My Facebook friend Jennifer sends me a link to this blog post by Greta Christine: Is Monogamy Fair? The post deals with whether it’s reasonable to ask your partner in a monogamous relationship to avoid masturbating, to avoid porn, or to avoid strip clubs and sex workers.

I pick those three examples because for many people, they fall on an escalating scale of “violation” of the basic principle of monogamy. While many folks are comfortable with the idea that their partners masturbate, many of those same men and women might prefer their partners not do so to porn. And many of those who are fine with a lover’s private porn use would draw the line at accepting their decision to have sex with a prostitute.

I’ve written about porn and masturbation before, and you can find my (often evolving) thoughts on those subjects under the categories on the right. What struck me about Greta’s post was the underlying premise: is it fair to ask a partner to only be sexual with you?

The simple answer, of course, is yes. Monogamy in 21st century Western culture isn’t coerced (though it is still elevated,often wrongly, above other options). People in committed relationships enter those relationships by choice, presumably motivated by desire. And it’s not unreasonable, in a relationship, to ask for what you want.

Years ago, Mary Chapin-Carpenter sang “It’s too much to expect, but it’s not too much to ask.” It’s an important distinction. Harry gets to ask Mabel to not masturbate alone because it’s his wish that both he and Mabel are only sexual when they are together. He’s allowed to want what he wants. But he doesn’t get to expect Mabel to agree. Even in marriage, one partner’s desire is not automatically the other’s obligation. To use Greta’s language, it’s fair for Harry to ask… and equally fair for Mabel to refuse the request.

Monogamy isn’t one-size fits all. Monogamy isn’t about the limitations you place on your sexuality so much as it is about the degree to which you prioritize a sexual relationship. So one monogamous relationship could be “open” to other partners while another was “closed”. What would determine the health and the strength of the relationship would be not the choices made, but the openness, clarity, respect, mutuality and honesty with which the ground rules of the relationship were negotiated.

Monogamy is, sooner or later, sacrificial. It calls for something maddeningly delicate — the merging of interests and the practice of constant compromise without the complete loss of individual identity. It is an endlessly shifting Venn Diagram in which there must always be three distinct entities: You, Me, and Us. The $64,000 question is the obvious one: how much of “Me” do I give up for the “Us”? To pretend that the answer is “nothing” is absurd. But to insist that the answer is “everything” is a recipe for romantic disaster.

What we want sexually (and in other areas) fluctuates over the course of our lives, and certainly over the course of a long-term relationship. Successful couples tend to renegotiate agreements and compromises. “You’ve changed!” should be less of an accusation than a compliment; who wants to be the exact same person at 45 that they were at 23? We’re here to help each other grow.

Part of that growth involves developing the courage to ask for what we want. Part of that growth also involves developing the courage to say “no” to a request we cannot grant without a loss of something very precious. We have the right to ask, but our asking never entitles us to a “yes”. In that spirit of balancing sacrifice with self-love, of valuing the Us while not letting go of the Me, a monogamous relationship can indeed find its way to fair.

So it is eminently “fair” to ask a partner to be sexual only with you. And it’s equally fair for them to say “no”. And fighting fairly through the conflict that follows will either allow the relationship to grow — or to end, gracefully and kindly.

I have a column up at Role/Reboot today on statutory rape and age-of-consent rules: Is Age Ever Just a Number? Teens, Sex, and Romeo & Juliet Laws. It was inspired by this piece by my Jezebel colleague, Erin Gloria Ryan.

Excerpt:

It’s impossible to write age-of-consent laws in such a way that they take into account the maturity and experience of every individual adolescent. As with legislation about drinking and voting, society needs to set a cut-off point—even if that point seems arbitrary and unfair. Where we draw those points shifts as cultural mores shift. (When I was born in 1967, the drinking age was 18 and the voting age was 21. The reverse is true today.)

Though the law cannot be written to meet every individual situation, Romeo and Juliet laws do reflect an evolving and increasingly nuanced approach to teen sexuality. These laws are enforced by police, prosecutors, and judges, all of whom can use their own discretion when it comes to deciding whether real harm has been done. Even when the law says, as it must, that 14 is 14 and 18 is 18, those who apply it should do so with both common sense and an appreciation for the very real complexities of teen sexuality.

In 1977, when it came time for CET to do the spring play, she took a shy and timid little boy who wanted to stand in the back and play a small part, and she cast him as a prince.  He didn’t think he could play the prince; Marcia saw that he could.  35 years later, whatever public confidence I have can be traced to that one moment on my little hometown stage..

In her honor, I’m reposting this 2007 meme below the fold:  list the mentors who made you who you are today.

J.K Gayle at Speakeristic tags me with a meme: name the thirteen teachers or mentors who most influenced your life, and offer a brief explanation of how they did so. The teachers can be professors, parents, or long-dead writers whose work has shaped you. Here goes:

1. E. Alison Moore Schwyzer, my mother. I see so much of the world through her eyes still; she gave me a love of poetry, a love of history, and a love of the spoken word. Hers were the first lectures I heard (on long car trips, she gave her two boys and their dachsund the same lectures she gave to her classes at Monterey Peninsula College), and I still often find myself imitating her style.

2. Hubert Rudolf Georg Schwyzer, my late father. He taught me many things, but mostly that masculinity and gentleness are indeed deeply compatible, and that in the end, decency and beauty and love are what matter most. I sat in on many of his lectures at UCSB and elsewhere over the years, and some of his mannerisms have made it into my style.

3. Margaret Roeding Moore Chickering, my maternal grandmother. “Peggy”, as she was known, was a renaissance woman. She taught me how to write sincere and witty thank-you notes; how to load and shoot a .22 rifle; how to plant bulbs; how to master a complex table setting. Equally at home riding trails on horseback or hosting a Junior League tea, she taught me that duty and joy were not mutually exclusive. And that’s a wonderful lesson to learn.

4. Elisabeth von Schuh Schwyzer, my paternal grandmother. “Elsa” was born in Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century. She was a relentless bundle of energy and of shifting opinions, an impetuous, inexhaustible woman, she had been a passionate adolescent Communist; a close and devoted lifelong friend to the philosopher Karl Popper; a farm wife who milked cows and raised hogs in rural England. She wasn’t Jewish, but she married my grandfather, who was. His conversion to Catholicism wasn’t enough to protect the family after Hitler’s takeover of Austria, and it was her determination that enabled them to make their way to safe haven in Britain. She returned to Vienna after the war, and worked as a teacher into her late 80s.

5. Robert Douglass, my third and fourth-grade elementary school teacher. “Mr.D” was a great big bear of a man, resembling a lumberjack more than an elementary school teacher. Hungry for male attention in the years after my parents’ divorce, Mr. D gave it to me. I was an inordinately clumsy boy, but Mr. D taught me how to make things with my hands — my mother still has the cutting board I made for her in 1977; when I look at it, I can feel his patient hands guiding my own.

6. Peter Lyon, my high school English and Social Studies teacher. Insisted his students call him by his first name. Ran a magnificently chaotic and ambitious course called “Five Cities”, a course in which, over the span of an entire school year, his students explored the art. culture, politics and vision of five places: ancient Athens, renaissance Florence, Enlightenment Paris, early twentieth-century Moscow, and our own Carmel by-the-Sea. We kept journals, and we wrote about everything imaginable in them — nearly 25 years later, I still have those journals. Peter’s comments were immensely encouraging to me; indeed, I still reread them. He was the first teacher (outside of my family) I ever had who told me he loved me. I loved him too, and I’ve never forgotten him.

7. Richard Fletcher, my high school biology teacher. “Fletch” is still alive, and just on the cusp of retiring after decades at Carmel High. Much of my commitment to environmentalism and animal rights was nurtured in his class, but he too was a magnificent mentor. Yes, he made me learn botany (I had nightmares about xylems and phloems for years), but he also was prone to giving spontaneous, memorable life lessons. One day after class he pulled me aside and told me, “Hugo, you need to take better care of yourself. You’re an addict in the making, and I’m worried about you.” I don’t know what he saw or how he saw it, but he was the first person to name my addictive streak.

8. Marcia Gambrell Hovick, who was my theater teacher and second mother from the time I was seven until I was eighteen. The Children’s Experimental Theater in Carmel was my second home through my childhood and adolescence. Marcia didn’t make me into an actor, as I’ve not performed since I left high school, but she gave me confidence and a voice that could reach the back of a room. Whatever fleeting charisma I seem to possess when I’m lecturing is largely due to eleven years of her guidance. Marcia is still teaching in her late 80s, and is an institution on the Monterey Peninsula. Every time I speak in public, I carry her with me.

9. Leon Litwack, the legendary American history professor at Cal. If you were a student at Berkeley in the last forty years, and you didn’t take Litwack’s intro course, you missed out. One of the most naturally gifted lecturers I have ever heard; his cadence and rhythm inspired me tremendously, and I find myself aiming for that same delivery in my own classes.

10. Norma Alarcon, who taught a Chicana Writers course I took in 1988. I was the only white guy in the class, and I was talkative and difficult — but also eager. I’m sure I drove her up the wall, but she was patient with me, and did more to help me see the depths of my own privilege than any professor I’d had before or since.

11. Father Al Moser, CSP; my favorite priest at Newman Hall in Berkeley. A wonderful, kind Paulist, I met with him often before and after my baptism and confirmation. He heard my first confession, and said to me once “Hugo, you know, God wants you to be happy.” Those words may well have saved my life, and they certainly have provided me a great deal of comfort over the years.

12. Scott Waugh, my graduate adviser. Fifteen years ago, if Scott had told me to walk through the fires of hell to bring him a latte, I would have done so — not that he ever made those sort of requests. A gifted teacher, he was as exceptionally patient with my insecurities as he was with my pompous and occasionally florid writing style. He once told me that I was only allowed to use one adverb per page, a restriction that nearly killed me but did a great deal of good.

13. Philip Arthur Schwyzer. I am not ashamed to say that my younger brother is one of my heroes. We are very different men, and “Pip” (as he is nicknamed in the family) is one of the most deeply moral human beings I’ve ever met. That’s not my way of saying that I’m deeply immoral, merely that for most of my life, I’ve been guided more by sentiment and impulse than by deep conviction. My brother has been the opposite; he was the one who first gave me the phrase I often use here on this blog about the importance of “matching one’s language and one’s life.” I still learn much from his example.

I tag no one and everyone.

I’m turning to an email I got from a woman last week. “Tara” wrote another in the series of queries from young women contemplating entering into a relationship with older men. The trick on this one is Tara (21)  is interested in a 36 year-old married fellow, one who claims, as so many do, to be in a less than fulfilling marriage. Tara asked me a couple of other questions, but finished with this one:

…do you think that the decision to cheat lies within the hands of the involved person, or does it share a weight equally with the “other woman”? am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision (as to whether a sexual or emotional affair happens.)

The simple answer is that cheating is cheating, and that anyone who knowingly enters into a relationship with someone who is pledged to another through marriage or another sort of monogamous arrangement gets a full and equal share of the blame. That’s perhaps the response of our age, though a history of adultery and its prohibitions reveals that that has not always been a universally held position. In different times and places, only the married cheater has been blamed, or only the woman. And some folks like to parse out differences between what is “adultery” and what is “infidelity”, even though most of us use the former to refer to the extra-marital subset of the latter. But while the history of Western law and religion makes clear that our sense of what kinds of extra-marital or pre-marital sex are wrong is a moving target, the modern received consensus is that having sex with someone who is pledged to another is bad.

For many of us, the real offense of infidelity (I use the term broadly, to encompass emotional as well as sexual affairs) lies in betrayal. The very word means to “break faith”. To be cheated on is painful enough, but to be lied to is, in a very real sense, worse. While most cheaters cover up their behavior through active lies or lies of omission, the real deceit lies in the betrayal of the original promise to be monogamous. Whether as part of a marriage ceremony or simply an informal agreement to “not see other people right now”, most (not all) relationships make their way towards some sort of mutual pledge of fidelity. To cheat is to break that pledge unilaterally. And once we’ve cheated, we’ve in a very real sense called into question every other aspect of the relationship; our pledges of fidelity aren’t just about what we promise not to do with our hearts and bodies, they are pledges about the effort we intend to put into this particular bond.

When I was going through the Twelve Steps with a strict sponsor many years ago, the subject of my many infidelities in my first marriage came up. I offered to Jack my “reasons” for cheating on my first wife. He snorted at all of them, and explained what I have come to see as the modern way of understanding the problem of infidelity. “Hugo, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. You need to understand, when you cheat on your wife, you’re not just betraying her, or any God you happen to believe in. The greatest problem with cheating is that it turns you into a liar; on a soul level, every time you sleep with another woman behind your wife’s back, you know you’re breaking a promise you made. No one can break his own promise and be happy.” I was in a pedantic mood, and snapped back that that sounded less modern than Aristotlelian, to which Jack — who wouldn’t have known Aristotle from Adam –replied that it didn’t matter what it sounded like, it was simply true. And of course, Aristotle was right, and Jack was right. One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life.

Promises of fidelity can be ended without betrayal; a mutually agreed divorce or break-up serves notice to one’s partner and one’s community that a particular bond has reached the end of its usefulness. Though the Church may teach that sex after divorce is still adultery, that position misses the whole point of the offense. A negotiated end to a pledge is worlds away from a secretive betrayal. When both parties (or the courts) have agreed that a bond no longer binds, then that bond has lost its power. If one’s spouse or partner no longer has any reason to have faith in one’s commitment, then “infidelity” is impossible because there is nothing left to betray. Promises made are constitutive — they help create the reality of a relationship; promises mutually ended are also constitutive — they create a new reality in which each partner is free to seek new forms of happiness.

But what does this have to do with Tara’s question? If I were more of a communitarian sort, I would argue that Tara has a moral obligation to respect the pledge made between this older man who has captured her interest and his wife. I would argue that a healthy society functions best when we respect not only the agreements we ourselves have made, but we do our best to help those around us uphold their own contracts and promises. After all, in many wedding ceremonies, it is customary for the minister presiding to ask the congregation if they will collectively do all that they can to uphold and sustain the newlyweds in their marriage; this recognizes the importance of community in nurturing seeminly private relationships. I would challenge Tara to consider this notion that others’ bonds are our business, at least to the extent that we do wrong when we actively seek to undermine them.

But I think a more compelling argument can be made from a more individualistic perspective (albeit one consistent with Aristotle and Jack). If Tara cares about this married man, then she surely wants what is best for him. While she may not recognize any obligation on her part either to his wife or to the bond between them, she presumably feels some tug of loyalty to him as a person. If she has an affair with him, she becomes an instrument through which he breaks a pledge he made not only to his wife but in a very real sense, to himself. When he promised his wife fidelity, he made a statement about his own identity: “I am not a cheater and do not wish to cheat.” When Tara sleeps with this man, she participates with him in his own “self-betrayal”. Whether or not she feels obligated by a promise in which she didn’t participate is irrelevant — her bond of concern for her prospective lover ought to include a regard for his happiness. And whatever protestations he may make to the contrary, deep happiness is radically incongruent with oath-breaking. When she sleeps with him, in other words, she is helping him to become what he pledged not to be.

None of this should be read as lifting the burden of fidelity off of the shoulders of those who are actually married. If we cheat, it is our fault, and not the fault of those who may deliberately or unintentionally tempt us. In the end, as adults, we are sovereign over our choices, and men have the same capacity for self-control as women. But it is also reasonable to suggest that whatever our feelings about monogamy as an institution, we have a responsibility to those we love and care for to help them make choices that are congruent with their values — and their pledges. Tara may owe nothing to the woman to whom her older man is married, but she ought to let the affection she feels for him — and her desire for him not to betray himself — to act as an influence upon her.

Amanda Marcotte has a short piece up at RH Reality Check on women and libido. For such a brief post, she manages to touch on two separate but interlinked issues: one, the problem with pathologizing low female libido; two, the root cause of widespread “lack of interest.” Here’s the marvelous final paragraph:

It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem–that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure. But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.

That’s spot on.

The great sex therapist, David Schnarch, writes in his Passionate Marriage (the best sex advice book for couples in long-term relationships I’ve ever seen) that we do well to avoid the question “Why doesn’t my wife (or my husband, or my bf, gf, what-have-you) want to have sex with me?” The whole structure of the question, Schnarch says, misses the point. It assumes a strong libido is the default setting in any romantic relationship. Rather, we should ask “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” And also “Why do I really want to have sex with him or her?”

This can be shaming, of course, if not asked rightly. Schnarch doesn’t want his patients following the “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” with a sigh and an “After all, I’m unattractive, it stands to reason that they should have no reason to want me.” Buit it is a reminder, as I’ve written many times, that sex is never obligatory. The “I will” of the wedding day is not a blank check to be cashed daily, weekly, or monthly by whichever spouse has a higher libido. We ought to be answering Schnarch’s question not with “Because she’s my wife and it’s her job” or even with “Because we’re in love, and people in love are supposed to fuck a lot.” We ought to be answering it by having an honest discussion with ourselves (before we have one with our partners) about what it is sex means to us, what makes us in the mood, what we see as the purpose of sex in our lives.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own marriage right now. My wife and I have a newborn. Though I wouldn’t normally share this sort of thing, it’s probably obvious that we haven’t had sex since before our daughter was born. My wife is recovering from a grueling physical experience, and is breastfeeding little Cerys on what seems like an almost hourly schedule. (And folks, thanks, but please spare us the advice about sleeping routines and so forth — we have tons of help.) I haven’t slept more than three hours straight in a single night since the baby was born, and am up changing diapers and soothing and cleaning at the strangest and most interesting hours. For a great many reasons, sex isn’t happening right now. Neither of us has a strong libido these days, though mine at the moment probably surpasses that of my wife. It’s an excellent opportunity for me to practice what I preach about self-soothing and about letting go of any lingering hint of entitlement and expectation.

One thing I learned in a liturgical church, and am learning all over again in my involvement with the Kabbalah Centre, is a great respect for seasons. We live differently, the great traditions tell us, at different times of the year. We have our penitential and reflective seasons, like Lent or the Omer; we have our seasons of celebration, like Easter; we have our seasons of activity and effort, like Sukkot and Pentecost. There’s a time and place, in enduring relationships, to fuck with violent abandon five times a day. There’s a time and place to make love reverently with thoughts of the divine (like midnight on Shabbat). There’s a time and a place, too, to take all of that carnality and put it elsewhere, focus it on some other aspect of living.

My wife and I are, like so many parents of newborns, like walking zombies much of the time. Last night, I changed Cerys after my wife had fed her, and I put my baby girl in her little night dress. We stood as a family at our bedroom window, looking out at the deck and the world beyond, and we placed Cerys between us. I held her so her head was near my heart, and my wife put herself around me in such a way that her heart and her chest was on the other side of our daughter’s head. Cerys nestled into us and we nestled into each other, skin to skin to skin. Let me tell you something: this is making love, making love of a different sort.

The imperious and real urges I feel are sublimated into something else, not because my sexuality is bad ever — there is never a season for shame, never a season for self-loathing. But they are sublimated because now is the season for sacrifice, for sleep deprivation, and for unconditional love. My wife’s libido is gone, for now, gone where it needs to go as she goes through the healing process and the mystery of first-time motherhood. Real love and real confidence is knowing it will return in due course, and that I will be fine in its absence. There is nothing to pathologize, nothing to doubt, nothing to question. All is as it should be, and right now, it’s all not about me.

Books like Real Marriage and Sexperiment aren’t just full of risible advice and tortured metaphors. (Clark-Flory cites this line from the latter book: “God doesn’t want us to experience little sex in the dog bed; he wants us to experience the power and purpose of big sex in the right bed.”) These aren’t even just manuals for how to have an active and fulfilling sex life with the same person until you die. These are battlefield manuals for the culture war. If heterosexual marriage is the cornerstone of civilization, and a hot sex life is (as even plenty of non-religious folks would concede) a key to a happy relationship, then having lots and lots of sizzling Christian married sex isn’t just about making babies or feeling good. It’s about doing your duty in the great struggle against the forces of moral relativism, homosexuality, and Satan.

“You should be the first to bring it up”, says “Ella,” an actress in her late 40s with two teenage boys. Three decades ago, Ella was a troubled teen star with a much-publicized cocaine addiction; at 19, she had a well-documented affair with a married movie executive nearly three times her age. Sober many years and happily married, Ella prepared early to help her sons come to terms with the inconcealable details of their mother’s past. 

“When my older son was 11, I mentioned in passing that ‘mom did some really foolish things when she was young.’ I didn’t go into detail because I knew that too much detail could be traumatizing. I just told him that if he ever heard anything from friends at school or anyone else, he could come to me and I would answer any questions.” As her sons got older, Ella gradually disclosed more. But she resisted the urge to share too much too soon.

Ella, Carré, and I share one thing in common: We’re well-known enough that our past indiscretions are matters of public record. In one sense, we have it easier than many other parents whose pasts are more easily hidden. We don’t have a choice about whether to reveal or conceal what we’ve done and who we were; our only choices revolve around how and when. We have one less decision to make than do most of our peers.

Read the whole thing.

On MLK day, I recorded a podcast for the Sex with Timaree show, hosted by the terrific Timaree Leigh.  Check out her short article here, and listen here.

The approximately 30-minute interview is broken into four parts to accomodate YouTube’s limitations.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men.

In my follow-up, I note that the New Testament, much like the Talmud, is misinterpreted by its most fundamentalist followers today.  Modesty doesn’t mean what we think.

In this age where hormones and evolutionary psychology are commonly cited as explanations (or outright excuses) for the most appalling male behavior, it makes good sense to teach women to look for an effective and enduring guarantor of masculine reliability. That means encouraging women to make romantic decisions based more on men’s devotion rather than on their own desires. Shorter Gottlieb: “caring” trumps “tedious”, and don’t be so much a fool to insist that you can easily have the former without the latter.

Not only do we believe that men are weak when it comes to impulse control, pop culture relentlessly reminds straight women that they are hardwired to be attracted to “bad boys.” Evolutionary psychologists trot out all sorts of theories to explain why women are sexually drawn to unreliable alpha males, but the end result is that we teach women to be suspicious of their own longings. In a corollary to the myth of male weakness, grandmothers and Gottliebs warn that a woman who is head-over-heels in love and lust will be less likely to see vital warning signs; a woman who finds herself only tepidly attracted to a man will be able to assess his character more accurately. His greater devotion keeps him faithful; her less intense passion keeps her safe — and, presumably in control both of her own emotions and of her male partner.

And then of course, there’s always Auden’s take.