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How Teaching Gender Studies Has Changed in 20 Years: Six Short Anecdotal Observations

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In my women’s history course this week, I mentioned that the number of male students in my gender studies classes had risen steadily over the years. A student asked what other changes I’d noticed, and though I didn’t have a ready answer, six things eventually came to mind.

At the end of this semester, I’ll have wrapped up my 20th year of teaching at Pasadena City College. Here’s some of what I’ve noticed since 1993:

1. The number of young men interested in gender/sexuality studies/feminism increases every year. When I started teaching women’s history, my first gender studies class, men were 5% of the students. Now, they’re about a third. The homophobia has gone down, as studies have shown; the willingness of young men to talk about feelings seems to grow every year.

2. The number of women who are open and vocal about sexual desire, body image, and raw ambition increases every year. Female students talk openly about masturbation and porn use with a frankness and a self-acceptance that they simply didn’t 10 years ago.

3. The percentage of non-white students in my gender studies classes is increasing faster than in my other courses. When I first started teaching at PCC, the campus was 30% white but my gender studies classes were 50% white. Now the campus is 25% white but whites make up maybe 15-20% of those who take courses like Women’s History, Navigating Pornography, Men and Masculinity.

4. Since the advent of social media, students are noticeably less apathetic and more politically engaged than they were/seemed in the 1990s. First started to see this in 2003 with the anti-war demonstrations that were organized online on campus — now, student activism using multiple platforms is electrifyingly successful.

5. The number of students willing to consider a women’s studies/gender studies major as a viable path has increased enormously. This is the most surprising thing — the number of students wanting to study gender has gone UP since the recession, almost as if there’s this sense that practical majors (business, pre-law) offer little guarantee anyway.

6. Fewer students come in reeking of cigarettes; more come in smelling of pot. When I first started teaching at PCC, you could smoke anywhere you liked outdoors; now we’re virtually smoke free. In the early 1990s, the cops went looking for pot smokers, now we have medical cannabis collectives everywhere and widespread acceptance.

Thursday Short Poem: Szymborska’s “Thank-You Note”

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I haven’t had a Thursday Short Poem up since 2011. This struck me hard when a friend posted it on Instagram, of all places; I knew a lot of Szymborska’s work but had somehow missed this.

Thank-You Note

Wisława Szymborska

I owe so much
to those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom –
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don’t wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can’t,
and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”
would be love’s answer
to this open question.

An old parable for Anti-Street Harassment Week

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It’s International Anti-Street Harassment Week, kicking off today. Follow here.

With the victim-blaming defenses of harassing behavior fluttering around, I’m struck again by how persistent the myth is that some women “ask for it” (harassment) because of how they dress or carry themselves. This famous image, with its appeal to the assumed male inability to resist staring at women’s exposed body, is making the rounds on social media again.

An even more famous parable.

Once, a great spiritual teacher was walking along the road with one of his young students. They were traveling for a whole day, and the young man was eager to learn one-on-one from such a renowned master. (In the best known version of the story, the two are Tibetan Buddhist monks. In others, they’re 7th-century Irish monks, or Jewish scholars in the Roman Empire.)

After an hour of walking, the two come to a river. The bridge has washed out. A beautiful, scantily-clad young woman is standing on the banks, looking dolefully across. When she sees the monks, she approaches them. “I can’t swim,” she says, “but I must get to the other side. Could one of you carry me?” She looks beseechingly at the fit younger monk, but he blanches; he’s taken a vow of celibacy that forbids him from even touching a woman. To the young man’s horror, his teacher gently volunteers to help. The young woman climbs onto the old monk’s back, wrapping her arms and legs tightly around him, and together they swim to the other side. The young monk swims alongside, confused and furious. How dare his teacher allow this beautiful young woman to touch him so intimately?

On the far shore, the old teacher bows politely to the young woman, wishes her well on her journey, and the two men continue down the road. The young monk is beside himself with confusion — is his master a fraud? Was this some sort of test, and he failed it by not volunteering himself? The image of the woman’s stunning body torments him. He can’t even speak to his teacher, instead giving into to a host of doubts and racing thoughts.

Finally, the two stop for lunch. The young monk can’t take it anymore, and questions come pouring out. “How could you let this woman touch you like that?” he asks angrily. “Didn’t you see what she was wearing? She was probably a prostitute and you carried her on your back! You… you’re unclean!”

The old man takes a sip of tea, and smiles. “I put that young woman down on the riverbank. You are the one who is still carrying her.”

In every tradition in which that story is told (there may be a Muslim version, but I only know the Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish ones) the point is the same. It’s not evidence of the old man’s special holiness that he was able to carry the beautiful young woman on his back. (In one version I’ve heard, he wades across the river with her in his arms.) It’s certainly not a sly reference to an older man’s declining libido. It’s about the obligation that all men — even young horny ones — have to treat every woman with human dignity and courtesy, regardless of what she’s wearing. The point is simple: to be distracted to the point of rudeness isn’t about what women have (or don’t have) on, it’s about how men choose — and it is a choice — to react.

Clearly, this point still needs making.

On James Deen and Jackie Robinson: UPDATED

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Is porn star James Deen more familiar to today’s college students than baseball legend Jackie Robinson? In an interview with the local paper in February, prior to Deen’s visit to my classroom, I suggested that he was. Both Deen and Robinson attended Pasadena City College and rank among our best-known alumni; an informal survey of my students at the beginning of the semester revealed more had heard of the 27 year-old actor than of the late athlete and civil rights activist.

Last night at the monthly meeting of the Pasadena City College Board of Trustees, representatives of the NAACP complained that my comments had unfairly maligned Robinson’s legacy, and demanded a public, written apology from me. (I was also offered a free ticket to see “42,” the new film chronicling Robinson’s role in integrating our national pastime.)

I stand by my original statement that — based on an entirely casual survey of a few dozen students — James Deen was a more familiar name than Jackie Robinson. I want to make it clear that I intended no disrespect to Jackie Robinson, and that I honor him as an important and remarkable figure in our nation’s history. Students everywhere ought to learn about his accomplishments both on and off the field, particularly here in his hometown and at the community college he attended.

At the same time, I want to make it clear that there is nothing inherently disrespectful about comparing Jackie Robinson to James Deen. Deen is a celebrity, an activist, and a mold-breaking star who is redefining erotic possibility. He too is worthy of celebration as an alumnus of Pasadena City College, and I reject any insinuation that his profession makes him unsuitable for recognition and honor as one of our most famous and accomplished former students.

UPDATED:

I sent this link to the entire board of trustees as well as the college president, Mark Rocha, and legal counsel Gail Cooper. I have not received a response from any of them. Here’s the cover letter I included:

“Dear trustees,

I’m told that last night, the NAACP asked for an apology for remarks I made to the Pasadena Star-News about two of our distinguished former students, Jackie Robinson and James Deen. I’ve placed a statement on my blog, writing entirely as an individual and not as a representative of the college. It is pasted in below and is available at http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/2013/04/04/on-james-deen-and-jackie-robinson/

I note that many members of the administration and the board of trustees have expressed concerns about the content of my Humanities 3 course, but that none have contacted me directly. I would be happy to chat on the phone or in person about the class, and I extend an invitation to any and all of you to sit in on one of the remaining lectures. This might be helpful in clearing up concerns and clarifying what it really means to ‘navigate pornography.’

I appreciate the college’s long and deserved reputation for the vigorous defense of academic freedom and bold intellectual inquiry, and am confident that you are as committed as I am to upholding that aspect of our mission.”

Erotic Disruption: on James Deen and my students at Daily Life

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At Daily Life Australia, a column on porn star James Deen and his merrily disruptive sexuality:

“It felt really good to be in a classroom where we could openly acknowledge that women get horny too without it being unsafe or weird,” one student wrote in an email.

“What I got out of his talk was encouragement not to be ashamed of ourselves,” said another student. “We fear living out our true desires, and we fear the shame that will most likely shadow us if we do. Our college’s reaction to James Deen shows us exactly how much they’re still invested in perpetuating that shame … at least for women.”

It would be wrong to equate criticism of the industry that has made Deen a superstar with a refusal to accept that women are visual creatures, too. It’s possible to be against both porn and shame. At the same time, there’s no denying that Deen’s meteoric rise reflects a cultural shift towards acknowledging that young (and not so young) women are as hungry for sexual pleasure as men.

As the unprecedentedly nervous administrative reaction to Deen’s appearance on my campus showed, that shift is profoundly threatening. When men realise that women aren’t just sexy, but sexual in their own right, the fear of not being able to live up to female demands can become overwhelming.

The more we deny and shame women’s libidos, the more we insulate men from the pressure to satisfy them. That’s what makes Deen such a destabilising, even dangerous cultural figure.

Read the whole thing.

Male fecklessness, female anxiety, and the impact on romantic expectations

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This week’s Jezebel column looks at a fascinating new book about young women and their life choices:

As feminists have been pointing out for some time, expanding opportunity for women without also expanding expectations for men leaves us with a lot of anxious and exhausted female overachievers. As Bell argues in ‘Hard to Get,’ one way that anxiety manifests is in young women’s growing “contempt for vulnerability.” If we want to get past this maddening dichotomy between romantic happiness and professional success, we need to do more than teach young women emotional self-defense. We need men to change.

We make public life less risky for women not just by encouraging them to take self-defense classes, but by demanding that men respect women’s bodies on the street, in the subway, and at work. We make romantic life less risky for women by challenging men to show the fuck up. The myth that excuses rape is the same myth that makes men into such apparently risky propositions as boyfriends or husbands. As long as we believe that men are too weak to control their sexual impulses, we’ll force the burden for preventing rape entirely onto women; as long as we believe that men are uniformly incapable of being exciting, reliable, and emotionally aware life companions, we’ll continue to mock and shame young women who make romance a priority in their lives.

Read the whole thing.

Shooting Tape: Sex, Editing, Masturbation, and Memory

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NOTE: This is a sexually explicit piece and may not be what some readers want to read. I originally wrote this for the magazine Body Talk, and it appeared in their October 2011 issue. I retained rights to it, and repost a revised version now.

Shooting Tape

What’s hotter? The sex we have, or the sex we remember having?

I was 12 when I discovered how to masturbate late one summer night in 1979. What began as accidental exploration was quickly revelatory, and then — as it is for so many kids that age — it became my private source of pleasure and comfort. My fantasies were simple, and genuinely vague: I’d lie in bed, thinking about pretty classmates, fantasizing that I was watching them undress. (I was unclear, to about what ought to happen next, but I knew it involved lots of hot naked kissing, which is what I thought about.)

I had a few dates, but was a shy kid. I’d kissed two girls by the start of my senior year of high school, but nothing more. I was, not unlike many of my classmates an awkward, dorky, twitching bundle of longing.

And then, thanks to some mutual friends with a discerning eye for matchmaking, I met Michaela. (Name changed.)

Michaela and I went to different high schools, and could only see each other on weekends. We’d have sex in her bedroom on Friday and Saturday nights (she had a blessedly liberal mother), go to the beach or to the movies on weekend afternoons, and spend Monday through Thursday talking on the phone. During our time apart, I’d masturbate every night to the visual memory of what she and I had done together the previous weekend. Sometimes we’d have phone sex, but more often, I’d get off to the arousing images in my mind.

These memories were more exciting than porn could ever be. Thoughts of Michaela’s naked body popped into my mind while walking to school or sitting in class, unbidden and almost unbearably arousing. Thinking about what we had done mixed with excitement about what we soon do when we saw each other again. The straight As I got my senior year says more about the lenience of my teachers than about my intellectual focus. My mind was elsewhere.

Michaela and I had been sleeping together for about two months when it happened. We were having sex in her bed on a Friday night, and I remember a thought suddenly popped into my head:
I’m gonna love getting off to this next week.

Huh? I didn’t stop what I was doing with my girlfriend, but I remember my own surprise at myself. Michaela and I were sexually inventive and open by the standards of American high school students in the mid-80s. I told my friends the sex was great, and I meant it. But at 17, as randy as could be, I realized I got more physical pleasure from masturbating to the memory than from the actual sex with this young woman I loved.

Sex with real people is messy, and not just physically. Michaela and I fumbled, as people do, and sometimes we hurt each other, and not in a good way. Like so many young men, during sex itself I spent a lot of time worrying about my own performance rather than focusing on connecting to the woman I was with. All of that detracted from my pleasure – and all of that could be “edited out” in my masturbatory recollections.

Michaela and I had a lot of hot sex with each other, and, eventually, with other people. I had my first ménage a trois with her and a guy from her work; later, she encouraged me to “do everything but” with one of her good girlfriends while she watched. Though I’d started senior year as a virgin, by the time graduation came, I’d had quite a rapid learning curve. And though Michaela and I broke up when I went away to college, I took with me my now-extensive collection of “movies” – all of which lived in my head.

For years and years, through one-night stands I can’t count and a half-dozen long-term relationships, through three marriages and three divorces, the pattern didn’t change. Whatever and whomever I did, the real thing was never as hot as the subsequent recollection. By the time I was in my later 20s, I had a term for what I did when I had sex: “shooting tape.”

Living in L.A., I got the term from my friends in the TV industry. It fit what I did perfectly. I realized that I thought of the actual sex with other people as “raw footage”, and I the director, the camera operator – and eventually, crucially, the editor. The finished product was what I had in my head when it came time to have sex with myself, free from pressure and anxiety. The fear and the fumbling were on the cutting room floor; what was left was an exquisite highlight reel better than any porn video – and better than any reality itself.

I think masturbation is wonderful, life-enhancing, healthy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fantasy. But… I will say that for so many years, my relationships suffered because I preferred both masturbation and fantasy to the messy, complicated reality of connecting with another human being. It was only at 35, divorced for the third time and scared that I lacked the tools to ever connect intimately, that I began to take a hard look at how “shooting tape” had impacted my life.

In my next relationship, with the woman who became my fourth and (God willin’) my final wife, I tried something different. I decided I’d only give myself “permission” to masturbate when I was sure that I wasn’t using sex with this woman I loved to create new material. The results were almost embarrassingly immediate. And predictably, I was more present and connected. Even if my wife didn’t notice, I did.

The tapes are all still in my head, of course. Outside of the movies and the tragic reality of brain trauma, most of us don’t have a delete button on our memories (the theme of the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). I’ve got decades worth of “video” that I “shot” with a great many sex partners. Some tapes are more memorable than others. But those tapes still exist, I don’t bring them out often. I know better.

Fantasy stops being healthy when it becomes something with which our real-life lovers can never compete. And no real lover can compete with the carefully edited erotic images in our minds. If I’m going to stay fully present with my partner when we’re sexual together, I need to be present in mind as well as body. That means not replaying old tapes of past lovers – and it means not seeing the present experience as a mere opportunity to produce a hot new video for future private consumption.

If I want a passionate now, I need to keep the images of the past tucked away. But I also need to remind myself not to bring a mental camera to bed. I’m the best lover I can be when I stop performing, directing, and editing. And start being present.

The addict checks out: sex, rage, rape, and Adam from Girls

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Since Sunday’s airing of “On all Fours,” the darkest and most troubling Girls episode yet, there’s been plenty of debate about whether or not what happened between Adam and Natalia was rape, bad sex, or something else that’s difficult to name. (I liked what Amanda Hess and Emily Heist Moss have to say.)

Like so many, I found the episode emotionally triggering to watch. Witnessing anyone — whether they’re friends or fictional characters of whom one has grown fond — relapse into destructive, humiliating, or dangerous behavior is painful. I have always had a lot of sympathy for the darkly brooding Adam (played so well by the magnetic Adam Driver), not least because he’s in recovery, having struggled with alcoholism since his teens. In this most recent episode, we see Adam make the conscious choice to drink again. As an addict who has been clean nearly 15 years (and who was in and out of Twelve Step programs for 11 years before that) I’m captivated by relapse. I want to watch it up close, partly because I will always be drawn to the fantasy of going back to drugs and alcohol, and partly because studying the mechanics of another’s fall is a kind of prophylaxis against making a similar decision.

What haunts me about Adam isn’t just that he’s a fellow drunk with a compelling mix of social awkwardness and sexually-charged charisma. It’s the way in which he externalizes his own self-destructiveness. Driver is a good enough actor that he’s able to show us two Adams at once: the disconnected narcissist and the vulnerable boy who knows that he’s capable of empathy if he can only, only get out of his own way. We never doubt why women fall in love with him, and we never doubt why they will invariably leave.

I’ve been Adam, both with the alcohol and with the sex. Watching him assault Natalia (I’m not gonna quarrel about words), I remembered how easy it is for the addict to use sex to disappear into one’s own pain, one’s own rage.   And I remembered — as Girls will surely show Adam remembering -the mix of shock and fear and disgust on the face of a woman who trusted me.  ”Where the fuck did you go?” one ex asked me in bewilderment and anger. I’d fumble with an apology, with remorse, with soothing words that always stood in painful contrast to what had just come before.  Like Adam, when I had sex high or drunk there was almost always this nearly instant post-ejaculatory regret, as if my orgasm had purged a demon and I could return to being present, empathetic, and tender.  (One reason I had to be celibate in early sobriety was to learn how to connect sexually, how to stay present even when my clothes came off.   That wasn’t an easy lesson to learn.)

It’s dangerous to over-identify with a fictional character. I’m not Adam.  But we’re similar enough that I was shaken to my core by the reminder of where it is I can go if I’m not “doing my work.”  I was also reminded that that destructive disappearing act, that vanishing into sexualized cruelty, had nothing to with the women I was with.  On Twitter, some of my friends were suggesting that what happened was partly Natalia’s fault for not understanding Adam’s peculiar kinks; “this is why Hannah was better for him,” they claimed.

Men don’t drink and disconnect and (yes) rape because they’re with the wrong partner.  It’s both a dangerous oversell of female power and a devaluation of men’s responsibility to suggest that a woman’s empathy — or sexual adventurousness — is enough to restore an addict to sanity.  Men like Adam (and the me that was) don’t need a particularly adventurous and understanding sex partner; we don’t drink and disappear into rage because we’re misunderstood.  The love of a kinky woman won’t save us for long.  We drink and disappear because we’re not working our program, because we’re not winning the fight every damn day against a disease that leaves us incapable of empathy, of sustained kindness.

The good news is that when we start to win that fight we change; we can become completely different people.  In sobriety, I learned how to be present, how to listen, how to play with humor and tenderness.  In the program, we’re reminded that we only have “a daily reprieve contingent on maintaining our spiritual condition.”  On Sunday night, I watched someone lose that “daily reprieve,” and inflict so much stupid, cruel, unnecessary pain as a consequence.

Monday morning, I called my sponsor.

On Modesty and Male Weakness: “Pegging” and Feminism at Jezebel

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I had two posts up at Jezebel this week:

Hot Girls in Tight Clothes Do Not Keep Boys From Learning Excerpt:

That modesty culture places an unreasonable burden on girls is undeniable. What gets missed is that it also sets men up for a lifetime of believing that they aren’t responsible for their own sexual urges. Boys don’t need to be protected from their own horniness (any attempt to provide that protection will end in failure), they need tools to learn to manage the intensely powerful feelings that they’re having. Teenage lust is a biological reality, but the socially-constructed assumption that it is only truly overwhelming for boys is destructive in two ways. It shames girls for being horny (because sexual desire is framed as exclusively masculine) and it teaches boys that they are at the mercy of urges they can’t be reasonable expected to control. What boys need, and aren’t getting, is the message that lust and learning aren’t mutually exclusive experiences.

If You Want a More Thoughtful Boyfriend, Try Pegging Him (Trigger Warning for, um, vulgar language) Excerpt:

The payoff for clearing those hurdles, Glickman says, is nothing less than the radical transformation of heterosexual sex. In 2011, Glickman wrote a column entitled “How Pegging Can Save the World,” arguing that no other erotic experience a man can undergo can create greater empathy with women than being penetrated by his partner. “For men who have never been on the receiving side of penetration, sex is something that happens outside the body. And when sex is external to your body, it can be easier to do when you have a headache or you’re not quite in the mood. A lot of men discover than when sex is about catching rather than pitching, their mood, their emotions, and their connection to a partner can often have a bigger influence on what they want to do and how it feels.” Men, Glickman and Emirzian suggest optimistically, will be a lot less likely to rush foreplay once they’ve experienced how long it takes to relax sufficiently in order to comfortably take a dildo (or other sex toy) in the ass.

For women, Glickman and Emirzian write, the experience of pegging a man can be equally revelatory, suggesting that “many women who use strap-on dildos discover how much work, responsibility, and (sometimes) power can be part of fucking someone.” It’s intellectually reckless to impose political meanings onto private acts, but it seems telling that in an “End of Men” era where exhausted and stressed-out women already are shouldering so much more “work” and “responsibility” than ever before, those burdens are extended — in a novel way — to the bedroom as well.

James Deen Wrap-Up

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James Deen’s visit to Pasadena City College ended up being a huge success. I’m grateful for the forbearance of college authorities, the news media, my wonderful students, as well as James and his very accommodating and flexible team.

A few news articles on the event:

New York Daily News

Pasadena Sun

Fox News (local affiliate, video)

The Pasadena Star-News (also featuring video and photos as well as a lengthy write-up)

Google will give you more.

I look forward to welcoming more stars of adult entertainment to class, such as Jessica Drake and Kelly Shibari. I’m also bringing in Charlie Glickman, sex educator and activist. And for the sake of balance and perspective, my students are also reading the work of Robert Jensen and Gail Dines, the two best-known feminist critics of pornography.

My students dealt with the media crush, the change of venue, and other distractions with aplomb. They asked great questions of both James and Stoya, his friend and another celebrated entertainer who came for support. I’m very proud of my students, proud of my college, and feeling lucky to have tenure.

After his talk to my class, a photo with a former student turned international star and activist

After his talk to my class, a photo with a former student turned international star and activist