Monthly Archives: March 2009

Cesar Chavez day, take two

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It’s Cesar Chavez Day, and the college is closed. Many things to do besides blog (though I’ll be back at it tomorrow), but can link to this old post of mine about Chavez and faith and this note from the Chavez Center about the great man’s environmentalist commitments.

I would also add this: Chavez devoted his life to justice for farm workers, yes. But he understood that getting the American public to change their buying and eating habits was inextricably linked with that justice struggle. Over and over again, Chavez made the case that there is a story — often a painful and exploitative one — behind what we buy at the grocery store. For those of us committed to veganism and animal rights, for those of us who believe the slaughtering of animals is deeply immoral, there is a reminder in Chavez’s life narrative of the importance of connecting justice and food consumption habits.

The chief immorality of factory farming is what it does to animals, sentient creatures who ought not be confined in misery and killed in terror for our sustenance. But a secondary immorality lies in the often abject conditions in which those who “process” the meat work; meat packers in this country have seen their wages decline dramatically in recent decades. Few factory farms are unionized; safety conditions are often appalling; many factory farms exploit the undocumented workers (overwhelmingly Latino) who now constitute a substantial portion of the labor force. Those of us who are vegans believe that the killing of animals does violence to the souls of the humans who engage in it. Animal liberation matters, but so too does the liberation of migrant workers from some of the ugliest, most unpleasant and most psyche-scarring labor done in this country. Animal rights and human rights can go together.

Consider honoring Cesar Chavez by consuming food today that was produced in a way that causes far less revulsion, far less pain, far less danger to the sentient. No agriculture is purely cruelty-free; pesticides kill animals, and the blades of combines on wheat fields chew up the bodies of small creatures. But we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the better — eat and shop in a way that honors the souls of farm workers and the souls (for they have souls, and rights to boot) of animals.

Martha, the Man: some preliminary thoughts on male feminism and workaholism

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I’m back from a happy family weekend in Santa Barbara; my youngest sister, Diana, got married on Saturday to a wonderful young Spanish hydrologist. Our late father taught at UC Santa Barbara for forty years; though there were many places the wedding could have been held, it seemed right and proper to have it on the lawn in front of the faculty club. The pelicans and swans in the lagoon looked on on Saturday as the family gathered on the same grass where each of my father’s four children had played as tots. Dad has been gone for nearly three years now, but we felt him with us all the day through.

Courtney Martin at Feministing wrote on March 19 about Five Issues I Wish More Feminist Men Were Taking On. Here are her five:

1. comprehensive sexual education that include critical conversations about rape, power, and violence with men AND teaches men what and where the clit is (just sayin’)
2. advocating for more family friendly work policy for all and changing the culture of work machismo among men
3. reflecting on how much $$ goes into male athletic culture, and how linked it is to violence off the field
4. changing the culture to give men more permission to identify, manage, and talk about their emotions
5. an intersectional approach to incarceration, poverty, and race that includes a gender analysis.

Many Feministing readers offer their own suggestions in the comments.

Well, I have armies of posts on #1 and #4, with more in the hopper. (I even post and teach about, ahem, the clitoris.) I have written occasionally about sports, violence and gender (see here and here), but could probably put up a few more. And for a host of reasons, I’m not the guy — not yet — to write on #5.

It’s “work machismo” that concerns me today. I’m not entirely sure what Courtney meant by the term: did she mean workaholism (the use of work as a distraction from private emotional pain) or did she mean the culture of competition which emphasizes the importance of out-earning and “out-succeeding” your male peers? Perhaps I’ll ask. In any case, I’m getting a new perspective on work and achievement as I move deeper into my forties and settle into the reality of first-time fatherhood — and I’m coming to terms with my own work addiction.

Last night, we got Heloise down about 11:00PM; she was up again at 2:20 in the morning. My wife and I have an established routine: when the baby wakes, I am in charge of changing and soothing, and my wife (obviously) in charge of breast-feeding. Sometimes, after being changed and fed, our daughter is ready for sleep within a few minutes. Other times, she wants to be up and entertained for an hour or more — this morning was one of those mornings. I stayed up with her until nearly 4:00, and then fell asleep until my normal wake-up time of 5:30AM. Normally, the baby sleeps her soundest between about 5:00-8:00AM, which allows me some quiet time in the morning for prayer and paper, coffee and the chance to collect my thoughts. That didn’t happen this morning; just as I was getting out of the shower, Heloise woke up again — and it took me an extra 45 minutes to get her down. I got to campus three-quarters of an hour later than planned.

I’m teaching six classes, volunteering, writing, and mentoring. I’m also doing my best to spend as much time as possible with the baby when I am home; my wife is with our daughter most of the day (and takes her with her to work), so when I get home in the evenings, it’s my chance to give my wife a break and do the vital bonding that needs to happen. What has been given up, largely, is my formerly heavy-duty workout schedule; I’m now lucky to run thrice weekly, and Pilates and boxing are distant memories. My body is not as it was, and that’s fine — it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. My daughter needs her Dad and my wife needs her husband more than either need me to have sculpted deltoids. (The ripped abs are gone, lost to a “lazy vegan” diet of carbs and a sudden reduction in exercise. And amazingly enough, I’m okay with that.) Continue reading →

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Off until Monday

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I’ll be away from the blog until Monday morning. My littlest sister is getting married up in Santa Barbara this weekend, and we’ll be gathering together in and around that city of my birth for the next few days. Heloise Cerys is two months old today, and we leave this afternoon for her first “road trip.” Ingmar the Volvo is packed to the gills, the hotel has already confirmed a crib in the bedroom, and we’re ready to embark with joy and a tiny degree of trepidation on another “first.”

Comments may languish in moderation longer than usual as a result. Your famous forbearance, my readers, is appreciated.

An apology to my progressive evangelical friends

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Reader Dan Whitmarsh gently points out the errors of painting with too broad a brush. In this post, yesterday, some of my words were chosen poorly. I gave the impression that all those who believe in abstinence before marriage are committed to an anti-feminist agenda. What I ought to have said is that the organized purity movement — with its rings and balls and pundits and bad comparisons of the sexually active to used chewing gum — is fundamentally reactionary and anti-feminist. But not everyone who believes in pre-marital chastity endorses the tactics, the rhetoric, and the broader cultural goals of the purity myth peddlers.

I left the Mennonite Church USA and the blogging team at Christians for Biblical Equality because my views on sex outside of marriage were at odds with the agreed principles of these two organizations. (I described my — amicable on all sides — departure from those outfits here.) I’ve known a great many folks whose commitment to radical gender egalitarianism and to economic justice is profound and real — but whose persistent sense that Scripture confines genital sexual activity to heterosexual marriage alone is also profound and real. These are not the sort of folks who marched in favor of Proposition 8, mind you, nor are they the sort who would be caught dead comparing a teen who has pre-marital sex to a rose whose petals have been plucked. They generally know that pelvic morality is never a “salvation issue”, as we say around the shop. But — often with reluctance and ambivalence — they will not go where the Bible, tradition, and their own sense of God will not permit them to go. I think they are fundamentally wrong in their hermeneutic (they feel the same way about me), but that doesn’t mean I lump them in the same basket with the noxious “True Love Waits” crowd.

To my friends on the evangelical left whose commitment to social justice and full inclusion for women is real, but whose commitment to marriage as the only licit venue for sex is also real, I apologize for having implied that you were indistinguishable from the “rascals on the right.” I may still believe you’re short of the mark, but you’re a lot closer than those whom Jessica Valenti so rightly excoriates.

Thursday Short Poem: Reiter’s “Wedded”

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For the second week in a row, I’m putting up a poem from a fellow blogger, the wonderful Jendi Reiter. This poem, which appears in the Spring ’09 issue of The Broome Review, begins by asking a timely question.

Wedded

Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,
the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?
In the days when mud was chocolate
we could march the egg cups down the table,
humming that universal tune.
The teddy bear and the piggy bank,
the lightbulb and the tomato.
Not all of these relationships would work out,
as we knew from the sound
of cloth tearing in another room.
Still we imagined,
in those days when peppermint was money,
that a bit of lace thrown over
the cat’s spitting head would make her beautiful,
and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling
with his mirror mate.
We were dizzy with weddings,
even when the books fell to the floor
inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids
with their mascara running.
Why do the things that were sold together,
the obvious salt and pepper,
rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,
always go missing?
So we married the glove to the mitten,
in those days when morning was bedtime,
when lunch was rice flung in the street
after the tin-can fugitives,
we matched the boot to the baby’s shoe
and no guests came.

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You should be reading…

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Three blogs that you should be reading:

Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex (mostly but not entirely worksafe)
Noli Irritare Leones
Flesh and Spirit: Embracing an Embodied Spirituality

It’s the last of these that I’ve discovered most recently, thanks to Jendi Reiter. And it’s through Jendi that I found this post from Teresa at Flesh and Spirit. It’s part of a long discussion about blogger Eve Tushnet (a bisexual Catholic who practices chastity) and her understanding of celibacy and faith, but the Flesh and Spirit piece includes some truly terrific analysis of Christian sexual ethics and the way in which we either center or ignore experience and desire in the development of those ethics. Here’s Tushnet’s piece.

As someone who came to Christ as a young adult, washed first in the blood of the Lamb when I was nineteen or so, Teresa’s words about Tushnet rang desperately, brilliantly true:

Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume. Post-modern morality is a challenging thing because, like a box of squirming puppies, it means you have to be alert to changing priorities and consequences.

Bingo. Read the whole thing.

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Exposing the abstinence agenda: a review of “The Purity Myth”

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I got my copy of Jessica Valenti’s newest book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women last week. If the editor-in-chief of Feministing continues to crank out books at this pace, I’m going to suspect that she harbors a secret Calvinist work ethic. Four books in two years is a remarkable achievement.

The Obama Administration offers hope that the long national embarrassment known as the abstinence-only movement is soon to be finished. Early signs are that funding for more comprehensive sex education will eventually come through, and that government support for the “purity movement” — a hallmark of the Bush years — is at long last coming to an end (though not rapidly enough for many of us.) Jessica’s timely, accessible book looks at the damage wrought by the “purity myth” and at the noxious agenda which hides behind the cry that “True Love Waits.” Her book went to press too early to include the most recent findings on the failures of the abstinence movement, which is a pity; all the best research indicates that a focus on “purity” has been an unmitigated disaster, leading to a spike rather than in a decline in unplanned pregnancies among American teenagers.

In The Purity Myth, Valenti employs the same accessible, conversational style — punctuated by hilarious asides and personal anecdotes — that characterized her first book, Full Frontal Feminism. As several hundred of my students have told me since I first started assigning FFF a year and a half ago, that style works to engage them and to challenge them in a way that a more formally-written text would not. This is not to suggest that my students are incapable of wrestling with books written in academic prose — but when it comes to a subject as personal as contemporary sexual ethics, a breezy conversational tone lends considerable legitimacy to the argument being made. And that tone and that legitimacy are on full display once again in this wonderful book.

The Purity Myth has many strengths, but perhaps the central theme of the text is the thorough and devastating debunking of the notion that a woman’s worth is in any way connected to the amount of sexual experience she has had. For teen girls, bombarded as they are by the twin lies of the abstinence movement and the crass, pornified “Girls Gone Wild” media culture, there’s a desperate need for sound, sensible, compassionate messages that emphasize the simple message that a woman’s sexuality belongs, in the end, to her and to her alone. It is not the property of a father or a future husband (Valenti’s take on “purity balls”, where Dads “date” their daughters and pledge to safeguard their purity, is chilling — particularly for me as a first-time papa to a baby girl). It is not the property of the culture, it is not the property of predatory boys, it is hers. Continue reading →

Men, women, and our common capacity for all that is human

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In the very first women’s studies course I took at Cal, more than two decades ago, the very first novel we read was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous utopian fantasy, Herland. (Parenthetically, we live three blocks away from Gilman’s home in Pasadena, now a registered historic site.) The novel, published in 1915, tells the story of a country of women in which men have become entirely superfluous — and of the three men from “our” civilization who, thanks to a hot air balloon ride, stumble across the society. The three males represent three different visions of masculinity, with the poles represented by the violent, hyper-masculine Terry and the gentle, chivalrous Jeff. Jeff, we’re told from the start, has women on a pedestal — he thinks them incapable of wickedness (or much strength). Part of the fun of Gilman’s novel is the way in which she exposes the myths to which both Terry and Jeff cling.

I thought of Jeff’s character yesterday when I read the remark in the thread below this post which suggested:

Or, you can believe, as I think Hugo does, that women are some higher order of humanity. That if only we could free this half of humanity – the innocent half, the half that lacks Original Sin – from dependency on us broken souls that they will be like a light unto the Gentiles, and show us the way.

That’s Gilman’s Jeff, all right, but it’s not Hugo Schwyzer – or any other feminist, man or woman, with whom I’ve worked. In the tired compendium of anti-feminist bromides, there are a few classic slurs which re-emerge again and again: pro-feminist men are gay; lupine sexual predators in sheep’s clothing; filled with intense self-loathing; convinced of the innate superiority of women and the innate inferiority of men. The misogynists can’t go out the front door to come up with any new arguments, so they return to these again and again — and it’s the last of these to which I want to — briefly, I promise — respond this morning.

I do not believe for a second in the innate moral superiority of women over men. As someone committed to the sound principle that most of our beliefs about sex difference are rooted in cultural constructs rather than in immutable physiological truths, I take it for granted that both men and women are capable of kindness and cruelty, sexual aggression and passivity, courage and cowardice, homicidal rage and extraordinary empathy. One excellent feminist first principle is that there is no human emotional or intellectual capacity that does not belong in equal measure to both men and women. I’ve been a card-carrying member of the National Organization for Women and the National Women Studies Association for years — and I’ve yet to meet a colleague of either sex who expressed in public or in private a conviction that females were, on account of their biology, superior to men. Continue reading →

A note on eye color: UPDATED

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I have pale blue eyes, like both my parents and all four of my grandparents. My wife has rich, deep, dark brown eyes. Her father, of Czech-Croatian ancestry, had blue eyes; her mother, of Afro-Colombian heritage, had brown.

Our daughter Heloise Cerys, eight weeks old today, has blue eyes. As many folks know, a baby’s eye color can change dramatically in the first year of life. My wife was born with blue eyes, and they gradually shifted to brown over the course of several months. We think our daughter is gorgeous and perfect and amazing, and her eyes are beautiful — and her mother and I have no particular stake in seeing them stay blue or turn brown, green, or what-have-you. We care that her eyes work to help her see the world, not what color the irises are.

But my goodness, we’ve been taken aback by the number of folks who, when meeting her or seeing her pictures, remark not only about the beauty of her blue eyes but who openly express a hope that they “stay blue.” And it’s gotten to the point that I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something vaguely racist about the obsession with having light eyes. No one has said “Well, I hope they turn brown” — but plenty have said “Oh, I hope they stay blue.” Perhaps they are politely acknowledging our daughter’s evident perfection. But I somehow doubt that if her eyes were brown, we’d be getting many people saying things like “Oh gosh, how lovely; I hope they stay brown and don’t turn blue!”

My daughter is mixed race, and that will be true regardless of her appearance. She will likely be lighter than her mother and darker than her father, and her final eye color is yet to be determined. And perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I’ve heard too much praise of “blue” with an implied slur against “brown” in recent weeks to let it pass.

UPDATE: Reader B sends me this link to a great discussion at Racialicious on this topic: Brown Eyes.

We have used our power to dominate and our weakness to manipulate: more on the egalitarian vision, and the fundamental sinfulness of traditional gender structures

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Last Tuesday’s long post about feminism and the free market got a large number of replies. My basic thesis was that strong public institutions liberate both men and women from the forced reliance on family for survival; an adequately-funded welfare state allows relationships to flourish based on choice and desire rather than on necessity and desperation. I also rejected the notion that men’s sense of self-worth is somehow inextricably linked to women’s dependence upon them. The old “women offer their vulnerability in exchange for men’s responsibility” myth is a favorite of those who think that at our core, we are governed by what they imagine to be the needs of our paleolithic ancestors. I have no desire to continue to debate those who peddle the risible notion that all males are biologically hardwired for violence and promiscuity, and can only be tamed by chaste and faithful and adoring women.

That said, I want to respond to SamSeaborn, who seems deeply concerned that men are somehow becoming superfluous. Men need women in order to reproduce in a way that women don’t need men, he argues, a point which on a purely functional level has some merit. (It’s easier to get sperm than it is to find someone to carry a baby — paying men to ejaculate into a cup is a lot cheaper, rightly so, than paying a surrogate to carry a fetus to term.) If the state offers sufficient aid to women so that they can raise children without a man’s financial assistance, what, Sam wonders, is to stop many men from “opting out’ into what I call the “unholy trifecta” of pot, porn, and Playstation?

Sam asks:

How can (men) feel valued as a human being if there’s basically nothing only they can do that women cannot while there’s a lot of things men cannot do that women can’t? You either get detachment or service in this situation, but service, of couse, is requiring social checks on women – some kind of affirmative action for men, which one may call patriarchy. Which leaves a bit of a problem: reject patriarchy and you’ll get male detachment.

How would you get around this? What would you suggest that would make men actually feel like complete human beings AND complete men that would overcome this potential dichotomy?

Sam’s right. At least he’s right if you accept “masculinity” as an inevitable feature of maleness. Obviously, we cannot continue to raise our sons with outmoded definitions of what “makes a man” and then expect those lads to seamlessly adapt traditional ideas about manhood to a modern egalitarian culture. The “Little House on the Prairie” vision won’t work any longer, and it’s evident that raising our sons with a traditional masculine ethos is just setting them up for cognitive dissonance, alienation, and anger. You can’t teach a boy that “A good man is one who provides for his wife and children and protects them from harm” and then expect him not to be a bit bewildered by a world in which women have both agency and autonomy. Hence the pathetic appeal of mail-order brides; American men, determined to hold on to traditional gender roles at any cost, sending away for wives from the Third World. The need for a green card, the lack of English language skills — these are often powerful markers of vulnerability, and can serve to puff up the fragile masculinity of a male determined to cling to a dated and useless understanding of gender roles. Continue reading →