Monthly Archives: October 2009

Reprint: Childishness, Responsibilty, and the Obligation to Grow

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This is an old post, first appearing in November 2005.

Holy cow, more than 5000 hits today, the highest since the beginning of the year.  What gives?

One blog I read fairly frequently is Barb’s Lucky White Girl.  She’s got a powerful and deeply personal post up today about her own current relationship, her parents, men, women, and roles — especially the ways in which we find ourselves playing the part of the child.  Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t want to be the mother in this relationship.  Children are afraid of getting into trouble.  They hide things from their parents.  I don’t want to be the feared dictator, the enforcer of rules.

I don’t want to be the child.  Children are dependent.  I’ve lived my own life for so long, I’m good at taking care of myself.  I don’t want to, don’t need to go backwards.

I want us to be two independent, mature adults.

What I don’t know is this:

Is it possible to consciously mold this relationship into something different from what it is now?  Or are these things hidden too deep within the psyche to change?  If the old adage about not trying to change other people is true, is it fair/right/reasonable of me to expect or attempt such change within a relationship in which I am only a part?

I don’t blog about relationships much, but this is a topic painfully near and dear to my heart.  In my past marriages and relationships, I found myself– like so many men — taking on the part of the "naughty boy" and the "helpless child."   Time and again, I turned wives and girlfriends into mother-figures, and the result was inevitably disastrous.

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers as to why we do what we do, or even why I did what I did. I do know that I’m not the only man who found "courtship" easier than "relationship."  Over and over again, I devoted time and energy to "getting the girl", and when I succeeded, soon felt vaguely let down and confused about my role.  It was all too easy for me to become increasingly childlike.  I figured out that most of partners were students of my emotions, and most of them were eager to make the relationship work.  So they were the ones who took over the "feeling work" of the relationship.  They were the ones who brought up when something wasn’t working, they were the ones who took on the primary role of keeping what we had "oiled and running", as it were.

When I lived with wives and girlfriends past, I’d quickly cede control over our living arrangements.  What went where, and what got done when were decisions I wanted my partner to make.  I thought I was being accommodating, telling myself and her "You know, honey, you care more about this (the color of the sheets, what kind of plants to have outside, what we have for dinner) than I do; why don’t you decide?"  And my wife or girlfriend would make a decision, and whether I liked the decision or not, I didn’t have much to say about it either way.  When pressed for my opinion, my favorite response was "Whatever you want, darling."  Of course, I liked having everything done for me — my wife or girlfriend maintained the relationship, kept things running, and in the cases where we lived together, made the major decisions about the house.  I said loving things, bought flowers occasionally, and did my best to be faithful.  That, I figured, was my part.

Now, as the son of a feminist mom, I was always very big on doing my share of the housework. I was a loyal washer of dishes, a frequent doer of laundry (I actually LIKE doing laundry), and a good grocery shopper.  But I thought of what I was doing as "doing chores", in much the same way I did chores as a child.  I did not take responsibility for making decisions about the household, even as I seemed to be — to the outside world — an equal partner in the running of the home.  I was very good at avoiding conflict. When conflict did arise, I had two tactics in my arsenal:

1.  Get very indignant and threaten to leave the relationship.

2.  Act like a small child, launch into a pathetic list of self-recriminations (what Robert Bly calls the "I’ve always been shit" speech), and get wife or girlfriend to feel sorry for me, start soothing me, and get off my case about whatever it was that I was doing that was driving her up the wall.

Can I see a show of hands of those who know what I’m talkin’ bout?

Continue reading →

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Of Schrödinger’s rapist, Zeno’s paradox, and the problem of trying to prove a negative

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Lorie H., a longtime blog-and-Facebook friend, sent me a link earlier this week to the Phaedra Starling post that is heating up comment threads across the sphere: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced. It’s the indispensable post for the first half of October, and I recommend it highly. (For those of you wondering who this Schrödinger is, here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the famous epistemological problem about his unfortunate cat.)

Some excerpts:

So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?

Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.

Bold emphasis mine. I’ve written about the “absence of a right to be presumed harmless” before. Starling’s spot on, and her point about the perniciousness of “rape culture” is something that most young men need desperately to understand, and don’t. Well-intentioned but clueless fellows cry in indignation “But you should trust me until I prove myself to be unworthy of the trust”, focusing only on the hurt they feel at not being immediately accepted — and refusing, sometimes willfully, to acknowledge that when women view them as threatening, they do so because it is rational and life-preserving to do so.

Starling offers a short but excellent list of things men who don’t like being viewed as Schrödinger’s Rapist can do; please read the whole post, and the 1216 comments currently below it.

But I’d like to pick up on the theme of trust, and in particularly, the “guilty until proven innocent” notion. One thing that I’ve learned in all my years doing men’s work and feminism: I can never prove myself “safe” to everyone. Indeed, a substantial number of women with whom I interact on a regular basis as students or colleagues or mentees or friends will retain, despite my best efforts, some small element of caution when dealing with me. Some of that caution may be based upon specific knowledge about my past, but far more of it is based on the inescapable reality of my maleness. Folks with my physiology tend to inflict far more physical harm on the world than those with female plumbing; men in positions of authority are notorious for abusing that power sexually. No mater how earnest I am about my feminism and my boundaries and my transformation, the reality is that regardless of who I might be on the inside, I still come across as “a man”. And in the inescapable math of rape culture, man=threat.

Mind you, I don’t spend much energy wondering to what degree I am trusted. It’s very important for male allies to not fall into a dynamic where they find themselves trying to pull out all the stops to convince the women in their lives that they are safe. That’s just another form of seduction after all; it places one’s own ego ahead of the very real, complex needs and concerns of the women with whom one is engaging. This isn’t a competition in which other men are rivals. I’ve seen some ostensibly feminist men make this mistake. Masculine culture sets up males as competitors, with women used to measure a man’s prowess. For many, that means sleeping with as many women as possible as a means of proving one’s masculinity — and, in some sense, bettering other men. The faux pro-feminist corollary is trying to prove to as many women as possible that you, their male feminist friend, are somehow different from all the other guys. The reward isn’t sex or homosocial validation — the reward is being told that you’ve done what other men couldn’t do, and that’s earn trust. While hardly predatory, there’s still something problematic about this kind of “safe seduction” behavior — because it places the man’s ego, rather than women’s safety, front and center.

In creating a safer world for all of us, men do well to follow the sensible sort of advice that Starling offers. They also do well to direct more of their efforts towards calling out predatory and sexist behavior in other men, rather than expending tremendous energy trying to earn women’s trust. (It’s probably obvious that the two activities aren’t mutually exclusive: a man who is actively feminist when he’s around other males is more likely to be viewed as sincere in his commitments, rather than merely pretending to be egalitarian for a female audience.) But in the end, it’s important for men who do this work to understand that no matter how hard they work, no matter how committed and sincere their efforts, a great many women will continue to view them as potential predators. They may succeed in lowering the intensity of the threat they pose until it is very near zero, but, like Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, they can likely never get to that elusive goal of total and complete trust. The sooner men understand that, accept that, and redirect any attendant frustration away from women and towards a culture that encourages rape and abuse, the better off we’re all gonna be.

Thursday Short Poem: Hadas’ “Afterglow”

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I was just talking this past week about the Francis Bacon aphorism that “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” And I remembered reading this poem, but blanked on the author, so had to — how modern and slightly embarrassing — google about until I found it. It’s by Rutgers professor and noted poet Rachel Hadas, whose work has been shamefully absent from the TSP until now.

The Afterglow

Certainties—truth, beauty, and belief—
go in and out of focus. Mostly out.
Occasional flickers sheet a sky turned dull,
lit up by little else than recollection.
Life is lived both
according to the memory of the flash
and in the dimness of the aftermath.
The tide goes out; comes in.
The light fades low again.
The raw wound of the crater fills with green.
But ah, the afterglow.
And oh,
the undertow.

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All age-disparate love affairs are not the same: why I prefer “cougars” to “silver foxes”

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I’ve written quite a bit about the older man/younger woman dynamic on this blog. (See archives on that topic and on the somewhat related topic of student crushes.) I’ve generally taken a dim view of age-disparate heterosexual relationships in which the male partner is substantially older than the female one, and in which the woman is still quite young (say, under 25 or so). Put simply, the potential problems in older men/younger women relationships seem to diminish based less upon the actual number of years in between the partners and more upon the age of the gal involved. I’m more concerned about an eighteen year-old woman and a thirty year-old man than I am about a thirty year-old woman and a fifty-five year-old man, even though the latter relationship has twice the number of years in between the partners. Read through the archives for more explanation of my position.

I’ve written virtually nothing about age-disparate relationships between same-sex partners, of course, and very little about the increasingly celebrated older woman/younger man pairing. A superficial concern with consistency would suggest that my feelings about all older/younger relationships ought to be the same, regardless of the sex or the sexual orientation of the partners involved. But I think a compelling case can be made that older women/younger men relationships are much less problematic than their reverse, and that the same is true of same-sex age-disparate couplings.

We don’t fall in love, or fall into bed, in a vacuum. Our desires are heavily shaped by the culture, as is our sense of how power is negotiated in sexual relationships. Patriarchal rules about gender roles show a surprising and depressing resilience; ask many young feminists of both sexes who, despite their deep ideological commitment to egalitarianism, struggle to resist social pressure to conform to traditional ideas about what a man and a woman should do in heterosexual relationships.

The older man/younger woman dynamic reinforces patriarchal conventions; the older woman/younger man dynamic subverts them. This doesn’t mean that traditional roles can’t emerge in older women/younger men relationships. I did write once about the notion of older woman as teacher and initiator, and the exasperation many women feel at being asked to “mother” men. Several folks pointed out that plenty of women are forced to take on mothering roles to male partners their own age or older. That tendency towards a kind of uxorious helplessness that afflicts so many men in their romantic relationships with wives and girlfriends can emerge, it seems, at any age and with any woman. The key is that far fewer women than men generally want to take on the “teaching” role. Women may eroticize youth and vigor in younger men, but they rarely are turned on by displays of ignorance or uncertainty; high-brow Western literature and low-brow pornography are filled with countless examples of men being aroused by much younger women who either “play dumb” — or are the genuine article.

Please understand, I’m not saying that every older woman/younger man relationship is inherently progressive while every older man/younger woman coupling is oppressive and reactionary. A great many young women do exercise great agency in relationships with older men. But there’s no escaping the reality that the potential for abuse and exploitation is likely to be much higher in an age-disparate relationship where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers. We must note, too, that we live in a world where men are seen as growing both more “visible” and more powerful as they age — while women, past a certain age, are either desexualized or mocked. “Cougar” was not coined as a compliment; “silver fox” was.

Same-sex relationships can replicate unhealthy dynamics from the dominant culture. But by their very nature, same-sex relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm” in a very healthy and important way. A romantic relationship between two men and two women reminds us that biology alone isn’t destiny, and that while a certain degree of complementarity is surely present in any enduring relationship, that complementarity doesn’t require radically different genitalia. The age-disparate relationship, while certainly quite common in gay and lesbian communities, doesn’t reinforce an unhealthy norm. Even a wealthy older man with a beautiful young (but broke) “boy toy” is a fundamentally distinct phenomenon from that of a wealthy older man with his hot young girlfriend. The latter relationship reminds us all of women’s relative powerlessness — and of older women’s disposability — in a unique and infinitely more damaging way.

Critics on this blog frequently accuse me of double standards, and of being harder on men. By noting that, all things considered, older men/younger women relationships are more problematic than any combination of partners of a different age, I open myself up to that familiar charge. Yet it’s simply absurd to pretend that we have, even now, achieved full equality for gays and lesbians; it is equally untrue that women, despite the tremendous advances of the past half-century, don’t still get the short end of the stick in virtually ever area of human activity. No matter how well-intentioned the parties involved, every older man/younger woman sexual connection sends a clear and visible signal to the outside world that the patriarchal norms are left untouched; every older woman/younger man bond sends the exact opposite signal. This doesn’t mean a good feminist can’t be involved with an older man, or a pro-feminist man with a younger woman. But it does mean that they will have to work twice as hard as anyone else to keep unhealthy cultural discourses out of their relationship.

“Think it through”: a note on a tool for dealing with unwanted thoughts and fantasies

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I mentor — and in 12 Step parlance, sponsor — a number of folks working to overcome various addictions. Part of any program of recovery is sharing what you’ve learned with those newer to the transformation than you. I’ve written often of the rule of three, which I see as central in my own progress. I make sure that every work (or almost every week) I connect with someone with more wisdom and experience and “time” than I have; a second person who is a peer both chronologically and experientially, and a third person, almost always much younger, who is just beginning recovery or a spiritual journey. Even for introverts, the rule of three can work (I’ve seen it).

One of the issues that came up a lot for me when I was getting sober from my various addictions (alcohol, drugs, sex, food, and so forth), was dealing with the intrusive thoughts about relapse. I struggled enormously with the compulsion to “act out”, and at times in my early recovery it seemed as if virtually every situation in which I found myself presented a fresh set of “triggers” designed to get me back into old and destructive behavior. I had plenty of relapses along the way. (I went to my first AA meeting in 1987, but didn’t get sober “for good” until 1998 — eleven years of walking in and out of a revolving door.) I made countless promises to stop drinking and using, and countless promises to be faithful to wives or girlfriends. I would cobble together weeks or months of recovery until I encountered a seemingly irresistible temptation of one sort or another (the “accidental” discovery of a large cache of benzodiazepines in a family medicine cabinet; a surprise encounter with an old flame or a fellow newbie in a recovery program), and I would “fall” again. And even as I put together large periods of abstinence from destructive and dishonest behaviors, I was tormented by dreams about using and intense fantasies about hooking up with unfamiliar, as yet unexplored skin.

My sponsor gave me a tool that is the point of this post, one that I share with those whom I mentor. When it comes to intrusive thoughts or seemingly irresistible fantasies about doing something that is almost certainly a bad idea, there’s no point in fighting the thought. Saying to oneself “don’t think about that” doesn’t work well. If one is told in a firm voice, “Don’t think about elephants!”, the first thing that pops into one’s mind is probably a pachyderm. Rather than fighting a futile, shame-filled battle against one’s fantasies, it makes more sense, my sponsor said, to give oneself permission to have the fantasy. But — and here’s the key — one doesn’t have permission not to think the fantasy all the way through. I was told that if I wanted to drink again, I could imagine the heat of the liquor in my throat, the soothing warmth in my belly, the delicious sense of calm suffusing my whole body. But, I wasn’t allowed to stop there. I had to continue the fantasy. I had to envision the nausea, the stumbling, the peeing on my self once I passed out. (Yes, I was a wet-the-bed drunk. I know, TMI.) I needed to continue the fantasy into the next day — the hangover, the guilt, the fear of seeing people again, the worry about the harm I had done, that awful sourness in my stomach and soul.

With thoughts about acting out sexually, I was told to do the same thing. I couldn’t just do the pleasant parts of imagining taking someone new in my arms for the first time, the taste of her mouth and the thrill of slipping the clothes from our bodies as we tumbled into beds, backseats, or bushes. I needed to think through the awkwardness to come, the fear of being discovered, the shame of knowing I had crossed a line (for the umpteenth time) I had sworn not to cross. I had to imagine not just the erotic aspects of a desired encounter, but all of the possible harsh, inescapable consequences. I couldn’t stop the fantasies half-way through, in other words; I was allowed to daydream all I liked, but only if I carried the reveries to their inevitable conclusions.

By the time I was given this tool, I’d had enough deceit-ridden hook-ups and binges that I couldn’t possibly have any serious illusions that the next time — if there were to be a next time — would be different than all the times before. I knew what was so sweet going down would be so vile coming back up; I knew what seemed so transcendentally ecstatic at 1:00 in the morning would leave me feeling empty and shame-filled twelve hours later. It was a great tool my sponsor gave me; it liberated me from the seemingly hopeless responsibility for policing my mind, but it forced me to introduce the reality of consequences into my fantasies. There was an element of psychological aikido to the idea; rather than resisting what seems so irresistible, I was told to flow with the thoughts as they came, and using the sheer force of their flow to carry them past the point where I would normally stop. I was liberated to want what I wanted — but only if I went past the point where I had initially wanted to go.

The tool worked for me. It helped diminish the urges by connecting cause and effect more clearly in my mind. The sort of temptations I struggled with a decade a more or ago rarely come to me now, but come they occasionally do. I don’t fight the thoughts that come, or shame myself for having them; I calmly let them wash over me, and I ride them like a wave that rolls all the way to the shore. I know that I can’t stop the fantasy before taking it all the way, to the ecstasy — and past it, to the devastating consequences beyond. I recommend this “think it through” tool to the young (and not so young) whom I mentor, whether they call themselves addicts or not. From what I hear, it often works nicely for them as well, and I thought I’d share it today on the blog.

No “one true path”: against “straight”

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It’s been a big weekend for the GLBTQ movement; on Saturday night, President Obama promised an end (though the timetable was missing) for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and for the Defense of Marriage Act. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of marchers took to the streets of Washington DC to call for equality. And Governor Schwarzenegger signed two key gay rights bills, one requiring California to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and the other making Harvey Milk’s birthday (the same as mine, May 22) a state holiday. Good news.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and many folks on Facebook (where I spend what may be an inordinate amount of time) took the opportunity to do just that. In a couple of different threads, discussions arose about the use of the word “straight”, a term I abhor for a variety of reasons.

The word “straight” has many meanings in the demotic. When I was a child, “straight” was less often used as the opposite of gay and more often to refer to someone who didn’t use drugs and alcohol. In seventh grade, Jenny Nix asked me if I was straight, and when I gave her a blank look, explained that she was asking if I wanted to “smoke out” after class. (My middle school was, at least in the late 1970s, notorious for its drug use.) To be “straight” meant to be sober, a meaning that survives in the popular teen subculture of “Straight Edge”.

In college, long after I knew of the sexual meaning of straight, I began to hear another, urban use of the term, one recently brought into the national discourse when the president employed it. My African-American roommate sophomore year, Terry, once said to me after we had had a particularly convivial discussion, “Hugo, we straight.” Rather than an affirmation of mutual heterosexuality, Terry explained to my quizzical self that he was affirming we had an understanding; “we straight” meant that we were on the same page, as it were.

And of course, it was also in college where, as I studied Christian history, I reflected on the term “orthodox”, which is the Greek for “straight path.” I noted the moderate curiosity that the opposite of orthodox is heterodox, which sets “straight” and “hetero” in opposition — whereas in sexual nomenclature, they are synonyms. Language is funny. Continue reading →

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Masculinities Week and a Call for Papers

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Upcoming excitement:

Occidental College is hosting Masculinities Week, kicking off this Thursday with a lecture by Michael Kimmel and continuing over the following eight days with talks by Jackson Katz, Byron Hurt, Robert Jensen, and Shira Tarrant. Events are open to the public; this is a chance to hear from the leading figures in American men’s studies. I count each of these folks as a hero, and urge all who live in the greater Los Angeles area to look at the schedule and attend one or more of the talks. (I note that I’ll be speaking on a panel about men and feminism with Shira Tarrant next month at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Atlanta.) I love Oxy, as it is known, and have many ties to the place I count as the alma mater of both my most recent ex-wife and of Robinson Jeffers, California’s greatest poet. Here’s hoping that more colleges and universities adopt the Oxy model, and sponsor their own “Masculinities Week”. (Your blogger may be available to speak at such events as well.)

And I’ve been asked to publicize the University of Central Oklahoma’s Women and Gender Studies Conference, to be held on February 27, 2010 in Edmond. The call for papers (for 15 minute presentations) is open until December 1, and the conference theme is “Progressions.”

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Friday Random Ten: “Letter B” edition

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1. “When Will I Be Loved”, John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen
2. “Not Fair”, Lily Allen
3. “Tougher than the Rest”, Bruce Springsteen
4. “I Don’t Know What Love Is”, Leslie Nuchow
5. “I’m Not Afraid to Die”, Gillian Welch
6. “Broken Things”, Lucy Kaplansky
7. “I’ve Always Loved You”, Third Day
8. “Satisfied Mind”, Rosanne Cash and Neko Case
9. “Reasons to Quit”, Phosphorescent
10. “Wisemen”, James Blunt

Bonus Track: “Silver, Blue, and Gold”, Bad Company
Bonus Video: “Letter B”, The Beetles — my favorite Sesame Street song ever. Perfection.

Tired of being coddled and feared: standing up to the myth of male weakness

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A reader writes in from the East with a query. “Micah” is an undergraduate, taking a class on Gender Issues in the Workplace. He writes of a problem he has with his female professor and her reactionary views:

… in our discussion on sexual harassment, we got into a (I’m
shy to call it a discussion), on how woman’s clothing is partly to blame.
She took the position that women should dress more conservatively, and that
it’s their responsibility in this way to prevent sexual harassment. Her answer to my question “If we make this opinion the norm, doesn’t it negatively affect a woman’s ability to seek redress after being harassed, in that she as the victim is blamed?” was simply, “No”.

I don’t want to create an adversarial relationship with my professor, but at the same
time I’m frustrated at the message she’s sending to both men and women in the class. It’s awkward to be a male student trying to take a feminist stance with an anti-feminist female professor! I’m having trouble explaining my concerns, and am wondering if you could offer some insight into approaching the situation.

Certainly, Micah is in a difficult situation. Indeed, it’s frequently problematic for a male feminist to engage in an argument about gender justice with an avowedly anti-feminist woman. Most men who embrace feminism in a public way run into this particular pickle sooner or later, and it is made exponentially more challenging when the anti-feminist woman is an academic authority figure.

Despite the awkwardness, there are a couple of tacks that Micah can take if he’s willing. The best one, of course, is to challenge his professor’s low expectations of men. The notion that women are responsible for “inviting” harassment by the way they dress is rooted in the belief that male sexual desire is a problem that is women’s to manage. It’s the old myth of male weakness, a myth that suggests that those of us who are incarnate as males simply lack the capacity to control our urges. Therefore, it is women’s job to set boundaries and to “help us” overcome temptations that we are incapable of overcoming on our own. It’s a myth that’s damaging to women, but Micah can point out that it’s incredibly insulting to men.

To borrow a phrase of which conservatives are over-fond, it’s a variation on the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s a complex bigotry to be sure, as the real victims of the myth of male weakness are not those presumed to be weak but those who are, because they are presumed to be morally strong, forced to assume the role of sexual gatekeepers. In the sexual harassment dynamic, the myth insults men by suggesting that all of the be-penised are knuckle-dragging, simple-minded thugs who would never get anything done at all if it weren’t for women’s careful encouragement and cajoling. The myth insults women by suggesting that while men’s sexual appetites are extraordinarily voracious and uncontrollable, women’s sexual desire either doesn’t exist at all or is so weak that it can be easily managed. (If a woman does experience intense desire, the myth suggests that there may be something wrong with her.) And above all, the myth holds women accountable for bad male behavior, forcing women to second-guess themselves endlessly while depriving men of something they desperately need, which is the chance to grow into kind, rational, self-soothing and self-controlled human beings.

Micah is right to be indignant in the face of the myth of male weakness. As a young male feminist, he is right to be furious at what sexual harassment does to women, and he is right to be exasperated at the pervasiveness of the belief that women somehow bring mistreatment on themselves through their behavior or their dress. He is certainly right, too, to be frustrated at what the dominant discourse about men, women, and harassment says about him and his fellow males. If he’s old enough to be in college, he probably already knows what it’s like to live as a relatively privileged American man: alternately coddled and feared, loathed and loved. If he pushes back — in a polite but robust way — against the damaging message his professor is sending, Micah will send a message to his classmates that not all of their male peers are willing to be complicit in the Great Lie. Whether he gains any traction with his prof is another question.

See more in the Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness categories.

Thursday Short Poem: “The Old Fools”

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A relatively well-known poem again, this time from the great Philip Larkin. One ages, one thinks about these things more and more. I read this poem differently in my fifth decade than I did in my second. Like most of Larkin’s poems, a streak of genuine nastiness runs through it — but his misanthropy is redeemed by his accuracy and his tiny flashes of tenderness.

The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines -
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

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