Condoms and Romance at Jezebel

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

My Genderal Interest column this week looks at condom use in long-term monogamous heterosexual relationships — and why (other than sensation) so many seem to feel that’s a bad thing. Excerpt:

When doing interviews for this story, I heard over and over again from married/monogamous women that they’d been encouraged by gynecologists and other health care providers to transition onto oral contraceptives or the IUD. “It was just assumed that I’d want to stop using condoms as soon as possible, and that it was only a question of finding the ideal replacement,” one married 32 year-old told me; “the doctor never considered the possibility that condoms might still be the best choice for me.”

Part of that assumption is rooted in the condom’s celebrated dual role as both contraceptive device and barrier against sexually transmitted infections. Of course, heterosexual monogamy holds out the promise of an end to the worry about the latter. As one 23 year-old woman I spoke to for this story told me, “condoms are what you use when you don’t fully trust the guy you’re with. Once you’ve both been tested and committed to being exclusive, you stop using them.” Numerous studies have borne out that perception that sexually active teens and adults alike rely much less on condoms once they move into committed relationships. “Too many people think that insisting on a condom symbolizes a lack of complete trust in a partner”, said Mia Herron, the director of marketing and communications for Sir Richard’s, a high-end condom company based in Boulder, Colorado. That sentiment seems widespread. “Having sex without a condom is a sign that you’re committed,” said a male student of mine, aged 20; “the first time you do it without one is almost as big a deal as the first time you have sex.”

Santorum’s Soft Patriarchal Appeal

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

At Role/Reboot today, I visit a popular question: why do so many conservative women embrace Rick Santorum? Excerpt:

In the Times piece, many of the women most passionate about Santorum cited his marriage and his seven children as their primary reasons for supporting the candidate. Santorum, as they seem to see it, has lived a life of running toward family responsibilities rather than away from them. To that mindset, Rick and Karen’s decision to fight to save their daughter Bella, born with Trisomy-18, isn’t just evidence that the couple are pro-life. It’s proof that Santorum is a man who doesn’t shy away from the kind of burdens that seem to overwhelm other men.

Like Don Draper of Mad Men, Rick Santorum’s image suggests a bygone era. Except that Rick is real, and what he reminds us of has less to do with debonair swagger and more to do with a kind of simple moral tenacity (some would say fanaticism) that’s worlds away from Romney’s waffling, Gingrich’s cerebral musings, or Obama’s tireless cool. For his fans of both sexes, there’s a sense that they support Rick partly because they wish so desperately that more men were like him. The women in the Times article seem almost wistful, perhaps stirred by the longing for husbands as passionate about their own families as Santorum is about his.

At the same time, Santorum’s emotional vulnerability is thoroughly modern. He’ll never be as glib as Gingrich, as rich as Romney, or as elegant as Obama—and he knows it. That doesn’t matter, he seems to be saying; I can out-feel them all. He doesn’t just center his family in his speeches, he seems to center his feelings about them.

Empathy Can Be Learned: Overcoming Narcissism, One Day at a Time

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

An earlier version of this post appeared in December 2008.

A couple of years ago, I put up this post about overcoming my own mental illness. In particular, I wrote in response to this post by the Happy Feminist about her relationship with her narcissistic father.

In my years in and around the mental health system, I was consistently diagnosed not with depression but with a personality disorder. More precisely, I was regularly described (by several psychiatrists) as having “cluster b” personality disorders: Narcissistic, Antisocial, and everyone’s favorite, Borderline. Based on the traditional criteria, I hit each and every one of the criteria for the last of these, and many of the crucial ones for the first two. From late adolescence until the cusp of thirty, as I cycled in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals, these diagnoses were offered again and again. And in my 2006 post, I talked in general terms about my recovery, conversion, and transformation. But I didn’t get much into specifics.

I’ve corresponded a bit with Jan at Planetjan, who has written quite a bit about dealing with folks with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (See her first, second, and third excellent pieces.) She wrote something that stirred me up a bit, for understandable reasons:

How is a personality disorder different from mental illness? I had a hard time initially wrapping my head around this one. A mental illness (schizophrenia being the most widely known) can be treated, with varying degrees of success, with medications or cognitive therapy. Most mental illnesses are caused by brain cell synaptic disruptions, most of which are believed to be genetic in origin. I have friends who are bipolar and as long as they take their meds, any symptoms subside and they feel and act relatively “normal.” Mental illnesses typically present themselves in late adolescence or early adulthood. The onset of the mental illness is often sudden and profound. A mental illness descends over a person’s personality like a heavy wool blanket feels on an already warm summer night.

A personality disorder, on the other hand, is all pervasive. The DSM-IV describes a personality disorder as “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectation of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.”

With mental illness, a person’s personality is blanketed, or suffocated, by the onset of the mental illness. But the personality of someone with a personality disorder is virtually interwoven into every fiber of that blanket. Unravel the blanket and you unravel their personality.

So someone doesn’t have a personality disorder; they ARE the personality disorder. These personality traits are so deeply ingrained that they defy change.

Bold emphasis mine.

I’ve heard this distinction between mental illness and personality disorders before, of course, though rarely so succinctly expressed. And of course, it brings me up short. Looking at my life narrative, three possibilities suggest themselves as a response to her position (widely but not universally held by the psychiatric profession) that personality disorders “defy change”:

1. Despite being diagnosed with cluster B disorders again and again over more than a decade by a number of doctors, perhaps I never really had a personality disorder — the shrinks were wrong. I just met a whole bunch of the diagnostic criteria, but not the disorders themselves.

2. The diagnoses were correct in the first place, and I’m fooling myself — and a lot of other people — when I claim that I have “overcome” the pernicious influence of these disorders on my psyche and my life. I may have gotten better at disguising the NPD and the Borderline characteristics of my identity, but they still dominate my identity at its very foundation.

3. Jan, and a great many doctors, are wrong. Personality disorders, as powerful as they are, can be overcome.

I want to believe #3, and most of the time, I do believe #3. I seldom give much credence to #1, largely because of the preponderance of evidence over a fairly significant period of time. I do worry, less and less as I grow older, about #2. The fear that I am broken, “maimed from the start” by an aspect of my identity that can be hidden but never erased, comes up occasionally. I know that I have aspects of my personality which continue to meet the diagnostic criteria for at least some of the named disorders, even if I do what I imagine is a very credible job of keeping them from becoming manifest and obvious to others. Continue reading →

Why Desire Matters Too: The Dangers of Underestimating Sexual Compatibility

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

An earlier version of this appeared in 2010.

I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named “May,” a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any heat to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. Sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading →

Scared White Men: Fragile Masculinity and the Death of Trayvon Martin

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

My latest at Role/Reboot looks at the long history of fearful white masculinity, and the role it may have played in the death of Trayvon Martin.

Excerpt:

Whatever happened on February 26, we can say with certainty that Zimmerman’s account follows a classic American narrative. A white male agent of the law confronts a black man; black man becomes violent, white man is “forced” to use deadly force to save his own life. The story plays on the classic racist assumption that black men are always physically stronger than whites. Because of that supposed physical superiority, the gun becomes “regrettably necessary” as a great equalizer. Too few white people question the familiar reasoning.

As Prof. David J. Leonard points out in a brilliant essay, millions of Americans learned the names of two black men this month: Joseph Kony and Trayvon Martin. Both became famous because white men labeled them as evils from which the world needed saving. The parallel goes further. Jason Russell, the head of the Invisible Children charity that started the viral Kony2012 campaign, and George Zimmerman each played essentially the same part: that of white male savior, protecting Ugandan children and Florida suburbanites from the real or imagined dangers presented by two black men.

While Russell had a bizarre (and notably sexualized) fall from grace last week, Zimmerman remains free. The black men they demonized have had different fates as well; while Kony survives somewhere in central Africa, Martin has been buried by his grieving family. Whether Trayvon’s family finds justice depends on whether prosecutors in Florida can find a lens other than that of anxious white masculinity through which to look. If history is any guide, we have little reason to believe that they will.

Do men have an obligation to witness the birth of their children?

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

Though this post first appeared in 2009, the topic of whether men have a responsibility to be present at the birth of their children (if the mothers want them there) came up again in discussion with friends this week.

Are some men just too squeamish to witness their children being born? If so, should we have compassion on that reluctance to be present — or should we ask these guys to grow the hell up?

The latest entry in the “men today have it so hard” sweepstakes is this Jonathan Last piece that ran in the June 4 Wall Street Journal: Present at the Creation. Remarking on the excellent new Judith Leavitt book Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room, Last wonders if our contemporary cultural insistence that men be present when the mothers of their children give birth is such a good idea.

Explaining how the dinosaurs once rationalized keeping men in the Stork Club (the waiting room for expectant fathers), Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor’s argument from the mid-1960s: “As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby — a negligee will never hide this apparition.” Another doctor concluded: “On the whole, it is not a show to watch.”

We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: “No thanks, I’ll be in the waiting room with cigars.” Ms. Leavitt’s fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

My head hurts.

Last strains to connect the increased expectation that Dads will be present with an increasing divorce rate (never mind that the divorce rate has been in decline throughout the admittedly brief 21st century). If there’s a need for a case study for correlation without even a whiff of causation, this WSJ piece might be a good place to start. One is left to wonder if Last actually believes that men are more inclined to divorce their wives after witnessing birth; perhaps he imagines that the delicate masculine sensibility is so easily overwhelmed by the sight of the “bloody show” that future marital relations are inexorably damaged as a consequence.

This, in other words, is just another bit of popular sexual “wisdom” from the purity peddlers and the chastity crowd. Last implies that men’s sexual desire for their spouses (or the mothers of their children to whom they are not wed) is contingent upon denial about the bloody reality of how life comes into this world. Women, of course, can be expected to endure childbirth — despite the pain and turmoil inherent in the process — and then turn around and long to do again with their men the very act that ended up putting them through the whole traumatic (albeit, presumably, rewarding) experience in the first place. Women’s libidinousness, in other words, isn’t allowed to be contingent upon some carefully enforced ignorance about bodily functions. Instead of marveling that so many modern women are willing to give birth more than once, to make love with their husbands with the memory of what lovemaking can lead to still embedded in the consciousness, Last worries about the poor lads whose fragile sensibilities might be permanently scarred at the sight, sounds, and smells of a delivery room. This is the myth of male weakness writ large indeed. Continue reading →

Webcams, Sexting, and Showing Off

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

My Genderal Interest column at Jezebel this week: Why Young Women Keep Making Striptease Videos, and Why Guys Keep Sharing Them.

Excerpt:

Cohen — and many of my students in the Navigating Pornography class I’m teaching this semester — told me story after story of how young men relentlessly urge young women to send them photos or striptease videos. (My students point out that the moves in these videos are invariably derivative and identical, just as are the pouts and poses in the still photographs.) Though research shows that the number of young people who actually send naked photos or videos may be surprisingly small, Cohen and others suggest that a far higher number of girls are pressured to do so. That coercion, whether it’s successfully resisted or not, is more of the problem than the sexy images themselves. “Back in the day,” one student of mine said, “a guy could only bug you to do something with him if you were physically together. Now he can nag you into doing something sexual that you’ll regret — while he’s on the other side of town and you’re alone in your bedroom.”

Why would young men who have a universe of explicit porn at their disposal pressure young women into sending them photos or videos that are tame by comparison? Predictably, the answer has as much to do with power as arousal. In explaining this, sex educator Charlie Glickman cites the John Hughes’ classic Sixteen Candles, in which a young Anthony Michael Hall begs Molly Ringwald to give him her panties, which will serve as proof of his sexual prowess to his disbelieving friends. “Getting a young woman to make you a video or send you a naked pic is the same thing,” Glickman suggests. A “sexted” picture isn’t just porn, it’s porn that its recipient will be the first (but probably not the only) guy to possess. That’s why boys usually share what they’re sent, invariably violating a promise to keep the images private. The photo or the video is an irresistible “talisman of manhood,” Glickman says. “It’s about proving to other guys that you were able to get a girl to overcome her inhibitions.”

We Don’t Need Women to Civilize Men

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

What are women for, asked James Poulos last month? The answer, as it is for so many complementarians, seems to be to do for men what the Y chromosome crowd refuse to do for themselves. I push back against the tired old (but tenacious) trope that women are here to civilize savage men in my column at Role/Reboot today: Why Men and Women Do Not Complete Each Other. Excerpt:

As the great psychologist John Bradshaw pointed out many years ago, there’s a problem with the complementarian arithmetic. We imagine that romantic love on a micro level, or societal harmony on a macro one, is the consequence of two “halves” being added together to form one whole. Men and women look for partners to “complete” them; the likes of Poulos look for men and women to perform their distinct roles so that the world functions smoothly. But as Bradshaw points out, the truth is that wholeness is the consequence of multiplication, not addition. When you multiply two halves together, you get one quarter—both individuals (and both sexes) are diminished by the complementarian lie. The only way you get 1 as the sum* by multiplying two integers is if each is already 1; the way you build an honest and healthy relationship or an honest and healthy society is by challenging men and women to become full and complete people. If you want oneness, in other words, you have to have wholeness first.

The truth is that men and women are human beings whose capacity for love and rage, desire and empathy are in no way circumscribed by hormones, genitalia, or chromosomal structure. If we want romantic wholeness and global healing, we need to be serious about identifying the ways in which sexist structures have deprived men and women of the full range of their humanity, forcing us to be “half people” looking desperately for completion in heterosexual relationships. We need to accept and celebrate the male capacity to nurture and reflect—and the female capacity to embrace ambition and anger.

And I’m pleased and grateful that the Good Women Project has reprinted “Your Body is Never the Problem”. Lots of interesting comments from the evangelical crowd.

*UPDATE: A commenter at Role/Reboot reminds me that the outcome of two multiplied integers is a product, not a sum; sum is only accurately used for the result of addition.

Holly Dyed Her Hair: One Girl’s Story of Escaping the Perfectionism Trap

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

From 2009.

I posted earlier this year against the “myth of female frailty” and the lie that “one mistake will ruin your life”. The topic of that myth arose again this week when I met with one of my former All Saints youth group kids, “Holly.”

Holly, whom I’ve known since she was in eighth grade, is now headed into her senior year of high school; she’s 17. When I first met Holly, and indeed for the next several years, Holly “presented” outwardly as the pretty, outgoing, poised and popular blonde whose passage through adolescence seems almost unfairly graceful. Holly was much sought after as a friend (and more) by boys and girls alike; at our Wednesday night youth group meetings, I often saw not-very-subtle attempts by kids of both sexes to sit on “Holly’s couch” and be near her.

Of course, Holly was far more than the walking embodiment of a stock American stereotype. Not only was she exceptionally bright and a particularly talented writer, her childhood had been touched by tragedy and loss to a degree that set her well apart from most of her peers. A few — a very few — of her friends got to know the depth of that loss and its impact on Holly’s life; I was one of the small group of adults to whom she also regularly turned. I watched her struggle with the disconnect between how the rest of the world perceived her and how she felt on the inside, and we talked often about her frustration with the realization that she was the object of desire, admiration, jealousy, and envy when for the most part, she felt out of place and frequently lonely. Holly’s is not an unfamiliar story — at its most extreme, call it the “Richard Cory” phenomenon after that famous Edward Arlington Robinson poem so loved by generations of misperceived adolescents.

This summer, Holly broke up with her first serious boyfriend, got her first lead in a play, and let go of a great many of her old friends. When I met with her earlier this week, her long blonde hair was mahogany brown. Despite the heat, she wasn’t wearing the short skirts that had been her trademark since junior high school. She wore corduroy pants, a t-shirt, and a vest. Not a trace of make-up on her face, but when we met at a local coffee shop, there was a sense of real happiness behind her eyes. Holly’s making changes; the outside shift reflects an inner transformation — and the brunette tresses a greater willingness to expose to the world the darker, more complex aspects of her personality. Continue reading →

International Women’s Day: some links

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Hugo Schwyzer

It’s Purim and International Women’s Day, and to read about the two together, check out this terrific post from TheMamaFesto: International Women’s Day: A Purim Story. (Hint: there’s some redemption love for Vashti as well as the customary honor for Esther.)

Check out this fun parody video celebrating the suffrage struggle: Bad Romance, Women’s Suffrage.

Clarisse Thorn, who has done much to change my views about “pick-up artists” in our many conversations over the years, has a brand-new e-book out today: Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men. It’s available for download at a special price of just $2.99 until the 17th.

A wonderful op-ed from Zoe Williams in the Guardian: As feminists, united we fall apart – divided we may yet succeed. The brilliant conclusion: When we try to present a united front, we’re not asking too much of ourselves, we’re asking too little: waiting for an unattainable unity is just another way of doing nothing. When we divide, we can burn more brightly in many places.

My latest at Jezebel: Men’s Magazines Aren’t Doing Them Any Favors. Excerpt:

As women know all too well, perfectionism doesn’t just manifest in an obsession with appearance. Perfectionism is about achieving excellence in virtually every area of life. The message is unmistakable: guys ought to be focused not only on looking great but on being great in bed. Young men are keenly aware that women do look, and by reading Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health (or contemporary lady mags) they’re also far more aware than their fathers’ generation of just how libidinous women can be. As a consequence, a young man’s worry about his own sexual performance may have grown in tandem with his increased anxiety about his appearance.