly aware. That awareness doesn’t entirely vitiate that childish and narcissistic longing to “know that I was important”.

But there is no Erfolgtraurigkeit. Rather, there is simply an acknowledgement that in the end, in the final analysis, we make sense of our past the best way we can, by making it all seem part of the plan. Many people know this famous excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth.

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

Bold emphasis mine. This is how I see my former lovers, and how — though I have no say in the matter — I would like them to see me. It’s how I see most people, really, who have come in and out of my life. And in that vision, there is surely no room for Erfolgtraurigkeit.

30 days in, and hope is very much alive

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Barack Obama has been president for thirty days, and to believe some reports, has proved a disappointment to liberals. Though I am far from a full-fledged political junkie any more (in high school, I could name all 100 senators; now I could probably get 60-70 at best), like a great many people I’ve been following these early hopeful days of 44 as closely as I can.

Remembering the old adage about politics being the art of the possible, I count myself very pleased with how things are going — particularly on the environmental front. These stories have had me pinching myself with excitement:

EPA to Regulate Carbon Dioxide

Oil and Gas Leases Needed Scrutiny

A Green Stimulus that Wins Praise from the Sierra Club

Vilsack calls for Stricter Food Labels

And the right-wing is worried about increased animal rights influence from within the administration. May their fears be well-founded, and may the estimable Cass Sunstein live up to his billing as an advocate for non-human sentient creatures.

I haven’t loved everything Obama has done; some of his cabinet appointments have left me crestfallen, though Hilda Solis at Labor and Steven Chu at Energy were the two perfect nominees for their respective posts. I’m increasingly optimistic about Eric Holder, our new AG, after his frank and brave “nation of cowards” speech yesterday. And I think Lisa Jackson will do a terrific job at EPA. Get us a strong family planning advocate in at HHS, and we’re in business.

I never believed Bill Clinton (the only other Democrat to hold the presidency in my adult life) was a progressive. The left forgave him over and over again, largely because he was a man so lucky in his enemies. We mistakenly believed that anyone who could arouse the wrath of the likes of Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Jerry Falwell had to be “one of us”. But the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and Bill deceived progressives more than once with that tack. I sense Obama is well to the left of the 42nd president, perhaps our most genuine progressive since FDR, to whom he is often compared. That may be overly optimistic, but at least some of what has been said or done these past thirty days has given me cause to believe it might be so.

Thursday Short Poem: an untitled Joseph Brodsky offering

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We live in a gloomy time of growing anxiety and diminished expectations, though for many much goes on as before. This Brodsky poem is more than a dozen years old, but resonates these days more than ever, even as we forget the specific era in which this first appeared.

Lousy times: nothing to steal and no one to steal from.
The legions return empty-handed from their faraway expeditions.
A sybil confuses the past with the future as if she were a tree.
And actors whom nobody now applauds
forget the great lines. Forgetting, however, is the mother
of classics. Eventually these years
too will be seen as a slab of marble
with a network of capillaries (the aqueduct, the system
of taxation, the catacombs, the gossip),
with a tuft of grass bursting up from within its crack.
Whereas this was a time of poverty and of boredom,
when there was nothing to steal, still less to buy,
not to mention to offer somebody as a present.
The fault was not Caesar’s, more suffering than the rest
because of the absence of luxury. Nor should one blame the stars,
since the low overcast relieves the planets of responsibility
toward the settled terrain: an absence
cannot influence a presence. And here’s precisely where
a marble slab starts, because one-sidedness
is the enemy of perspective. Perhaps it’s simply
that things, more quickly than men, have lost
their desire to multiply. In this white captivity.

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“Overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed”: some thoughts on relationship, libido, having children, feminism, and so forth

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Amanda Marcotte has a short piece up at RH Reality Check on women and libido. For such a brief post, she manages to touch on two separate but interlinked issues: one, the problem with pathologizing low female libido; two, the root cause of widespread “lack of interest.” Here’s the marvelous final paragraph:

It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem–that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure. But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.

That’s spot on.

The great sex therapist, David Schnarch, writes in his Passionate Marriage (the best sex advice book for couples in long-term relationships I’ve ever seen) that we do well to avoid the question “Why doesn’t my wife (or my husband, or my bf, gf, what-have-you) want to have sex with me?” The whole structure of the question, Schnarch says, misses the point. It assumes a strong libido is the default setting in any romantic relationship. Rather, we should ask “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” And also “Why do I really want to have sex with him or her?”

This can be shaming, of course, if not asked rightly. Schnarch doesn’t want his patients following the “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” with a sigh and an “After all, I’m unattractive, it stands to reason that they should have no reason to want me.” Buit it is a reminder, as I’ve written many times, that sex is never obligatory. The “I will” of the wedding day is not a blank check to be cashed daily, weekly, or monthly by whichever spouse has a higher libido. We ought to be answering Schnarch’s question not with “Because she’s my wife and it’s her job” or even with “Because we’re in love, and people in love are supposed to fuck a lot.” We ought to be answering it by having an honest discussion with ourselves (before we have one with our partners) about what it is sex means to us, what makes us in the mood, what we see as the purpose of sex in our lives. Continue reading →

“People like you should be parents”: of Nadya Suleman, Alfie Patten, and well-meaning but problematic classism

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The octuplets born to Nadya Suleman came into the world on January 26, 22 days ago — and just three hours or so after our daughter was born. (And in Bellflower, a working-class Los Angeles County community some twenty miles away from us.) Our first child shares a birthday with the world’s first surviving group of eight babies born at once, and in the midst of all the hubbub and upheaval that goes with having a new addition, I’ve paid at least some attention to the coverage of Suleman and her (now) fourteen children. I’ve also noticed, more than I might otherwise, the coverage of the birth earlier this month of little Maisie in London — a girl whose father is apparently Alfie Patten, age 13.

Maisie and the Suleman octuplets have been welcomed into the world in the harsh light of the media glare and nearly-universal censure. The mental state of Nadya Suleman (a single woman who recently reported she has been celibate for eight years) and the foolhardiness of her fertility doctor have been much decried; Maisie’s arrival has been greeted with the not-particularly-original lamentation about how awful it is for “babies to have babies”. In the Suleman case, it’s that she’s had too many babies without a husband or the obvious means with which to provide for all of these children. In both the Patten and Suleman case, we’re dealing with folks who have been labelled “unfit” to be parents, and the orgy of hand-wringing commenceth.

I contrast these infamous stories with the reaction to the birth of baby Cerys, born as she is to a well-off, heterosexual married couple (husband in his early forties, wife in her mid-thirties). Baby Cerys was longed for and planned for and wished for, not only by her now-doting (if exhausted) mother and father, but also by an army of grandmothers and aunts and uncles and friends and cousins and even acquaintances. (One of our chinchillas, Ninotchka, regularly expressed enthusiasm by allowing my wife to hold her while she was pregnant, but only near the growing belly.) My growing family has been showered with love and with gifts and with warm words of praise, as if we have done something new and surprising and wonderful. Admittedly, many in my family “never thought they’d see the day” when the inconstant black sheep of his generation became such a devoted papa, but that surprise and delight at this change in me is only partly a reason for such enthusiasm.

My wife and I have been given a compliment many times in the past three weeks, sometimes with direct reference to the Suleman case. Both friends and family members have said to us: “You two are the sort of people who should be parents.” It’s a sentence loaded with meanings, only some of which may be intended by the many who have spoken and written it to us. What’s meant, at least by most, is that my wife and I are “ready” to be parents. We are in a stable relationship (married three and a half years, together for more than six). We are homeowners, employed, insured. We are certainly not young parents, but not so old that folks start to question whether we will be physically up to the challenges of raising small children. We are in good health physically, and at least for the past decade, mentally. We are planted in a strong and supportive spiritual community, and so on and so forth. And we’re feminists, which at least to a great many people is an encouraging sign in the parents of a newborn daughter.

It’s true that all of these things are helpful, though in and of themselves none of them are guarantors that we will be great parents. But I can’t help but hear a tinge of classism in at least some of the voices that have proffered this well-meaning phrase in one form or another. Though it is true that my wife and I are, of course, delightful human beings, I’m troubled by the implied comparison between us and the likes not only of Nadya Suleman or Alfie Patten, but all of the vast army of new parents who lack our educational background and financial good fortune. It’s hard to say “Hugo and Eira are the sort of people who should be parents” (the emphasis is generally the speaker’s) without wondering who it is that the person offering this insight thinks ought not to have reproduced.

Most of us think there’s something just a bit odd about Nadya Suleman. Most of us think having eight embryos implanted after having had six children is a bit unusual at best. And most of us think a thirteen year-old boy and fifteen year-old girl are woefully unready to be parents. But it’s not as if our sense of outrage and judgment is limited to the likes of these. The praise and encouragement lavished upon my wife and me is sometimes explicitly linked to a sense that we will have the resources to provide comfortably for Cerys and any other children whom we might have. Continue reading →

Older Men, Younger Women Book Proposal Research Questions: UPDATED

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I noted a few weeks ago that I was interested in hearing from folks with experience in older men/younger women relationships. I mentioned at the time that I wanted to hear from four categories of persons:

1. Women who have been in sexual or romantic relationships with substantially older men, particularly when those relationships began while the women were in their teens or twenties; also, younger women who have had a pattern of attraction to much older men.

2. Men who have been in sexual or romantic relationships with substantially younger women, or who have developed a pattern of attraction to much younger women.

3. Young men who have felt exasperated, hurt, or confused by a female peer’s interest in a much-older man.

4. Women who have felt exasperated, hurt, or confused by a male peer’s interest in a much-younger woman.

Please email me at hbschwyzer@gmail.com with your story.

I didn’t include a questionnaire, because for the purpose of the book narrative stories are much more helpful than interview-style answers. But some folks have asked for more guidance, and I want to accomodate them below the fold. Continue reading →

“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well

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Yesterday, I posted Lauren’s response at Faux Real Tho to Courtney’s Feministing piece on a day in the life of a feminist activist, and Ann’s, also at Feministing response to both. I’d rather that folks read the exchanges, but the best summary that I can offer is that these posts capture the stark reality of economic, geographic, and professional privilege — a reality made all the more stark by the dismal nature of the current global financial crisis. The discussion at Feministing (again, I highly recommend reading all the posts as well as the comment threads) has turned to what feminist life looks like in the current climate, with unemployment and under-employment and collapsing social services all around. It’s a sobering, as well as uplifting discussion.

This is in my head this morning as I read about the projected state budget deal which will strip $8 billion from California schools and community colleges. The bleak summary:

This month, tax refunds were suspended, along with payments to vendors and some welfare and college grants. And now much of state government is shutting down two days a month, furloughing most employees without pay.

Under the new budget agreement, cuts to other state services would be deep and long-lasting.

Schools and community colleges, which account for nearly half of all state spending, would lose nearly $8 billion. Only part of that would be backfilled by Washington. Several state requirements on how schools allocate their money — including on class size reduction — would be suspended for several years.

School officials say the plan could lead to the elimination of after-school activities, elective classes such as art and music, classroom supplies and thousands of teaching jobs.

Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for school districts, said, “For the first time, people are really going to see tangible negative impacts from cuts.”

State colleges and universities, where tuition has been steadily rising for years, would lose $890 million.

Scheduled cost-of-living increases for public-assistance recipients would be canceled, and mental health and early childhood education programs created by voter-approved ballot initiatives would be cut by over $830 million. The state would cut spending on local public transit by $459 million.

My newborn daughter is, on her father’s mother’s side, a seventh-generation Californian. I am saddened to think that she will not know the California I knew growing up, just as my parents and grandparents were (I have been told many times) sad that I would never see what the Golden State looked like in their eras. The dream that brought my ancestors and my wife’s here — from places as disparate as Croatia and Colombia, Ulster and Illinois, Austria and the Piedmont — is not now what it was, nor is it likely to be so again.

But this is not the place for nostalgia. Frankly, I’m as concerned about my students as I am about my daughter. My classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own PCC. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what Ann and Lauren and Courtney are blogging about, I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading →