Monthly Archives: September 2011

Healthy is the New Skinny at Modern Mom Magazine

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The Healthy is the New Skinny team is now blogging for Modern Mom magazine. I wrote the first post: What’s Scarier Than The Sex Talk? Talking About Food & Weight! It opens:

Would you rather talk to your teen daughter about her sex life or her weight? If you chose the former, you’re not alone: a new study released this month by WebMD showed that nearly 22% of parents are uncomfortable discussing the dangers of being overweight with their kids, compared to only 12% of parents who feel uncomfortable discussing sex with their teenager.

This study jives with my experience. As a college professor who teaches courses and leads workshops focused on issues of both sexuality and body image – and for many years, as a high school church youth leader – it’s astounding to see how differently young people react to these two topics. While talking about sex can certainly be awkward, even in an academic setting, the discomfort often turns quickly to laughter and warm, safe humor. Teens are generally hungry for accurate information about sex and eager for a non-judgmental environment in which to ask questions and share stories.

But that’s not the case with the issues surrounding weight and body image. When that topic is on the agenda, there’s far less giggling, far less fun.

Click for more. We’re excited about the new collaboration with Modern Mom!

An accidental rapist?

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The Good Men Project put together a powerful package on rape and sexual violence today. I recommend the particularly powerful pieces from GMP CEO Lisa Hickey and my wonderful colleague, Emily Heist Moss. My offering is called The Accidental Rapist. It begins:

“Sometimes I say ‘yes’ when I’d rather say ‘no.’”

It’s been nearly 25 years, but I can still remember the beautiful Berkeley fall afternoon when I heard those shattering words. Katie and I were sitting in a coffee shop just off campus. What had started as a “friends with benefits” situation had blossomed into a sophomore year romance with this dark-eyed dance-and-philosophy double-major. Katie and I had been sleeping together for more than two months—and saying “I love you” for about a week—when she summoned up the courage to bring up this one very painful truth.

At first, I didn’t know what she meant. She spoke so softly I had to lean across the table to hear her. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but sometimes I really don’t want to have sex. Sometimes I do, but not as often as you want it. And sometimes I want to tell you ‘no,’ but I can’t bring myself to do it. So I try and send you signals, hoping you can just tell how I’m feeling. But that doesn’t work, so it’s… it’s just easier to say ‘yes’ or just say nothing at all.”

My face flushed. I felt nauseated. I thought instantly of the previous night, where we’d grabbed what I thought was a hot half-hour when my roommates were both gone. Katie had seemed so passionate when we’d been making out, but then gotten very quiet once all our clothes were off. I’d told myself she wanted to have one ear cocked for the sound of a key in the door. I hadn’t considered—or hadn’t wanted to consider—the more obvious possibility: she was trying to tell me that she didn’t want to have sex.

I looked out the window. I couldn’t meet Katie’s eyes. My gaze fixed in the distance, my voice trembling, I asked what seemed the only possible question: “Are you trying to tell me I raped you?”

Read the rest here.

What’s Your Number? Who Cares, and Why?

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A new film, What’s Your Number? revisits old questions about sexual pasts, honesty, and slut-shaming. Samhita (whose new book Outdated is a treasure) writes about the film and the obsession with “the number” today at Feministing.

I recently did a still-unpublished interview with a reporter for a college paper, and in the middle of a conversation on this topic, she asked me my “number”. I blurted it out, much to my own amazement, and had to send her a message after we were off the phone to ask her not to use it. (She agreed.) For a host of reasons, I don’t disclose the number of sexual partners I’ve had, but in a relaxed moment, out it popped…

In any case, a good time to link to this piece from February at the Good Men Project: Why Does It Matter How Many Partners She’s Had? Excerpt:

I lost my virginity at 17 to my high-school girlfriend. She was a year younger but much more sexually experienced. She was my first for anything that went below the waist; I was the fifth guy she’d had sex with. I’d asked her number, of course, and then fought hard not to obsess about the four boys who had “been there” before me. But I saw the pain my questions caused her. And I came to realize that it didn’t matter.

I don’t know my wife’s number. I’ve never asked her. She’s never asked for mine. I know enough from the stories she’s told to know that there was more than one guy before me; she knows enough about my past to figure out that she can’t count my lovers on her fingers. Beyond that, we—who have shared so much sexually and emotionally in our nine years as a couple, six years as spouses, and two years as parents together—don’t need to know more specifics.

When we’re in a monogamous relationship, what we have a right to insist on is that no names get added to the list after our own. It doesn’t matter if I’m number five or 55. I’ll be crushed if my wife adds a number six or a 56 behind my back.

But the right to ask to be last is not the same as the right to know how far we are from the first. And for me, part of being a good man is knowing what I don’t need to know.

Joining Jezebel

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I’m so pleased to announce that next month, I’ll be joining Jezebel as a weekly contributing writer. Of course, my regular columns at Good Men Project and Healthy is the New Skinny will continue to appear.

I’m thrilled about joining Gawker Media and Jezebel, and reaching a particularly intelligent, savvy — and occasionally ruthless — commentariat.

My column is tentatively set to appear on Thursdays. My first piece is scheduled for October 6.

I’ve written a few things for Jezebel before:

Spring is No Excuse for Sexual Harassment.
A Dating Paradigm Shift For Women In Their 30s
Why the Ladies Love Ryan Gosling
How the Good Guys are Hard to Find Narrative Hurts Women
How the Skinny Bitch Discourse Isolates Women

And my most-read piece to date:

The Problem with Being Sexy But Not Sexual

The soft bigotry of low expectations: affirmative action for boys

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The New York Times reports today on a new study about changing college admissions practices, done by Inside Higher Education. The results are depressing and predictable: colleges are increasingly giving preference to wealthy students — and to men of all races. I write about this at Good Men Project today: Do Boys Need Affirmative Action?

Excerpt:

…when it comes to competitive admissions men of all backgrounds are now lumped in the same preferential category as athletes, children of alumni, and offspring of donors. Though rumors have persisted in recent years that some colleges did favor men in admissions to try and achieve a balanced sex-ratio, we’ve never had evidence of just how widespread this practice is until now.

There’s no question that the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees has climbed in recent years—and that at the same time, slightly fewer men are attending or finishing university. There are a host of hotly debated reasons for this shift. Some, like Leonard Sax, argue that boys lack the natural ability to focus that girls possess, and as a result tend to fall behind in school. They may need extra help, a different pedagogical approach – and apparently, preferential treatment in admissions.

But it’s hard to escape the sense that the decision to admit guys with lower grades than their female peers is tied to a panic about the seeming feminization of ambition and success in our culture. In the 1920s, the Ivy League famously initiated quotas to keep down the number of Jewish students, who were considered too bright, too pushy, and too likely to displace the young WASPs in pursuit of their gentlemen’s Cs. In the 1980s, there were widespread rumors that the University of California was taking steps to reduce the very high percentage of Asian students at campuses like Berkeley.

Women, it seems, are the “new Jews” of higher education—forced to be better than everyone else in order to be treated equally.

“The Thoughts of Six-Hundred Pounders”: Class, Ambition, and the Privilege to Err

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This is an abridged and updated version of a post I wrote in February 2009

Is it irresponsible to tell young people to follow their bliss?

Four weeks into the new semester, my classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own Pasadena City College. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what we all fear is to be long slow decline in public education — and about the double-dip recession in which we are almost certainly now caught — I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading →

Beauty and its discontents at Good Men Project

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It’s beauty week at the Good Men Project. Founder Tom Matlack has a piece asking Are Women Addicted to Beauty? Editor Lisa Hickey answers at least partly in the affirmative with her powerful Chasing Beauty: An Addict’s Memoir. My take is almost predictable, I suppose: Her Looks, Your Status: Why Men’s Claims Not to Care About Beauty Ring Hollow. Excerpt:

The desire for the approval of other men shapes straight men’s sexual desires. Think of the very reasonable claims of many men that they’re not attracted to size zero, skin-and-bones supermodels. Lots of guys claim, with apparent sincerity, that they love women with “curves.” So why are men so interested in dating skinny models? (A question asked and answered brilliantly in Ted Demme’s marvelous Beautiful Girls.) The answer, of course, is that a great many men care as much about what other guys think of their girlfriends and wives as they do about their own desires. The young guy who claims to love curves may be sincere, but he may also have to endure the taunts of his peers, who’ll call him a “chubby chaser” – or simply remark dismissively, “Dude, your chick’s fat.”

In Guy World, models imbue their beaux with a special and rare cachet in the eyes of other men. And that cachet is more than worth dating a woman with a body type that is less of a turn-on than a great many people imagine. This isn’t true of all men. But it drives a great many guys throughout their lives: from high school boys who sense the homosocial boost of dating a cheerleader to middle-aged men who suddenly start dating “hotties” half their age. Put simply, it’s not about the sex, it’s about the status.

And while we’re talking beauty, let me start plugging Beauty, Disrupted: A Memoir, available for pre-order in advance of its October 11 US release.

Perfectly Pink

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My post on Friday at Healthy is the New Skinny looked at the controversy over pink. Excerpt:

It’s only been in the last fifty or sixty years that the strong association between pink and femininity has taken root. Pink has become the commercialized way of signifying something associated with women: think pink ribbons for breast cancer, or the marketing term for selling something to women that was once sold mainly to men: “pink it and shrink it.”

As a result of all that marketing, many girls grow to dislike pink intensely, often because it’s been foisted onto them from the time they were very young. Others hate it because they associate it with a set of limitations that they’re trying to escape. “”I call it the pink prison”, my student Kailee says; “I feel like everytime I put on pink I’m being put in a box that forces me to behave a certain way. Like when I wear pink, my voice gets softer and I don’t get to express myself.”

But as many young women can attest, pink is more complicated than that…

I also wrote about pink back in February 2009.

Pitiful Husbands

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Lots of controversy over at the Good Men Project with this post of mine: Poor, Poor, Pitiful Men: The Martyr Complex of the American Husband. (In this case, the title was mine, as it rarely is at GMP.) Excerpt:

The Guy Code teaches men how to pursue women, how to court, and how to charm; it teaches us nothing about how to be in an actual relationship with a woman once we’ve succeeded in catching her. (If you’re getting an image of a dog who looks bewildered and helpless when he’s finally managed to catch the cat he’s been chasing, you’re not far off the mark.)

Once in a relationship (much less a marriage) with a real-honest-to-goodness human being who didn’t grow up with the Guy Code (and thus wasn’t shamed out of her ability to articulate her feelings, as most of us were as boys), we’re often in awe of what seem like her “naturally” superior emotional abilities. Women seem to have this extraordinary capacity to describe their feelings with precision; they seem to be so much better at remembering the nuances of conversations we’ve long since forgotten.
Many young—and not-so-young—men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners.

When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got—or he feels he hasn’t got—the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code.” And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.