I’ve got a guest post up at Scarleteen today on Christian faith and pre-marital sex. Folks may also be interested in reading my three main posts on this subject:
“The battery that powers our livesâ€: more on sex, faith, justice
Comments are re-opened on all.
And this may also be of interest:
I had a great time on KPFK last night. I like doing radio programs; there’s something thrilling about the adrenaline rush of being “live”, not having a script, and knowing that there’s nothing worse in the world than “dead air.” (The link to last night’s program is here; lots of pitching for Pacifica Radio but also some clips of Jackson Katz and me as we chat with the hosts of Feminist Magazine. I don’t come on until about 16 minutes into the one-hour show.)
The last question that both Jackson and I were asked revolved around what we saw as our biggest challenge as male feminist activists. I had a moment to think about it while Jackson gave his reply, and I flashed immediately to a meeting I’d had in my office yesterday morning. Dinah, one of my students, is a sexual assault survivor. A year ago, while working on a progressive political campaign in the Midwest, she was raped by a renowned male activist, a man in his thirties. Dinah was eighteen at the time. Dinah wants her anonymity protected, hence the pseudonym and no specifics about the group with which she and the perp were affiliated.
Dinah has been politically engaged since she was in junior high school, working on a host of left-wing causes. Articulate and brave, as soon as she turned eighteen she spent school breaks traveling around the country working on various campaigns. And on one such campaign, while traveling alone with this celebrated male activist through rural Wisconsin, she was raped by this man she looked up to and admired. The “culture” of this campaign was hostile to law enforcement, viewing the police through a class and race-conscious lens of suspicion. Instead of calling the cops, Dinah confided the truth about what had happened to some women in the movement, who insisted that she keep quiet. What had happened, she was told, was “regrettable” and “unfair”, but the harm was to her alone (or so these other activists claimed.) They suggested to Dinah that she consider the “good” her rapist was doing for the cause. “He’s helping so many”, she was told, “and he hurt you. Isn’t it better to just avoid him? We’ll warn him to shape up, but we can’t go further than that. He’s too valuable.”
Anyone who knows the history of sexual politics in liberation movements will recognize an old and familiar story. From digital history:
Women within (Sixties-era) organizations for social change often found themselves treated as “second-class citizens,” responsible for kitchen work, typing, and serving “as a sexual supply for their male comrades after hours.” “We were the movement secretaries and the shit-workers,” one woman recalled. “We were the earth mothers and the sex-objects for the movement’s men.” In 1964, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson presented an indignant assault on the treatment of women civil rights workers in a paper entitled “The Position of Women in SNCC,” to a SNCC staff meeting. Stokely Carmichael reputedly responded, “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”
Forty years on, Stokely Carmichael’s view of female activists in the social justice movement remains astonishingly — infuriatingly — common. Dinah, who was born in 1991, isn’t the first young woman I’ve known to be raped or abused or harassed by a male compatriot in an ostensibly progressive organization. These assaults happen in ethnic organizations like MEChA, in animal liberation/welfarist groups like the ALF or PETA, in anti-war coalitions like ANSWER. That’s not a comprehensive list, mind you. But what all these groups have in common is an ideological conviction that women’s liberation needs to take a back seat to something “more important.” It doesn’t matter whether that “more important” thing is fighting for farm workers, or stopping the war in Afghanistan, or liberating lab animals. In each instance, young women activists are warned that reporting sexually abusive behavior by a male fellow activist jeopardizes the movement and does irreparable harm to the cause — a cause, that the young victimized woman is always reminded, is so much bigger than her. Continue reading
This is from Sharon Olds’ most recent collection. Most of my readers know of my fondness for the celebrated Berkeley poet who writes the body so beautifully. And this rings right on the worries that happen around an ageing parent.
The Ecstatic
On her first antidepressant, my mother
is adorable. Like many of us, she’s not
interested in much except for herself, but these days
she’s more happily interested
in herself. Now I think of those years with her
as the Middle Ages, before morphine.
We could have put something in her food!
like a Rose Fairy Book potion. Yes, I
wanted her to put me first, I wanted
to draw out
Leviathan
with an hook. But I sensed the one under
the one under the spell — this one,
the child who was in there to be tinkered down to.
She’s had her fitting for the MedicAlert,
“I’ve got it on, I’m all dingus’d up,
I knew you would want to know that I’m all
hooked up!” She is happy that I want to know,
and proud of wearing a little transmitter — not
unlike being an opera singer –
a link to those who wish her pleasure and long
life. Oh I have my mother on a leash.
Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?
When the morning stars sang together?
I was there with my mother.
More on this tomorrow, but my appearance on KPFK’s Feminist Magazine show is over, and the program is available for download. Lots of pitching for a pledge drive, but you get some snippets of me and of Jackson Katz. Click here.
From July 2006.
This post about the “tell your boyfriend I said thanks” t-shirt briefly diverted onto a subject of dress and class. I wrote:
To generalize enormously, the less privileged the background, the more intense the sense of competition among young women. Far too many young ones grow up with a sense that their sexual desirability is a more marketable commodity than their intellectual accomplishments; this is all the more likely to be true in families where there isn’t a history of women going to college. (If you don’t believe me, visit any American community college on a hot day — and then visit an elite university in the same weather. You’ll see more mini-skirts and heels in five minutes at Pasadena City College than you will in five hours at Berkeley or Stanford. That’s anecdotal, sure, but don’t take my word for it — try it yourself.) The bottom line: class and sexual competitiveness among women are, to say the least, not unrelated!
Glendenb’s comment was so good I wanted to repost part of it:
I think the difference was between people who saw education as a right and those who saw it a privilege. Among the students at the cc, they dressed in their best (which for some was heels and mini skirt) to show that they deserved the privilege but also to combat a social dis-ease; they were aware that they were moving across a social dividing line and were attempting to prove they belonged. Students who were first in their family to attend college were straddling a social dividing line – breaking from a set of values that weren’t comfortable with the extreme casualness around sexuality, but not yet fully embracing a set of values in which sexuality was (far too often) separated from emotion.
Students at my undergraduate college perceived education as their right – the hedonism, brazen sexuality, deliberate crossing of behavioral barriers that were not crossed in their upper-middle class families were seen as part and parcel of the college experience – the icing on the cake. They didn’t have to prove they belonged at college to anyone, least of all themselves. At the community college, many students were trying to prove to themselves that they deserved to be there. What to my eye was sexualized behavior, was really a more carefully studied mimicking of what was perceived as appropriate collegiate behavior. Clothing choices were made that would help students feel brash, or strong, or confident in ways that students from the upper middle class didn’t feel they needed.
The bold emphasis is mine. To use the Anglicism to which my passport entitles me, that’s "spot on".
I note this phenomenon is not merely confined to women. Many first-generation male students, particularly but not exclusively East Asian (PCC is over 33% Asian), are ostentatiously fond of labels, particularly those that they associate with the "establishment." Every year, even on hot summer days, my classes will be filled with remarkably neat young men in pressed khakis wearing Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, A&F, or even — oh, flashbacks to ’80s preppydom! — Brooks Brothers polo shirts. The labels are always conspicuous. Reading Glendenb’s comments, it occurs to me that these young upwardly mobile fellows are indeed mimicking what they imagine to be the appropriate attire of the privileged. (Only later will some of them transfer to Cal, Stanford, and Georgetown and discover that the real privileged tend to be far more unkempt.)
The names of many young men — particularly young Chinese from Hong Kong — are often rather touchingly quaint. This summer, I have — these are first names, mind you — a "Fitzgerald"; a "Woodrow"; three "Benedicts" (my middle name); two "Henrys"; one "Maxwell"; and, my favorite, one "Colfax." It sounds like a parody of the membership roster of my grandfather’s fraternity, circa 1926! And at the risk of sounding horribly classist, it strikes me as a rather naive attempt to deliberately appropriate WASP cache. Imagine all of these parents, newly immigrated, working long hours to clothe young "Winston Wilberforce Chan" in what television has led them to believe is the outfit of success: polo shirts and chinos with shiny penny loafers. From the perspective of someone who grew up in WASP country-club culture, this sincere attempt at imitation strikes me as, at the least, oddly misplaced!
But as Glendenb points out, those of us who have "made it" and have an easy sense of entitlement ought not to be too quick to judge those who are eager to ascend the social ladder our ancestors climbed for us. This morning, I’m wearing a pair of slightly distressed women’s jeans and one very bright multi-colored paisley cowboy shirt. I’ve got a Paul Frank watch on (with Julius the Monkey in Mariachi garb.) The affect is no doubt garish, and probably — outside of major urban centers — decidedly effeminate. But I’ve got tenure, and I’ve got the security to know that my authority in no way hinges on whatever get-up I get myself in to. I can afford to dress for comfort and to honor my own admittedly odd fashion sense. Even when I was younger, as an undergrad or a grad student, I slouched around Berkeley and Westwood in old concert t-shirts and ripped 501s. Like most of my compatriots, my certainty that I "belonged" gave me the freedom to be slovenly. It wasn’t "affected working-class chic"; it was laziness, and a laziness reinforced by the certainty that such sloppiness would not be an obstacle to acceptance in a milieu that was, after all, mine by birthright.
In thirteen years of community college teaching, I’ve learned to be a hell of a lot less judgmental of my students. I’m not offended, aroused, angered, or distracted by anything my students do or don’t wear — though from time to time, I’ll confess I’m still amused (a reaction I keep to myself as much as possible). Glendenb’s point is well-taken: what students wear tends to reflect not only their personal style, but also their perception of what college is, and their own ease with being here. I do well — we all do well — to remember that as we comment on the remarkable diversity of choices our students make each morning as they dress themselves.
From June 2009.
One of my former youth group kids, “Holly” contacted me last week. Holly’s 17, an aspiring theater actress, and just landed her first lead role in a summer production. She has a boyfriend, Ferdinand — and Ferdinand isn’t happy about the part Holly’s taken. In one scene in the play, Holly’s character needs to kiss her “husband”; it’s an indispensable part of the show. Ferdinand has been in a funk ever since he found out Holly was going to do the show, and until he relented last week, threatened a break-up if she went ahead with her plans to take the role.
Holly and I talked on Friday about her relationship, the problem of ultimata, and what it meant to play a part on stage. This little quarrel raises some important issues about trust and fidelity, of course, but also about the vital distinction between the form and the content of a physical act. (I blogged at length about “form” and “content” in this post about faith and sexuality from July 2008.) To be concerned with form is to be concerned with a particular act, like kissing; to be concerned with content is to be concerned with what that act signifies to the two people involved. These aren’t mutually exclusive concerns, of course, but understanding the distinction is vital, as I explained to Holly.
For example, touching another person’s genital region generally has the form of sexual intimacy. At the same time, there’s a world of difference (one does rather hope) between the way a woman might be touched by her OB/GYN and by her lover. Even if both doctor and boyfriend (or girlfriend) touch her vagina in an act of similar form, the content of the touching is radically different. Even Ferdinand, surely, doesn’t object to Holly seeing a physician. Anyone who’s been to the doctor intuitively grasps the form/content distinction.
Another example lies in art: in a figure drawing course, one is often required to draw a a picture inspired by a live nude model. In our puritanical culture, where the body is so often concealed, steadily gazing at a naked human being has the form of something sexual. But the content of the act (drawing from a nude figure) isn’t sexual; the concern of the student artist is usually something like “How the hell am I going to get that calf muscle right?” and not “Oh my goodness, I’m so turned on right now.” That doesn’t mean sexual arousal can’t happen in a figure drawing class — it may. But sexual arousal can come in any number of unexpected ways and in unexpected places. It would be unreasonable, I think, for a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse to say to their beloved “I don’t want you taking a studio art class where you draw naked people”, just as it would be unreasonable to say “I don’t want your doctor touching your private parts.” Form and content are, in these instances, distinct.
And the same, of course, is true in Holly’s situation. Those who have little experience with acting may marvel at the apparent ease in which movie stars portray passion on the screen; one reason why actresses in particular (Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, etc.) win Oscars after making films in which they did explicit scenes is because we marvel that anyone, particularly a woman, could so expertly separate form and content. (Winslet, whose husband is the director Sam Mendes, has talked often about the inability of some folks to accept her ability — and her spouse’s — to separate the brilliant realism of her “form” from the content of her heart.)
An actor is as much a working professional as a doctor. Each may be called into close proximity with the naked flesh of another human being as part of their professional responsibilities.. Obviously, Holly isn’t a professional actress yet, and she isn’t doing a nude love scene: she’s merely kissing an actor on the lips. Everyone will stay clothed; it will be at most a PG-rated act. But Holly, who is head-over-heels in love with Ferdinand, is quite clear about her own ability to distinguish between the form and the content of what it is that she will do. And it seems as if her beau is slowly coming around to seeing things her way.
Of course, in a romantic relationship one generally wants form and content to go together. When we make love with a partner, for most of us the goal is to have the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts be radically congruent with what we are doing with our bodies. Though that isn’t a universal ideal, it’s certainly a widespread desire. For many of us, monogamy is also an ideal. We don’t want our partners being sexual with other people. But we need to understand what Kate Winslet understands: not everything that has the outer appearance of being sexual really is.
When two actors feign passion, their on-screen or onstage kisses and caresses are no more authentically sexual than a pelvic exam down at the women’s clinic. That doesn’t mean co-stars can’t fall in love with each other; they often do. But when two teenage actors in a summer stock production embark on a romance, it’s usually because the experience of working together on something each believes in so passionately is itself a powerful aphrodisiac. Onstage kisses are hardly the cause.
I’ll be on the air with KPFK radio tomorrow night, participating in their fall fundraising drive and appearing on Feminist Magazine, which airs from 7-8PM Pacific every Wednesday. They’ve even got a little CD of some of my talks (versions of my most popular posts) that’s part of their “premium package.”
Here’s the blurb from the show’s Myspace page:
This rare edition of “Feminist Magazine†is NOT FOR MEN ONLY: it’s for ALL of us who want to work together for gender justice and a transformed world. We’re talking with Hugo Schwyzer and Jackson Katz who are committed to eradicating sexism –and all other social and political inequalities. And we’re calling on YOU –the men and boys in our audience and all the people who love you — to open your minds and hearts –and wallets!
Pioneering History and Gender Studies Professor Hugo Schwyzer, a “stand-up†instead of a “stand-by guyâ€, takes on men’s roles within feminist movements as they “Step Up, Step Back†and address “Men, Women and Anger”. Jackson Katz, internationally recognized for his ground breaking work in gender violence prevention with men and boys, describes his seminal book “The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Helpâ€, and his award winning educational video “Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity.†And, we’ll feature ‘Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men,’ by Dr. Michael Kimmel one of our leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity.
The books, video, and Schwyzer’s CD are available as thank you gifts in exchange for your pledge to support KPFK.
Sooooo —–Tune in to Pacifica Radio-KPFK’s “Feminist Magazine†with your hosts Ariana Manov and Melissa Chiprin- this Wednesday, October 13, at 7 PM (PDT). Heard in Los Angeles 90.7 FM, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara and streaming live and archived at kpfk.org
Right below, I mention my mild dismay at the fallout for coming in first on one particular list.
But other folks are making more interesting lists. Check out the Good Men Project’s list of Top Ten Good Politicians, a bi-partisan offering of fellows who seem to have been chosen for their affability, bipartisanship, and seriousness (as well as their willingness to answer questions from GMP.) Michigan’s Carl Levin comes in first. Tom Matlack says that on this list, they mostly “looked for men who aren’t completely full of shit.”
Meanwhile, Lindsey offers her list of the the Top Ten Fictional Feminist Icons. Scarlett O’Hara carries off the top prize, and count me appalled that Dagny Taggart snatched third. The absence of heroines from genuinely feminist novels is also a surprise. I’d have expected “Jo” from Little Women, “Shug” from The Color Purple or maybe “Offred” from The Handmaid’s Tale.
On both lists, your thoughts are welcome; post your own choices for either list here or at the original sites.
It’s been nearly two years since I “won” the honor (however dubious) of being named “America’s Hottest Professor” by the Ratemyprofessors website.
Over the weekend, an anonymous comment ended up in my moderation queue for this blog:
You are so far from hot. You rated yourself over and over again to win that award. Your (sic) ugly and vain and a poser.
I get comments like that every few weeks now, though in the days after I won the 2008 award from RMP, they were much more frequent. My actual ratemyprofessors page was spammed with all sorts of vileness, though whoever moderates that site did take down most of the cruelest and most scurrilous postings.
I was happy when I won the “award” not because I genuinely believed myself to be the most physically attractive college professor in the States — I doubt that’s true even within my own department. But I was excited about the possibility of leveraging whatever small degree of notoriety came with the announcement to drive traffic here to this blog and to gain a larger audience for my writing and speaking engagements. Not being very wise about this sort of thing, I operated with the “all publicity is good publicity” mindset, and though I would much rather have been named “best teacher”, I figured this little bit of recognition could only help.
My friend Jane, a PR professional, reminds me that that little saying about publicity is frequently untrue. Interviewers and media outlets have not come knocking as a result of my being named hottest prof. Though I’ve been fortunate enough to start work on other projects, and to collaborate on a forthcoming book (about which more will come, promise) none of those opportunities were linked to the Ratemyprofessors distinction.
On the other hand, my ego has taken one heck of a battering. Sometimes, it’s seemed a bit like some sort of sadistic high school prank: set the dorky kid up for something for which he’s manifestly not qualified, and then rip him ruthlessly. I generally stay away from the Ratemyprofessors site itself, as I don’t trust the authenticity of what’s written there. But the emails and anonymous comments, even when they are quickly deleted, do take their toll. I remember being an awkward, unattractive teenager. Frankly, the continued reaction to the Ratemyprofessors brings back unpleasant thirty year-old memories of being teased. (It’s worth noting that there’s male privilege involved here. Were I a female professor who had won, and my “victory” was considered equally undeserved, I suspect the comments would have been even ruder and more vociferous.)
In the grand scheme of things, this is not a source of great pain in my life. I have a wife and daughter who mean the world to me, a job I love, a community of friends and students and colleagues whose support is an indispensable joy. Their gentle ribbing is affectionate and welcome. My looks mean less to me than my health; my worries around my body these days are less about my appeal to others and more about staying fit under a breakneck schedule. But I’d be lying if I said that the steady flow of nasty reminders of just how undeserved the 2008 award was didn’t take just a little bit of a toll. While winning the “hottest professor of 2008″ title wasn’t quite the same as being handed a poisoned chalice, the taste of that “victory” has proved decidedly bittersweet.
..at least on recent posts.