Monthly Archives: December 2010

Hef gets engaged again: on Everlasting Novelty and Sexual Invisibility

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My friend Bill asked me to post about 84 year-old Hugh Hefner’s announcement this week that he’s engaged to be married again, this time to a former Playmate exactly sixty years his junior. Knowing my many problems with age-disparate relationships, he wondered if I had a comment about the perpetually be-robed octogenarian’s latest assay into wedlock.

Still on vacation in Placer County, I’ll keep this short. It’s easy to see Hef as a caricature, and a rather sad one to boot. But more than one young man has looked at this aging cultural icon and said to himself, “Damn, I’d like to be like him when I’m old.” Some find instruction in what others of us find ridiculous. It’s important to remember that.

The tragedy of Playboy is, as I’ve said before, that it focuses on “everlasting novelty.” (The phrase is my father’s, but the point was originally made by Barbara Ehrenreich in a book I highly recommend, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment .) Men wanting to look at beautiful women isn’t the problem — it’s the need to always see new beautiful women that is so troubling. Playboy wouldn’t have made money with one issue a year, after all. A new issue every four weeks guaranteed variety — or more accurately, encouraged a mindset that was only aroused by variety. It is Hefner who is widely credited (though it may be apocryphal) with the devastating line “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you the man who’s tired of fucking her.” It is trendy to accept that fascination with everlasting novelty as rooted in our biology, but the weight of the evidence suggests that pornographers like Hef are more creators than reinforcers.

And of course, Playboy Playmates — like the most successful and celebrated of porn actresses — are overwhelmingly young, 18-24 at the time they break into the industry. With a tiny handful of exceptions, few work successfully in the business after 30. This focus on youth suggests that women over 25 have passed their “sell-by” date; Hef has done more than his share to contribute to the sexual invisibility of older women. (The occasional issue focusing on an over-40 hottie is the classic example of the exception proving the rule.) It’s little wonder, then, that Hef has spent six decades chasing women in their early twenties. He’s sold himself on his own narrow vision of what is and isn’t desirable, and as a consequence has become incapable of experiencing sexual interest in any woman past the age of his Playmates. It’s one thing for nineteen year-olds to be drawn sexually to their peers, another thing for their grandfathers to lust after the same barely post-pubescent women.

This isn’t about the porn wars; I recognize the potential for liberation in visual depictions of the erotic. This is about the Playboy ethos. (As Ehrenreich suggested and as I always tell my students, it’s better to write it as “Play, boy!”, driving home the point that the opposite of a “playboy” is a “working man” who accepts responsibility and is capable of constancy.) The Playboy ethos is almost puritanical in its distaste for bodies that deviate from a narrow standard, and contemptuous(as well as fearful) of the sexual potential of women over 25. Above all, the Playboy ethos insists on the necessity of endless variety. Familiarity breeds contempt and aging breeds disgust, or so Hef’s world view holds.

It would be pathetic if it didn’t resonate so loudly with so many. We can do better.

Happy Christmas from the 95661

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I’m fortunate enough to have spent Christmases on three different continents, in places wild and luxurious, elegant and homey, familiar and bizarre. But I don’t know if I’ve ever had a happier one than the one we’re enjoying today at the Residence Inn in Roseville, California. I’m here with my wife’s family, visiting her relatives who are scattered across “Gold Country.” (We aren’t far from Auburn, where the Healthy is the New Skinny project launched earlier this month. More photos of that event are now up at the HNS site.)

Heloise is blissful, and wishes one and all a “Mahwee Crissmiss!” She has a new leather jacket and a small rubber ducky that lights up, and the latter brings her the greater pleasure. A happy holiday to all!

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Earning the epithet: men, deliberate cluelessness, and deserving the label “creep”

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In my Facebook newsfeed this morning, I saw this post by Lu Fong at the Good Men Project: The “Creepy Factor.” Fong, a staff writer at GMP, used the word “creepy” in one of her recent posts, and was called on it by Jeremy Paul Gordon. Gordon’s take on what he calls “the worst thing a woman can call a man” is here. And it’s, well, creepy. Gordon:

Without a doubt, creepy is the worst casual insult that can be tossed at a guy. A guy can publicly scoff at something you say and be a “douchebag;” sleep with your best friend, never call her back and become an “asshole;” cry while listening to Neutral Milk Hotel and forever be a “pussy.” But creepy is not that simple. It doesn’t relate to someone’s appearance, actions, or behavior. More accurately, creepy is a vibe. You can’t define it — you just know it. It’s when a guy looks at a girl for a little too long, when he friends her on Facebook a little too quickly, when he doesn’t understand that no actually means no, not “Try harder.” It’s a tag that isn’t easily dispelled — after all, what are you supposed to say? “I’m not creepy! I’m NORMAL! I say normal things and act like a human being!”

Well, Jeremy, when a guy “doesn’t understand no actually means no”, that is — at best — creepy. When you stare at someone longer than is polite, or refuse to take no for an answer (read Gordon’s post for an example of where he had that problem) then the epithet is well-earned. In a world where women have good reason to fear men’s potential for sexualized violence, a man whose behavior or words suggest that he doesn’t grasp boundaries well is rightly called a “creep.” Merriam-Webster defines creepy as “producing a nervous shivery apprehension”, and women are not overreacting when they’re apprehensive or nervous in the presence of a man who sends the unmistakable signal that he’s not good at taking no for an answer.

Guys like Gordon complain about being labeled as “creeps” (or more commonly these days, “creepers”) even when their own words make it evident that they’ve done more than enough to invite the tag. Convicted on that point, they tend to fall back on an appeal to male cluelessness. “Judge me by my intentions, not by my clumsy actions”, they beg. To put it another way, these lads are asking women to be mind-readers, to possess the magical ability to distinguish between genuine danger and mere social awkwardness. That’s a huge over-ask.

What isn’t an over-ask is to expect men to be capable of sufficient self-control so as to hear a “no” for what it is, a no. What isn’t an over-ask is to expect men to know the obvious difference between an appreciative smile and a hungry leer, and to refrain from offering the latter. And when we fail to do these basic acts of self-regulation, it is an over-ask to insist that women not call us “creepy” because it, well, hurts our feelings.

I’m not asking guys to man up. But jeepers, lads, clue in! Your capacity for empathy and intuition is there, it really is. Use it.

On mama’s Christmas party

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I’m in what I consider my hometown, Carmel. With my grades turned in and a respite from other projects scheduled, I’m enjoying a holiday break. My wife and daughter will come up north on Thursday, so for now I’m alone with my mama in the house I grew up in. While Los Angeles is getting historic rainfall, it’s dry and cool here on California’s central coast.

My mother held her Christmas party last night, the same party she’s thrown 36 out of the last 37 years. From 1973-2003, she had 31 straight parties; she spent Xmas 2004 in England, and resumed the tradition in 2005. I missed that ’05 party as Eira and I were in South Africa, but I’ve been at each and every other party mama has had.

The Party has rules.

It is never held earlier than December 18, nor later than December 21. It is not to be held on a Sunday, as one of my mother’s dear friends also has a Christmas Party that has been on the third Sunday in December every year since the Kennedy Administration. Since my mother’s gathering only dates to the final year of Richard Nixon’s presidency, she defers. The Party is always scheduled from 4:00-6:00PM. Guests start trickling in at about 4:15, and invariably, some family members will linger until 7:00 or beyond. We are lenient with departure times! Peak attendance tends to be around 5:00, when my mother’s little cottage nearly bursts with people.

For most of the past 37 years, we’ve served the same menu: cold cuts and cheeses, assorted cookies and brownies, lots of chips and dips. In my childhood, we made and decorated Christmas cookies; with her sons grown, my mother buys them now at the store. (She still makes her famously unkosher clam quiches and her “midnight meringues”.) We serve mulled wine, made according to a recipe that requires lots of cinnamon sticks, sugar, and huge gallon jugs of cheap Gallo red. I helped make the wine when I was a child too young to drink; now I make it as a sober alcoholic who no longer drinks. (There were only a handful of parties where I was both old enough to drink the wine and not already trying to get sober!) We serve a non-alcoholic punch, which is made of cran-rasbperry drink mixed with diet 7-Up. Sounds dreadful, but it’s served in a lovely ancient punch bowl. The store-bought cookies and cheeses taste all the better on 19th century silver, too.

Growing up WASP (OKOP) means having lots of store-bought things served on heirloom china and family silver. (I came to learn, as I went out into the world, that others cared more about the taste than the presentation, preferring home-cooked delicacies served on paper or plastic. Diff’rent strokes.)

Some fashions have changed. In the 1970s, one of my jobs was to help lay out the cigarettes. We had Vantage and Merit and Camel on offer, cunningly arranged in little silver trays. My christening cup was useful for holding cigarettes, and we had lighters placed handily about. Ashtrays were ubiquitous, and emptying them during the party was nearly as important as passing hors’ d’oeuvres. We began to phase out cigarettes around the time that disco lost its appeal, and by the time I had graduated high school, smoking was only done outside. The christening cup now holds candy canes, but no one ever takes one. It is not as useful and needed as once it was.

I’ve also become much more helpful. In 1973, I was six, and my main job was to police my three year-old brother during the party, something I did with excessive vigor and a grave sense of responsibility. As we grew up, my brother and I evolved into indispensable co-hosts. Mama is 73 now, and can’t do what she used to do with the same ease. I watch her now to make sure she doesn’t get over-tired during the party, just as she once watched me to make sure I wasn’t eating too many meringues.

And of course, the guests are so much older. I, who so often am the oldest person in the room when working with young people, was the youngest by two decades at last night’s gathering. My mother was in her mid-thirties when she started her Christmas parties, and most of her friends were her peers, young parents and fellow professors; friends from her poetry club, the League of Women Voters, and various local boards and commissions. There were older guests as well, but not many. And there were children for my brother and me to play with. We often needed to whip up an emergency extra batch of mulled wine. Some who left the party ought not to have been driving.

But no more. So many of those who came in the past have gone on to the brighter party from which none need take their leave. Those who do still come grow frailer each year, something I notice keenly as I only see most of these guests for an hour each December. There are canes and wheelchairs to be managed. They eat and drink half what they did in their younger years, but from their faces, with no less pleasure. Those who in my childhood were towering and vigorous, younger than I am now, are gray and stooped. Their fingers shake when I hand them a cup of wine, and they take my arm when I lead them up and down the garden path to and from the party and their cars.

Last night, I walked one of my mother’s recently widowed friends out to her car, carefully made sure she was situated safely behind the wheel, and watched her drive off. Carmel has no street lamps, and the street was pitch black at 6 in the evening. But as I looked back at our house, I saw the tree aglow in the window, saw the light radiating out, smelled the wood smoke from the fireplace. It might have been blasphemous, but as I stood on the cold dark street and stared at the glow from the house in which I was raised, the words of John 1:5 came to my lips. I felt the pinpricks of tears in my eyes, as I realized that these parties won’t keep going forever. My mother finds them a bit more tiring every year; each year less and less is eaten; each year the guest list shrinks inexorably.

But mother is not quite done.

As a sentimentalist to my core, I like my Tennyson, and as I stood on the roadway, I remembered something else, a line from his most loved poem: death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done. In the grand scheme of things, a Christmas party is not a great work of noble note. But when we gather around the tree and the fire once again, with rain and chill outside, and catch a scene or two from the last act of a play we’ve been watching all our lives, we are bearing witness to the light. And the darkness will not overcome it.

Until 2011

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I may have another note or two (or, more likely a reprint or several) up before the end of 2010, but I suspect that this will be my final post of the year. Regular blogging will resume again on or about January 4. I’ll be with my family (and my wife’s family) in various parts of Northern and Central California over the next two weeks, celebrating Christmas and New Year’s.

It’s been a challenging year for almost everyone I know, a year of progress and set-backs and a sense that the road that carries us “further up and further in” (as C.S. Lewis would say) has gotten a little steeper. In fat times and in lean, I remain grateful to my readers here. Thank you for your inspiration and your commentary and your provocation. It is all (well, almost all) welcome.

Looking forward to having you visit in 2011.

Oh, and below the fold (for the seventh straight year), A.A. Milne’s King John’s Christmas. Continue reading →

Thursday Short Poem: Williams’ “Christmas Poem”

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Here’s a famous one, a latter-day holiday classic from the great Miller Williams.

A Christmas Poem

In a little bar on the Gulf Coast
someone offers a Christmas toast.
The piano player, believe it or not,
plays “As Time Goes By.” Almost.

The bartender brings over a lot
of nuts and crackers. I have a shot
of Jack to get me on my way.
After a while, it’s What have you got?

A drunk counts out some coins to pay
for a bottle of wine. He stops to say,
How are you doing? The syllables stink.
I lift my glass to say, I’m OK.

Out of the corner what I think
is a man in a wig and a ratty mink
weaves his way across the floor
and buys the piano player a drink.

At a table for two close to the door
a man seems to mean to ignore
a woman chewing a wad of gum.
The bartender brings me a couple more.

The piano player plays us some
of what the season wants. We hum
along and call for more and then
a man at the bar takes his thumb

out of his mouth and says there are ten
minutes left, Good will to men.
Good men, a woman says, to me.
He puts his thumb in his mouth again.

I manage a toast to the Christmas tree
and one to the sweet absurdity
in the miracle of the verb to be.
Lucky you, lucky me.

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The right to pursue, not the right to have: a response to Miguel on sexual entitlement: UPDATED

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Miguel at EmporiaSexus has had a pair of posts up this week dealing with male heterosexual desire: Men Can’t Opt Out and Sexual Entitlement. He takes issue with me in both posts, particularly the former, and with my friend Clarisse Thorn in the latter. Clarisse wrote in a comment on one of her posts:

…no one is actually entitled to sex, and if we start acting like a given class of person is entitled to sex, then that becomes extremely dangerous extremely fast… No one has a right to a sexual partner. … [I]t’s really important that we don’t ever make claims about how a given person “should” have a partner or other people are hurting that person by not partnering them, because these are tacit efforts to guilt people into having relationships they don’t want.

I don’t always agree with Clarisse, but I stand with her on that.

Miguel argues that Clarisse and I are missing the point badly, she presumably because she’s a woman and I because my own sexual experiences render me incapable of understanding the frustrations of the involuntarily celibate male. Miguel doesn’t argue for the obligation of any individual woman to consent to sex with any particular man, but he does argue that men — especially those who battle low or non-existent sexual self-esteem — should feel entitled to sex at some point:

Put an ordinary, sane person in solitary confinement, and that person will rapidly decompensate and become severely disturbed. And yet nobody would argue I have a right to coerce another person into being my friend, or to pressure another person to touch me, even platonically. Yet at the same time, to say that friendship and human touch are “privileges” – and they are either privileges or entitlements, there is no third choice – is to say it is wrong to feel entitled to a basic human need. The fact is, to survive psychologically as social beings, we are all desperately dependent on – and entitled to – that which other people cannot be ethically compelled to give us.

Bold mine.

I appreciate that Miguel isn’t endorsing coercion. But as I read further in his piece, it’s clear that he thinks women — and sexually “successful” men — have failed to appreciate just how devastating the condition of involuntary male celibacy can be. And it’s clear too that he thinks that this is because of the choices women make. His finals words in the post: young women’s preference for the aggressive, dominant man is unmistakable, obvious, and brutal. It’s fairly clear that he thinks the victims of that preference are the beta (or omega) males who are rejected and ignored — and in some sense, robbed of what is rightfully theirs.

I’m reminded, reading his piece, of a conversation I had with my mother when I was in fourth grade. I was in fourth grade in 1976, the bicentennial year when every elementary school in the country did something to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I’d memorized some of the more famous phrases, and on one occasion, when my mama wouldn’t give me something I wanted, I shouted at her “Jefferson said I had the right to life, liberty, and happiness. But you’re taking away my happiness!” My dear mother, with her doctorate in political philosophy, kept a straight face. “No, Hugo, you don’t have a right to happiness. You have a right to pursue happiness. But Jefferson never promised that the government would give you happiness. To pursue means to earn, and you need to do more around here to earn.”

I actually knew the correct quotation, but had left out the key words in order to attempt to convince a woman (my mother) that I was entitled to have my desires fulfilled. Miguel (a grown man) is doing what I was doing when I was nine: conflating the right to pursue fulfillment with the right to have it. But my mama — and Mr. Jefferson — were right: we are not entitled to happiness, and we are not entitled to sex. We are entitled to pursue both, and in a society that guarantees equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome, none of us are entitled to have our basic needs for friendship, or orgasm, or a romantic partner met. Continue reading →

Oh, holy tree

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My wife was in Florida on business this past week, and had taken Heloise and my mother-in-law with her. When I got back from my trip to Roseville and Auburn, I was on my own at the homestead — and I used the time to put up the Christmas tree.

To say that Christmas trees are important in my family would be to miss the point: the tree, as my mother often remarked (and still does) is Christmas. I was raised by an atheist mother, herself the daughter of freethinkers who had long since lapsed from the mild Christianity of their forebears. From my very early childhood, I knew it was possible to feel the magic of Christmas without faith in Christ; despite the words of the pious, Jesus need not be the “reason for the season.” (And as all good students of history know, there’s no biblical evidence for December 25 as anything other than the birthday of a sun god — in much of the ancient northern hemisphere, four days after the winter solstice is the earliest people could be sure that the days were in fact getting longer, hence the ideal day for the sun to be “reborn.”) In my childhood — and now in my daughter’s — Christmas is inextricably bound up not with the story of the god of the sun or the Son of God, but with an eight to nine foot fir tree the decoration of which is ritualistic, celebratory, passionate, and lengthy.

My faith is still with me. But even after my conversion to Christianity, I never made an emotional connection between Jesus and the holiday that has come to be associated with his birth. I focus on Christ during Lent and Easter. Advent and Christmas are fundamentally pagan in my mind, associated with smells and tastes and decoration that have everything to do with tradition and virtually nothing to do with theology. And in the end, it comes down to the tree.

We had Douglas firs in my childhood, but I’ve switched to Fraser firs now that I’m buying trees myself. And as I’ve written before, on the tree must go white lights and white lights only. Years ago, one of my cousins married a woman from a “colored light” family, and it was widely remarked that this was a “mixed marriage” that might well face trouble from the start. Their divorce, when it inevitably happened, was attributed to many other things — but chief among them, their divergent tastes in Yuletide illumination. (My family is now ethnically mixed, WASPs having married folks of Jewish, Chinese, African, Latino and East Indian ancestry. But damned if those who yet remain aren’t all “white light” people.) I don’t put much stock in most holiday prejudices of older generations; I’m happy to have vegan Thanksgivings and Christmases with arepas and vegetarian empanadas instead of the turkey and ham of my childhood. But don’t dare bring a noble fir with colored lights into my house! I am as inflexible as a constipated Stalinist on the matter.

On Saturday, I bought the tree, put up the lights, and hung the decorations. I put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (conducted by Leonard Bernstein) on the sound system — nothing says “WASP Christmas” like listening to a great Jewish composer conduct the lusty voices of Latter Day Saints! I sang along in my cracked baritone, talking to each ornament as it emerged from the Christmas boxes, exclaiming my happiness at seeing these old friends. It took the better part of five hours; I rush through many things in my life, but not the trimming of the sacred tree. On Sunday, I put up the family snow scene (behold a 2007 photo of the process). That was another three hours. Continue reading →

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Top Ten in ’10: the top five

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Last week, I put up the second tier of my top ten posts of 2010. In ascending order, here are what I’d consider my best five. (#4, “The Paris Paradox”, was reprinted at Jezebel and has been the most linked, Tumblered, Facebooked and tweeted post I’ve ever written. But there are three posts of which I’m prouder.)

5. “I just cannot turn it off”: on not wanting to be attracted to younger women (February 4) Excerpt:

…the attraction to the very young is part of a fear of dealing with the demands of adult women. Teenage girls may appear sexually mature, and they may have very real libidos. But despite their not-infrequent claims to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of adolescents don’t have a very good understanding of their own inner terrain. Though they imagine that they are exceptionally intuitive (many young women who do have sexual relationships with older men overestimate their own maturity), few 17 year-olds have the vocabulary and the experience and the courage to engage as an equal with an older guy. And they almost invariably don’t have nearly as developed a “bullshit detector”. Teenagers wear cynicism as an affectation — their naiveté is always there, concealed behind truculence or feigned apathy or ironic detachment or sexual assertiveness. Bottom line: women Jake’s age will be much clearer on what they want; girls of 16 or 17 will be much more eager to please and have a much harder time setting boundaries and limits with someone they care for. And though Jake might not like to consider it so, there’s no question that for a great many men, the sexual fascination with much younger women lies in the not-entirely-incorrect assumption that they will be less demanding and easier to manipulate than their older sisters.

4. The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation (November 9) Excerpt:

One of the most important tools we can give young people — boys and girls alike — is the reminder that their sexuality belongs to them. Pleasure is a deep and profound good, and for all of what we imagine to be their self-indulgence, young people today don’t have nearly as much healthy pleasure as they need. This is about more than teaching young people to masturbate without shame (though that’s never a bad idea.) It’s about giving them the time and space and privacy to reflect on their sexuality as something that belongs to them. With young women, it’s about teaching the difference between the desire to be desired and desire itself… It only takes a girl a few seconds to realize what someone else may want from her sexually. It often takes her much longer to figure out what she really wants, to discern the pleasure she gets from bringing pleasure to another from the pleasure she wants for herself. And once she’s figured that out, it’s vital to work to create a culture where she can articulate that want without shame. That’s part and parcel of what it means to stand up for sexuality — and stand against sexualization.

3. Your body is never the problem: a letter to a sixteen year-old on clothing, style, and creepy old men (May 4) Excerpt:

It’s important too to note that however much skin you are revealing, you are never responsible for another person’s inappropriate behavior. Save for the blind, we are all visual people. We notice each other. There is no right not to be seen. But there is a right not to be stared at with a penetrating gaze of the sort that makes you feel deeply uncomfortable. While it may seem that you get those leers more often when you’re showing more skin, you’ve probably noticed that you get those creepy stares at other times as well. And the key thing you need to know is that men can control their eyes — they really can — and women can control their judgment. Your body is not so powerful that it can drive others to distraction. (And yes, if we’re honest, sometimes we wish that our bodies were that powerful, particularly if it meant drawing the attention of someone to whom we are attracted!) If some men choose to be distracted by you, that is their choice, a decision for which they (not you) are solely responsible. No matter what anyone tells you, you need to remember that.

2. Apples and appetite: on anorexia and western faith (September 16)

Part of beginning a feminist journey is making a commitment not merely to self-indulgence, but to the principle that all human beings are entitled to seek out pleasure. It’s one thing to say those words aloud, another to live them out. And since feminism is never merely about transforming the self for the self alone, it’s vital that men and women commit themselves to being advocates for shame-free pleasure in the lives of their friends and family. Though our understanding of when and how we seek pleasure may be informed by our own spiritual beliefs, and though we ought never seek pleasure at the expense of another’s happiness, we can still boldly, loudly, and continually proclaim the God-given right to delight in our bodies.

Creation, in all of its messiness, is a good thing.

1. Step Up and Step Back: more on the role of men in feminist spaces (August 22)

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men. Stepping back is a way of renouncing the “knight in shining armor” tendency that afflicts many young men who first come to anti-sexist work. Women need colleagues and partners on this journey, not rescuers or substitute father figures.