Monthly Archives: December 2011

Top Ten in 2011

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Since 2005, I’ve shared my Top Ten Posts of the year each December. (Here’s 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006.)

But I rarely post original content on this blog anymore, as so much of my work now (fortunately) appears elsewhere. So in no particular order, here are my ten favorite pieces I wrote this year. (And just FYI, here’s the one post I regret having written.)

Real Women Have… Bodies
Let’s Talk to Girls about Beauty, Too
The Cautery of Hate: on Breakups, Psychoanalysis, and the Healing Power of Rage
Men, Princess Culture, and the Sexualization of Young Girls
Spring is No Excuse for Sexual Harassment
The Male Body: Repulsive or Beautiful?
The Opposite of “Man” is “Boy,” Not “Woman”
Short Skirts Magically Turn Women into Bitches
What’s the Difference Between Privacy and Secrecy?
Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness

Ten Global Firsts for Women 2011

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Continuing a little tradition from years past, here — in random order — are ten “firsts” for women in 2011.

1. The Royal Navy joins the US Navy in opening its submarines to female sailors. The first American women boarded as submariners this year.

2. Denmark and Thailand elect the first female prime ministers in their nations’ histories.

3. Quebec teen Stacey Nesbitt became the first woman to win the Canadian Superbike Championship’s Honda CBR125R Challenge title.

4. Christine Lagarde replaces the disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn and became the first woman to head the IMF.

5. England, the birthplace of soccer, inaugurated its first semi-professional women’s “super league.”

6. Saudi Arabia announces a limited expansion of voting rights for women; for the first time, women will be permitted on the Ashura Council.

7. The US Census Bureau announced that for the first time, women now earn more advanced degrees than men. (Women had already passed men in number of bachelor degrees earned some time earlier.)

8. For the first time, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded simultaneously to three different women: Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, Tawakkol Karman of Yemen and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

9. Blessing Liman becomes the Nigerian Air Force’s first female pilot.

10. In the UK, women under 30 with college degrees began to earn more money than similarly educated male peers for the first time.

Which Stories Can we Tell? Reflecting on Reaction to my “I Married a Lesbian” piece

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Jezebel reruns my “I Married a Lesbian” piece, and as always, the commnents are plentiful and heated.

Several people have raised the question of whether I’m violating my second wife’s privacy by sharing this account. (One even suggests that “Courtney” has grounds to sue for libel.) In one sense, yes; I’m sharing a true and intimate story of a train wreck of a marriage, replete with some moderately graphic sexual details. On the other hand, there’s simply no way that my second ex-wife could be identified from my article. The chances of someone digging through records to find our marriage license (they’d have to know the county in which we were wed first) and discover her real name are slim indeed. We have no mutual friends, no one to “connect the dots”.

The dilemma of anyone who writes about his or her past is the same: how to tell the truth without harming the innocent. It’s a tough needle to thread. I have little doubt that “Courtney” would not be pleased if she read the story. But I don’t owe her my silence; I do owe her the right to keep her privacy. I think I’ve struck that balance.

At what point do the stories from our past, the ones that invariably involve others, become ours to tell? This was a discussion I had often with Carré Otis when I worked as her co-writer on her memoir, Beauty, Disrupted. (We changed some names, but we never altered the truth about what happened in her life.) Indeed, I wouldn’t have written this story about my marriage to a woman who later came out as a lesbian had I not had the experience of collaborating on Carré’s autobiography. I’m grateful for that shot of courage to tell the truth — just as I’m grateful that that commitment to candor has been tempered by the responsibility to preserve the dignity and anonymity of those who deserve both.

I welcome other perspectives.

Should the libido mature?

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About five years ago, after I’d written a blogpost about my work as a youth group leader, I got an email from someone named Fiona. She asked:

Do you ever worry about being sexually attracted to your students or youth group kids? Don’t you ever think you might be tempted to cross the line? You write as if you are immune to temptation. Just because you don’t act on it doesn’t mean you don’t feel it!!

Do male youth leaders like you “behave” because you don’t have sexual desire for teens, or do you have sexual desire but just control it?

My answer was a simple one: no. No, I was never attracted to the kids in my youth group. No, it’s not about control; it’s about the genuine absence of desire.

One thing I’ve been blessed with: a consistent track record of being attracted to women my own age.  When I was 16, I thought about my fellow teens.  In my college years, I was attracted to other students.   Unlike some of my peers, when I was in college I had little interest in older women (honestly, I found them intimidating beyond words!)  I certainly lost interest in high school-aged girls not long after leaving Carmel High.

I think a case can be made that being peer-attracted throughout one’s life is developmentally healthy for everyone concerned. But it’s possible I’m universalizing (and worse, moralizing) from my own experience.

An anecdote:

When I was in college, I remember having a discussion with a male friend of mine.  "Sean" and I were talking about my friend’s father, who had recently left his mother for a younger woman. Sean was understandably disconsolate.  But one thing he said haunted me for a long time.  I’ll paraphrase:

Dad left mom for someone only a couple of years older than us. (We were 20 or so at this time).  I don’t find women my mom’s age sexy at all.  It seems my dad doesn’t either.  What if I get married, get to be my dad’s age, and find out I’m still attracted to girls in their early twenties?  What if my sex drive doesn’t mature along with the rest of me?

Boy, do I remember when Sean asked that question in bold!  I had no answer for him, beyond a feeble "Man, that would suck."  But it frightened me.  All around me I saw evidence of men in their forties and fifties who were strongly attracted to young women in their teens and early twenties.  It wasn’t just a media phenomenon; in my early years of taking women’s studies classes, I heard countless anecdotes from my female classmates about harassment at the hands of much older men.  It made me angry, it made me cynical, but it also terrified me.  Sean was right about me too: when I was 20, I didn’t find women twice my age to be at all sexually attractive.  What if I felt the same way when I too was 40?   For whatever reason, that fear nagged and nagged at me.

But I was lucky.  I found that my libido evolved along with the rest of me.  As I aged, my interest in my peers remained the same.  Gradually, girls in their teens lost their appeal.  Women in their 30s, and then older, began to become far more interesting.  By the time I was in my early 30s, this maturation in my own psyche was quite clear to me, even as I was going through a series of unsuccessful relationships.  My behavior was neither feminist nor gentlemanly, but even at my worst, it was always age-appropriate. Yes, I slept with some of my students early in my teaching career; almost all of them were within half a decade of my age, older than the traditional students. One was three years older. That doesn’t make my behavior any more defensible, but it does make it, perhaps, less overtly predatory.

Today, I can say that my wife’s beauty awes me.  With a body that bears the unmistakable marks of having given birth, she’s beautiful late in the fourth decade of her life, and I have every expectation that I will find her every bit as lovely in her eighth decade on this planet.

Once I began working with teenagers regularly at All Saints Church (some 12 years ago), I found that my emotional response to "my kids" was, not surprisingly, often intensely paternal.  I’ve wanted to be a father for a few years now, and the teenagers with whom I work today are easily old enough to be my biological children.  And while I adore these teens in the specific, I find that those protective, paternal feelings exist for all boys and girls of similar age.  While I can certainly acknowledge the aesthetic beauty/handsomeness of certain teens, juvenile loveliness strikes no chord in me.  This is not merely due to my very happy marriage, but also due to this strong internal sense that sexual desire is rightly directed towards one’s approximate peers.

When I was in my early teens, one of my first celebrity "crushes" was on Kristy McNichol. (Famous for "Little Darlings", but also for a favorite TV show few of you remember, "Family.") Then in high school and college it was on Jennifer Jason Leigh.  Now, if I were to admit to one at all, it would be (as I’ve posted before) on Mariska Hargitay.  All three are just slightly older than I am.   And while I admire Scarlett Johannsson as an actress, hearing her dubbed "the sexiest woman alive" made me laugh out loud with disbelief — not because she isn’t lovely, but because she seems so damned young to me.

I do not mean to suggest that someone who is 44 (as I am) shouldn’t be attracted to someone who is 34 or 54.  But those ages seem to me — and this may be my own peculiarity — the outer limits of acceptability.   Anything beyond ten years either direction seems, well, odd.  At the same time, I acknowledge that age-disparate relationships can work, as long as the younger partner is genuinely emotionally mature.  A relationship between a 35 year-old and a 15 year-old is immoral, criminal, and indefensible; a relationship between a 55 year-old and a 35 year-old is none of those things. 

Still, I admit that I am perplexed by those who find such disparities to be erotically or emotionally exciting.  For me, the truth is simple: since I hit puberty, I have never experienced sexual attraction to someone old enough to be my mother or young enough to be my daughter.  And I acknowledge that one reason why I am often so hard on men who do experience that attraction to much younger women is because I can’t empathize with it, not even for a moment.   I try and "get it", and I just can’t. 

It is possible that my experience that the objects of my desire age as I age is just a quirk of my personality.  It certainly hasn’t been the result of any conscious effort on my part (and my regular readers know I am quick to sing the praises of conscious effort!).  But I can’t help but think that "my way" is the fundamentally healthier way.  It just seems to me that a great deal of heartache and exploitation could be avoided if we could all just match our libidos to our approximate peer group.  Or am I wrong?

Virtual Models and the Tired Trope of the War Against Men

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Two more pieces up today.

At GMP, I respond to Tom Matlack and to this Meghan Casserly piece in Forbes. See It’s Not the End of Men, and We Still Have Work to Do. Excerpt:

As reported this week, men with children are doing more housework than ever before. We’re up to spending 80% as much time as women do on chores. That’s an undeniable improvement over where we were a few short decades ago. But again, a trend in the right direction doesn’t mean the problem of inequality has been licked. And as that same study found, women are doing much more than those statistics suggest, largely because women spend much more time than men multi-tasking. The fact that we’re doing more than ever before doesn’t change the reality that we’re still not pulling our weight.

There’s a long tradition in men’s writing (see Freud, Sigmund) of complaining that women’s demands are excessive and irrational. The modern iteration of that tactic is to point out how hard men are trying. What more could women possibly want? Don’t women have more opportunities than ever before? Aren’t men doing more domestic chores and showing more affection than their fathers’ generation ever did? Why isn’t that enough? When are these shrews going to give us a break, give us a cookie, and let “good enough” be sufficient?

Individual men are not called to be martyrs. (I don’t know any women who expect them to be.) But we can do better than point endlessly to all the things we’ve done right, as if they constitute a credit balance sufficient to discharge the debts from all the places where we continue to fall short. And make no mistake, we are still falling short. That men are up to doing 80% of the work—and that women are up to earning 80 cents on our dollar—indicates progress. But to use a football analogy, it’s still the third quarter and though we’re catching up, we need another couple of touchdowns to win the game. And some men sound like they’re ready to hit the showers.

At Healthy is the New Skinny, my column looks at the H&M virtual models controversy. See All Women are Real…Unless They’re Digitally Generated. Excerpt:

But models are more than just walking and talking mannequins. For all the real problems in the beauty industry, there’s a growing awareness of the tremendous potential that real (as in human) models across the size spectrum have to inspire us to think differently about our bodies. More and more current and former models – including so many of our HNS ambassadors are speaking out in favor of a healthier approach to fashion. We’re seeing a new generation of models emerge who are genuine role models, willing to share their joys and their struggles and their tools for living happy and complete lives. No computer image can do that.

For the sake of those role models – and more importantly for the sake of the young people who need those role models – it’s worth pushing back against the current H&M campaign. If we’re ever going to return the beauty ideal to something that’s sane, healthy, and attainable, we need real, human women to show it to us.

Losing it at GMP, and Why You Shouldn’t Sleep with Your Prof at Jezebel

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Two new pieces up today.

The first is part of the Our Sexual Vocabulary series at GMP: Why “Losing It” is Sometimes the Best Term for First Sex. Excerpt:

I’m not troubled by the language of losing, as long as we understand that some losses are to be welcomed as well as grieved. When we lose a fear of heights by learning to skydive, we overcome an obstacle. That’s a positive loss. When we lose our fear of speaking up, and become assertive in social situations, we have lost something we needed to lose. Loss can be redemptive and a marker of spiritual, physical, and psychological growth. Rather than trying to avoid using the language of loss to describe first sexual experiences, we can broaden our understanding of what it means to lose.

And at Jezebel, my Genderal Interest column: The Real Reason You Shouldn’t Fuck Your Professor. (Hint: I didn’t pick the title, and I don’t read the comments.)

Stopping the Holiday Fat Talk and a Fem Magazine Interview

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If you’re willing to make your way through an Issuu format magazine, you can read an interview I did with UCLA’s Fem Magazine. Click here and go to page 7. I’m quoted at length and almost — almost — verbatim.

And my piece at Modern Mom (on behalf of the Perfectly Unperfected Project) ran earlier this week: Let’s Stop the Holiday Fat Talk. Excerpt:

…in many years of working around body image issues as a professor and youth group leader, I’ve found that the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas can be even more stressful than bikini season. For young people with body anxiety, the social expectation to eat (and over-eat) can be enormous. More than ever, this is the season where we display devotion by baking and cooking for our friends and loved ones. Teens in particular can feel overwhelmed by the pressure to demonstrate gratitude by eating; at no other time of the year is refusing to eat more emotionally charged for everyone involved.

The answer isn’t to tell ourselves (and our teens) that they can “worry about it later.” Neither is the answer to engage in “fat talk,” such as swapping stories with colleagues and friends about how much was consumed at the last party or lamenting how tight our pants have become. Of course, beating ourselves up emotionally for the fat talk doesn’t help either. Repression is a lousy solution.

My favorite carol

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My favorite Christmas carol is the one that puts the lump in my throat every year at this time: “O du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.

But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.

That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.

I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 44, miss mine this Christmas.

It’s a fine carol.

Merry Christmas.

Perfect Little Bitches? Two links

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Two new columns in the last 24 hours.

This week’s Genderal Interest piece at Jezebel looks at the recent Canadian study of college-aged women and their reactions to scantily-clad peers: Short Skirts Magically Turn Women Into Bitches. Excerpt:

Bitchiness (at least as defined by this study) is rooted in the same set of beliefs as the requirement in other parts of the world where women wear burqas. We demand that women cover up to protect men from temptation because we don’t believe that men are capable of self-control. We also pressure women to cover up as a sign of solidarity with other women; modesty is, as this research reminds us, promoted as currency for buying female friendship. By that calculus, revealing clothing gets interpreted as a sign of hostility towards other women. The “slut” is hated not just because she attracts male attention, but because she refuses to play by the “rules” that are supposed to keep women safe.

It’s not news that women are socialized to be competitive with each other. It’s not news that, as my students remind me, sisterhood is easier in winter. And it will continue to be the same old news until we name the real root of the problem: our collective refusal to believe that men are capable of being strong, responsible, reliable adults.

And at Healthy is the New Skinny, I’ve got a little comment about the one word I heard over and over again during a certain TV broadcast Tuesday night. Check out The Victoria’s Secret Show and Perfectionism. Excerpt:

But even as we broaden our definition of what is beautiful, our definition of perfection remains as unattainably narrow as ever. As the tweets and the Tumblr posts and the Facebook status updates made heartbreakingly clear Tuesday night, you can be healthy and beautiful at almost any size – but true “perfection” requires skinniness. As one commenter put it “Not every thin girl is perfect, but every perfect girl is thin.”

We all want to be inspired by what we see. But there’s a huge difference between encouraging the healthy pursuit of beauty and celebrating perfectionism. Girls today are under more academic, financial, and emotional pressure than ever before. A big part of the problem is that increasingly, role models (and make no mistake, fashion models are role models) aren’t admired merely for their looks or their achievements. They’re admired for their perfection, and for the suffering they may have endured to achieve it.