Royal Wedding, Take Two: the sermon, the hats, the kerfuffle

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

We had planned for 20 guests, but in the end several who had promised to come to our royal wedding party found the early (or late) hour too much of a stretch. A dozen of our friends did make it over at 1:00AM California time this morning to watch the royal wedding. We offered tea and scones, Stilton and Plymouth gin. We had a wonderful time, enjoying the build-up as well as the ceremony itself. I tried to explain the intricacies of the British class system to our guests, but gave up; it was an overask for the middle of the night.

I’ve explained my fondness for the royal family before, noting the distinction between respect and undue reverence. Both American and British, I’m comfortable with moving in two different cultures — though I am certainly at my core more coastal Californian than anything else. (I feel more at home in L.A. than in London. But I feel more at home in London or Exeter or Durham than I do in Bakersfield or Baton Rouge or Boise. My thoroughly cosmopolitan wife feels much the same way.) My brother, raised as I was in the same places, feels English, and has chosen to make his home in the land that saved my father’s family from destruction.

I posted on Facebook about the wedding, and “live-tweeted” my response to various happy aspects of the ceremony (like Princess Beatrice’s splendid hat and Bishop Chartres’ wise homily). I was stunned by the vehemence of some of my friends and acquaintances who were not only uninterested in the goings on at Westminster (perfectly understandable) but nakedly hostile to the entire event. I knew it was coming: on this Feministe thread, some commenters were unhappy that a feminist blog celebrated the wedding uncritically. And a few Facebook friends of mine went further, insisting that progressive politics were fundamentally incompatible with affection for the monarchy. It got a bit heated.

I like Dan Hodges’ bit in the Guardian today: We needn’t be royal wedding party poopers just because we’re leftwing. Hodges wrote: What we saw today wasn’t a celebration of aristocratic privilege. It was a celebration of a shared heritage. A heritage that is owned as much by the left as by the right. I agree.

As for the sermon by the Bishop of London, it was splendid. My favorite bit:

Marriage should transform, as husband and wife make one another their work of art. It is possible to transform as long as we do not harbour ambitions to reform our partner. There must be no coercion if the Spirit is to flow; each must give the other space and freedom. Chaucer, the London poet, sums it up in a pithy phrase:

“Whan maistrie [mastery] comth, the God of Love anon,
Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon.”

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

Bold mine. (And I’d add that this is true of any enduring commitment, including those between two people of the same sex. What is needed is the complementarity of spirits and hearts, not necessarily the complementarity of male and female.) We all need reminding that no other person can be the sole, or even primary, source of our joy.

Friday Random Ten: Royal Wedding Edition

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Other than the bonus, these tracks have nothing to do with the royal wedding and are as random as can be. Since my “random” function favors recently played tracks, and since I’ve been playing the heck out of the wonderful new Emmylou album released this week, it makes sense that the title cut would be #1.

And the bonus is the greatest and most English of hymns, both patriotic and revolutionary in its reference to “dark satanic mills.”

1. “Hard Bargain”, Emmylou Harris
2. “Wuthering Heights”, Kate Bush
3. “We’ve Met”, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
4. “We Shall Not Be Moved”, Mavis Staples
5. “Virginia, No One Can Warn You”, Tift Merritt
6. “California Love”, 2Pac
7. “Calling All Angels”, Wailin’ Jennys
8. “Georgia Cane”, Zack Walther and the Cronkites
9. “Everybody’s Here”, Brad Paisley
10. “Fountain of Sorrow”, Jackson Browne

Bonus Track: “Jerusalem” (William Blake and Charles Hastings Parry)

Notes on the appreciative gaze, young men’s body anxiety, and why strong public institutions enable private liberation

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

The Frisky reposts my piece on how good men gaze, giving it the more accurate title of How to Check Out Women.

And my Thursday post at Healthy is the New Skinny reminds readers that guys also suffer from our culture of body perfectionism — and are often less well-equipped than women to talk about it. Excerpt:

What we need to remember is that no one is immune from self-loathing. Eating disorders and poor self-esteem are found in men and women alike, and if we haven’t hit parity yet, the evidence is that within a generation, we might. Too many of our little brothers as well as our little sisters are struggling to live up to an impossible ideal, doing harm to their bodies and their spirits as they pursue the unrealistic and the unhealthy.

We need to encourage more men to be open about their own body image issues. We also need to be ready to hear what they have to say without insisting that women invariably “have it worse.” Building a world that prioritizes good health and happiness will take all of us working together in a team, spreading the message that “healthy is the new skinny”. And just maybe, we can add “healthy is the new ripped.”

And in honor of the Tea Party nuttery of Rep. Allen West, I wanted to link to an old post of mine: The road out of serfdom: gender roles and social democracy. Excerpt:

Strong public institutions are not “traps of dependency”; rather, they are agents of liberation. Excellent day care, good hospitals, inexpensive education and a strong social safety net give the traditionally underprivileged, men and women alike, the chance to do something vitally important: form and maintain relationships based on desire and mutual respect rather than on need and vulnerability.

“Too Much to Expect, Not Too Much to Ask”: on fairness and monogamy

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

My Facebook friend Jennifer sends me a link to this blog post by Greta Christine: Is Monogamy Fair? The post deals with whether it’s reasonable to ask your partner in a monogamous relationship to avoid masturbating, to avoid porn, or to avoid strip clubs and sex workers.

I pick those three examples because for many people, they fall on an escalating scale of “violation” of the basic principle of monogamy. While many folks are comfortable with the idea that their partners masturbate, many of those same men and women might prefer their partners not do so to porn. And many of those who are fine with a lover’s private porn use would draw the line at accepting their decision to have sex with a prostitute.

I’ve written about porn and masturbation before, and you can find my (often evolving) thoughts on those subjects under the categories on the right. What struck me about Greta’s post was the underlying premise: is it fair to ask a partner to only be sexual with you?

The simple answer, of course, is yes. Monogamy in 21st century Western culture isn’t coerced (though it is still elevated,often wrongly, above other options). People in committed relationships enter those relationships by choice, presumably motivated by desire. And it’s not unreasonable, in a relationship, to ask for what you want.

Years ago, Mary Chapin-Carpenter sang “It’s too much to expect, but it’s not too much to ask.” It’s an important distinction. Harry gets to ask Mabel to not masturbate alone because it’s his wish that both he and Mabel are only sexual when they are together. He’s allowed to want what he wants. But he doesn’t get to expect Mabel to agree. Even in marriage, one partner’s desire is not automatically the other’s obligation. To use Greta’s language, it’s fair for Harry to ask… and equally fair for Mabel to refuse the request.

Monogamy isn’t one-size fits all. Monogamy isn’t about the limitations you place on your sexuality so much as it is about the degree to which you prioritize a sexual relationship. So one monogamous relationship could be “open” to other partners while another was “closed”. What would determine the health and the strength of the relationship would be not the choices made, but the openness, clarity, respect, mutuality and honesty with which the ground rules of the relationship were negotiated.

Monogamy is, sooner or later, sacrificial. It calls for something maddeningly delicate — the merging of interests and the practice of constant compromise without the complete loss of individual identity. It is an endlessly shifting Venn Diagram in which there must always be three distinct entities: You, Me, and Us. The $64,000 question is the obvious one: how much of “Me” do I give up for the “Us”? To pretend that the answer is “nothing” is absurd. But to insist that the answer is “everything” is a recipe for romantic disaster.

What we want sexually (and in other areas) fluctuates over the course of our lives, and certainly over the course of a long-term relationship. Successful couples tend to renegotiate agreements and compromises. “You’ve changed!” should be less of an accusation than a compliment; who wants to be the exact same person at 45 that they were at 23? We’re here to help each other grow.

Part of that growth involves developing the courage to ask for what we want. Part of that growth also involves developing the courage to say “no” to a request we cannot grant without a loss of something very precious. We have the right to ask, but our asking never entitles us to a “yes”. In that spirit of balancing sacrifice with self-love, of valuing the Us while not letting go of the Me, a monogamous relationship can indeed find its way to fair.

So it is eminently “fair” to ask a partner to be sexual only with you. And it’s equally fair for them to say “no”. And fighting fairly through the conflict that follows will either allow the relationship to grow — or to end, gracefully and kindly.

Thursday Short Poem: Szymborska’s “Cat”

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Like many, I first discovered Wislawa Szymborska when she won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature. This ran again this week in the online edition of the New York Review of Books. I don’t love cats, but this is very fine.

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

Royal Wedding

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Eira and I are hosting a small royal wedding party at our home on Friday morning. Kate and William are set to be married at 3:00AM Pacific time, and our gathering kicks off two hours earlier, continuing until the couple has returned to Buckingham Palace and we’ve been treated to the sight of the balcony wave. (For an earlier post on this particular union, see here.)

It’s fashionable to appear mystified at all the hoopla surrounding the Windsors. The right sort of people, especially on the left, are expected to engage in the customary round of eye-rolling about American Anglophilia and public laments about the continued cruel appeal of monarchy. It’s acceptable to be interested in the royals from an anthropological standpoint, or if your fascination is presented with a thick layer of ironic detachment. But to be genuinely moved by the pomp and circumstance, to be uncritically joyful — this is said to be a sign of an unreflective and vulnerable mind.

I’m not offering a Palinesque critique of the “cultural elite”. There’s much to question about the continued relevance of monarchy in the 21st century, particularly about the way in which it legitimizes enduring inequality. There’s also a great deal that’s right in the suggestion that what we do to the royals is cruel, a point Christopher Hitchens makes so eloquently in the second link above.

The Windsors don’t represent everything that is British, or even the best of Britain. But they are the public face of one aspect of that country and that people, one for which I am deeply grateful, as I wrote in this 2009 post:

My love for Britain isn’t rooted in ethnic heritage; on my mother’s side, I’ve got some ancestors from that sceptered isle, but far more from the continent. The love I have is rooted in many things, but perhaps most plainly in my family’s history. My paternal grandmother, Elisabeth von Schuh, was born in Vienna to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father; her husband, Georg Schwitzer (the spelling would later be changed) was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism when he married. My father was uncircumcised and baptized, but was ethnically 3/4ths Jewish; that latter fact would have meant a death sentence for him and the rest of the family following Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938. My grandfather, a gentle physician, wasn’t eager to leave; like many, he thought things wouldn’t “get that bad” for Viennese Jews (who were used to anti-Semitism as a political prop.) My late grandmother knew better, and she explored every avenue she could to get the family out.

It was Great Britain that welcomed in my father’s family. Not the USA (my grandmother tried that option). Not France (lucky, too, given what would happen to French Jews during the war.) The only door that opened was for Britain, which was willing to take certain Jewish professionals, especially doctors. The family escaped just before the outbreak of World War Two, and after a brief period in London, settled in what was then Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire, in a place called Fawler Manor just outside of Kingston Lisle. Though my grandfather was briefly interned as an enemy alien, he was eventually released and allowed to practice medicine. While my grandmother and her children stayed in the south, he went to work as the staff doctor at the refinery in Ellesmere Port, Lancashire — where he would die in a car accident in 1947. Continue reading →

How Good Men Gaze: UPDATED

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

As I’ve mentioned before, like most writers, I don’t get a say in how my pieces elsewhere get titled. Editors do decide, and they want reader eyeballs, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. Such an instance today with my Tuesday column at the Good Men Project: How To Stare At Women. My suggested title for the piece was “How Good Guys Gaze”, but I suppose that was fairly weak sauce. I protested to my editor today, and he agreed that it was a mistake given the theme of this week’s offering: An excerpt:

…I realized that I’d grown up believing what many men believe, that guys may not have a right to touch what they see, but they have a right to look as much as they want. Listening to women’s stories, I understood for the first time just how uncomfortable it was to be on the receiving end of those penetrating stares.

The question I wrestled with then was one I now often get asked by other men: How do I look? These guys aren’t asking for feedback on their appearance; they’re asking for clear guidelines for how to check out women in ways that aren’t going to make those women (or others) uncomfortable…

…Breasts don’t walk by themselves; they belong to human beings. It isn’t erasing a woman’s humanity to notice her body (or particular body parts). It isn’t erasing her humanity to fantasize about having sex with her. It is erasing her humanity when you make your gaze and your fantasy her problem. A blogger named Holly once wrote, in a comment about this very subject, that there should be “no objectification without due subjectification.” That’s jargon, but the idea is a simple and useful one: it’s OK to stare at someone else’s body (and even long for it) as long as you don’t ever forget that you’re looking at a person. And just as you have a right to lust, that person has a right not to be made forcibly aware of your desire….

UPDATE: In my column, I offer up the “three-second rule”. Ben Privot of the Consensual Project has another take here.

An Easter note from the sandwich son

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

We made a whirlwind trip up to Northern California yesterday to spend Easter with my family. Heloise, Eira, and I caught the first morning flight from LAX up to San Jose, and took the last return flight last night. In between, we spent a few happy hours on my family’s ranch on the slopes of Mission Peak.

Growing up in a secular family, we had a quartet of major holidays and a series of minor celebrations. (Among the minor celebrations, I grew up eating cherry cakes and pies on Washington’s birthday, and making nosegays to leave anonymously on neighbors’ doorsteps on May 1). The Big Four: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. Just as Christmas always had more to do with the tree than with either the solstice or the birth of Christ, Easter has always been about fine baskets and egg hunts rather than the resurrection.

When I saw on the calendar that this year’s Easter was to be the latest since 1943 (and the second-latest day upon which it can ever fall), I felt confident we’d have lovely weather at the Ranch for my daughter’s first proper egg hunt. Last year rain fell on the Ranch and my daughter crawled around on a floor and grabbed a handful of very obvious plastic orbs. But Heloise is 27 months old now, talkative and active and agile. (The last she doesn’t get from her father.) We had been telling her about “Easter at the Ranch” all week, and she was eager. But the weather was cool and damp, and so her private hunt, accompanied by flashbulbs and many ooohs and aaahs from parents, grandmother, and cousins, took place on a porch rather than on our all-too-soaked lawns.

In the afternoon, before it was time to return to the airport and after Heloise had fallen asleep for her nap, my cousins and I played three quick croquet matches. Croquet on the Ranch bears only a passing resemblance to its genteel origins. It’s been played on the place since World War One, if not before, and I grew up watching my uncles, aunts and cousins swear and bluster their way around the course. Gopher holes make natural obstacles, and ranch rules forbid the clearing of even the largest bits of natural debris that might find their way on to the grass. I hadn’t played in a couple of years, and it was great fun. The thwack! of the mallet striking the ball, the ceaseless roisterous patter from the competitors and the sound of ice clicking against glass in the drinks all held — these were the sounds of my childhood and yesterday, they were once again the sounds of my now. It was a very fine thing.

Less than a month shy of my 44th birthday, I belong firmly to the “sandwich generation” of the American middle-aged. For those of us in that bracket, our parents are aging, increasingly frail, and dying while our own children are still very young. (While in many parts of America and the world, to be first-time parents at our ages would be unusually old, it’s not unusual in my family and in our circles. We have many friends of both sexes who’ve who’ve had their first kid on the high side of 40 and who will be eligible for Social Security before their youngest is out of high school.) Many of us in the sandwich generation can already feel our own mortality; we’re not as young and energetic as we were a decade or two ago. On the other hand, we’ve got access to both material and emotional resources we didn’t have before; it wasn’t until my late thirties that I found a very deep reservoir of patience that I had no idea previously existed.

I watched my septuagenerian mother, aunts, and cousins closely yesterday. I watched my daughter with an even more tender eye. To be in the middle generation is to know the anxiety that comes not as a single spy but in matched pairs of worry. We know that the day our parents and other older loved ones will die draws ever closer, just as we know (or pray) that a child grows steadily less dependent. We are preparing ourselves to be left, I realized yesterday, accepting that those who raised us and those whom we raise must separate from us sooner or later. It can be a frightening thought, but there is comfort in it as well.

Even secular families sometimes think about death on Easter. I thought about death and resurrection yesterday as we drove away in our rented Hyundai Tucson, waving out the window to relatives and to the place I love best on this earth. I looked from my white-haired mother, her hand raised in farewell, to my daughter, babbling happily in her car seat, to my yawning wife, anticipating a short nap. A line from Jeffers came into my head: deep love endures to the end and far past the end.

That’s right, I said under my breath, that’s right. Happy Easter.

16 is not 16 is not 16: a reprint on different rates of maturation

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

From June 2010

There’s been much talk this week about the adventures of Abby Sunderland, the Southern California 16 year-old whose attempt to sail solo around the world ended when her boat lost its mast in the Indian Ocean last Thursday. For several hours, there was fear — much of it hyped by the media — that Abby was “lost at sea”. The story is on its way to a happy ending, as Abby is now on a fishing boat headed for Madagascar, and, eventually, home to her family.

The debate, of course, is whether her parents ought to have allowed her to make this journey. (Her brother had undertaken a similar adventure a few years ago when he was just a little bit older than Abby.) That Abby had the technical skill to handle her boat is not in question; what befell her could easily have befallen an experienced sailor thrice her age. But lots of teenagers have the capacities of adults, but are still denied all the freedoms of adulthood. We all know 15 year-olds who know more about politics than their parents, but we don’t let 15 year-olds vote. We know, certainly, that plenty of 17 year-olds are capable of making responsible decisions about alcohol — and that plenty of 27 year-olds aren’t.

It’s not news that our lines of demarcation that separate children from adults are somewhat arbitrary. Whether we draw those lines at 16 (Austrians can vote at that age, which appalls many Americans; Americans can drive at that age, which appalls many Europeans) or 21 (a ridiculously late drinking age in the eyes of many around the world), any sensible person recognizes that some of those beneath the line are capable of handling the responsibilities that at least of some of those above that line are not.

Sensible people, however, recognize that society must draw lines somewhere. (This debate is as old as classical Athens, if not older.) We can’t test every young person to see if they are “ready” to vote, or to drink, or to have sex, in quite the same way that we issue driver’s licenses. And even with driver’s licenses, while turning 16 doesn’t automatically grant the right to have a license (the test must be passed), being under 16 automatically bars a young person from be licensed.

These lines are drawn based upon many things: history, tradition, collective assumptions about risk and maturity. These lines shift based on social trends and evolving beliefs about young people, rights, and responsibility. In the Vietnam era, a growing sense that it was unjust to send 18 year-olds off to die in wars while not permitting them to vote led to the passage of the 26th Amendment; a decade later, anxiety about other risks led to a Reagan-era mandate to raise the national drinking age from 18 to 21. These shifts don’t always make sense; they lead to the obvious silliness that a young soldier can operate a machine gun in combat but can’t buy a beer. That kind of arbitrariness grates. But the alternative to arbitrary line-drawing is far more grating: a kind of intellectual or maturational means testing that would be subject to abuse and overt politicization in a hearbeat.

We have no laws regarding the minimum age to operate sailboats on the high seas. (They are unlikely to come, as they would require an international convention that would end up banning teens from working in the fishing industry.) Abby’s parents broke no laws, but in the minds of many, they broke an unwritten rule about the diligence parents ought to show in protecting their children from harm. As a youth leader and a father, I’m emotionally conflicted about that charge. On the one hand, I can’t imagine being comfortable sending my own child off around the world on a sailboat by herself. But if I’m honest, I know full well that protectiveness won’t vanish when my Heloise turns 18; I’d worry just as much if she were 18 as if she were a few months younger. Lines of demarcation don’t have much effect on the heart. Continue reading →

For the Many, Not Merely the Few: In Defense of the Kabbalah Centre

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

It’s Good Friday, and I’m getting writing done while listening to Mavis Staples.

My writing, speaking, and teaching is increasingly focused on issues around body image, masculinity, sexuality, and perfectionism. I write less and less often about other topics. (When one is trying to build a brand there’s no sense in diluting it, as it were.)

But in this Passover season and on this most solemn day in the Christian calendar, I wanted to post a small piece I wrote in defense of one of my spiritual homes, the Kabbalah Centre. I’ve been a student of the Centre since 2004, and have found so much within this practice that has enriched and enhanced my life, my marriage, and my work. The Kabbalah Centre has been on the receiving end of considerable negative publicity as of late, much of it rooted in speculation and innuendo rather than hard facts. It gets tiresome to hear the accusation that this place I call home is a “cult”, or simply a front for money-grubbing snake-oil salesmen. (Google “Kabbalah Centre” and “cult” and you’ll find all the familiar allegations.) Continue reading →