Healthy (role) models

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

I have two posts up today at Healthy is the New Skinny. The first deals with the impact of Title IX on women’s body image, and the way in which the opportunity to play sports quickly became the obligation not only to be thin, but “toned” and “defined.” Obviously, as I point out, the problem isn’t with Title IX or athletic opportunities for women; it’s with the culture of perfectionism.

The second post was a rapid response to this infuriating story that ran in the UK media today, reporting on an effort to encourage “size zero” models: Forget chubby, keep it slim!.

With the exception of the last paragraph, I penned the editorial response on behalf of the entire team at Natural Models Los Angeles, Healthy is the New Skinny, and the Perfectly Unperfected Project. The images are of my colleagues and teammates, all of whom are healthy, fit, working models and activists.

An excerpt:

Clinical obesity has medical consequences. But we need to remember that one of the many causes of unhealthy weight gain is low self-esteem of the kind that comes with living in a culture where only the skinniest of women are celebrated as beautiful. The obsession with thinness does colossal damage to girls’ self-esteem. And while some diet compulsively to pursue an unattainable ideal, others respond by developing destructive overeating habits. Food becomes a drug to soothe pain – a pain made worse by the fashion industry’s relentless focus on skeletal models.

Common sense and research tell us that people develop healthy habits when they’re provided with the tools to eat right. While many girls and young women deprive themselves and suffer enormously to imitate the waif look, many more turn away from the fashion industry altogether. Many women find no inspiration in what they see in the magazines because those models don’t look anything like what they themselves see when they look in the mirror.

Dragone and Savorelli either don’t understand or have chosen to ignore the tremendous harm that the fashion industry’s fixation on thinness has done to women around the world. As a result, they’ve given us a false choice between anorexia and reckless overeating. But they’ve missed the real solution.

The solution is simple: promoting health means promoting images of healthy models. It means using models committed to living a balanced lifestyle. It means recognizing that beauty and health happen on a size spectrum between the destructive extremes of emaciation and morbid obesity…

Women are hungry for images of models that are happy and fit as well as beautiful. Give them those images, and we’ll not only change the fashion industry, we’ll change how women see themselves. That’s the transformation that will be the most effective weapon against unhealthy eating — and the misery that causes it.

Maundy Thursday Short Poem

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Maundy Thursday services are my favorite in the Anglican liturgical year. I’m a fan of footwashing (both giving and receiving). And on this Holy Thursday eve as we remember the Last Supper, this classic by Wilfred Owen (who did write about topics other than war) is worth sharing. And yes, we worship best when we touch, with lips or hands, the living.

Maundy Thursday

Between the brown hands of a server-lad
The silver cross was offered to be kissed.
The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad,
And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced.
(And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.)
Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had,
(And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.)
Young children came, with eager lips and glad.
(These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.)
Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte.
Above the crucifix I bent my head:
The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:
And yet I bowed, yea, kissed – my lips did cling.
(I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)

Penis myths at SRCC

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

My (work-safe) post on the “top five penis myths” is up at Sir Richard’s Condom Company blog. Sample:

3. Myth: “A hard dick has no conscience.” I’m often asked whether erections take blood from the brain, thus inhibiting decision making. Though erections are indeed caused by blood flow into the penis, the body has more than enough blood to support the operation of every other organ during physical arousal. There is no scientific evidence that a hard-on impairs cognitive function. In other words, guys can’t justify assault or infidelity based on biology. A penis may have no conscience (flaccid or hard), but the moral center of the brain (the frontal lobe) does – and that moral center keeps right on working, no matter how turgid the erection. By the way: women get clitoral erections. But I’ve never heard anyone claim that a swollen clit has no conscience.

Men and the underestimated capacity for reinvention

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Today is my little brother’s 41st birthday, and I’m sending him lots of love.

On this first full day of Passover, my new column revisiting the old problem of the myth of male inflexibility is up at Good Men Project. Excerpt:

If there’s anything exceptional about America, it’s the legendary capacity of its inhabitants for self-reinvention. We’ve seen it most clearly with the women’s movement of the past five decades. Women are now CEOs and war fighters, having moved almost seamlessly into male-dominated professions for which they were presumably unprepared from an evolutionary standpoint. We’ve let go of the silly notion that all women are hardwired to nurture rather than compete, because we’ve seen so many excellent counter-examples. What some of us are still not seeing is that men are every bit as adaptable.

The much-celebrated “slacker dudes” who populate Judd Apatow movies and their mother’s couches aren’t displaced auto workers, confused by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China. They’ve famously made it clear that they find traditional masculinity unsatisfying (even if many are hooked on hyper-macho video games like Call of Duty or Black Ops). As their sisters and girlfriends will often attest, these guys are more articulate about their feelings and their passions than men of earlier generations. What they’re missing isn’t the ability to transform—what they’re missing is the inspiration, ambition, and encouragement to go out into the marketplace and match their skills to the changing demands of our transforming economy.

Holy Week, Pesach, and Spring Break

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Spring Break, Holy Week, and Passover all coincide this year, so very little posting over the next seven or eight days. I will have my regular post up at the Good Men Project on Tuesday, and at Healthy is the New Skinny on Thursday. Here’s a link to last Thursday’s HNS piece. Excerpt:

Too many girls have learned that the fastest way for two women to bond is by talking harshly about a third. Many find that judging and criticizing is an incredibly difficult habit to break; it becomes a strange kind of addiction. As much as it hurts to be on the receiving end of judgment and the “she shouldn’t be wearing that” comments, it’s a challenge to overcome the temptation to say something cruel and clever when we see an outfit that invites our criticism.

Note: the target audience for HNS is high school — and junior high school — young women. Hence the use of “girls”.

Love, like water, should flow downhill

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Yesterday’s post about Guess How Much I Love You prompted a phone call to my mother. After all, I had just written that if I were forced to choose between saving her or my daughter from a burning building, I wouldn’t choose the woman who gave birth to me. I brought it up with mama, and she had the expected reaction: “Of course. Love flows downhill.” (Meaning that we love those whom we raise more than we love those who brought us into the world.) Or rather, and here’s where it gets tricky, we should love our children more than we love our parents.

In the human past where children died so frequently that the average parent buried at least two or three of their kids, the kind of love we feel for Heloise would be, perhaps, unthinkable. (This is one of the classic debates in medieval and early modern history, and it tends to get folks riled up: did our ancestors love their children as we love ours, given the high infant mortality? Did they steel themselves against heartbreak by “holding something back”? Scholars of family and childhood can’t agree.) In a world without pensions of one sort or another, the need of the parent for the child increases exponentially.

In my family, the great horror of the aging is becoming a “burden to the children.” It’s an idea loaded with both class privilege and assumptions about what a family ought to be. Comfortable retirement communities with various stages of care or a team of home nurses are out of financial reach for many. And of course, many families believe that changing grandma’s diapers, while perhaps burdensome, is part of the natural reciprocity of life. “As she once did for you, you now do for her” and so forth. That’s not our familial ideal; the thought of someday needing Heloise to care for me fills me with horror. When it comes my time, and if my mortal coil shuffles off slowly and painfully, I’d infinitely rather the care I receive be given by kind strangers than by my own flesh and blood. I’d want Heloise to visit my bedside, but I’d want to shield her to the last from the decay of my body.

Her vulnerability was my responsibility; mine will not be hers. That’s loaded with class privilege, sure, but also with what I know is a very particular (and relatively new) view of what family is. I would lay down my life for my daughter, but would be horrified if she felt compelled to do the same.

Water, love, and duty should all flow downhill. That may not be a universal sentiment, but it is as deep a truth as I know.

You should adore your kids more than they adore you: in defense of “Guess How Much I Love You?”

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

When Heloise was born, we bought (or were given) all the classic children’s books. We have Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny; Each Peach Pear Plum and Ferdinand. We read what we were read; I can’t wait to recite Charlotte’s Web to my daughter in the next few years, as I loved it so. (My brother and I grew up listening to the LP’s of E.B. White reading his famous book aloud.)

I’ve learned that children’s books can divide parents; everyone has one they love or loathe. But I was surprised to read this commentary at Daddy Dialectic about one of my daughter’s favorites (and one I also treasure), Sam McBratney’s Guess How Much I Love You. Jeff writes:

In it, two rabbits – an adult and a child – engage in a game of one-upmanship in their quest to say how much they love each other. The game begins with the little rabbit telling the big rabbit “Guess how much I love you.” The little rabbit then stretches his arms out wide and says “This much.” The big rabbit smiles, and, doing the same thing with his arms, says “Well I love you this much.” They then proceed in back and forth fashion through raised arms, extended legs, jumps, etc. until the little rabbit begins to fall asleep. At this point, the little rabbit presents his final claim: “I love you all the way up to the moon.” The big rabbit ultimately concludes the book by replying: “I love you all the way up to the moon – and back.”

According to the publisher this book has sold over 15 million copies and is published in 37 languages. The children’s book review publication Booklist gave it a starred review and said about the book, “There’s not a wrong note in this tender tale.”

Am I the only one who thinks the adult rabbit… is a bit of an asshole? Aren’t the adult rabbit’s constant moves to up the ante on the little rabbit evidence of an ego that’s out of whack? Even when channeled through professions of love, this kind of behavior doesn’t feel particularly tender to me. In fact, it seems to me that the adult rabbit’s answer to the question of how much love it has for the little rabbit should be, “Not enough to restrain myself from besting your every move.”

Gosh, that’s not how I read it at all. And since I’ve never written about children’s books before, I’m happy that my defense of McBratney’s charming tale will be my first. Continue reading →

Gripping the sword, embracing the lover: SNL spoofs the masculine double bind and the myth of male inflexibility

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Chloe sends me a link to this Saturday Night Live skit that ran last weekend. With Helen Mirren as special guest star, the cast cleverly spoofs our cultural confusion about masculinity. Two comedians take on the roles of Hugh Jackman and Gerard Butler — actors who have shown a penchant to oscillate between playing romantic, sensitive leading men and hyper-macho heroes. They pound their chests and sing Broadway numbers before welcoming Mirren, who plays Jule Andrews — and promptly becomes genuinely homicidal.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live often, but this was one of the funnier and more pointed skits I’ve seen in a long time.

The SNL short points at two key problems in our contemporary representations of masculinity. Popular culture is deeply ambivalent about men who break free of traditional gender roles: romantic comedies celebrate men who can be sensitive and insightful, witty and artistic while action films feature cartoonish exaggerations of swaggering manliness. In the case of actors like Jackman and Butler, the two genres in which they are most famous for working grow ever further apart: the action movies feature greater savagery (and less depth) than ever; the romantic comedies show us heterosexual male protagonists who are increasingly comfortable with their “feminine” side. The SNL skit riffs on the absurdity of that ever-widening gap, lampooning our own confusion about what it is that we expect men to be.

At the same time, the skit plays on a darker myth, the one that says that men can’t emotionally multi-task. Men can either be violent, protective, macho brutes — or they can be intuitive, kind, and charming. But to expect them to integrate aspects of both traditional masculinity and traditional femininity is a massive overask, or so the myth of male inflexibility has us believe. Of course, in real life, not many people expect a man to be both a Spartan general and a tender aficionado of musical theater. All that most of us would like to see is men who are capable of both compassion and decisiveness. What we’re missing are images of men whose emotional dexterity and flexibility is as great as women’s. Those men do exist, of course. We just see them so rarely.

Chloe asked me for my thoughts on the skit at almost exactly the same moment that I got an email from a student of mine who wanted to share a line from a Japanese anime comic (or film, I’m not sure; one of my readers can fill me in.). One character says to another:

“Unless I grip the sword, I can not protect you. While gripping the sword I can not embrace you.” Isn’t that another perfect encapsulation of the double bind of masculinity, my student wondered. Continue reading →

Here and there

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

My post on wedding rings was picked up at The Frisky, and the comments (you must log in to read) are, as always, worlds apart from those at the Good Men Project. I do note that my dear editors at GMP titled the piece”If you’re married, wear your wedding ring” — which was not really the point of my post.

And Alternet edits my recent post on perfectionism and relationships, and titles it How Our Sick Culture Makes Girls Think They Have to be Gorgeous to Be Loved. Lots of comments you don’t need to be logged in to read.

And an interesting take (replete with a straw Hugo) on my overall suspiciousness of older men/younger women relationships at Literate Perversions: Lolita, Darth Vader, and Hugo Schwyzer.

And if you’re burned out reading me or about me, read this great post from the splendid Peggy Orenstein: Playing Catch-Up. Itself a summary of recent posts about girl culture, it opens with a devastating juxtaposition of “wordles”. Check it out.

Thursday Short Poem: Hirsch’s “Happiness”

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Edward Hirsch isn’t just one of our greatest living American poets, he’s a zealous advocate for poetry. I first heard him read aloud at a celebration for Czeslaw Milosz at Claremont in 1998 (where I got to shake the great Nobel Laureate’s hand.) This seems right as we head towards spring break, towards Passover, and towards Easter morning.

Happiness Writes White

I am a piece of chalk
scrawling words on an empty blackboard.

I am a banner of smoke
that crosses the blue air and doesn’t dissolve.

I don’t believe that only sorrow
and misery can be written.

Happiness, too, can be precise:

Doctor, there’s a keen throbbing
on the left side of my chest
where my ribs are wrenched by joy.

Wings flutter in my shoulders
and blood courses through my body
like waves cresting on a choppy sea.

Look: the eyes blur with tears
and the tears clear.

My head is like skylight.
My heart is like dawn.