Monthly Archives: March 2009

More on BP and teen marriage

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Much too busy to post, but do look for an announcement about a revised comments policy coming this weekend. I checked my stats this morning, and I’ve had more hits in the past seven days than in any one week period since last summer.

Three links to more on the Palin, motherhood, teen marriage thing:

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon: Don’t worry, stab yourself in the eye
Sungold at Kittywampus: Letting Kids be Kids (Even when they’re parents)
Lynn Gazis-Sax: With some buckshot in his bottom, how could he say no

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Friday Random Ten: he can type with one hand edition

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Lest anyone with a dirty mind think otherwise, this refers to my newfound penchant for cradling a baby in the crook of my left arm while typing with my right. Several of these songs have shown up on previous FRTs. I think this means that I ought to limit myself to one FRT per month.

1. “Steve’s Hammer (For Pete), Steve Earle
2. “Writing to Reach You”, Travis
3. “Return of the Grievous Angel”, Gram Parsons
4. “Pretty Face”, Oh Susanna
5. “Walk Down this Mountain”, Bebo Norman
6. “The Shape You’re In”, Catherine Feeny
7. “You’re Still Standing There”, Lucy Kaplansky
8. “Thunder Road”, Bruce Springsteen
9. “Wisemen”, James Blunt
10. “Salvation Song”, The Avett Brothers

Bonus Track: “We Close Our Eyes”, Oingo Boingo

“Poor girl”: Bristol Palin, and the chagrined pity of the right

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My friends who self-describe as social conservatives are having a bad week. The chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael “Wait, what I meant to say was” Steele is in hot water again for apparently endorsing the pro-choice position on abortion. On Monday, President Obama eliminated Bush-era bans on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. The new omnibus spending bill, signed yesterday, reduces funding for abstinence education and increases funding for contraception on campus. And the bitter cherry on this unhappy cupcake of a week for my right-wing friends is the announcement that Bristol Palin, the adolescent daughter of the former vice-presidential candidate, is not getting married after all to Levi Johnston, the lad who fathered her out-of-wedlock baby boy. Eliot was wrong; March is turning out to be the cruelest month for the socio-cons. (And at wit’s end, they’re now accusing dear Jessica Valenti of turning into Bridezilla, merely because the celebrated author and activist wants an egalitarian wedding.)

Here’s National Review columnist Lisa Schiffren on the Palin situation:

I certainly don’t know if they should have gotten married. You’d have thought so . . . even if it didn’t last forever. Better odds for the kid. If the parents didn’t like it, well, they should have thought about that when they were drinking and fooling around. But, as we all know, shotgun marriages lead to plenty of unhappiness, some of the time. And very young marriages have a lousy track record. So parents of the expecting teens are not willing to push. And maybe they are sometimes right. Still, the default position of the girl, left on her own with the baby, now in serious and immediate need of further education and a set of remunerative skills with which to support herself and Tripp, which will be harder to acquire with her maternal responsibilities, isn’t much of a happy picture either.

For all of the high-minded discussion of marriage policy on these pages and elsewhere, to me it looks very late. That train left a while ago. Even Corner readers, who will discuss choosing life vs. abortion, with endless passion, do not get so worked up about marriage. Which is why all I have to say is, “poor girl.”

You want to know why your side is losing the culture war, Lisa? Because of that last line (the bold emphasis is mine). If all you can do in the face of normal human frailty and adolescent impulse is mournfully shake your head and mutter “poor girl”, then yours is a movement whose race is run. I understand your frustration. She had all the advantages you want to foist on to the rest of America: two heterosexual Christian parents, an abundance of siblings, a first-class abstinence only education. Even after she and Levi “fell short of the mark”, they were offered a chance at redemption; they chose not to terminate the pregnancy and they promised to wed. Oh, how we love the narrative of the redeemed sinner, particularly when that sinner is a pretty white adolescent girl! But now the wedding is off, and one senses it might all have been a sham to advance mother Palin’s political career. Brave Bristol, in a moment of dangerous candor, remarked on national television (on Fox News, the Pravda of the right) that abstinence-only education was “unrealistic”, and her mother didn’t step in to correct her. No wonder, Lisa, you’re frustrated and at wit’s end.

On the other side, Lisa, some of us are having small episodes of intense schadenfreude, for which we ought to ask forgiveness. But once we’re done taking in the spectacle, most of us are going to say that we don’t think Bristol Palin is a “poor girl.” Not only is she still in a very privileged family, but she also lives in a society in which a great many young unwed mothers with fewer advantages than hers have ended up just fine. Only those who are rigidly committed to the notion that lifelong heterosexual marriage is the One Great Prophylaxis against all social decay would be so quick to predict doom for this young woman and her baby. But for those of us on the left, helping Bristol to raise little Tripp on her own is as much the responsibility of broader society as it is of the Palin clan. We’re pushing for a substantially expanded public sector, one which offers economic and educational support to women in Bristol’s position. We’re pushing for a world where not only is marriage for everyone who wants it, including same-sex couples, but also a choice that can be made without regard to financial necessity. We’re pushing for a world where Bristol can have access to excellent day care for Tripp, so that she can be a single mother and work on what you, Lisa, rightly call her “serious and immediate need for further education” while remaining confident that her son is cared for. We’re pushing for a world where men like Levi are encouraged to be involved in the lives of their children, but where women are not forced to choose between poverty on one hand and a marriage to a man they do not love on the other. The more robust the public institutions that provide care, the less the potential for young people to trap themselves into unhappy relationships for which they are unready and ill-prepared. This is at the heart of the progressive understanding of marriage: that is a bond of affection, a vehicle for personal transformation, and one particular venue in which to bring children into the world. But it ought not any longer — if it ever was — be the sine qua non of prosperity and opportunity.

I wish Bristol and Tripp and Levi nothing but the best. I’m glad that they are not getting married, since it seems that one or both of the two young adults isn’t ready to cross that bridge. I’m glad for the message that brave young Bristol sent on national television, when she spoke honestly of the hard work of being a mother to a new infant — and spoke even more honestly about the inefficacy of the abstinence-only curriculum which had been foisted upon her to no avail. To paraphrase Jeremiah, Bristol may be little more than a child, but she knows how to speak the truth. And in the face of the messy reality of that truth, as we come to the end of a hard week for those morality is rooted in a nostalgic longing for an age that never was, no wonder that even on their flagship blogs, their best writers can offer no more than a chagrined, rueful, and impotent “poor girl”.

Your words, Lisa, not ours.

Thursday Short Poem: Vetter’s “Wild Flowers”

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Jendi Reiter, wonderful woman and poet and blogger, gets the credit for introducing me to this splendid Gary Vetter poem, one that fits in nicely with my many muddled musings about fathers and sons and men in search of… something.

Wild Flowers

At fifty-six, having left my mother,
my father buys a motorcycle.
I imagine him because
it is the son’s sorrowful assignment
to imagine his father: there,
hunched on his mount,
with black boots, with bad teeth,
between shifts at the mill,
ripping furrows in the backroads,
past barn and field and silo,
past creek and rock,
past the brown mare,
sleek in her impertinence,
never slowing until he sees
the bull. He stops, pulls
his bike to the side of the road,
where golden rod and clover grow,
walks up to the fence, admires
its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing
its breath, its girth, its trampling
of small wild flowers.

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God is not impressed by the orgasm you didn’t have: of sin, Lent, therapy, and Rod Dreher

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I like Rod Dreher, the celebrated creator of the so-called “Crunchy Con” phenomenon and author of a blog and book by that name. (“Crunchy con” = social conservatives interested in communitarian values and possessed of a mild environmentalist streak.) Dreher is usually wrong, but he’s wrong in interesting and provocative ways, and he proves a useful thorn in the side of both religious liberals (like me) and the doctrinaire conservatives who are more in love with the free market than with Jesus.

Dreher, like several of the more thoughtful types on the right, has drifted towards the smells and bells and other-worldy pieties of Eastern Orthodoxy. In a seemingly superficial world, some find new opportunities for profundity by immersing themselves in ancient rituals and liturgies. One doesn’t want to begrudge anyone a chance to taste the transcendence that comes with chants and incense. But Dreher’s latest column at USA Today is both a great challenge and a great disappointment; it’s about Lent and the need for the church to preach more commandments and fewer affirmations.

Dreher contrasts the writings of St. Andrew of Crete, who emphasized sin and the need for repentance, with the words of contemporary mega-church pastors like Joel Osteen, who emphasizes the good news that you are loved and doing just fine. Dreher laments the pervasiveness of an easy message where a comfortable middle-class priest in our comfortable middle-class parish instructed the congregation that the Lenten season is all about — no kidding — learning to love ourselves more.

If Andrew of Crete could see us today, would he conclude that the problem with Americans is they don’t love themselves enough? To the contrary, our problems consist chiefly in that we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about faith, and since it is Lent, let me have a crack at what Rod is saying here.

First off, he’s right that churches across the ideological spectrum tend to peddle what Dietrich Bonhoeffer so famously called “cheap grace.” Too many churches don’t challenge their congregants to do the hard work of looking inward, but instead encourage a kind of self-satisfaction of the saved. Liberal churches sometimes define salvation as being saved from the ignorance and moral rigidities of the right; conservative churches too often define salvation as the state of being somewhere where those decadent liberals won’t get to go. It’s very tiresome and it’s not very Christian. And it’s true, too, that churches need to do more than repeat the message “Jesus loves you.” I mean, that’s great — Jesus’ love is the Great Fact of my life — but at some point, I need to hear how it is that I am supposed to live now that I have this awareness that I (along with everyone else) am God’s favorite.

Rod makes a mistake, however, when he writes that our problem is that “we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.” It sounds good, but he misses some key points. First off, a great many people who spend a great deal of time pursuing material things do so not because they love themselves too much, but because they don’t love themselves enough. Much of the reckless consumption that characterizes the modern middle-class lifestyle is rooted in a profound anxiety and unease rather than in genuine self-satisfaction. We consume and consume in order to distract ourselves from ourselves, eating when we’re not really hungry and buying what we don’t really need. Folks in that situation don’t need happy little affirmations that everything is fine, but neither do they need stern admonitions about their own sinfulness; heck, deep down they already suspect they’re plenty sinful enough. Continue reading →

Happy 30th to a Schwyzer

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Happy 30th birthday today to my little sister, Elizabeth. She’s the associate arts editor at the Independent; an accomplished writer, dancer, and black belt. If you live in Santa Barbara, you know her or know of her. Elizabeth and I are kindred spirits in many ways, and her conscience and her intuition and her passion continue to inspire her eldest brother and many others.

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Rihanna, Chris Brown, myths of male weakness and lies about transformation

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I’ve avoided commenting on the Rihanna/Chris Brown drama for a host of reasons, not least among them that I haven’t had the time to follow the story. I knew, vaguely, who Rihanna was (thanks to the marvelously catchy “Umbrella” song), but had never heard of Brown until after his arrest. I learned a long time ago that my credibility with young people didn’t hinge on my being savvy about popular music as much as it hinged on my capacity for empathy and my willingness to listen. These days, when I look at the pop charts, I am usually unfamiliar with every artist; bluegrass and folk are the only genres with which I keep even a passing degree of currency.

As a feminist and as a gender studies professor, I’m saddened but hardly surprised by the way in which so many have responded both to the story of the original incident but also to news of the couple’s apparent reconciliation. The vile sort of people who think that Brown’s assault was somehow justified aren’t going to listen to anything someone like me has to say. But I am concerned by stories like this one, from the at-least-sometimes reliable Jane Velez-Mitchell of CNN: Brown-Rihanna case’s dangerous message. Velez-Mitchell, host of a program on Headline News, writes:

…less than a month after this ordeal, Rihanna has apparently forgiven him…

Rihanna’s apparent quick forgiveness for the alleged pummeling sends the worst possible signal – namely, that this sort of behavior is just par for the course when it comes to male-female relationships.

If she is going back to Chris Brown so soon, Rihanna is putting herself at risk and seems to be falling into the brutal cycle of powerlessness, fear and low self esteem that often accompanies abusive relationships. And it sends a message to Brown that he doesn’t have to change.

If the reconciliation is real, Rihanna is also setting a dangerous example for other abused women. Unfortunately, despite her incredible looks and talent, I think she is now the poster child for battered woman’s syndrome.

Our society must stop this cycle of helplessness that traps abused women. We must give them the help they need to escape the abusive spiral. But women must begin holding their loved ones to a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to violence.

Bold emphasis mine.

This is what passes for common sense these days, I realize, and I trust that Velez-Mitchell means well and is genuinely concerned both for Rihanna and for her legions of young fans. But her commentary falls woefully short of the mark by suggesting that it’s women’s job to send the right signals to men. Women “enable” bad male behavior, according to Velez-Mitchell; apparently, men are incapable of self-restraint unless guided and nurtured in the proper way by the women in their lives. This is the ugly, hoary old “myth of male weakness” in another guise. Continue reading →

Unlearning flirting and letting go of “feigned fascination”

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I’ve worked with a mentee of mine for about a year who, while immensely bright, struggles with some sexual compulsivity issues. (Yes, this mentee is also in therapy; I’m not overstepping my role.) “Kelly” read this old post of mine about flirtation, and brought the subject up with me last week. Kelly asked: “How do I go about unlearning flirting? It’s like second nature to me, and it gets me in so much trouble.” I gave Kelly some tips, and thought I’d roll them into a post.

First off, I realize that when I talk about “unlearning flirting” it raises an obvious question: why would someone want to unlearn such a pleasurable and innocent pastime? For most people, flirting (once they figure out what it is) is exciting and pleasant; it offers an opportunity for thrilling little boosts to one’s self-esteem without great risk. It makes a lot of people feel just a bit more alive. Then again, the same might be said for alcohol. Some of my friends can take one or two drinks and stop; my experience over many years was that I couldn’t. I tried for years to drink in moderation, and failed spectacularly — all of my growth in the past decade or so has come since I became completely sober. No half measures for me in this area of my life. Kelly is someone also struggling with chemical dependency, but the primary addiction seems, to my experienced layperson’s eye, to be sexual compulsiveness. It is something with which I am all too familiar from my own life — and it is something which led me to conclude that at least for me (I speak for no one but a select group of my fellow addicts), flirtation was unhealthy and destructive.

I’ve written before about flirting, but never in detail about how I “unlearned it.” It was more difficult to do than quitting drinking, but for my recovery, just as essential. And the first step, of course, was acknowledging that flirting (or as I called it in Twelve Step programs, “intriguing” – used as a gerund) was making my life unmanageable. I was good at it, if by good we mean able to elicit positive responses from the folks with whom I flirted. I wasn’t always looking for sex itself (though I rarely turned that down); rather, I was looking for validation. The addict in me cared far more about ego gratification than about orgasm; knowing that I had aroused interest or desire was usually sufficient to satisfy me. At times, sex itself became a rather tedious, obligatory postlude to what had really mattered, which was getting the reassurance that someone wanted to sleep with me, or was at least interested in me on a physical/romantic level. It took me a while to realize that this was what I was doing; it was much more flattering to think of myself as a hyper-libidinous (if decidedly nerdy) Don Juan figure than to acknowledge the truth that I was just pathetically insecure, trading on chemical attraction and all of its attendant rituals to get the attention I craved.

I made an inventory of what I did when I flirted. I’d been practicing flirting since eighth grade, and over many years I’d developed a “bag of tricks” that tended to serve me well. (Parenthetically, these tricks were hopelessly ineffective in certain other countries. Traveling through Italy one summer when I was twenty, I gave up early on — whatever “game” I had had been developed with North Americans very much in mind!) Flirting was about words, of course, but also glances and the gentle but insistent erosion of normative physical boundaries. I realized I changed my voice, very slightly, and tended to hold a gaze just a second or two longer than the American standard. I leaned in towards people, affecting shyness or boldness based on what my intuitition told me would work. And I remembered the cardinal rule that my uncle Wolfgang had taught me when I was about ten: “Hugo, if you want to be popular, remember to be interested in what other people tell you. Even if they bore you, remember a few things that they say and ask them questions about what interests them. They will be fascinated that you find them fascinating.” I’ve never forgotten that last line, and it was the foundation stone on which all the little tricks were built. Continue reading →

Babies, family planning, environmental stewardship and the needs of the preborn: the real roots of the culture war

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Regular readers know that I tend to discourage my conservative commenters from derailing threads by questioning the very suppositions on which this blog is based. This is a feminist blog, for example, and one which seeks to explore various things from a feminist perspective. This is not a place to question whether the feminist lens is an appropriate one through which to see the world; similarly, a Calvinist blog which seeks to offer a Calvinist perspective on current events is not the place to question the essential tenets of Calvinism. This is why I read quite a few very conservative blogs, but rarely — if ever — comment there. I’m interested in what is said, but since I reject the fundamental premises on which their worldview is based, I don’t think I have much to offer to the conversation. It would be like insisting on speaking Finnish to a group which prefers to dialogue in Thai.

That said, reading all these blogs, I’m increasingly convinced that the core of the split between social conservatives and progressives in this country revolves around not abortion or gay marriage, but a more fundamental disagreement: population. Religious conservatives have become increasingly vocal about their desire to see larger and larger families; indeed, their arguments against abortion and gay marriage seem less couched these days in an assumption that these are intrinsic evils, and more in the language of concern that these practices pose a threat to the large families which the right venerates above all else. Hostility to feminism is surely a sine qua non of contemporary social conservatism, but reading what the pundits on the other side have to say, it seems more and more obvious that their hatred of feminism is rooted in the recognition that increased sovereignty for women over their own bodies is inextricably linked with the reasonable desire to not have, in Amanda Marcotte’s happy phrase, their “vaginas turn into clown cars.”

Feminists and environmentalists have formed common cause over the vital issue of family planning. Those who believe that the world’s resources are already over-taxed by humans whose behavior is frequently parasitic have allies in those who believe that women can and should be encouraged to find fulfillment in pursuits other than motherhood. The longer women wait to marry or reproduce, the less likely they are to have large families; the more opportunities we can create for women to pursue happiness outside the home, the greater the likelihood they will delay marriage and childbirth. The intersection of sound environmental policy and the campaign to give women the precious right of personal autonomy is a fortuitous one indeed! And almost to a man and woman, social conservatives despise this alliance, one which is changing family structures across the western world — and increasing the possibility for greater happiness for the earth and its creatures.

Here, replete with grammatical error on top of grammatical error, is a piece by David Goldman in First Things: What Should Conservatives do about Obamanomics? It takes the “we must have big families” argument to a new level, by suggesting that the collapse of the real estate bubble is due — wait for it, can you guess? — to, yes, birth control:

The first thing that conservatives have to tell Americans is: “You are poorer because you failed to bring up enough children. The decline of the traditional family is undermining the American economy.”

Right. Apparently, that’s why the countries with the highest birth rates, like Sierra Leone and Chad are so rich, and countries with among the lowest, like Sweden and Switzerland, are so desperately poor?

This isn’t the place to point out the risible foundations of the “we must have more babies or the world will collapse” argument. Plenty of economists have pointed out that the “growth” model can be replaced by a healthy “sustainability” model. The transition may be wrenching, but far less so than the apocalyptic impact on our planet of ever-growing voracious human appetites.

What I’m wondering — to get to the point of this post — is why religious conservatives are so eager to have large families? I get the economic argument (we need more future workers to maintain retired ones), but the churches were urging their flocks to “be fruitful and multiply” long before anyone thought up modern pension schemes, or modern feminism. Beyond the instinct to reproduce and survive, what are the theological roots of this obsession with making babies?

I know my Mormon friends believe, or so they tell me, that there are countless billions of “pre-born souls” wandering around up in the ether, each longing to be born. Thus, having a large family is an act not of irresponsibility but of self-sacrifice: parents give up their freedom in exchange for the satisfaction of helping as many of these pre-born souls as possible become incarnate. (My LDS friends, please tell me if I’ve misrepresented the idea.) Some of my friends in the Kabbalah Centre believe that in the Beginning, God created a “vessel” which then shattered into trillions of tiny sparks. Each of these sparks is a sentient soul, and each longs to be born into human flesh for the sake of reassembling the broken vessel and completing what in Hebrew is called tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Thus for Mormons and Kabbalists, family size limitation is selfish on an eschatalogical level — it delays the final redemption and robs the “pre-born” (the term sends chills down my spine) of their shot at participating in the glories of incarnation. Continue reading →