For those of you who want to know about this book I keep dropping hints about, I can finally come clean about what it is I’ve been working on. You’ll see more publicity about this in the months to come, but here’s the first sign the book is real and is on its way. Click here or here.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Can Men and Women Be Friends? Yes, and We Must Help Them Be So
From June 2009
In the aftermath of the Mark Sanford debacle, Laura at the conservative Pursuing Holiness blog asks the old question: Can Men and Women be Friends? Her answer is the expected one: no.
Can men and women be friends? Certainly. My husband is my best friend – the ultimate “friend with benefits.†But it is unwise in the extreme to invest your emotions and build an intimacy with someone with whom you can’t complete that intimacy. Even if you are never physically unfaithful, is there any way to have an intimate friend of the opposite sex without depriving your spouse of the emotional investment to which they’re entitled?
I wrote a post four years ago on this subject. I re-read that piece of mine this morning, and as is so often the case with my “older” musings, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself in equal measure. As I mark eleven years clean and sober this week, I note that my own spiritual journey since 1998 has been a rapid and occasionally turbulent one — and as a result, my thinking on a variety of issues continues to evolve and shift as I grow and learn. The posts I put up in my first two years of steady blogging (2004-05) tended to be much more conservative in tone than the ones I’ve put up more recently. Four or five years ago, I was only just coming out of what I call my “boundary-learning” stage; after so many years of what might best be described as exuberant transgressiveness, I was until recently perhaps over-sensitive to the potential for a sexual charge in virtually any relationship. I’m glad I practiced that level of caution; it was a needed corrective to an earlier way. I note that by last year, when I put up this post about controlling boyfriends, my views had already begun to shift.
But in light of Laura’s post, and my own words from 2005, I’d like to revisit — briefly — the issue of male-female non-romantic friendship.
First of all, like Laura, in my 2005 post my approach was blindly heteronormative. If men and women can’t be friends because of the possibility of sexual attraction, then it follows that lesbians and straight women can’t be friends, nor gay men and straight guys. And bisexuals? Clearly a group for whom radical introversion and isolation is the only possible course. One mistake we make around these issues, over and over again, is that we can predict with certainty what sort of people we are going to be attracted to. The anecdotes are legion of women and men falling in love with people of their same sex after living — in many instances, quite happily — in heterosexual relationships for years and years. As a man who has been generally drawn to women throughout his life, I’ve been surprised once or twice by an unexpected twinge of attraction to a male friend. It is culturally imposed homophobia rather than biological hardwiring that prevents more men from admitting the same thing.
In other words, sexual attraction is, for a great many of us, a fluid thing. A few of us always fall for the same types, like blonde tennis players or dark-eyed philosophy majors of North African ancestry. But most of us who think we have or had a “type” are stunned by how the radical exceptions come into our lives. And not as infrequently as is imagined, that exception is of a completely different gender identity. Simply telling your husband “I only want you hanging out with guys, not with women” isn’t an automatic prophylaxis against an affair — it’s only an attempted barrier against a heterosexual one. The number of men or women who were stunned beyond words by their other-sexed spouses’ decision to leave them for partners of the same sex is, as is widely noted, nearly legion. So often, no one in a marriage sees it coming.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that a hostility to the possibility of genuine platonic friendship between men and women exacerbates the problem of infidelity. When we repeat the traditional common sense notion that men and women can’t be friends, we set ourselves and our culture up to view the other sex with a mix of suspicion and wonder. We also set ourselves up to believe in our own frailty. Those who wish to make a theological case for the total depravity of human beings have a great deal invested in emphasizing the universality of weakness; they have a reason to stress our incapacity to sublimate our erotic desires to our reason and our promises. Conservative Calvinists are on common ground with the peddlers of romance novels, who emphasize stories of folks being “swept away” or “knocked over” by love. When we set people up to believe that they are vulnerable to being swept off their feet, of course, the chances are excellent that they will find themselves swept off their feet. We’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy by relentlessly underselling human agency.
Saying that human frailty is oversold isn’t the same thing as saying we ought’nt to be careful. We are, as a species, remarkably proficient at self-deception. But we can learn how to be close without being romantically or sexually intimate. Through practicing good healthy non-sexual relationships with folks of other sexes, we learn our own boundaries. The earlier we start in forming these relationships, the better. Rather than teaching young teens on the cusp of puberty that the other sex is a mystery, we need to do everything we can to demystify men and women to each other. That process of demystification happens best by encouraging opposite-sex friendships to flourish at all ages, from kindergarten to adulthood, among the single and the committed alike. And while this demystification won’t lessen the power of attraction, it will make the attraction seem less destructively overpowering when it does emerge.
The fragile male body
Not much writing here, not least because I’m still fighting this bug that came home with me from Brazil. I’ve been sleeping in the guest room all week; Eira doesn’t need my hacking and my night sweats when she’s trying to get her rest. And it’s been painful not to have the energy for Heloise that I’d like to have, as I missed her so much during my eight days abroad.
It’s natural that one thinks about mortality when illness strikes. And I’m reminded of this post of mine from January 2, 2008, which I reprint here. I wrote this before I was a father, and I take it even more seriously now:
My father-in-law died early Sunday morning, and we have been busy with taking care of family and with funeral arrangements. (Remember, this is a reprint from three years ago.) Sunday afternoon, my wife and I spent several hours dealing with the cemetary, the mortuary, and all the minutiae that come with death. I’ve gotten too familiar lately with all the details that survivors cope with in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing.
My Dad died eighteen months ago, at 71. My father-in-law died three days ago at 63. Over and over again, the words “much too young” echo in my head. My father’s father died at only 44 (in a car accident); my mother’s father died at 62. Both of my wife’s grandfathers died relatively young as well. Though the causes were all different, we both come from families where there are plenty of older women — and too few older men. The statisticians tell me that men in America and Europe should live to see at least 72, but for my wife and for me, neither our fathers nor any one of our four grandfathers made it to that age. Meanwhile, all four of our grandmothers made it to at least 80, and most well beyond.
So in addition to the grief over losing a loved one, I’m feeling this week an acute sense of fragility. Some of that is just the reminder — of the sort we always get when we’re confronted with death — of our own mortality. But in my personal experience (and the experience of my family), dying “too young” is a largely male phenomenon. Though some of these deaths were due to poor lifestyle choices, the emotional impression I am left with is that men are somehow more vulnerable than women.
I opine frequently “against the myth of male weakness”. I am adamant that men can exercise the same degree of self-control as women can; I am convinced that men have the same capacity to nurture and love as women do. I see that proven by men all around me; I see it being proven — at last — by my own actions. What I don’t see, I’m afraid, is the same corporeal resiliency on the part of men that I do with women. “Premature” death has robbed me of my grandfathers (I never knew either); it has taken my father and my father-in-law and many other dear relatives. (My uncle Peter, a formative figure in my youth, died last year as well.) The impression all this leaves me with is that the strength of the male will is not matched by the endurance of the male body.
Yes, I know women outlive men for a variety of reasons. (I also know that thanks to death in childbirth, this has not always been true. Think of the ubiquitous “wicked stepmother” of the fairy tales, and ponder what happened to Cinderella’s biological mom.) I’m not writing this morning about medicine and masculinity, because my knowledge of the former is dim indeed. I’m writing from a place of grief, matched by an awareness that as a man who will not celebrate his fortieth birthday again, I have an obligation to be the best steward of my body that I possibly can. Accidents, alcohol abuse, over-eating, cigarettes: these were factors in the deaths of several of the men in the family. And though I could be — God forbid — struck by lightning tomorrow, I know that to at least some degree, my longevity is within my hands.
My wife’s grief is palpable. In a sense, it’s almost harder to bear than my own grief over losing my Daddy in 2006. Watching the person you love most in the world go through pain is harder than going through it yourself, particularly when your own experience tells you how sharp that hurt is. But her grief — and that of her family — is cautionary to me as well. The choices I make have an impact on others. Whether I buckle my seatbelt matters. How I eat and drink matters. How I take care of my body matters.
I’ve written about this before, particularly from an animal rights perspective. But not only is it important to me that my lifestyle choices be as “cruelty-free” as possible — hence my veganism — it is also my moral obligation to do everything I can to make decisions that will maximize my longevity. I have people in my life who love me and depend upon me. And while I do not expect to live forever, when I do things that might shorten my life I treat my loved ones with callous disregard. This will become doubly true when I become a father. I won’t be a young Dad by any means. Those of us over forty who contemplate parenthood for the first time surely have a special responsibility to do as much as we reasonably can to ensure that we will be around for as long as possible.
On Monday, we buried my father-in-law. Though all of his children and grandchildren were there, and all were in tears, the one who was perhaps most deeply affected was his youngest daughter. My “littlest” sister-in-law is just 22, still in college. Several times over the course of this difficult past week, through her tears, I’ve heard this sweet young woman say, “I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready.” No one is ever ready to lose a parent, of course, whatever the age of the child. But there’s little doubt that it’s harder to lose one when you yourself are still so very young.
As much as I honor the memory of my father-in-law, I acknowledge — as does his entire surviving family — that his own poor choices surely hastened his death. And what his passing reminds me of is that though men are not fragile, we are often foolish. Our greatest foolishness, perhaps, lies in our sense that our private daily habits do not impact everyone around us. I am inspired today to redouble my efforts to live fully, boldly, and, at the same time, with a sense that I am steward of my flesh. Though to die young is, of course, not a sin in itself, to continue to make decisions that are widely regarded as life-shortening perhaps is.
Thursday Short Poem: Gullar’s “Things of the Earth”
Since I was in Brazil last week, it makes sense to offer a poem from a Brazilian for the TSP. I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t think of any Brazilian poets off the top of my head, but a little bit of hunting led me to Ferreira Gullar. This lovely translation by William Jay Smith of what is apparently a famous Gullar poem grabbed me at once.
Things of the Earth
All the things I speak of lie in the city
between heaven and earth.
All are things perishable
and eternal like your laughter
words of allegiance
my open hand
or the forgotten smell of hair
that returns
and kindles a sudden flame
in the heart of May.
All the things I speak of are of the flesh
like summer and salary.
Mortally inserted into time
dispersed like air
in the marketplace, in offices,
streets and hostelries.
They are things, all of them,
quotidian things, like mouths
and hands, dreams, strikes,
denunciations—
accidents of work and love. Things
talked about in the newspapers
at times so crude
at times so dark
that even poetry illuminates them with difficulty.
But in them I see you, new world,
pulsating,
still sobbing, still hopeful.
Bonding through revulsion and desire: a reprint on men and strip clubs
From December 2009
A reader named Sarah recently wrote in about a conversation she had with her husband about strip clubs:
My husband today mentioned the time he took his younger brother to a strip club when the brother turned 21. I laughed a bit, and said, “wow! i never heard that story before!” A few more teasing words were said between the 3 of us, and Imentioned that if he ever took our (still non-existent) son to a strip club i’d be furious. I assumed no more needed to be said, as the whole idea of it was so ludicrous and that my husband wouldn’t do something so creepy and so anti-women with a son of ours.
My husband shocked me by saying that yes, he would take our kid to a strip club and he doesn’t see why it would matter to me if “our son is getting married, and we all go to a titty bar for the bachelor party. it’s not like i’d encourage him to cheat!” I was left sputtering and a little disturbed, and totally unsure on how to proceed with this conversation as my husband is a man who’s always respected women and agreed on these matters. (or I obviously wouldn’t have married him!)
I’m no fan of strip clubs for a host of reasons. But Sarah’s email isn’t really about strip clubs — it’s about the problem of homosociality, a topic I’ve written about many times before. (Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women.) One of the most odious features of homosociality is the way in which it employs women’s bodies as devices for bonding men together. For example, many women are perplexed (as well as infuriated) by the habit young (and not-so-young) men have of cat-calling female pedestrians from passing cars. “Why do they slow down and whistle at me, making those comments?” a young woman asks; “Do they really think I’m going to get in the car with them?” The answer, of course, is that the fellas in the car are far less interested in the woman they’re harassing than in bonding with each other. They demonstrate their heterosexual bona fides to each other, and in the process of humiliating women on the street, forge a closer homosocial relationship. (It’s more than anecdotal to point out that groups of men, having just harassed a woman sexually, will high-five each other; one of the most devastating depictions of this comes in the rape scene from “Boys Don’t Cry”.)
Going to a strip club, of course, isn’t necessarily analogous to participating in a gang rape. But fathers and older brothers have been taking their sons and younger brothers to “titty bars” and brothels for a long time; in parts of Latin America, the practice is particularly common. The stated purpose may be an “initation into manhood” for a teen boy, or a bacchanalian farewell to bachelorhood for a man about to be wed. But there’s invariably more to it than that. Wives and girlfriends, not unreasonably, suspect that the motive is sexual: fathers and brothers may claim to be doing it as a favor for a son or a sibling, but in reality they’re just looking for an opportunity for “justified infidelity” of one kind or another. That may be true, but there’s a deeper and more common reason: a longing for homosocial intimacy.
Going to a baseball game is the paradigmatic “father-son” bonding activity. But for many men, sporting events are less effective than strip clubs as homosocial strategies. Women haven’t been excluded as spectator from ball parks for generations; very few wives and mothers actively disapprove of sports. (They may find watching sports dull, but that’s hardly the same.) Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable. American boys prove their manhood, after all, through their rejection of their mothers’ values; to care too deeply about what mom thinks is to be a sissy, a mama’s boy. And need I point out how many American men have relationships with wives and girlfriends that closely resemble the mother-son dynamic? Mama might not object to taking little brother to the Yankees game — but she’s likely to be less pleased with a sojourn to the titty bar down the block.
The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies. A single man in a strip club, nursing a beer, is seen as a vaguely pathetic — or perhaps threatening — figure; a group of men on a “stag night” in that same club are anything but. What is unacceptable in solitude is admirable and manly when done in solidarity with other males.
For men who, perhaps like Sarah’s husband, who have not yet done the vital work of learning how to establish intimate relationships with other men which do not require the objectification of women as “bonding glue”, the homosocial appeal of the strip club experience is tremendous. But women aren’t cement to hold together that which can’t otherwise be joined. Emotionally competent adult males don’t use either women’s revulsion or women’s bodies in order to establish closeness and cameraderie with each other. And men’s universal capacity to become emotionally competent — at a relatively young age — is very real. The fact that so many choose not to exercise that capacity is not evidence that they lack it.
Home, sick, and the Tuesday Good Men column
I’m home from Brazil, and I’m as sick as can be. It’s been many a year since I’ve felt so rotten; I was coming down with something even before I flew down, and it got worse while I was in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. I made it through my two lectures, and was moved by the warmth and openness of the students of the Kabbalah Centre in those two great cities. I’m afraid that other than a brief trip up to the top of Corcovado, I didn’t have much energy for sightseeing, and spent far more time than I would have liked flat on my back in hotel rooms. (That meant watching hours and hours of CNN International’s coverage of Egypt, which was indeed gripping.)
I’m so happy to be home to Eira and Heloise. I just wish I weren’t dreadfully under the weather.
My weekly Tuesday column is up today at Good Men Project: Why Don’t Men Settle Down? It’s a familiar theme to long-time readers of this blog. And it’s nice to have a word limit and an editor with a sharp eye.
“We have used our weakness to manipulate and our strength to dominate”: a reprint on undermining gender roles
A reprint from March 2009
Last Tuesday’s long post about feminism and the free market got a large number of replies. My basic thesis was that strong public institutions liberate both men and women from the forced reliance on family for survival; an adequately-funded welfare state allows relationships to flourish based on choice and desire rather than on necessity and desperation. I also rejected the notion that men’s sense of self-worth is somehow inextricably linked to women’s dependence upon them. The old “women offer their vulnerability in exchange for men’s responsibility” myth is a favorite of those who think that at our core, we are governed by what they imagine to be the needs of our paleolithic ancestors. I have no desire to continue to debate those who peddle the risible notion that all males are biologically hardwired for violence and promiscuity, and can only be tamed by chaste and faithful and adoring women.
That said, I want to respond to SamSeaborn, who seems deeply concerned that men are somehow becoming superfluous. Men need women in order to reproduce in a way that women don’t need men, he argues, a point which on a purely functional level has some merit. (It’s easier to get sperm than it is to find someone to carry a baby — paying men to ejaculate into a cup is a lot cheaper, rightly so, than paying a surrogate to carry a fetus to term.) If the state offers sufficient aid to women so that they can raise children without a man’s financial assistance, what, Sam wonders, is to stop many men from “opting out’ into what I call the “unholy trifecta” of pot, porn, and Playstation?
Sam asks:
How can (men) feel valued as a human being if there’s basically nothing only they can do that women cannot while there’s a lot of things men cannot do that women can’t? You either get detachment or service in this situation, but service, of couse, is requiring social checks on women – some kind of affirmative action for men, which one may call patriarchy. Which leaves a bit of a problem: reject patriarchy and you’ll get male detachment.
How would you get around this? What would you suggest that would make men actually feel like complete human beings AND complete men that would overcome this potential dichotomy?
Sam’s right. At least he’s right if you accept “masculinity” as an inevitable feature of maleness. Obviously, we cannot continue to raise our sons with outmoded definitions of what “makes a man” and then expect those lads to seamlessly adapt traditional ideas about manhood to a modern egalitarian culture. The “Little House on the Prairie” vision won’t work any longer, and it’s evident that raising our sons with a traditional masculine ethos is just setting them up for cognitive dissonance, alienation, and anger. You can’t teach a boy that “A good man is one who provides for his wife and children and protects them from harm” and then expect him not to be a bit bewildered by a world in which women have both agency and autonomy. Hence the pathetic appeal of mail-order brides; American men, determined to hold on to traditional gender roles at any cost, sending away for wives from the Third World. The need for a green card, the lack of English language skills — these are often powerful markers of vulnerability, and can serve to puff up the fragile masculinity of a male determined to cling to a dated and useless understanding of gender roles. Continue reading
“Asian Students Struggle, Too”
I wrote a post last month about the Tiger Mother phenomenon made famous by Amy Chua. A reporter interviewed me and some of my students, and the end result is this piece that ran in the McClatchy media group: Tiger Mother meets reality: Asian students struggle, too
On sizes
I’m in Sao Paulo, getting ready to speak in a couple of hours. It’s been a grueling trip physically, as I’ve got a worsening cold that is threatening my voice and has limited my ability to do a lot of sightseeing. I’m tucked in my quiet hotel room in the Jardins neighborhood, one eye on CNN coverage of Egypt and the other going back and forth between laptop and lecture notes.
My newest post on the history of the divergence between men’s and women’s clothing sizes (in America) is up at Healthy is the New Skinny.
On Princesses and Street Harassment: two different posts on what men can do differently
A rare two-in-one week event at Good Men Project: my column on The Princess Problem: Men and the Sexualization of Young Girls is up today. What do princesses have to do with sexualization? A lot as it turns out. The conclusion:
Too many men do everything they can to protect adored daughters, nieces, and little sisters – while making little attempt to disguise their longing for other young women who aren’t all that much older than the child whom they cherish. Girls who are raised to see compliments as currency quickly learn that if they want to keep the praise flowing in, they’ll need to do more to “earn it.†And too often, they learn exactly what they need to do to earn it from by listening to the words and following the eyes of the men they love and trust most.
And my second in a two-part series is up at the Stop Street Harassment blog: Male allies: what matters most is speaking up and holding other men accountable.
My last full day in Rio de Janeiro today. I ran on the boardwalk through Ipanema and Copacabana, and two new friends from the Kabbalah Centre took me up to Corcovado. Off to Sao Paulo tomorrow night to speak there.