Monthly Archives: December 2009

Spoilsport feminists and the monogamy ideal

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Andrea sends me a link to this Jay Michaelson piece that ran last Wednesday at the Huffington Post: It’s Not Just Tiger: Monogamous Marriage Is An Anomaly. The title is, one admits, historically accurate; marriage, as Stephanie Coontz has shown so ably, is a dynamic rather than static institution, and it has meant different things in different cultures. Certainly monogamy (at least for men) hasn’t always been expected, and in making this rather familiar and unoriginal observation, Michaelson is on solid ground. But once we get past the title, we’re off to a bad start:

It was understood – in the Bible, in the Talmud, in Protestant Europe, in colonial America – that married men would visit prostitutes. And while this may have been a sin, it was everyone’s sin – and not a particularly serious one.

That’s simply bizarre. I assume Michaelson has read Midrashic commentaries on Judah and Tamar, for example, or Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America. Godbeer, an old friend of mine, ably demonstrates that the Puritans actually believed that men had more (rather than less) self-control than women, whom they regarded as disordered by the unfortunate condition of hysteria. The notion that in deeply religious Western cultures men were always seen as entitled to sexual release outside of marriage is absurd. Certainly, men were generally (though not always) punished less severely for sexual transgressions than were women, and prostitutes treated more harshly than their patrons — but to say that the record of Western civilization is one that reveals that men’s use of prostitutes was largely accepted is to grossly misrepresent the evidence.

But that’s not the real objection to Michaelson’s piece, which is written, more or less, in defense of philandering. (As a post, it stands as a terrific illustration of how to “praise with faint damns”.) It turns out, according to Michaelson, that feminists — who else — spoiled the fun men had been having for centuries by insisting on companionate, monogamous, egalitarian marriages:

What changed all this was, ironically, feminism. The first feminists weren’t bra-burning radicals: they were pious scolds, who in late 19th century America mobilized for purifying American manhood. They cleaned out the brothels and closed the pubs – feminists were the first prohibitionists. What had for hundreds of years been the common practice of men of all social classes became a great vice to be eradicated.

Twentieth century feminism added another layer of condemnation: after all, why should men be allowed to philander while women were expected to remain faithful and stand by their (abusive, cheating) men no matter what? Why are promiscuous men heroes, and promiscuous women sluts? Women aren’t slaves, feminism taught us, and men need to respect them as equal partners in marriage. Infidelity had been a religious sin – now it was a secular one as well.

Nineteenth-century feminists, as Michaelson doesn’t know, were far more concerned with fighting prostitution because of what it did to the lives of women and girls; purifying American manhood was about saving their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers from exploitation and misery. Of course, Michaelson is, like a great many men, attached to the idea that any woman who demands responsibility from a man is a hen-pecking killjoy who fails to understand men’s earthy, rambunctious, eternally puerile nature. And Michaelson ignores the countless male advocates for sexual restraint and fidelity, like Sylvester Graham, John Kellogg, and Anthony Comstock, whose influence was (probably unfortunately) far more significant on Victorian American culture than that of Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Continue reading →

Top Ten in 2009: the top five

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Last week I posted the “bottom half” of my top ten posts of 2009. Here are my top five, in ascending order.

5. “She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness (August 25)

Excerpt:

I’m also troubled by the message this version of the myth of male weakness sends to girls. It encourages the noxious idea that men are loveable but easily led, and that “pretending to be weak” or “dressing real cute” are better strategies for young women to use to get what they want than simple forthright candor. In a very real way, it teaches little girls that manipulation is preferable to directness, and that good looks and feminine wiles are the most valuable tools a woman can possess. Above all, there’s a sinister reality that undergirds this whole discourse: if men are easily manipulated, than they can never fully be trusted. If a Dad can’t say no to his daughter, he sends her a message (however subliminal) that men are fundamentally unreliable. Whether in families or in boardrooms or in bed, one basic rule of life is that you can never, ever trust anyone who doesn’t have the strength and the agency with which to tell you “No”.

4. Rihanna, Chris Brown, myths of male weakness and lies about transformation (March 10)

Excerpt:

And while we might be right to question Rihanna’s judgment in returning to this callow young man, it’s vital that we don’t put the onus for his transformation on her. Women are not responsible for “making men change.” Despite what the myth of male weakness tells us, men do not need to be nurtured and guided by their wives and girlfriends into becoming competent adults with a reasonable degree of self-control. If anyone is responsible for holding the Chris Browns of the world accountable, it’s other men — particularly older men — who need to signal, in an unmistakable way, that this sort of violence is puerile and utterly unacceptable. Chris Brown must change even if Rihanna doesn’t; whatever “issues” she has that leads her to be willing to return to a man who has beaten her savagely do not mitigate his moral and legal responsibility to deal with his own violent nature. If he hits her again, he is entirely responsible and she is entirely innocent. The first person to escalate a domestic dispute from a verbal exchange to a physical one is always to blame; to say otherwise is to repeat the odious lie that we humans are so frail that words can override our capacity for self-restraint.

3. “Sin boldly”: against the trap of the “emotional” affair (February 24)

Excerpt:

Both men and women are equally prone to self-deception about emotional affairs. For men, acculturated to think of sex in purely physical terms, it’s often difficult to grasp the degree to which an emotional betrayal can be just as devastating as an explicitly carnal one, but women are not immune from this misunderstanding either. One of the ugliest aspects of the emotional affair is that the participants often applaud themselves for what they see as their own admirable restraint. A couple that goes to lunch every day, exchanging intimate chatter and exchanging longing glances, may feel both the agony of unsatisfied longing and the perverse satisfaction of imagined virtue. It’s easy to say “Oh, Frederick, aren’t we wonderful people? We know we want to be together, but too many people would be hurt! It’s proof of how special our love is — and proof of how good we both are — that we are only exchanging these texts and emails and longing looks rather than getting naked at the Good Nite Inn out by the interstate.” As the kids say these days, epic fail.

2. Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men (May 4)

Excerpt:

The very real hurt, the very real rage, that men often feel as a result of having no sense of their own attractiveness has very real and very destructive consequences. It’s not women’s problem to solve; it’s not as if it’s women’s job to start stroking yet another aspect of the male ego. The answer lies in creating a new vocabulary for desire, in empowering women as well as men to gaze, and in expanding our own sense of what is good and beautiful, aesthetically and erotically pleasing. That’s hard stuff, but it’s worth the effort. I know what it is to believe myself repulsive, and what it was to hear that not only was I wanted, but that I was desirable for how I appeared as well as how I acted. That was precious indeed, and far too few men have known it.

#1 Post of the Year: “My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked (April 7)

Excerpt:

The problem with connecting sexual intimacy with emotional vulnerability is that it breeds a particular kind of dependency. Once married or in a long-term monogamous relationship, the man becomes increasingly dependent upon his partner for emotional release. While she may also feel connected to him (one hopes that she does), women in our culture are generally given permission to separate emotional and sexual availability. Women are more likely to have friends of either sex with whom they can “get naked without getting naked”; women are also more likely to have strong family support systems. And because both partners figure out that there is some sort of connection between sexual and emotional intimacy for the guy, it becomes all the more difficult for him to find others besides his wife or girlfriend with whom he can be vulnerable. One of the factors that works to prevent married men and women from having close opposite-sex platonic friendships is this suspicion that at least for men, sexual and emotional closeness are easy to confuse.

Friday (not at all) Random Ten: carols and videos

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Instead of a regular Friday Random Ten, here are my ten favorite traditional carols, — in order of fondness — with Youtube videos. Sound quality varies.

1. O, du Fröhliche
2. Angels We Have Heard on High
3. The Holly and the Ivy
4. God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
5. Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
6. O Come, Emmanuel
7. For Unto us a Child is Born
8. Joy to the World
9. Masters in this Hall
10. In the Bleak Midwinter

“If they could see me now”: sex, homosociality, and the internalized male audience

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In the comments below yesterday’s post about Tiger Woods and homosociality, Tom questions my use of the concept in describing the golfer’s infidelities with a certain type of woman. If homosociality drives men to use women to seek status in the eyes of other men, he wondered, how does it explain the behavior of men who have (what they thought were) clandestine affairs? Doesn’t the desire for secrecy vitiate the argument that the behavior is driven by a longing for validation from other men? It’s an important question, and deserves a longer answer than can fit in the comments.

In 2005, I wrote a long post about the task of helping women silence their internalized audience. The internalized audience is that Greek chorus in one’s head, made up of parents, peers — perhaps pastors and professors — and so forth. When one does something, even in secret, that one imagines might either delight or scandalize members of that audience, one spends time ruminating “What would they think if they could see me now?” For many women in particular, that internalized audience is incapacitating and shame-reinforcing, as I wrote in that post and again in this one.

The notion of homosociality dovetails nicely with the male version of the internalized audience. In other words, status-seeking young men don’t just perform for other flesh-and-blood males (fathers, brothers, coaches, Alpha guys) — they perform for the internalized audience of those figures. In Guyland, Michael Kimmel’s marvelous work about contemporary young men, Kimmel interviews a fraternity member who recalled having sex with a young woman whom all of his “brothers” thought was incredibly hot. The young man remembered that all he could think of while hooking up with this woman was what his “bros” would think if they could see him at that moment. The homosocial boost to his ego, in other words, was more powerful than his own sexual excitement — even though his fraternity brothers were not, in fact, watching or (yet) aware of his “conquest.”*

This young man wanted his male peers to find out eventually. But his pleasure came not merely from letting them know that he had sex with a particularly desirable woman, it came from contemplating their reactions before they knew about it. This is a not-uncommon scenario; the actual revelation of “what happened last night” is almost anti-climactic compared to the delicious validation that comes with imagining other men’s envious, even awed responses to this evidence of his masculine prowess.

In describing his own coming-of-age in rural Mexico, Amherst professor Ilan Stavans writes in the anthology Muy Macho of his ritualized first visit to a brothel:

Losing our virginity was actually a dual mission: to ejaculate inside the hooker and then, more importantly, to tell of the entire adventure afterward.

It’s not a leap to imagine that the thrill while with the prostitute lies chiefly in the imagination of how the recitation of the night’s events to one’s peers will go down!

For men who, for any reason (often because of adultery) need to be secretive about their extra-marital sexual lives, it’s certainly possible, even probable, that the validation that comes from imagining the status-boost that would come if their buddies knew who they were bedding is almost as good, or perhaps even better, than actually letting them know. Just as so many little boys, playing alone on a court or a field, imagine that they are in a stadium in front of a huge cheering audience, so too slightly older boys, getting it on in a hotel room with a gorgeous young woman who isn’t their wife, may imagine something remarkably similar.

*It is popularly believed that in single-sex groups, it’s common for women’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with men to be much more graphic than men’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with women. If this is true, then it reinforces the point that men’s story-telling is not about the exchange of detailed information, but about the opportunity to gain status in the eyes of other men. Other men may want to know that you got the “hot chick” into bed, they may want to hear your claims of how good it was (and how good you were), but any further detail about what transpired is positively unnecessary. For homosocial reinforcement to work, that it happened is enough — how it happened is irrelevant.

Thursday Short Poem: Kavanagh’s “Advent”

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Patrick Kavanagh was a great Irish poet of the sort whose work can only be understood when read aloud. What seems perplexing and merely clever in print becomes dazzling when spoken. This, one of his more famous seasonally appropriate pieces, is no exception.

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover -
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

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Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

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(The title of this post differs slightly from when it was first put up this morning.)

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere these past few days about this Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post: Tiger’s validation complex. Robinson, who is African-American, is troubled by more than the famous golfer’s equally famous multiple infidelities. He’s troubled by the type of woman that Tiger seems to have pursued:

Here’s my real question, though: What’s with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story — and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn’t variety but some kind of validation…

…the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an “official” standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious — a control freak even when he’s committing “transgressions.”

There is a long and painful history in the African-American community revolving around the penchant that a great many successful black men have had for pursuing white women. Indeed, the problem (if we can name it that) is a staple of magazine articles and fiction aimed at African-American women. I’m not a commenter on race, so it’s best that I merely note that the reaction Robinson is having is connected to a bitter and complicated history that is a good deal older than the now-disgraced superstar golfer.

But there’s a part of Robinson’s piece that isn’t just about race; it’s about the way in which men of all ethnicities use certain types of women as “trophies.” It is almost axiomatic that female beauty is a commodity which men employ to boost their status with other men. I wrote about this in April 2006, in a post about men, women, homosociality and weight. An excerpt:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

“Whiteness” can function similarly to “thin-ness”, particularly for men of color. America has a long and bloody history of violence towards dark-skinned men who were even suspected of a sexual interest in white women. For some men of color, to be with a white woman — particularly one who embodies the all-American “Barbie” ideal — is to say to the world “See, I’ve made it. You can’t touch me; I’ve achieved sufficient power and wealth so that I can have ‘access’ to what was once forbidden and could have gotten my grandfather lynched.” I’m not saying that was Tiger’s motive (Robinson is, and he’s in a better position than I to do so). I am saying that bedding whiteness, in the misogynistic homosocial economy, gives status points.

One of the important challenges we all need to take up is that of separating out what aspects of our desires are organic to us, and what aspects are socially constructed and reinforced. Men who are afraid to date heavier women “because of what my buddies will say” or women who are reluctant to date shorter men “because of how we’ll look together in public” do have, I think, an obligation to distinguish their fear of losing status from their actual desires. As we all know, the human libido is flexible but not infinitely so; it can be influenced but not entirely molded by culture and experience. Most of us have preferences and types, as I wrote in 2005, that are to some degree essential to us:

…feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.

Most of us — not all — have certain physical “types” to which we are often drawn…A “type” does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an “Asian fetish” that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women “know how to treat a man better.”

I’d add the Tiger corollary to that, which is that individual preferences are fine insofar as they are not thinly (sorry) disguised excuses for pursuing a particular type of woman in order to gain validation and status in the real or imagined eyes of other men. Untangling what we want sexually from what we ourselves want in order to meet cultural or familial expectations is a universal challenge. Unlike my postmodernist friends, I do believe we have an identity and desires that are deeper than our culture; our sexuality, although more malleable than many imagine, isn’t entirely a tabula rasa. (If that were so, there’d be far fewer GLBT kids growing up in conservative Christian households than there in fact are.)

Part of becoming a responsible, sexually mature adult is doing the often difficult work of discerning what one craves inherently from what one has been taught one ought to crave, and what one has learned will win approval from parents or peers. It ain’t rocket science, but it isn’t easy either. And while Tiger may “organically” crave youthful white women with Barbie-esque proportions, one suspects that for all his achievements, he has not yet come close to gaining insight and understanding of the role sexuality plays in his life. And the consequences of lacking that understanding are, as we have seen in his case, devastating.

Dreams for Women Calendar

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A quick and worthy commercial plug:

The good folks at Antigone Magazine (a Canadian feminist magazine based at the University of British Columbia, where my littlest sister studied for a year) have put out a calendar honoring some of the North American women athletes competing in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — which get underway in just over two months!

No, it’s not that kind of calendar. The “Dreams for Women” calendar features female athletes from Canada, the USA, and First Nations. Each woman is depicted competing, along with an inspiring snippet of her personal dream. Proceeds benefit the Antigone Foundation, which aims to empower young women (aged 10-35) to become engaged politically. You can check out a PDF here.

Top Ten in 2009: the bottom five

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As I’ve done each December since 2004, I’m doing a countdown of my top posts of the year. You’re invited to do the same at your blog. I wrote far less this year than in the past thanks to the birth of Heloise, but have enjoyed blogging no less as a result. Here’s the bottom half of the top ten; the top five posts of 2009 will appear next week.

10. Learning to long for what is good for us: some thoughts on sexual recovery for unquiet minds (February 25)

Excerpt: There’s an old saying in recovery: “You can’t think yourself into right action, you can only act yourself into right thinking.” That is especially true for those of us who come out of destructive sexual backgrounds. I learned how to be faithful even in the presence of overwhelming temptation. And I learned that if I just controlled my actions, then it would become easier — slowly — to control my words and my eyes. And if I controlled my words and my eyes, it would become easier — slowly — to redirect my thoughts away from people and situations that would prove colossally destructive. There was always a significant lag time, however, in which I felt panicky and frustrated. For a long time, I worried that I had given up an intensely exciting lifestyle that was killing me for a stultifyingly dull one that threatened to kill me with boredom. But I trusted, somehow, that I would find new and different kinds of excitement. I trusted that I could find excitement in the arms of a woman who wanted to live, who had no discernible addictions, who had no history of wild acting out. And lo and behold, it all came to pass…

9. Love, Again: second marriages and the triumph of hope and grace (September 8)

Excerpt: I am particularly sentimental about weddings between two folks who’ve done the whole thing before. I like witnessing the union of two people who’ve long since let go of their illusions about marriage; the romantic aspirations of the young are touching, but the willingness of those who’ve been to the show and had their hearts broken to commit again is a far more compelling spectacle to witness. Remarriage after divorce may still be a sin to those whose rigid adherence to a narrow reading of Scripture trumps their sense of grace and hope, but to the rest of us, it is an even greater testament to the power of love than the wedding of two comparative innocents.

8. On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust (May 28)

Excerpt: Jesus healed by touching, often touching folks who inspired disgust in others. He overcame, and taught His disciples to overcome, the culturally-conditioned revulsion coded into the Law. Much of the language of the Torah is about what is “unclean” or “abominable” or “disgusting”, after all. (I know that many folks take the Torah very seriously, as do I. It is only the literal-mided to whom I address my rebuke here.) Being spiritual rather than narrowly religious, is, in a sense, the insistence on prioritizing love over disgust. One might say the same about liberals and conservatives.

Our bodies are not disgusting. Other people’s bodies are not disgusting. Love is not disgusting. Suffering, human or animal, may seem revolting — but we need to overcome that reflexive disgust in order to get to empathy, to compassion, and to righteous action.

7. “”When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”: of a doctor, an usher, and the answerer of a call (May 31)

Excerpt: George Tiller was martyred today, not least because he stood — and stood publicly and openly — for the God-given dignity of women in the face of a movement that seeks to deny women their full humanity.

6. The danger of wanting to be first: a reply to bmmg39, updated with lyrics (January 23)

Excerpt: When a good relationship grows and endures, it does so in its own memorable ways. There is very little, from a purely physically sexual standpoint, that my wife and I could possibly do together that we haven’t each separately done with other people in the past. But that has damn all to do with the memories we create together and the marks we leave on each other. For heaven’s sakes, when I kiss my wife, I’m not comparing her tongue to that of umpteen other women; I’m fairly certain that she isn’t comparing my touch to that of her previous lovers! The tapes of what was are stored away. Why on earth would it matter that I’m not the first to make the woman I love call on the name of God in a moment of pleasure? It would only matter if I allowed my ego to trump my love, if the need to be the first was more important than the need to be the now.

Claiming the name

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I got a message on Facebook from Delia, asking a familiar question:

I’ve got a good friend of mine, a man, who is absolutely supportive of feminist causes. But he really dislikes the word feminist, and prefers to call himself (and me) an “egalitarian”. To him, “feminist” sounds too exclusionary. I’ve tried to give him a good answer as to why focusing on women matters, but am not having much luck. Perhaps you could respond?

First off, let me recommend the indispensable Feminism 101 blog, a wonderful resource for answering all sorts of questions about feminism. Delia’s friend’s problem is addressed in this pithy answer, and it’s well worth the read.

I think it’s vital to “claim the name” of “feminist”. As the Feminism 101 site explains, refusing to use the term in favor of more general words like “egalitarian” obscures the reality of misogyny. While there’s nothing wrong with a commitment to egalitarianism as a principle, to use it to title an ideological perspective implies a false equivalence between the sexism that is directed towards men and that towards women. If someone were to say, “Oh, I believe blacks should be equal to whites, but I don’t feel comfortable calling myself an ‘anti-racist’; I’d rather just be an ‘equalist’”, we’d hear the statement for what it was: a refusal, probably motivated more by ignorance than malice, to accept the reality that black oppression in American history far outpaces that of whites.

As it says at Feminism 101, these are not mutually exclusive terms. One can be a feminist and believe in egalitarian principles. One can be a feminist and a Christian; one can be a feminist and a Republican, or a Democrat, or a defiant independent. To claim the name of feminism doesn’t mean rejecting all other names; it means, simply, that one acknowledges the reality of misogyny and one commits, in whatever way one can, to struggling against that ugly reality.

I call myself a feminist. I was once wont to call myself a “pro-feminist”, largely because in the 1980s, when I first began to do academic feminism, there was considerably more skepticism about men doing this work than there is today. As I’ve written before, younger feminists are much more willing to accept — and demand — men’s full participation in anti-sexist activism. A new generation of men has grown up, sons of mothers (and occasionally, fathers) who were steeped in feminism. The notion that a “man simply can’t get it” seems to be one that divides many feminists generationally, with those under 30 particularly unlikely to believe that essentialist view.

Men don’t get cookies merely for calling themselves feminists. But it is important that we do, at least as long as we are willing to strive to match our life to our language. We send a message that this disease of misogyny has done damage to us all, but especially to mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, partners and pupils and professional acquaintances. When we call ourselves feminists, we remind ourselves and others that the belief in the inferiority of women is the Great Crime. We renounce our complicity with that crime, and pledge — imperfectly — to work to build a world beyond misogyny. But we can’t build that world if we don’t accurately identify that which we fight for, and that which we fight against.

The slut-shaming of Amanda Knox: an old and ugly Italian pattern plays out again

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As a busy afternoon has faded into a quieter evening, I’ve been unable to get thoughts of the Amanda Knox conviction out of my mind. For those not in the loop, Knox is a 22 year-old American woman who was found guilty today by an Italian court of murdering her British housemate while both were students doing a year abroad in Perugia. Knox and her Italian boyfriend were convicted on what the vast majority of American observers considered to be circumstantial evidence, with no convincing evidence of a motive, and after another man unconnected to Knox and her fella had already been convicted of the crime. The murder of the young English woman, Meredith Kercher, took place in 2007, and the story has been given sensational coverage throughout the European media, particularly in Italy and the UK. The allegations — never proved to the satisfaction of most — that Knox and her beau had killed Kercher as part of a bizarre sexual ritual were captivating; the prettiness of the young women involved and the luridness of the story spun by the prosecution generated tremendous global interest.

In the fall of 2000, I taught a semester abroad in Florence. I traveled with one other teacher and 45 Pasadena City College students, two-thirds of whom were female. The vast majority of Americans who study abroad are women, for a variety of reasons, and our trip was no exception. We warned our students about the attitudes that many Italians have towards young American women; we advised them about the different “street environment” they could expect to find in Florence. But even I, who had traveled extensively in Italy before going as a professor, was stunned by the attitudes we encountered. The reputation of American “girls” as sexually undiscriminating, freed for the first time from the watchful eyes of parents and at least most of their peers, was nearly universal. And while it is certainly true that for the young and not-so-young, travel is almost invariably an aphrodisiac and a notorious compromiser of inhibitions, the beliefs about American women students were grounded far more in myth and media than in reality.

Still, some of the young women on our trip did have flings with the locals; a few did find Italian boyfriends, as Amanda Knox did. There were some heartbreaks and some scares. I half-jokingly told my students, in one of our pre-trip meetings, that I had only three rules for them: No jails, no hospitals, and no unintended pregnancies. We had a couple of students picked up by the cops (and then released, for smoking marijuana with local lads), we had one tragic incident that left one of our guys paralyzed for life from the waist down. It was an eventful trip. But though there was a lot of drinking and quite a few short-term affairs, for the most part our students emerged unscathed. And whatever they were doing, they treated Florence and the rest of the country with respect and the kind of wide-eyed wonder so natural among youngsters from the New World making their first serious visit to the heart of the Old.

I hated the contempt for our students that I so often heard from some in Florence and elsewhere. Though it was often tinged with anti-Americanism (and this while Clinton was still in the White House), it was directed almost exclusively towards our female students — particularly the ones who were perceived as more attractive, or who wore more revealing clothing. The prosecutor in the Amanda Knox devoted extensive time to discussing the defendant’s sex life and her occasionally flamboyant dress, even her taste in (or lack of) underwear. Her diary, replete with the personal details one would expect in a private journal, has been read repeatedly in court. The vulgar British tabloids labeled her “Foxy Knoxy” and “No Knicks Knox”; it was a world-class exercise in cruelty and slut-shaming. Apparently, to the amazement of even Italian legal experts (familiar with the guilty-until-proven innocent style of jurisprudence in that country) the paper-thin case, built more on animosity towards sexually adventurous American girls than actual evidence, worked today. Knox and her boyfriend face a quarter-century in prison, but have a chance to have that reduced on appeal.

Before, during, and after I taught in Florence I never believed that Yanks abroad ought to be above the law. A dual citizen myself, I have no patience for the “ugly American” code of conduct. (I will note, having mentioned my British passport, that tourists from the UK were often far more poorly behaved on Italian beaches and in Italian nightclubs than were students from the States.) At the same time, I have no patience with reflexive anti-Americanism of the sort that many of my students, no matter how polite, ran into all too frequently. And as a feminist professor, I was and am particularly disgusted by the mix of prudish censoriousness towards and predatory fascination with the sex lives of young women from America who come to Italy to study.

When I look at the face of Amanda Knox, I see someone who looks a great deal like many of the students I taught. When I hear the details of her private life discussed with both salacious enthrallment and affected repugnance, I think of the experiences of so many of my students who went abroad with me. When I hear the twisted, groundless narrative that the prosecution offered, something along the lines of “American girl is sexually curious and open about it and she smoked pot: therefore it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to stabbing one’s prudish roommate to death”, I’m enraged and indignant. What happened to Amanda Knox — and I am nearly as convinced of her innocence as her parents — could have happened to a dozen young women I knew and taught in Italy.

Make no mistake, I grieve the loss of Meredith Kercher and the horrible way she died. But I have little doubt that if Knox had been a little less pretty, a little less sexual, and a little less American, she’d never have spent a day in prison for her roommate’s murder. On her behalf, and on behalf of others like her, I am very angry tonight.