Jendi Reiter sends me a link to this article on dual citizenship, nations, and states.

And so this dual citizen is reprinting a piece from June 2008 on this very topic.

I normally like the perspective that L.A. Times’ columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes. But he wrote an op-ed eleven days ago that really irked me: Rootless to a Fault. Here’s a portion of it:

Here in the U.S., highly skilled workers and wealthy entrepreneurs from around the globe contribute mightily to this nation’s productivity and creativity. Their presence in our cities, and ours in theirs, has fostered a greater appreciation of global cultural diversity. It has spawned a vibrant cosmopolitanism that broadens our collective concern for people who live beyond our borders.

A few years ago, I was at a fancy dinner party and found myself the only one at the table who held only one passport.

Rodriguez goes on to make a jarringly wrong premise: those who see themselves as “citizens of the world” are somehow dramatically less engaged in civic activity than those whose horizons are smaller and whose loyalties more narrowly defined. He opines:

Without denying the benefits of globalization, we should remember the beauty and strength of parochialism.

It’s all well and good to love the world, but real social solidarity is generally found on a smaller scale. And it’s not just the unskilled immigrants we should be concerned about. We need to find ways to encourage the highly skilled ones to form a sense of attachment and commitment to their new homes. On top of that, we natives must remember that there is no honor in escaping engagement by becoming a citizen of the world.

First off — and I could be wrong — I smell a tiny whiff in Rodriguez’s piece of an old anti-Semitic canard: the notion that the “wandering Jew”, cosmopolitan to a fault, undermines the stability of whatever society in which he finds himself, because his loyalties are eternally elsewhere. Though that is surely not Rodriguez’s intent, there’s no denying that jeremiads against “jet-setting elitists” who have no commitment to place are not new, and that in the past, many of those attacks have been aimed quite explicitly at Jews. Gregory ought to have known that.

But what I resent about the piece is the notion that loyalty to the world and all of its creatures is somehow incompatible with deep concern for the well-being of particular places. Rodriguez posits what is frankly a monstrously false dichotomy: parochial and engaged or cosmopolitan and unconcerned. Indeed, I assure Greg that there are those among his readers who are devoted to Los Angeles and its well-being without feeling any need to elevate the needs of L.A. above those of the entire planet! Continue reading →

This was the first of three posts from that fall 2007 series. The two follow-ups are here and here, and see this related post on iron, copper, and fighting fair.

This is the first of what I hope will be a successful three-part series. Part two to come next week.

This past week in my “men and masculinity” course, we began discussing Robert Bly’s Iron John. Nearly two decades after it was written, Bly’s alternately captivating and exasperating call for a return to the “deep masculine” still resonates. Many people who know nothing else about the men’s movement (not to be confused with the men’s RIGHTS movement, a different beast altogether) have heard of Bly and “Iron John”. I make sure that my students read Bly in conjunction with very different figures in the movement, like the pro-feminist Michael Kimmel. But as confounding and opaque as Bly’s writing can be, my students seem to enjoy “Iron John” more than any other book I assign in this course.

Re-reading the book in preparation for this week’s lecture, I found myself thinking about the much discussed “Nice Guy” phenomenon. “Nice Guys” often cloak their misogyny behind a facade of sensitivity. “Nice Guys” often talk garrulously about gender issues, and often establish their bona fides by bemoaning the way in which “other guys” treat women. About every ten minutes, a Nice Guy will drop an “But I’m not like other men!” into the conversation. The Nice Guy becomes less nice when he realizes that despite all he obviously has to offer, women are remarkably uninterested in dating or sleeping with him. Nice Guys often lose their temper when rejected, launching into embittered, “slut-bashing” diatribes about how foolish women are for choosing “bad boys” (or traditional men). Most Nice Guys alternate between stunningly low self-esteem and staggering hubris, secretly believing that their “sensitivity” makes them the answer to every maiden’s prayer. A great many feminist women have their share of “Nice Guy” stories, and if you spend much time in the feminist blogosphere, you’ll read your share of ‘em.

Nice Guys are, in a few respects, similar to the famous SNAG (“Sensitive New-Age Guy”) who first made his appearance some four decades ago. SNAGs, I suggest, aren’t automatically as passive-aggressive as Nice Guys; SNAGness is about much more than a tactic to get sex from women. Becoming a male feminist isn’t easy, and most men who start down this road do so with the best of intentions, often with a profound and genuine desire to create a more just world for both sexes. The stereotype that many SNAGs are the sons of single-mothers doesn’t always hold true — but a great many pro-feminist men did grow up acutely aware of their mother’s feelings.

I was raised the first-born son of a single mom; from age six (when my parents separated) on, I was a “student of my mother’s emotions.” My grandmother and aunt told me that I needed to “take care of my mother” after the divorce, as she’d been through a “hard time.” And so, of course, I did my best. While I did often annoy and exasperate my mother (not least when I would torment my little brother), I did become very, very good at taking her emotional temperature. My mother is hardly mercurial (though she is a Gemini), and she was generally on an even keel. But she was anxious about many things, and I picked up on that anxiety very early on. She and I talked a great deal together, and in some ways — especially in the period between the divorce and the onset of my interest in girls about seven years later — my mother was my best friend.

I’ve talked to many other men active in the feminist movement, and a very high number of us have similar stories about our mothers. Let me clear that this isn’t the only reason we remain committed to the feminist movement today. It’s easy to play armchair psychologist and pathologize every activist. An adult commitment to justice is always rooted in more than childhood experience. But one thing I learned about myself a long time ago applies to a great many other men in the movement, including the “SNAGs”: we often confuse verbal dexterity for authentic insight. Our commitment to women’s rights is sincere, but we’re often incapacitated by a surprising lack of self-awareness.

Bly, who is often wrong about the remedy but rarely wrong about the diagnosis, writes of men like this:

Part of their grief rose out of remoteness from their fathers, which they felt keenly, but partly, too, grief flowed from trouble in their marriages or relationships. They had learned to be receptive, but receptivity wasn’t enough to carry their marriages through troubled times. In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while: both the man and the woman need to have it. But at the point when it was needed, often the young man came up short. He was nurturing, but something else was required — for his relationship, and for his life.

The “soft” male was able to say “I can feel your pain, and I consider your life as important as mine, and I will take care of you and comfort you.” But he could not say what he wanted, and stick by it. Resolve of that kind was a different matter.

Emphasis in the original.

Living a feminist life as a man is about more than sensitivity to women. It’s about more than ideological assent to egalitarian principles, and it’s even about more than putting those principles into practice in one’s public and private life. Part of being a true feminist is acknowledging the enduring reality of male privilege. For men in this society, that means doing the best one can to renounce that privilege. But the danger in that renunciation is that it can destroy the capacity to act. Too many aspiring feminist men, too many nice guys, are incapacitated. They are incapacitated by a fear of doing the wrong thing — and, as Bly points out, deep down they aren’t really sure what they want. These good guys have spent much of their lives focusing on women’s concerns, and have developed the vocabulary of sympathy and solidarity. They have not developed genuine self-awareness in the process.

And this self-awareness is a prerequisite for continued growth. It is the prerequisite for the sort of resolve that Bly mentions. And righteous action, predicated on both empathy for others and upon deep self-awareness, is something far too few men comprehend.

More to come.

From May 2006.

I’ve been thinking about men in women’s studies classes, and jokes about "male-bashing."

This semester’s women’s studies class is like most: overwhelmingly female.  I’ve got 32 women and 6 men in the class.  I met individually last Thursday with the women for "all-female day"; I met with my guys on Tuesday for "all-male day."  This morning, we all got back together in the classroom for the first time as a full group in nine days.

Most of the guys hadn’t spoken in class all semester; today, all did.  A number of the women in class were eager to ask questions and create dialogue; up until this week, mine has been the only consistent male voice in the classroom.  The guys did a great job of sharing about many topics (we spent a lot of time on the "myth of male weakness")  But two of the guys did something that I see over and over again from men in women’s studies classes.  They prefaced their remarks by joking "I know I’m going to get killed for saying this, but…"  One of them, even pretended to rise from his desk to position himself by the door, saying that "Once I say this, I know I’m going to have to make a run for it."   Most of the women laughed indulgently, and I even found myself grinning along.

When men find themselves in feminist settings (like a women’s studies class) they are almost always in the minority.  When I was taking women’s studies classes at Berkeley in the 1980s, I was usually one of only two or three men in the room.  In my women’s history classes over the past decade, men average 10-20% of the students, never more.  Even when they make up as much as a fifth of the class, they generally do less than a tenth of the talking. That isn’t surprising, given the subject matter — I was often fairly quiet in my own undergraduate days.

But one thing I remember from my own college days that I see played out over and over again is this male habit of making nervous jokes about being attacked by feminists.  In my undergrad days, I often prefaced a comment by saying "I know I’ll catch hell for this".  I’ve seen male students do as they did today and pretend to run; I’ve seen them deliberately sit near the door, and I once had one young man make an elaborate show (I kid you not) of putting on a football helmet before speaking up!

All of this behavior reflects two things: men’s genuine fear of being challenged and confronted, and the persistence of the stereotype of feminists as being aggressive "man-bashers."  The painful thing about all this, of course, is that no man is in any real physical danger in the classroom — or even outside of it — from feminists.  Name one incident where an irate women’s studies major physically assaulted a male classmate for something he said?  Women are regularly beaten and raped — even on college campuses — but I know of no instance where a man found himself a victim of violence for making a sexist remark in a college feminist setting!  "Male-bashing" doesn’t literally happen, in other words, at least not on campus.   But that doesn’t stop men from using (usually half in jest) their own exaggerated fear of physical violence to make a subtle point about feminists.

There’s a conscious purpose to this sort of behavior.  Joking about getting beaten up (or putting on the football helmet) sends a message to young women in the classroom: "Tone it down.  Take care of the men and their feelings.  Don’t scare them off, because too much impassioned feminism is scary for guys."  And you know, as silly as it is, the joking about man-bashing almost always works! Time and again, I’ve seen it work to silence women in the classroom, or at least cause them to worry about how to phrase things "just right" so as to protect the guys and their feelings.  It’s a key anti-feminist strategy, even if that isn’t the actual intent of the young man doing it — it forces women students to become conscious caretakers of their male peers by subduing their own frustration and anger.   It reminds young women that they should strive to avoid being one of those "angry feminists" who (literally) scares men off and drives them away.

Here’s where I need to issue a big ol’ mea culpa.  Until today, I don’t think I fully realized how common this strategy of joking about male-bashing really is.  I didn’t realize how I, as a teacher, permit and thus encourage it.  Too often, I’ve been so eager to make sure that my small minority of men feels "safe" in the classroom that I’ve allowed their insecurities to function to silence the female majority — in what is supposed to be a feminist setting!  Though I haven’t made such remarks myself, I’ve laughed indulgently at them without stopping to consider their function.

Part of being a pro-feminist man, I’ve come to realize in recent years, is being willing to face the real anger of real women.  Far too many men spend a great deal of time trying to talk women out of their anger, or by creating social pressures that remind women of the consequences of expressing that anger.  Many men, frankly, are profoundly frightened by women who will directly challenge them.  In a classroom, they don’t really fear being struck or hit.  But by comparing a verbal attack on their own sexist attitudes towards physical violence, they hope to defuse the verbal expression of very real female pain and frustration.   I know that it’s hard to be a young man in a feminist setting for the first time, and I know, (oh, how I know) how difficult it is to sit and listen to someone challenge you on your most basic beliefs about your identity, your sexuality, your behavior, and your beliefs about gender.  It’s difficult to take the risk to speak up and push back a bit, and it’s scary to realize just how infuriating your views really are to other people, especially women.

The first task of the pro-feminist male in this situation is to accept the reality and the legitimacy of the frustration and disappointment and anger that so many women have with men, and to accept it without making light of it or trying to defuse it or trying to soothe it.  Pro-feminist men must work to confront their own fears about being the target of those feelings.  Above all, we cannot ever compare — even in jest — verbal expressions of strong emotion to actual physical violence or man-bashing.

After all, one of the pernicious aspects of the "myth of male weakness" is that men can’t handle being confronted with women’s anger.  We either run away literally or figuratively, disconnecting with the television, the bottle, the computer screen.  But we’re not little boys who will physically lash out in rage when challenged, nor can we be so fearful that we dodge and defuse and check out.  That’s not what an adult does in the face of the very real emotion of another human being.

I’ve allowed this kind of joking and defusing to go on too long in my classes. It’s going to stop now.

UPDATE:

Please don’t get into thread drift here.  This is not a forum to question the basic tenets of feminism, or issues of domestic violence and abuse, or why I’ve banned anyone in the past.  I’m going to be much more careful about monitoring what is posted here.  This is not a free speech zone, nor need it be.  It’s my blog, and y’all have other forums for discussing gender issues.

If you want to see the original (now closed) 2006 comments section, click here. Any new comments can be put below this post.

From October 2008. See also this follow-up.

In the past month, three of the students I mentor (two women, one man) have come to me reporting pregnancy scares. They are all between 18-21, and each is in a committed relationship, though not with one another. In the case of the lad and one of the gals, the tests came back negative; in the case of the second young woman, she’s planning on taking a pregnancy test later today. (In case you’re wondering, yes, I do have a solid number of students of both sexes whom I mentor — and some of those students choose to seek me out for advice about their private as well as their intellectual lives. In cases where professional counseling is needed, my motto is “affirm and refer”, but in most instances, what these students need is a safe and reliable ear. Given that I teach so many courses on gender and sexuality, it makes sense that some students would seek me out for direction and counsel. I see it as part of my job, remembering that in my college days, I had a few professors from whom I sought personal as well as professional advice.)

I’m familiar with pregnancy scares. Heck, I’m familiar with unintended pregnancies, both in my own life as an adolescent and in my work as a teacher and youth leader. I have helped arrange (and in a couple of instances, helped pay for) abortions, and helped facilitate one adoption. I have been to two weddings of former students who got married as a result of a pregnancy. I’m honored to be trusted by as many young people as I am, and I hope to continue to be worthy of that trust.

But I’ve been thinking more about why so many young people I know choose not to use contraception. The gal who came to see me yesterday had been on the Nuvaring, but her insurance coverage lapsed, and she couldn’t get the scrip refilled. She and her beau had condoms available, but chose not to use them. “I don’t know why we’re so stupid”, she said to me yesterday. The young man I work with who came to me last week, worried his girlfriend might be pregnant, also reported that “condoms were available” at the key moment, but “we went ahead without them anyway.” I wasn’t shocked. When I got my high school girlfriend pregnant, we had condoms nearby as well. I didn’t like wearing them, and my girlfriend said she hated the way they felt. So we used them “some of the time”. And predictably, a pregnancy resulted.

The $64,000 question is: “Why?” Why do bright, educated young people who are very clear about how exactly babies are made choose to have unprotected heterosexual intercourse so very often? Why, on many occasions, do they find such flimsy excuses for not using contraception, even when contraceptive devices are easily available? In some cases, of course, lack of affordability is an issue — condoms aren’t as cheap as some folks think, and other forms of prescription contraception have grown much more expensive in recent years. In other cases, one partner (almost always the male) will nag the other about how “uncomfortable” condoms are. But in plenty of cases, these young people have access to reliable methods of birth control, and choose not to use them. Ignorance is not an all-encompassing explanation, and neither is expense. Something else is at play.

The very same month I got my girlfriend pregnant, my high school English class was assigned Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I remember that my girlfriend and I had that fateful unprotected intercourse on a Sunday afternoon; earlier in the day, I had finished a paper on the play. Like most students, I memorized a few lines (and there are many wonderful lines in this tragedy.) But while some of my classmates fell in love with the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, the line that grabbed me in 1985 and still grabs me:

But here, on this bank and shoal of time. we’d jumped the life to come.

Even though the verb reads in the past tense, it’s uttered by Macbeth before he has murdered his lord. These are the words of a man thinking through the consequences of what has not yet been done, and realizing he’s risking everything (in this case, his soul.) And I remember, on that afternoon in the spring of 1985, not long before I would turn 18, that that line came into my head as my girlfriend and I made love without any protection. We hadn’t seen each other in a week, she and I — she went to a different high school, and had been away on a retreat. Five months into our relationship, we’d been quarreling a lot in recent weeks. We tumbled into bed that afternoon filled with that potent cocktail of horniness and romantic anxiety, longing as much for reassurance as for orgasm. We had had sex without contraception once or twice before, but this time felt different.

I’m not normally given to premonitions, but I knew intuitively that this was a particularly “unsafe” time to be having sex without a condom. And I remember thinking that I simply didn’t care. The lines from Macbeth flashed through my mind, and I remember changing the verb to the present tense: “on this bank and shoal of time, we jump the life to come.” It seemed desperately romantic (remember, I was 17). As awful and as risky as what Macbeth and his wife were doing, they were doing it together, as a couple, bonding themselves together in their mutual sin. And as my girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves around each other, unable to get enough of one another, I remember thinking “I’m willing to risk everything for this — and the life I’m willing to jump is my own, my future.” Like so many young people in this same situation, I was briefly intoxicated with thoughts of a life together with a baby. My gal and I would always be together, would be unable to part, if we made a child together, or so I believed. And driven by these romantic visions, driven by anxiety, and driven by a longing for fusion with this, my first real love, I came inside my girlfriend. Continue reading →