Tag Archives: Age

“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict

Posted on by

It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.

At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.

But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading →

Kinder, gentler, softer, slower: on the shock of running a 2:04 half

Posted on by

Thoughtful posts will appear this week, I hope.

For now, it’s a quiet Sunday night, and I’ve got the chinchillas out in their “nursery.” I ran a half marathon this morning, the Valley Crest trail race out in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s a tough dirt course, very hilly, but I’m still disappointed in my time. Though I pushed myself up each and every hill as best I could, I managed only a 2:04 — thirty-five minutes slower than what I was running less than a decade ago. I finished in the middle of the pack, and though I felt fine at the end, I was incredibly frustrated at my inability to generate more “leg turnover” — or speed.

Yes, it’s harder to be fast in one’s forties than in one’s thirties. But I’m also running so much less than I was in the late ’90s, when I was single, newly sober, and trading one set of addictions for another. I haven’t stepped onto a track to do speed workouts of any kind in more than five years, but it wasn’t so long ago that I was pounding out 10×800 repeats on a local track before dawn. I was never as fast as I wanted to be, but could usually manage to finish in the top 10% of the men in most of the races I entered.

And yet, as slow as I am these days, I wouldn’t go back to that old way of living. For me, that kind of training was monumentally self-centered. Yes, I was very fit. Yes, I was sober (and at my fastest, celibate), and it was clearly important that I go through a process of replacing one set of addictions (sex, alcohol, etc.) with another (running). I still run, but four days a week instead of six and 25-30 miles a week instead of 60-70. And I finish well back in the pack in the races I run these days instead of contending for, if not an overall win, at least an age-group placement.

I’m reminded again that my wife, my animals, my students, my friends, my colleagues, my mentees, and my large and wonderful extended family don’t need me to be fast. They certainly don’t need me to go back to 4% body fat, and they don’t need me to excuse myself from function after function because I’ve got training or recovery to do. I still make time for running, because running keeps me sane and happy; the addiction to endorphins continues. But I’ve learned that athletic pursuits must take a back seat to other obligations. I have no intention of ever ceasing to exercise regularly, but I also have no intention of having my wife or my future children become “running widows.”

I wrote a long post with a long title about endurance sports and communal obligations here: Tennyson and Sharon Olds, Ulysses and Telemachus: a very long post about endurance athletes, independence, and the single body alone in the universe against its own best time. I note that my inner Telemachus is winning out over my Ulysses these days. And I am kinder, I am gentler — and, I note with rueful acceptance, softer and slower.

Birthday memories

Posted on by

Today, newly forty-one, I’m not nearly as reflective as I was a year ago. Forty is a milestone, and for me, ’twas a happy one to reach. Forty-one has less epic resonance, though I do note that today marks the 20th anniversary of my first legal drinking experience. And soon I will mark the tenth anniversary since my last drink.

I’m thinking this morning not about my age, but about past birthdays. Here are a few that stick in my mind:

1970 (age 3); The first birthday I remember, and one of my very first memories. I attended the “Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School” in Santa Barbara, and I had a very fine cake.

1975 (age 8): My birthday fell on a weekend, and my mother arranged a party on Carmel River State Beach. The theme was “pirates”, and we barbecued hot dogs and flew a pirate flag. We had invited most of my class, but only a small handful of boys came. It was momentarily disappointing, but as I recall, one of those who did come was Brett, perhaps the most popular boy in school. He had never paid me much attention before, but he spent a few hours with me that afternoon, playing in the sand. I was very happy. Continue reading →

Hugo’s back pages: of charity galas, sophomoric cynicism, veganism, PETA, socks, and the very real sense that the world can be changed

Posted on by

I’m bleary-eyed at my desk this morning. United flight 33 from JFK to LAX landed at midnight, but it was just five or six hours ago that I finally got into bed. And today is my long day, one which will see me on campus thirteen hours. On the other hand, I am entirely the architect of my own adversity in this regard, so there will be no whining.

We were in New York this weekend to participate in Farm Sanctuary’s annual gala. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about our visit to the Orland farm; we had a very different but nearly-as-enriching experience in Manhattan.

I like events like this, and it’s not because I enjoy running around in black tie and getting goodie bags. (Okay, I do like both of those things, but in moderation.) What I find so exciting and inspiring is the chance to spend an evening in the presence of people with whom I share the same passionate commitments. As any vegan will tell you, spending a lot of time in debate and argument with folks who don’t share those same values can be exhausting and dispiriting. It’s the same thing with feminism, or any other ideological commitment that involves a holistic transformation of how one lives, thinks, acts, and consumes. Being in the presence of those who do what you do, and have often done it longer and more publicly, is galvanizing. Continue reading →

On compartments, fuck-ups, and more precious voices leaving the blogosphere

Posted on by

Eliot was right about the cruelty of April. Jill at Feministe has announced she is taking an extended hiatus from blogging, joining Blackamazon and Brownfemipower as prominent voices who have chosen to leave the ‘sphere in the aftermath of some immensely painful discussions about race, class, gender, and identity. I’ve been reading Jill since she joined Feministe years ago, and I will miss her prolific and insightful posts. How she blogged so much whilst in law school is beyond me.

I won’t say I haven’t thought about taking a break as well. (I do take short hiatuses of a week or three fairly regularly). Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve run out of things to say, or if, as Jill wondered today, my voice is doing more harm than good. I am confident an extended break will happen someday, but for now, I’m going to keep at it.

One aspect of male privilege, I recognize, is the learned ability to compartmentalize. I’ve railed against various aspects of compartmentalization before, particularly when it becomes a device for avoiding the hard work of reconciling contradictory aspects of one’s life. At the same time, there are some useful aspects to compartmentalization, particularly when it comes to blogging. Continue reading →

Waxing poetic at the Sandpiper Lodge

Posted on by

I’m blogging from the Sandpiper Lodge in Santa Barbara, a place I’ve stayed quite a few times on previous visits to this, the town of my birth. This afternoon, I rented a large Ford E350 van from the Avis franchise in Pasadena, drove to LAX, and picked up my brother, sister-in-law, and their three children who had just flown in from England. We loaded all their gear into the gas-guzzling monstrosity that is the E350, and drove up here to Santa Barbara. My brother’s family is staying at my stepmother’s. I considered driving back down to Pasadena tonight (it’s 92 miles, door to door), but I’m beat from a hard week of traveling and teaching. The Sandpiper has free wireless and decent coffee in the morning, so this works for me. I’ll drive back down to the ‘Dena tomorrow morning, and my wife and I will be back up on Sunday for a more extended family visit.

I have a lot of serious things I want to blog about, mostly in the usual categories. (And you may notice, I’m rapidly adding more categories on the sidebar, trying for greater precision). Tonight, I’m too tired for anything serious. Tonight, I’m by myself in a cheerful two-star motel in the city where I was born, and where I watched my father die, and I’m feeling both deeply exhausted and deeply content. I’m wearing polka-dot boxers, a half-buttoned dress shirt, a wedding ring and not a damn thing more; I’ve been here less than an hour and somehow have already managed to make a mess. (I’ll leave the room tidy in the morning — I am very good about not making more work for the maids.)

A moment ago, I stood in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, struck by how old my face looks — and how much like my Dad I am becoming. Both in my ageing and in my growing resemblance to my father, I feel blessed. A month shy of 41, I am living out what Donald Justice wrote in the second part of his most perfect and famous poem:

…And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Something is filling me, deep and enormous and ancient and good. And there is still so much more to come.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ,

Guys in love: celebrating the new SUNY Oswego study on teenage boys and relationships

Posted on by

Reader “English Rosebud” sent me a link this weekend to this story that ran in the New York Times on Friday: Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter. As she mentions in her email, it’s a powerful corrective to the widespread notion that teenage boys have just one thing on their mind.

The stereotype of the 16-year-old boy is that he has sex on the brain. But a fascinating new report suggests that boys are motivated more by love and a desire to form real relationships with the girls they date.

Based on a study that appears in this month’s Journal of Adolescence, the researchers (from SUNY Oswego) concluded:

Among the boys who had been sexually active, physical desire and wanting to know what sex feels like were among the top three reasons they pursued sex. However, the boys were equally likely to say they pursued sex because they loved their partner. Interestingly, only 14 percent said they sought sex because they wanted to lose their virginity, and 9 percent did so to fit in with friends.

The researchers note that there is no way to assess the truthfulness of the boys’ answers, but the rate of sexual activity in the sample is consistent with national trends, suggesting the boys were answering honestly. The survey group was ethnically and economically diverse, and 95 indicated they were heterosexual, while 10 boys didn’t answer the question.

Bold emphasis mine.

The overall findings are contrary to cultural beliefs that boys are interested primarily in sex and not relationships.

“Let’s give boys more credit,’’ said study author Andrew Smiler, an assistant professor of psychology at the university. “Although some of them are just looking for sex, most boys are looking for a relationship. The kids we know mostly aren’t like this horrible stereotype. They are generally interested in dating and getting to know their partners.’’

(I wish Professor Smiler hadn’t used the phrase “horrible stereotype”. I wince at the implication that wanting sex for pleasure is “horrible”. After all, both men and women do sometimes pursue sex outside of the context of an enduring relationship. While dishonesty and manipulation are indeed “horrible”, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake need not be accompanied by deceit or abuse. It’s “slut-shaming” at its most tiresome to suggest otherwise.)

Still, I’m delighted with this study, and not at all surprised. I’ve worked with adolescent boys as a youth minister for many years, and I’ve taught slightly older young men for even longer. One of the most common complaints that I — and anyone else who works with teen boys — hear is “I’m tired of having everyone think all I care about is sex”. Like the boys in the SUNY study, the teens I work with don’t deny that they are sexual creatures; they don’t pretend that sex isn’t frequently on their minds. What they find more frustrating than unsatisfied horniness is the enduring stereotype that they have no real interest in love and romance. When speaking of teens of either sex, it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that they want either sex or a relationship. All the recent research suggests that adolescent girls can have powerful libidos; this study makes clear what youth workers already know: that teenage boys, as horny as they are, have deep and complex emotional desires. Continue reading →

Empathy and exasperation: on men, ageing, and the “Peter Pan” syndrome.

Posted on by

I’m reading through the comments left below old posts while we were away. Below my post on the older man/younger woman dynamic in “Juno“, my old friend Bill asks for more compassion for men — like the fellow played by Jason Bateman in the film — who struggle to accept their ageing:

I wish you wrote about men who have had trouble growing up with a little more empathy, particularly those, like Mark, who had dreams with expiration dates and who did not see them come true and now must figure out where to go from there. I think you actually feel such empathy but it doesn’t come through here.

It might be helpful to read the original post for context. In Juno, the character of Mark is apparently in his late thirties. He and his wife are unable to conceive naturally, and are eager (or his wife is eager) to adopt. But as the audience discovers, Mark still has dreams of success as a musician. He bonds inappropriately with Juno, and it becomes clear as the picture progresses that that bond is less sexual than emotionally chronological. Her interests (comic books, music, horror movies) are his; his wife’s interests (domesticity, children, middle-class stability) are not.

(This doesn’t mean that an interest in comic books is inappropriate for older people. I know many fine folks over 40 who have seemingly adolescent hobbies. There’s nothing wrong with still going to punk shows or comic book conventions when you’re old enough to remember the Nixon Administration. Maturity is not about one’s interests; maturity is about the understanding that like it or not, ageing means the acceptance of certain responsibilities: financial, emotional, professional, and so forth. And, of course, as in the oft-quoted Donald Justice poem, it means “closing softly the doors to rooms (you) won’t be coming back to.”)

But to get to Bill’s point: I’m sympathetic, but not terribly empathetic, with men whose dreams turned out to have “expiration dates.” Part of that is that I am fortunate to be doing at 40 more or less what, at 20, I expected to be doing at this age. I was studying to be a history professor when I was a teenager, and by the time I was 26, I had a tenure-track job. I’ll admit, I was lucky. Getting the job I wanted wasn’t solely due to luck (I’d like to think talent had something to do with it). Continue reading →

Men, mortality, stewardship, love

Posted on by

It’s not a conducive time for posting ’round these parts. We leave for the Philippines on Saturday night; we’ll be back on Friday, January 11. I have lectures to prep and packing to do.

My father-in-law died early Sunday morning, and we have been busy with taking care of family and with funeral arrangements. Sunday afternoon, my wife and I spent several hours dealing with the cemetary, the mortuary, and all the minutiae that come with death. I’ve gotten too familiar lately with all the details that survivors cope with in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing.

My Dad died eighteen months ago, at 71. My father-in-law died three days ago at 63. Over and over again, the words “much too young” echo in my head. My father’s father died at only 44 (in a car accident); my mother’s father died at 62. Both of my wife’s grandfathers died relatively young as well. Though the causes were all different, we both come from families where there are plenty of older women — and too few older men. The statisticians tell me that men in America and Europe should live to see at least 72, but for my wife and for me, neither our fathers nor any one of our four grandfathers made it to that age. Meanwhile, all four of our grandmothers made it to at least 80, and most well beyond.

So in addition to the grief over losing a loved one, I’m feeling this week an acute sense of fragility. Some of that is just the reminder — of the sort we always get when we’re confronted with death — of our own mortality. But in my personal experience (and the experience of my family), dying “too young” is a largely male phenomenon. Though some of these deaths were due to poor lifestyle choices, the emotional impression I am left with is that men are somehow more vulnerable than women. Continue reading →

The burden of being a change agent caught betwixt and between: a note to “Kendra” about women, the sciences, and grad school

Posted on by

I got a long email from a woman I’ll call “Kendra”. Here’s some of it:

I’m writing you because I’d like to get your thoughts on a major frustration I’ve had for a while (if you have time or feel so compelled).

I’m a 32 year old graduate student in electrical engineering. I’ll be finishing my masters next spring, and then I know I want to get a PhD…

It really stinks being a woman who is pursuing an advanced degree in engineering (or physics, which was my undergraduate area). It is even worse as you get older. I have two very close friends, both of whom are women. However, I don’t see them often.

Most time is spent around my “peers”, who are often 10 years younger than myself and almost entirely male. Most guys that age seem a bit phobic of girls and women. Age-wise, I am as old or older than most of the junior faculty in the department. However, none of the faculty seem terribly interested in being friendly. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. If I walk into the lunchroom when the faculty are there, they often stop talking as long as I am there. I honestly can’t tell if it’s the fact that I’m “just a student” or if it’s because I’m female, or possibly both. Either way, I wish I could blend into the wall. It’s obvious that they know I’m there, but also as obvious that they have no desire to include me.

I also don’t have a terribly easy time relating to other people outside of school. I hate to say it, but it seems like the stereotype of the engineer without any social skills is true. So much of what I do is wrapped up in my work that I can’t seem to relate to most people effectively. Although I’m a social butterfly by engineering standards (probably too much so since I’m rather talkative once you get me going), but I am often perceived (especially by other women) as “showing off” simply by discussing things that interest me. The feeling I get is that it’s okay for men to be engineers and talk about that “technical stuff”, but not for women.

I really hate being in this position.

No matter which path I follow career-wise, I sense that I’m always going to be caught in this limbo where people don’t fully accept me as a peer because I am different. I’m either older, younger, female, married with kids, a student, (someday) faculty, what have you…and this cuts off a lot of options for friendships. It’s very isolating and makes me wonder what I am paying in order to have the career I’ve been trying to work toward for so long. I would hope that going someplace else may change some of that, but I’m really not sure.

Does this ever change? Once I have my PhD, will faculty magically start treating me like a peer? Or will other students distance themselves even more because I crossed that imaginary line?

I don’t have an easy answer for Kendra. My Ph.D. was in the humanities, and I went through a graduate program that was evenly divided between men and women who were almost all my chronological peers. We were a gossipy, emotionally entangled lot.

I had a good friend a few years ago who was a Caltech graduate student (I can’t remember exactly what she did. It had “materials” in the name). My friend was, like Kendra, in her early thirties and one of the only women in her program. She also felt isolated from both her peers and her professors. Her fellow graduate students either had obvious schoolboy crushes on her, or they ignored her, unsure of what to do with a woman in what they clearly thought of as “male space.” Her male professors tended to treat her with exaggerated formality, always civil and encouraging, but also a bit distant. She noticed that her chief supervisor regularly went out for beers with some of his male graduate students, but never invited her — out of fear, she suspected, that he might misinterpret an invitation as an inappropriate advance. She was never once sexually harassed — but she found the “walking on eggshells” treatment to be almost as frustrating.

We need to acknowledge that graduate school can be a terrifying business. Working on a Ph.D. in any field is frightening; no matter what your topic or your field, there’s always the fear that your research won’t pan out, that you’ll end up in a dead end, or — worst of all — you’ll discover at the last minute that some other grad student at another university just did their doctoral work on exactly the same thing, and finished a month before you did. Add to that the financial strain that graduate education almost invariably imposes, throw in some family responsibilities, and the whole thing can be fairly wretched. I spent years oscillating between intellectual elation and debilitating anxiety, between authentic cameraderie with my fellows and bitter competitiveness. It was a tough time, and I think it is almost certainly worse for women in male-dominated fields.

As for the questions Kendra asks, I can say that in my experience — and, anecdotally, in the experience of most of my fellow graduate students — things do change once you get the Ph.D. I was never especially close to my dissertation supervisor, though we certainly got along quite well. At the moment he signed my completed dissertation, with all my exams and research and writing done, he said to me just one word: “welcome.” Not “congratulations”, or “well done”, but “welcome.” I already had tenure here at Pasadena City College (even though I technically had only an MA), but in his eyes it seemed, getting the Ph.D. was a hurdle I had to get over in order to become his peer. Honestly, “welcome” was the word I most wanted to hear at that moment. It was the recognition not just of a significant accomplishment, but of belonging.

Of course, once you have the Ph.D. you cease to be a student like other students — even if you’re doing a post-doc somewhere rather than actually joining the professoriate. My friends in the sciences who are doing post-doctoral research (but not teaching, and not being paid as full-time academics) often do report feeling a bit “betwixt and between”. On the one hand, they’ve achieved the highest standard the western academy offers, and on the other, they’re not climbing the tenure ladder and they don’t yet have students of their own. Whatever your sex, whatever your age, it can be a rough time.

But in the end, things do get better. And in the sciences, they have started to get dramatically better for women. The percentage of women receiving advanced degrees in the hard sciences, mathematics, and engineering has climbed considerably in recent years. Caltech now is over 40% female, three times what it was just a quarter-century ago. At times, the continued obstacles all around us blind us to the happy reality that we have already come so far. And though women in science and engineering continue to experience the kind of treatment that Kendra writes about, that sense of isolation will decrease as more and more women like her continue to work for the Ph.D. and continue to take post-docs and tenure-track jobs.

I remember very well one thing my old friend from Caltech said to me: “Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I tell myself I’m taking this shit so other women who come after me won’t have to.” It’s hard to be a pioneer, and it’s hard to carry the burden of being a “change agent.” But sticking with it gives others the inspiration to follow in your footsteps. And as more and more women come into the sciences, as math and engineering departments cease to be all-male enclaves, the sense of isolation that “geek women” experience will inevitably diminish. And though that may not be much comfort to Kendra now, in the long run, I hope that it will be.