Monthly Archives: July 2009

Men and Feminism: a review of Shira Tarrant’s newest

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A year and a half ago, I wrote a review of the very fine anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant of CSU Long Beach. I was honored to be among those asked to contribute to the volume, and am glad that the book has been generally very well-received.

Shira — with whom I will be speaking on a panel at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in November — has a new book out which I’ve been tardy in reviewing: Men and Feminism, published by Seal Press as part of its wonderful “Seal Studies” series focusing on various aspects of feminism, history, and society. Barely 160 pages, Men and Feminism is a quick primer rather than an in-depth analysis of every aspect of this fascinating topic. Yet despite its brevity, Shira’s book is a marvel of economy, offering an astoundingly comprehensive survey of the role of men in American feminism from even before the First Wave down to the present.

But Men and Feminism is more than a history text; it offers a short but thorough introduction to the contemporary understanding of how masculinity is constructed in American culture. Shira offers concise summaries of the insights of the most important pro-feminist writers on men’s issues; in a few short pages, the reader is introduced to the work of Michael Flood, Michael Kimmel, Jackson Katz, and Robert Jensen — perhaps the most indispensable theorists and activists doing this work today. In her chapter “Gender Advantage”, Tarrant offers a devastatingly effective case that, despite the shrill claims of right-wing men’s rights activists, male privilege is an omnipresent reality in the lives of Americans of every social and ethnic group. She quotes the aforementioned, and also cites the wonderful blogger Barry Deutsch (of Alas, a Blog) whose “male privilege checklist” is indispensable reading for newcomers to men’s work. For the guys — and the women — in your life who continue to insist that “feminism has gone too far” and that “men have it harder today”, this single chapter in the center of the book offers a bracing corrective.

As Shira says in her introduction, this book is “about what men can offer feminism and what feminism can offer men.” I’ve been a self-described male feminist for over half my life, and I’ve been teaching women’s studies for a third of the time I’ve been on the planet. Though I label myself in many ways — Christian, vegan, husband, father, teacher, mentor, brother, son, progressive, runner — there are precious few terms that have meant as much to me as that of “feminist.” Feminism gave me a chance to be a complete human being rather than a stunted caricature; feminism gives me a chance to explore a full range of emotional possibilities for my life and for my relationship; it is feminism as an idea and the feminists I’ve known throughout my life who extricated me from the straitjacket of masculinity. To paraphrase a line from my favorite Merwin poem, it was and is feminism that helped me “wake and slip from the calendars, from the creeds of difference and contradictions, that were my life and all its crumbling fabrications.”

The feminist movement doesn’t center men, nor should it. But Shira Tarrant’s book suggests that the feminist movement is at its strongest when it reaches out to men as well as women, and when it does so without compromising its message in order to soothe male anxieties. The feminist movement surely doesn’t need men as leaders, but it does need men as activists, particularly as agents of change in the lives of other men. Men and Feminism offers a long list of opportunities for men to get involved in the ongoing struggle for gender justice, and in its short span, makes an irresistible case that men have vital, perhaps even indispensable roles to play in that struggle. For that reason alone, this book is both timely and welcome.

I’ve used other books in the splendid Seal Series in my classes; my women’s history students find Rory Dicker’s A History of US Feminisms to be very helpful. I’ll be incorporating Shira Tarrant’s Men and Feminism the next time I teach my Introduction to Masculinity class; in the meantime, let me shower it and its author with well-deserved praise.

Thursday Short Poem: Nordhaus’ “I Was Always Leaving”

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A few days ago, Jendi Reiter sent me this Jean Nordhaus poem.

A lot of us know what it is like to contemplate leaving duties and lives and loved ones; a lot of us know what it is like to do it; a lot of us, of course, know what it is like to not go through a door which has fallen open. Anyhow, it’s a good TSP choice.

I Was Always Leaving

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

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Shame, mystery, and vulnerability: a very long post about the penis and the longing for acceptance (REPRINT)

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As I reduce my blogging load in the summer, I’m reprinting older pieces. This first appeared in March 2008.

As I’ve mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching my Humanities course on “Beauty and the Body in the European-American Tradition” again. I’ve only taught it once before, four years ago, and frankly, it feels as if I’m teaching it for the first time. I always love the rush of a new course; as much as I enjoy my core Western Civ and Women’s Studies courses, the material is so familiar to me that I long for new challenges from time to time. “Beauty and the Body” certainly brings that.

We’re using a variety of texts in the course, including Susan Bordo’s The Male Body. Her first full chapter, famously, is about the penis. Not the phallus, mind you, that phantom symbol of patriarchy that haunts courses in psychoanalysis and literature. (In the underworld, I will be forced to sit in a Lacan seminar for four hours on Friday afternoons. Ask me how I know that this constitutes hellishness). Bordo is talking about the “real” penis, that flexible appendage which is a source of so much desire, anxiety, pleasure, distaste, and sheer bafflement. And so yesterday afternoon, we had what I rather roguishly enjoy referring to as “penis day # 1″. (My lecture schedule calls for two more over the course of the semester.) More below the cut (hah), and though there are no images, the topic is obviously a, uh, sensitive one. Continue reading →

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Sovereignty and stewardship: some thoughts about fatherhood and a child’s body

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There was a great post at Womanist Musings a few weeks ago about children and touch. (Forgive me, I can’t remember which reader tipped me off to it.) The post begins:

Sunday was Father’s Day and so we went out to dinner to celebrate. When “Destruction” (the author’s son) was telling the waitress what he wanted to eat, she reached out and pinched his cheek. After she left, he told me that it hurt and that he really did not like that she had touched him. Upon her return after clearly thinking about the incident, he politely told her that she hurt him and he would appreciate it if she did not pinch him again. Destruction has always been protective of his personal space. I remember when he was three and got into a scuffle with a Walmart Greeter when she wanted to hug him.

Once he became old enough to understand what I was saying, I began asking if it was okay to kiss or hug him. I never presumed that I had the right to have access to him because he is my son. Most of the time it is always an enthusiastic yes, however occasionally it would be no I’m not in the mood. I have never gotten upset or felt rejected, I simply tried again later…

As a feminist first-time father of a five and a half month old daughter, I’ve been thinking a great deal about issues of parenting and body integrity. As I wrote not long after Heloise was born, my shift back to a firm pro-choice position was solidified by watching my wife go through pregnancy and childbirth. My sense of the importance of women’s sovereignty over their own flesh was strengthened, not weakened, by sonograms and the like. And in a not dissimilar way, caring for my daughter is solidifying my belief that physical autonomy is an indispensable right for all.

Each day that passes, my daughter gains greater control over her own flesh. She’s learned to roll over. (There was a one-week lag time between being able to roll from back to tummy to being able to roll from tummy to back.) She can raise up her head easily; she can reach out and grab with ever-increasing force and accuracy. She can suck her toes, getting her foot into her mouth in one fluid motion. And she is achingly close to crawling, something we think she’ll be able to do in a matter of days. Heloise’s body responds more to her will each and every day; in a very real sense, we’re watching the miracle of the growing assertion of sovereignty.

But still, our daughter is radically dependent. We change her and bathe her and dress her. We strap her into her car seat and carry her about. She has very little say in how or when she’s touched, but that doesn’t mean she has no voice. We notice when she reaches out for us (something she started doing within the past month); we can tell when she wants to be held and when she’s perfectly happy playing by herself. We try, as best we can, to respond to her needs; when she wants cuddling, she gets cuddling. And when she tries to wriggle out of an embrace, something she does on occasion, we are quick to allow her — within the bounds of reason and safety — more freedom and mobility. She may be less than six months old, but she’s learning that her needs matter. Her body is hers, even if that body — for now — requires our active and constant care. Continue reading →

Sarah Palin, liberal culture warrior

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Sarah Palin’s surprise Friday announcement of her impending resignation proved to be a central topic of conversation among my nearest and dearest as we gathered for the Independence Day weekend. My large extended family includes members at virtually every point on the political spectrum, though most do tend to occupy the center. And among those of the blood and their guests, the Alaska governor had her vehement supporters and her equally vehement detractors.

I’ve always been ambivalent about Palin. I wrote two posts last year, well before the election: Shattering the glass ceiling of complementarianism: some thoughts on Sarah Palin, John Knox, and the difficult position of the Christian social conservative, and a few weeks later, “Backwoods Barbie” and white rural feminism: of Dolly Parton, 9 to 5, and Sarah Palin. In the first post, written the week she was selected as the GOP VP nominee, I wrote:

If you believe that women should submit to men, shouldn’t have teaching authority over men and so forth, then you are going to have a hard time accepting Sarah Palin as vice-president. To be a complementarian, after all, is to embrace the idea that men and women were created for distinct roles. Palin, who seems eager to court Hillary Clinton voters, sends a message with her life and her career that neither her sex nor her status as a mother of five should serve as a barrier to holding what could quickly become the most powerful post in the world.

That’s what excited me about Palin. I found her politics crudely reactionary, and still do. But I was and am troubled by the way in which some of my fellow progressives have failed to recognize that, in many ways, Palin’s popularity with the “base” reflects a radical cultural shift among our conservative brothers and sisters: with some notable and defiantly troglodytic exceptions, most on the right were and are quite comfortable with the idea of this woman, a mother of five, serving as president. This reflects nothing less than the happy truth that, for the most part, we on the left have won and are continuing to win the culture war. A generation ago, far more pastors and conservative pundits would have railed against a mother of young children pursuing a very public career outside the home. Her ambition would have been decried; her husband Todd’s primary role as caregiver to the younger daughters (Willow and Piper) would have been blasted as a tragic refusal to submit to God’s plan for the human household. And though some on the very fringes of the far right did indeed make noises to that effect, I was pleased that a clear majority of conservative voters repudiated those traditionalist sentiments. Continue reading →

“Be Proud at Least that We Know We Were Wrong”: a Richard Wilbur Reprint

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Just as I like putting up AA Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”, I like this Richard Wilbur bit for every Independence Day. Here’s a reprint of what I had up last year:

Richard Wilbur is one of our greatest poets. 22 (23) years ago, he wrote a fine long poem for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. These two stanzas from that poem move me still, and they describe perfectly a most imperfect and yet not-unpraiseworthy country. If the great E.M. Forster could give two cheers, not three, for democracy, then we who call ourselves citizens of the world first can give at least one solid cheer for the USA.

From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.

Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time and in Washington’s shadow,
Their invincible hope to be free at last…

Be proud at least that we know we were wrong. And only those, perhaps, who acknowledge the depth and the scope of the wrongs can have an honesty to their pride.

A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars

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It might surprise some readers that the students in my women’s studies classes are as politically and religiously diverse as the students in my other general education courses. The widely-held stereotype that feminist-themed courses only appeal to those on the left-hand side of the spectrum has not proven true, at least not for me here at Pasadena City College. (And is it possible that this fall I will begin my seventeenth year of teaching here? Where does the time go?) Though my women’s history classes do tend to attract slightly higher numbers of white students, and correspondingly lower numbers of students of color compared to the college average, those students who do take the class and submit journals and participate in discussions do run the full gamut.

Creating opportunities for honest, non-condemnatory and respectful dialogue isn’t particularly easy, particularly when the issues we discuss (like abortion rights, or the merits/drawbacks to abstinence, or the intersectionality of race and gender) are so potentially explosive. As diverse as my students are, most come from backgrounds where women are conciliators and peacemakers; many come from the “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. And as a result, while we sometimes have very charged discussions in class in which emotions run high, my students tell me that outside of school, they tend to seek out friendships with those who are ideologically like-minded. The young woman committed to abstinence until marriage, for example, seems to find it hard to form a honest frienship (rather than a mere civil acquaintanceship) with the young woman who volunteers as a sex educator and talks openly about the physical aspects of the relationship she has with her boy — or girl — friends.

Labels like “prude” and “slut” have genuine power to wound. (Some women, of course, are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of both.) Those on opposite sides of the “abstinence divide” frequently imagine that it’s harder to be wherever they are; those who advocate for or live by a more progressive sexual ethic often carry the scars from words like “slut” or “whore” or even the surprisingly not-yet-dated “tramp.” Those who remain virgins (or who become born-again virgins) insist that theirs is the tougher cross to bear, that living in a sexually permissive environment where the pressure to fit in is enormous requires courage and resilience. There is an element, I note of the old “suffering Olympics” problem, in which various constituencies compete for the title of “most maligned” and “most deserving of sympathy.” Continue reading →

“I Have So Much Love to Give”: Young Women and Self-flattery (Reprint)

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This post originally appeared April 9, 2008.

In my women’s history class yesterday, we were making our way through Lynn Phillips’ Flirting With Danger, a text about which I have written before and which I have used in class for the last several years.

Phillips talks a great deal about discourses that impact the lives of contemporary young American women. Among these is what she calls the “Love Conquers All” discourse:

The love conquers all discourse does not limit itself to the notion that long-term heterosexual relationships are necessary for women’s fulfillment in love. Indeed, it suggests that finding the right man will somehow solve all of life’s problems.

Fed by Disney movies and pop songs, magazines and movies, most girls run into the notion that love conquers all early on. Some fiercely resist it, of course. The discourse suggests, however, that those who most fiercely resist making romantic love a priority are fooling themselves; from Jane Austen’s time to our own, we have countless fictional heroines who are initially dismissive of love, but in the end, succumb to its all-consuming power.

My students know all this, of course. It’s not news to any group of college students that they live in a culture that tries to impose a vision of happy heterosexual fulfillment on each and every one of them. But I’ve found another aspect of the “love conquers all” discourse that Phillips largely ignores: a great many young women (usually younger than typical college-age) go through adolescence with a vast over-estimate of just how much love they have to give to the “right person”.

When I first started working with youth group kids, particularly ninth and tenth-graders, I was struck by how often I would hear the same thing from so many of the girls with whom I worked. In group discussions or in writing, many would say something more or less like this:

I have so much love to give. I’ve never been in love, not really, but I just feel like I have this huge amount of passion inside of me. If I could just find someone whom I could really trust, then I could give him (usually, it’s a him) everything I have inside of me. I know it sounds corny, but I really believe love can heal all our problems. I feel like I have enough love inside of me to change the world, if I could just find a way to let it out. Continue reading →

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