Monthly Archives: January 2010

The safe male traveler

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I’m in Moscow, a bit jet-lagged, getting ready for a guided tour of the Kremlin. My hotel has a lovely view of at least part of Red Square, and I managed a comfortable vegan breakfast this morning. I’m on my own for this trip, the main purpose of which is a lecture next week. My wife and daughter are back home, and it’s for the best — I’m not sure Heloise is ready for the cold. It’s -5 Fahrenheit outside, not counting the wind chill, as I write.

There’s a not entirely undeserved stereotype about men traveling alone. I’m fortunate to have traveled a great deal in recent years, often with my wife (and in the last year, quite a bit with my daughter), and also frequently alone. I’ve noted over and over again the subtle (and occasionally, not so subtle) distinction between the way I’m treated when I’m by myself and when we’re together as a family. I’m keenly aware — and this is probably an awareness rooted in my work — that I’m often seen as a potential predator when I’m by myself. Young women in the service sector (in nice hotels, for example) tend to be just a bit more guarded with me when I’m alone than when I’m with my wife. It’s not that my behavior is any different whether or not my spouse is with me; it’s that a great many women the world over know that single men can be “troublesome”, particularly for young women who are employed to serve them in some capacity.

Part of being a responsible single male traveler — particularly a relatively affluent male traveler in a less affluent country — is to be cognizant of the potential threat (and in a few instances, the potential opportunity) that one poses. I don’t hide from my Americanness (I may have a UK passport, but my manner and bearing are very much of the New World), and of course, I don’t disguise that I’m a man. I know very well the “ugly American” stereotype, and I know the stereotype (grounded in considerable but not universal truth) that men of my age traveling alone are very interested in using whatever leverage they have to get sex.

And so while I hope I’m hardly impolite when I’m with Eira and Heloise, I’m even more aware of my manners when I’m traveling abroad by myself. I know full well that though it might seem the job of hotel staff, for example, to put me at ease, it’s also my job to make them comfortable. That doesn’t mean I don’t ask for extra pillows if I need them (and I frequently do; I tend to like to build small fortresses on the bed). It does mean that when making requests, I make sure that I am cordial, appreciative, and utterly and unmistakably safe. Having a wedding ring helps, but the number of philandering traveling husbands (and, to be fair, wives) has done much to vitiate the power of that symbol to indicate a particular kind of safety.

I have a private tour guide this morning, a young woman who has already phoned twice to make sure I will meet her at the appointed place and time. I know that when we do meet in person, in about half an hour’s time, I will do my best to project myself as an earnest, inquisitive, ever-so-slightly bumbling, desexualized American. Yes, that comes naturally to me now (especially the bumbling bit).

I certainly don’t expect others to adopt my personality quirks. What I do think is reasonable is to ask ourselves — as well as our boyfriends and brothers, fathers and friends — how we behave when we’re alone “on the road” and around women whose livelihood requires serving us in some capacity. Do we flirt for validation? Do we tip more generously those who flirt with us, or those who are more attractive? If we do — and a great many men do — we aren’t having a little “innocent” fun. Ask women who have worked as a server in the food and beverage industry; flirtation is frequently mandatory. After all, there are few things more disheartening than watching a middle-aged man in a restaurant leer and fawn over a young waitress half his age merely because she doesn’t have the power to tell him off or avoid him. Most of us have seen this countless times.

It’s not enough to not be part of the problem. We — and in this case, I mean single male travelers and business professionals — have a moral obligation to make sure that those who are paid to care for us and provide us with comfort on our journeys know that we are safe. We each need to practice our own form of gentle, polite reassurance.

Oh, and newsflash, people: when you’re in a hotel, you tip the cleaning staff. Every day. Don’t wait until the day you check out to leave a single amount; the maids generally rotate, and everyone who comes to tidy your mess needs to be recognized.

Eastward ho

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If you can read Russian, you know where I’m going and what I’m gonna be lecturing on next week. Hint: off to somewhere very cold. Will try and update while I travel.

For more updates on what I’m doing and where, friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I’m listed under my name.

Reprint: Mystery, Anxiety, Vulnerability, and the Longing for Acceptance — a note on penises

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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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Reprint: Monogamy, Memory and Desire

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This post first appeared in October 2006.

The post that got eaten this morning was a long explanation of a comment I made last week when writing about "wild oats."  I wrote on Friday:

Part of living a radically monogamous life is being intentional about "erasing the mental videotapes" of all prior experiences. 

I need to explain what I mean.  I meant to write primarily about the images of past sexual experiences, but before getting there, I want to touch on something else that led me to this conviction: weddings.

One of the innumerable things that I admire about my lovely wife is her extraordinary courage in becoming my fourth spouse.  As you might imagine, she took a tremendous amount of flak from her friends and family when she and I started dating.  At the time, I was thirty-five, going through my third divorce, with a conversion only four years old and a track record of reckless promiscuity, addiction, and mental instability behind me.  Well-meaning folks rushed to warn her off, but she trusted me, she trusted her instincts, and she trusted in my transfomation.

Still, it was particularly hard when we got engaged in the summer of ’04.  One clod of a friend said to her: "Hey, just let Hugo handle all the wedding details; he’s done it three times before, he should be an expert."  On the day I went to buy the engagement ring, a colleague said "Hugo, I bet by now you really know your diamonds, huh?"  It’s not that these people were being deliberately cruel — but they were making it difficult to focus on the newness and the excitement of this particular marriage and this particular engagement.

Of course, I had vivid memories of my first three weddings.  But after I proposed to she who is now my wife, I realized that the greatest gift I could give her would be to make a conscious,deliberate, concerted effort to erase the images of these past nuptials from my memory.  I knew it would be hard, and it was.  But in Buddhist meditation, they teach you that with persistence you can direct your thoughts and control where they wander.  I may not be a Buddhist monk, but I appreciate discipline, and I respect its power.  I began to pray a prayer that summer of 2004: "God, make this engagement as new and fresh for me as it is for my fiancee; take from me the urge to compare the now and the yet-to-be to what once was." 

That prayer worked.  It really, really worked.  One of the most important gifts I was able to give my wife during our engagement was that radical excitement that comes when one does something brand new.  I shared her joy, and by an act of will (aided by grace, naturally) refused to reflect on my three prior weddings.

Did I delete the memories, the way one deletes information from a  hard drive?  Probably not.  If I were forced to recall the dates and details, I have no doubt that I could.  But even if they are still stored in some corner of my brain, they aren’t part of my consciousness.  They are stored and packed away in neat boxes, never to be opened again.

The same thing works, I believe, for sex.  Some advocates for abstinence argue that too much sexual experience (whatever that is) can ruin one’s future marriage.    They warn that if you’ve had a fair number of partners and a variety of short or long-term sexual relationships, you’ll find it impossible not to compare your future spouse to these past lovers.  They also warn that your future spouse may be tormented by worry over how they compare to those with whom you had sex in the past.  Thus, they argue, better to remain chaste before marriage — and stay married to the same person for life.  No pesky memories, no debilitating anxieties.

Such warnings give human beings far too little credit.  While it is absolutely true that for many of us, our sexual experiences get seared into our consciousness, it is — in my experience — false that we will invariably be haunted or titillated by those memories.  Obviously, if we choose to dwell on the past we’ll keep our memories of past sexual experiences alive and close to the surface.   Many people I know — including myself in my younger years — feel an intense desire to hold on to these recollections. 

Since human memory is notoriously faulty, what we end up holding on to is frequently a very edited version of what actually happened.  If we think of our memories as videotapes, what we’ve got in our consciousness is not actual raw footage, but a carefully reworked narrative that is edited and re-edited year after year.  Frequently, I’ve noticed, people tend to edit out the awkwardness and the anxiety, and add in extra doses of excitement.  The memory of a past sexual experience thus ends up being infinitely "better" than the actual incident was in the first place!

The danger is obvious: our very real present can rarely complete with the carefully edited film productions of our minds.   For those of us who have had considerable experience, the danger is that our current relationships may suffer by comparison.  In my previous marriages, I often found myself comparing the physical relationship we were actually having to these endlessly exciting, elaborately produced videotape memories in my head. It wasn’t fair at all to my partners at the time, and it made me feel as if i was destined for a monogamous life that I can best describe as "tender tedium."

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Thursday Short Poem: two by Chella Courington

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Jendi Reiter sent me a link to last month’s Disquieting Muses Quarterly, and pointed out these two poems by Chella Courington, who teaches writing in the city of my birth. Jendi knows my taste, and though these are indeed disquieting, they are very fine.

To My Father’s Right

stands the body. Dad is left-handed. When he stretches his hand, the
body jumps. I used to stay in the body. We would ask Why can’t I have
the drumstick? Why? Why? Then the questions stopped. We were nine and
eating peach ice cream. Condensed milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, fresh
Clanton peaches. Butt numb from sitting on the churn as Daddy cranked,
fingers handle-thick. No seconds little fatty. We reached for the ladle.
The next thing I saw was the body on the floor. Its cheek red and dry.

The Body in Ninth Grade

Diet tricks—red and yellow missiles the body steals and carries to
school. The body blasts off before algebra and Mrs. Burgoyne, braced in
support hose. Glaring at thighs, she writes the body up for a dress code
violation. Three to four, the clock hand circles in the cafeteria. The
body does time. Afterwards, an offensive guard bangs it blue under the
gym bleachers. The short skirt bunches about the body’s waist.

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Men, money and marriage: the Times drops the ball

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The blogosphere and the mainstream media have (when they aren’t rightly focused on the continued heartbreak of Haiti and the implications of the Scott Brown victory) had much to say about the Pew study released Tuesday that shows that more than ever before, men are likely to marry women with more education and earning potential than they themselves have. From the Times story:

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s.

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

Some of this is attributable to the much-discussed “mancession” (the startling reality that 75% of all jobs lost since the start of the current downturn have been held by men). But this is more than a short-term trend; as the study notes, more women than men receive college degrees. Not only are women more likely to hold jobs in sectors less impacted by the recession, women’s superior educational attainment makes them more attractive hires, particularly for better paying jobs.

Of course, the Times piece — like many of those that commented on the Pew study — chose to take the opportunity to emphasize the exact opposite of what the study actually said. The Sam Roberts article begins and ends with anecdotes from a successful 28 year-old, Beagy Zielinski, who recently broke up with her less-well-educated beau because, as she put it, he was “extremely insecure about my career and how successful I am”. The tone of the piece suggests that despite the evidence that a great many men are willing to marry women who earn more than they do, “being too successful” is still a threat to a woman’s chances of finding love.

Here’s one key tidbit from the article:

While marriage rates have declined over all, women with college degrees are still more likely to marry today than less educated women.

There’s the fact. So why does Roberts conclude the piece with this bit from Zielinski?

Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

I’m not just picking on the reporter who wrote the piece, though ol’ Sam is deserving of some serious criticism. She (or he) is only reflecting what we’ve seen over and over again in the media for decades; the tone of the article is just a repackaged version of the old warning “Don’t show the boys you’re smart, or none of them will want you.” As women continue to enjoy greater and greater access to economic and political power (it should be noted that the gains for white women have outstripped those of women from other groups), there is mounting evidence that younger men in particular are comfortable with dating and marrying women whose educations and incomes are equal to or greater than their own. But the old discourse that “real men” (Zielinski’s ex was a blue-collar shipyard worker, a profession redolent with masculine caché) won’t accept an independent woman as a mate continues to exert influence, even in the face of the facts.

Marriage rates are dropping. A growing number of people see the institution as archaic and unnecessary; others continue to delay marriage far later than earlier generations, sometimes because of unrealistic expectations about what is needed in order to enter into wedlock. But the happy evidence is that as fewer and fewer marry, those who do marry are increasingly likely to reject (in practice if not in their hearts) the traditional ideal of man as “breadwinner” and woman as “homemaker.” Despite what grandma or the New York Times may say, the evidence is clear and unmistakable that for women who still do want to marry a man, having a college education and a career increase their chances of finding a husband.

Men and the Work/Life balance: an upcoming radio program and campaign

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I’m delighted to announce that I will be participating in Feminism 2.0′s first 2010 “Wake-Up” campaign, which kicks off next Monday. The summary:

Fem2.0 is kicking off the New Year with Wake Up, This Is the Reality!, a campaign to help change the way Americans talk and think about work and to begin shifting the national narrative away from privileged “balance” and corporate perspectives to one that reflects the reality on the ground for millions of Americans and American families.

On January 25, we will launch a two-week blog radio series on how work policies impact specific communities. That will be followed by a week-long blog carnival (Feb. 6-13) that will flood the public space with articles, opinions and personal stories about what it’s like to work in America today.

One week from today, on the 26th, I’ll be participating in the Work/Life and Men: Superman Versus Family Man radio show. Click on the hyperlink for more details on how to listen; there will be a podcast made available for subsequent download.

Details:

Tuesday, January 26, 1:00 PM EST

Host: Marc Chimes

Scott Coltrane, Dean, University of Oregon; Author, Gender and Families
Hugo Schwyzer, Blogger, hugoschwyzer.net
Joan Williams, Director, Center for WorkLife Law at University of California – Hastings

What does it take for a caring, responsible father to be both a breadwinner and a family man? If there is a work/family balance, it appears to depend on where you stand in the social order. Come investigate with our panel the daunting barriers working fathers face in sharing responsibilities in the household. Join with America’s leading experts as they discuss the problems, possibilities and policies surrounding fathers in the workplace.

“He Might Rape”: the myth of male weakness and the convenient exploitation of low expectations

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The indispensable Figleaf (not necessarily a work-safe site for all) has a terrific commentary up today on the recent study, reported in the Guardian, on men who visit prostitutes.

Fig quotes one of the more troubling passages of the Julie Bindel piece:

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

It’s not hard to see that this belief — part of what I refer to as the myth of male weakness — serves a particularly important self-justifying function. “I need to have sex with prostitutes”, the line goes, “or I might rape.” We see something similar in arguments about pornography, in which men (often husbands or boyfriends) explain that the use of erotica “prevents cheating”. Call it the “You should be bloody grateful that this is all I’m doing” narrative.

Many women who are uncomfortable with their male partners’ porn use (or visits to strip clubs, etc.) tell themselves (and concerned friends) that they’re grateful that their guys “don’t do anything worse.” Perhaps there are some who genuinely believe what the men in the Guardian study claim to believe: that prostitution provides a necessary sexual outlet for fellas whose supposedly insatiable needs cannot be met in any other way. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations writ large, with the twist that the most painful consequences affect those who hold these assumptions — rather than those about whom the expectations are held.

It’s worth noting that the two men quoted in the Bindel piece use the second and third person to describe what “you” or “a desperate man” might do. Perhaps this is a way of claiming cover under the myth of male weakness without risking the sobriquet of a potential rapist. On the other hand, perhaps these lads don’t use the first person because in their hearts, they know it isn’t true. The “prostitution is necessary because otherwise men would rape” thesis is useful enough to be repeated; it is hoped that wives and girlfriends will believe it, and thus co-sign men’s hiring of sex workers as the lesser of two evils. But because these guys know well enough that in their own experience, lust is not a catalyst for rape (anger is, but that’s a different story), they are unwilling to use the first person singular or plural. They want the myth of male weakness to work because it serves their agenda; they know that in their own lives, the myth is oversold. This is cynical, yes, but devastatingly effective.

Until we dismantle the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire we cannot build a just and safe world for all.

Reprint: a response to Artemis on girls, subjectivity, and lust

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This post first appeared in November, 2005.

Let it not be said I don’t "take requests."  Artemis at the splendid Feminist Mormon Housewives had a very kind post about my piece yesterday.  She also wrote:

The only thing I think is missing (but would be better addressed in a separate post) is more of the girls’ point of view and a validation of girls’ sexuality–letting girls know it’s okay for them to have (and enjoy and not feel guilty for) those feelings, as well as how they too are responsible for them. Which, I suppose, could lead to a discussion of whether men and their dress are responsible for women’s sexual desires, or–since there are double dress and sexual standards for women and men in our society–the repression or secondary-ness of women’s sexual desires.

I’ve dealt with the issue of men and dress, and specifically how I dress for the classroom, here: The Male Teacher’s Body and Propriety.  Here’s what I wrote at the end of the last of these posts: What I really care about is not using my body to make others uncomfortable.  I don’t want my clothes and my flesh to arouse others, I don’t want them to scare others, I don’t want them to inspire economic envy, and I don’t want them to distract others.

So that deals a bit with the second part of the Artemis query.  But what of the first part?  What about the healthy, pro-feminist validation of young women’s sexuality?  Let me take a lunchtime stab at the subject…

When dealing with young women and sexuality, I find it is always dangerous to confuse two issues: the joy of being an object of desire, and the joy of being a subject of desire.   The former and the latter are two fundamentally different experiences.  The former is the traditionally validated expression  of female sexuality, and it’s the one with which young women are much more comfortable.  From a very early age, most girls in this country are taught to dress themselves with a keen attention to their role as objects of scrutiny.  Parents and grandparents praise cuteness long before boys and older men leer.  Much more so than boys, girls are programmed to be alert to the various signals their dress and their bodies send.  And indeed, for many girls — not all — the attention and the validation they get as young girls for being "cute and pretty" feels good.

And then comes adolescence.  Is there anything as contradictory as the various messages that bombard young girls about their bodies?  Parents and teachers and op-ed writers urge them to "Cover up!"   Pop culture figures urge them to "flaunt it" (whether they have "it" or not).  And as always, young girls notice that their peers who do dress in certain ways get more attention and validation than others. 

Because of this, those of us who do youth work have to be aware that it’s never enough to ask teenage girls "What do you want?"  We first have to ask them another question, one I regularly ask my girls:  "How does it feel to be wanted?"  In both youth group and in college groups, I’ve had my female students share their feelings about being objects of desire.  The answers, of course, vary.   As always, it depends on what form the "wanting" (or at least the "noticing") takes.  If it’s what I call the "appreciative glance", especially if it comes from an attractive boy, then most of my girls say it makes them feel really, really good.  Even more common than "good" is the word "powerful".  Over and over again, girls report saying it feels exciting and empowering to be noticed and desired.

But if the "wanting" takes the form of a penetrating stare, particularly from an older man, then that doesn’t feel good at all.   "I feel creeped out", "Gross", "Icky", "Like I want to wear a raincoat or disappear" — these are some of the typical responses to questions about reactions that are either  flagrantly sexual or that come from considerably older men.  (And of course there’s the whole other question of how other girls and women respond!)

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Support Madre in Haiti

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I get relatively little news from my television these days. I read updates online throughout the day, and read at least the main sections of the print version of the Los Angeles and New York Times each morning. But my favorite source of news is the BBC World Service, who by themselves are worth the price of the monthly satellite radio subscription. This morning, driving to and from the gym well before dawn, I wept at the extraordinary descriptions of the devastation in Haiti from the BBC’s reporter on the ground in Port-au-Prince. There’s something about radio journalism that forces home emotion like no other medium. I’m not a very visual person, but spoken language for me has a particularly visceral power. I pulled over to the side of Pico Boulevard this morning, riveted and moved, as I listened to the interview with a man desperately trying to care for his one living but seriously injured child, a girl crying for her older sisters who had perished in Tuesday’s quake.

There are certain cultures of the world to which one feels an odd but undeniable affinity. Though I have no ethnic ties to the region, I’ve written before about how I felt strangely at home when I visited the Philippines a few years ago. I felt the same way when I walked the streets of Stellenbosch, South Africa. And yet there are other places (including some to which I have some blood ties) which do not touch me the same way; I have, on my mother’s side, a host of Scots-Irish ancestors from places like County Antrim — but I felt no pull to either land or people when I spent a week touring Ulster in 2002. I’ve met other folks who are privileged enough to travel who have felt the same way about places that surprised them. And this is true too, for me, of places I’ve never been. I’ve never been to Haiti, but it’s very high on my list of places I very much want to go, and has been for years.

In any case, I made an initial donation to UNICEF on Tuesday afternoon. This morning, I read this post by Andrea: Haiti’s Earthquake Could Disproportionally Impact Women and followed her link to MADRE, whose work on behalf of vulnerable women worldwide has been extraordinary. MADRE has a special partnership already in place with a Haitian clinic, Zanmi Lasante, and they are hard at work already distributing medicines, treating the injured, and providing life-saving supplies. A donation to MADRE’s Haiti fund can be made here.

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