Monthly Archives: July 2011

“Sin Boldly”: the trap of the emotional affair

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From February 2009. I thought I’d have two Potter Stewart references in as many days.

A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.

I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.

I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.

Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others. Continue reading →

“Your ancestors want you to be happy”: marriage, exogamy, and rejecting the fetishization of the past

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Feministe has a guest post today from “Cindy”: Diversity in Dating. An undergrad at UCONN and a Chinese-American woman who has a history of dating white guys, Cindy reflects on the rise in interracial marriages. As Cindy notes, the fetishizing of the “other” is alive and well (see the website for the recent J.G. Davies book “I Got the Fever: Love, What’s Race Got to Do with It?”), as is the enduring opposition, 44 years after Loving v. Virginia to what was once known as miscegenation.

Unlike Cindy, I never had much of a racial type. I’ve dated women from almost every race, body type, height, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation. (My second wife came out as a lesbian after our divorce, which was a shock to no one except for me. Love blinded my normally acute gaydar.) When I was single, I described my type as Potter Stewart (probably apocryphally) said of pornography: I can’t define it, but I sure do know it when I see it.

My first wife was half Chinese, half Filipina. (My first mother-in-law was born in L.A. to Cantonese immigrants, my first father-in-law was a native son of Manila.) Much like Cindy, my first wife grew up in a largely white environment, and preferred dating white guys. When we started dating at Berkeley in 1987, I heard the derisive term “yellow fever” for the first time. Many folks assumed that I was the stereotypical nerdy white dude who longed for a pretty, submissive “China doll.” It wasn’t an accurate slur, as I had no particular interest in Asian women. But I remember the hostile stares she and I sometimes got when we’d walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown — or stop in small (then) all-white towns in the Central Valley.

My second wife (the one who ended up with women) and my third wife (the Pentecostal psychotherapist) were both white, as WASPy as could be, from pioneer California families like my mother’s. Similar cultural backgrounds were no guarantor of compatibility, as I quickly discovered. (My first marriage had foundered because of my multiple addictions, and not because of any problem around our different cultural backgrounds. But I’d briefly told myself otherwise, until two more divorces thoroughly disabused me of that notion.)

My fourth wife and I have been married nearly six years and we’ve lived together for more than eight. She’s mixed race; born to a Colombian mother of mixed African, Spanish, and indigenous heritage and a Croatian-American father from Montana. Eira’s first language was castellano; raised by a single mom, she is more her mother’s daughter than her father’s. My wife “passes” for white but, not surprisingly, black people see her as black. When she tells white people that she’s 1/4 Nigerian, they look astonished; “Oh, I can’t see it”, they say. Most African-Americans see it instantly and don’t have to ask. When we’re in black neighborhoods of L.A., we’re marked as an interracial couple — but everywhere else, we’re not.

My daughter Heloise “looks” white. In the hateful language of Jim Crow and the one-drop rule, her one-eighth African ancestry would make her an “octoroon,” That might not seem like much, but it’s worth remembering another octoroon: Homer Plessy, whose unsuccessful lawsuit to desegregate Louisiana’s train cars led to the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Plessy wasn’t “white enough” for a New Orleans train conductor, and if this were another era, neither would my daughter. That’s a history worth remembering, and one I will (in time) pass on to our daughter.

Heloise goes to the Kabbalah Children’s Academy for preschool, where the language of instruction is bilingual: English and Hebrew. (She already calls her parents “abba” and “ima”.) At home, we speak to her in English and Spanish; my mastery of the latter is far from certain but it’s good enough to speak to her. As I’ve written before, we want to raise her aware of but at the same time unburdened by the struggles of her ancestors. Heloise will know that her great-great-grandmother (on my side) perished in Auschwitz and that some of her maternal ancestors were indigenous Colombians whose culture was all but annihilated. But these will be facts of interest only. They are part of a story she should know, but a story that asks nothing of her save to be remembered. Continue reading →

Rethinking “Isaac”: pain, redemption, male sadism and the Mac McClelland story

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Based on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, when people aren’t talking about the Casey Anthony verdict, they’re debating this electrifying Mac McClelland piece that ran in Good Magazine last week: I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD. McClelland, a veteran and celebrated journalist, writes about her experiences in Haiti after the devastating January 2010 earthquake — and about her own complex response to what she witnessed. Predictably, her article aroused outrage from those who felt she was de-centering the far greater PTSD of the people of Haiti — and from those appalled by her sexual frankness. The usual slut-shaming suspects have been out in force.

Thanks to this piece at Feministe, I found this terrific defense of McClelland by Roxane Gay at the Rumpus: Still with the Scarlet Letters. Gay gets it right, particularly in her final paragraph:

Just as there cannot be a single story about any country, there cannot be a single story about women and desire and sexual violence and how those things knot themselves together. One woman saying she wants or needs violent sex does not negate another woman’s disgust at the idea of violent sex but it is damaging to try and silence either of those perspectives.

That makes good sense.

But reading McClelland’s honest and harrowing account of her experiences and recovery, I wondered about the man with whom she had the violent sex that proved so healing for her. The rest of this post is below the fold because of the obvious trigger warning. Continue reading →

When Harry Was Wrong: Desire and Non-Sexual Friendship

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We’re home from a brief trip up to Northern California for the Fourth of July festivities with family. A happy time for all, including for Heloise, who has decided she loves the family’s “safe and sane” fireworks.

My Tuesday column at Good Men Project went up this morning. It riffs on the famed exchange in When Harry Met Sally about the possibilities of male-female nonsexual friendship: Harry Was Wrong: Lust Doesn’t Have to Ruin a Platonic Friendship. Excerpt:

We assume that male sexual desire is so powerful that it overrides everything else, including friendship. One of our great myths about men is that lust invariably cancels out empathy. Call it the sexual equivalent of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time: Harry, Sally, and too many of the rest of us were raised to believe that men can’t experience lust and practice non-sexual friendship simultaneously.

The truth is that men and women alike are capable of being platonic friends with someone to whom they are powerfully attracted. That’s true regardless of the reasons why someone can’t act on his or her desires. Perhaps it’s because the attraction is one-sided, or perhaps it’s because one or both of the friends are in monogamous relationships with other people. Sometimes the attraction is openly acknowledged, more often it’s something of which both are aware but about which there isn’t necessarily much need to speak.

There are a couple of keys to making a platonic friendship work despite the presence of sexual attraction. First off, it helps to demythologize sexual desire. Too many of us speak about attraction as if it were an irresistible and destructive force, like a tornado or a tsunami. If you’ve genuinely fallen in love with a buddy who considers you “just” a friend, that’s one thing. But if all that’s happened is that you find yourself sexually attracted to someone who isn’t attracted to you (or isn’t your significant other), it’s worth saying so what? We’re hardwired to be sexual creatures. But we’re also equipped with the ability to “override” those desires for a host of other reasons—including preserving friendship.

Read the whole thing.

If you like you can also read it at The Frisky.

Elsewhere, I’m interviewed — along with my old friend and foil Glenn Sacks — in this piece for Good Magazine on the marketing of a male contraceptive.

Who Pays?

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On the Good Men Project this morning, my GMP colleague Emily Heist Moss and I have an exchange about first dates and who pays for them. Excerpt:

Hugo: Add in the reality that women pay more for haircuts and drycleaning (often substantially more), and there’s little doubt that the average young American woman has probably spent a lot more money getting ready than has her prospective beau. In that light, expecting him to pay for the date is less unreasonable than it first appears.

Emily: I think it’s fair to assume that we all are constantly trying to impress our desired partners, but we go about that in different ways. Having a higher income is and of itself a “burden” that men have to bear in order to make themselves more desirable to women. I’m not advocating that that’s right or fair (it isn’t), only that financial expectations are placed on both genders, they just manifest differently. Given that framework, I’d prefer that both of us approach a first date as individuals. I don’t expect him to pay because I don’t want him to think that his money is part of his appeal, and I don’t want him to treat me because he thinks that I can’t make as much as he can or because I spend my income on beauty maintenance.

Emily and I reach consensus by the end. Read the whole thing.

DSK and the “only good girls get justice” narrative

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Things are changing fast, but it appears that the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is collapsing due to the unreliability of his accuser.

We don’t know what we don’t know. But what we do know is that women who lie on asylum applications can still be rape victims. Women who have shady drug-dealer boyfriends can still be rape victims. Women who themselves deal drugs, or who work in as prostitutes, or who commit fraud can still be rape victims. Yes, in a court setting, a pattern of dishonesty on the part of the accuser will undercut a prosecution’s case. But we need to push back against the developing narrative that only a “perfect victim” (virginal, middle-class, impeccably honest) deserves the protection of the legal system.

Women shouldn’t have to be flawless — or even all that “good” — to get justice.

UPDATE: I’ve been waiting for Jill Filipovic (an attorney in New York City as well as a feminist blogger) to weigh in. And she doesn’t disappoint. See There Are No Perfect Accusers.

UPDATE #2: Waking up this morning to more than two dozen comments in moderation on this thread, almost all from Men’s Rights Activists in gleeful, vengeful tizzies, I’m closing this thread altogether.

Let’s let the rest of the story come out.

My sober bar-mitzvah: 13 years clean

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Thirteen years ago this morning, I was released from the locked psychiatric ward at Northridge Hospital in the San Fernando Valley. Tracy P., (a former girlfriend who had become my one sane companion in the last months of my downward spiral) came to collect me. She brought me a pair of sandals to wear, as I had on nothing but borrowed scrubs and hospital slippers.

It was a hot day, and we stopped to get a Slurpee at a 7-11 before getting on the 101 for the short drive back to Pasadena. “Are you going to be okay”, Tracy asked, her voice cracking with concern. “Yes”, I said. “I think so. I don’t really know.”

And I didn’t really know. It was my seventh psychiatric hospitalization in eleven years. This time, I’d nearly killed myself and someone else. I was 31 years old, and had been battling depression and addiction since my teens. I’d somehow managed to get tenure at Pasadena City College, but I wasn’t sure I was going to live to the start of fall semester.

But I did live. I chose life, I chose sobriety, and one day at a time a miracle unfolded. I stayed sober. I took a temporary vow of celibacy. I went to therapy and Twelve Step meetings round the clock. And in that hot summer of ’98, my life changed for good.

I don’t want to oversell my metamorphosis. I haven’t been perfect since July 1, 1998, not by a very long shot. But since that morning a baker’s dozen years ago, I’ve been given the gift of staying sober one day (and sometimes, five minutes) at a time. I’ve found contentment, I’ve found purpose, and I’ve found tremendous joy. And I’ve lived long enough to be here today, on my “13th birthday”, or as I like to think of it, my “sobriety bar-mitzvah.”

So many people I knew and loved were not as lucky as I. They didn’t live to be parents, or to feel their bodies settle and thicken with the onset of middle age. They died young and rarely beautifully, taken away by a disease that for some reason I may never understand could not, did not, take me.