For Ash Wednesday, a reprint from 2009.

Do we love ourselves too much, or love ourselves too little?

Rod Dreher, a conservative convert to Easter Orthodoxy, thinks Christians take it too easy on themselves, even in Lent.

In a now unavailable article in USA Today, Dreher contrasted the writings of St. Andrew of Crete, who emphasized sin and the need for repentance, with the words of contemporary mega-church pastors like Joel Osteen, who emphasizes the good news that you are loved and doing just fine. Dreher laments the pervasiveness of an easy message where a “comfortable middle-class priest in our comfortable middle-class parish instructed the congregation that the Lenten season is all about –no kidding — learning to love ourselves more.”

“If Andrew of Crete could see us today, would he conclude that the problem with Americans is they don’t love themselves enough? To the contrary, our problems consist chiefly in that we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.”

It’s been a while since I’ve written about faith, and since it is Ash Wednesday, let me have a crack at what Rod is saying here.

First off, he’s right that churches across the ideological spectrum tend to peddle what Dietrich Bonhoeffer so famously called “cheap grace.” Too many churches don’t challenge their congregants to do the hard work of looking inward, but instead encourage a kind of self-satisfaction of the saved. Liberal churches sometimes define salvation as being saved from the ignorance and moral rigidities of the right; conservative churches too often define salvation as the state of being somewhere where those decadent liberals won’t get to go. It’s very tiresome and it’s not very Christian. And it’s true, too, that churches need to do more than repeat the message “Jesus loves you.” I mean, that’s great — Jesus’ love is the Great Fact of my life — but at some point, I need to hear how it is that I am supposed to live now that I have this awareness that I (along with everyone else) am God’s favorite.

Rod makes a mistake, however, when he writes that our problem is that “we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.” It sounds good, but he misses some key points. First off, a great many people who spend a great deal of time pursuing material things do so not because they love themselves too much, but because they don’t love themselves enough. Much of the reckless consumption that characterizes the modern middle-class lifestyle is rooted in a profound anxiety and unease rather than in genuine self-satisfaction. We consume and consume in order to distract ourselves from ourselves, eating when we’re not really hungry and buying what we don’t really need. Folks in that situation don’t need happy little affirmations that everything is fine, but neither do they need stern admonitions about their own sinfulness; heck, deep down they already suspect they’re plenty sinful enough. Continue reading →

From October 2007

We drove down to Inglewood yesterday to see Corteo, the current Cirque de Soleil production touring the West Coast. One would have to be very curmudgeonly indeed not to find the various Cirque shows riveting, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

“Corteo” is based around the story of a clown imagining his own funeral. One of the most magnificent sections of the show comes in the first half of the performance. According to the program:

“In a divine spirit of sisterhood, the clown’s former lovers emerge above him as in a dream.”

Three dancer/acrobats, clad in lingerie, swirled from chandeliers over the head of the clown, who sat on his bed and reached for them. It was a visually impressive sequence, but I couldn’t help but chuckle at seeing such a classically narcissistic male fantasy.

Perhaps twenty-five years ago, in high school, I read Nancy Friday’s collection of male sexual fantasies, Men in Love. I haven’t even seen a copy of the book in years (to my surprise, it’s still in print), but I vividly remember just one story — and it isn’t a sexual one. A man remarked to Friday that his ultimate fantasy would be to sit under a tree on a beautiful day, surrounded by every woman he had ever loved, all of them focused on him, all of them laughing and enjoying themselves. Even when I was a teenager, I remember nodding my head vigorously in agreement that this was, in some sense, something for which to be fervently wished!

Many years later, when I was dating the woman who would end up becoming my third ex-wife, she asked me what I thought heaven would be like. I was in a flippant (yet candid mood), and so I told her: “Heaven to me is all the women I’ve ever loved — my mother, sisters, ex-girlfriends, lovers, friends, ex-wives — all together with me. Everyone will get along, and I won’t be forced to choose among any of them!”

My third ex-wife told me that it was the most “overwhelmingly chauvinistic” thing she’d ever heard me say. I got defensive, trying to pretend that I was “only joking”, but it left a mark. She brought it back up again when we were going through marriage counseling, preparing for divorce. Continue reading →

From May 2011

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.

From January 2009

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.

From February 2009.  (Note: my daughter’s full name is Heloise Cerys Raquel.  We initially planned to call her primarily by her second name, and that’s what we were doing when this post was written less than a month after her birth.)

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.

From February 2009

I suppose that many of my upcoming posts will touch, in one way or another, on the experience of becoming a father. My daughter is one week old today, and she and my wife are resting comfortably at home. Our little girl — whose name will be given soon — is perfect and lovely and captivating, and my wife has never been more beautiful and amazing in my eyes. It’s a happy time, albeit a sleep-deprived one.

It would be odd if going through this pregnancy with my wife and watching my daughter be born didn’t have a profound impact on how I see the world. The whole experience shaped, and is continuing to shape, many aspects of my thinking. I have no doubt at all that parenthood will continue to transform me, though that is hardly my child’s primary purpose in the world. My job is to love her, hers is to be loved unconditionally, and whatever insights come along the way are a bonus. And one way in which this journey has impacted me very profoundly is in my views on feminism.

Years ago, Susan Bordo wrote a wonderful essay: Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and Subject-ivity, which appeared in her Unbearable Weight. Bordo makes the point that our American legal system has an historic concern for the autonomy of the individual, but that a pregnant woman’s right to bodily integrity is uniquely subject to challenge:

The essence of the pregnant woman, by contrast, is her biological, purely mechanical role in preserving the life of another. In her case, this is the given value, against which her claims to subjectivity must be rigorously evaluated, and they will usually be found wanting insofar as they conflict with her life-support function. In the face of such a conflict, her valuations, choices, consciousness are expendable.

In other words, my wife’s status as an independent person collapsed, in the eyes of the world, the moment folks started to realize she was pregnant. And while I’d been quite prepared to discuss reproductive rights theory with colleagues and students, nothing has shaped my gut feelings about the issue of women’s subjectivity like witnessing my wife’s pregnancy and the birth of this daughter. And believe me, nothing has made me more committed to feminist principles than this experience!

It is much commented upon, but no less remarkable for its frequency: an amazing number of people seem to believe that they have the right to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. My wife, who has a keen sense of body integrity, did not like to have her stomach touched by anyone other than me and her various professional caregivers. But for the last four months of her pregnancy, as her belly began to swell, family and friends and even strangers made all sorts of attempts to get their hands on her tummy. My wife got very good at fending people off politely, and I did my best to remain cool while helping (particularly with my family) to keep prying hands at bay. Continue reading →

From May 2010

There’s been much talk this week about the adventures of Abby Sunderland, the Southern California 16 year-old whose attempt to sail solo around the world ended when her boat lost its mast in the Indian Ocean last Thursday. For several hours, there was fear — much of it hyped by the media — that Abby was “lost at sea”. The story is on its way to a happy ending, as Abby is now on a fishing boat headed for Madagascar, and, eventually, home to her family.

The debate, of course, is whether her parents ought to have allowed her to make this journey. (Her brother had undertaken a similar adventure a few years ago when he was just a little bit older than Abby.) That Abby had the technical skill to handle her boat is not in question; what befell her could easily have befallen an experienced sailor thrice her age. But lots of teenagers have the capacities of adults, but are still denied all the freedoms of adulthood. We all know 15 year-olds who know more about politics than their parents, but we don’t let 15 year-olds vote. We know, certainly, that plenty of 17 year-olds are capable of making responsible decisions about alcohol — and that plenty of 27 year-olds aren’t.

It’s not news that our lines of demarcation that separate children from adults are somewhat arbitrary. Whether we draw those lines at 16 (Austrians can vote at that age, which appalls many Americans; Americans can drive at that age, which appalls many Europeans) or 21 (a ridiculously late drinking age in the eyes of many around the world), any sensible person recognizes that some of those beneath the line are capable of handling the responsibilities that at least of some of those above that line are not.

Sensible people, however, recognize that society must draw lines somewhere. (This debate is as old as classical Athens, if not older.) We can’t test every young person to see if they are “ready” to vote, or to drink, or to have sex, in quite the same way that we issue driver’s licenses. And even with driver’s licenses, while turning 16 doesn’t automatically grant the right to have a license (the test must be passed), being under 16 automatically bars a young person from be licensed.

These lines are drawn based upon many things: history, tradition, collective assumptions about risk and maturity. These lines shift based on social trends and evolving beliefs about young people, rights, and responsibility. In the Vietnam era, a growing sense that it was unjust to send 18 year-olds off to die in wars while not permitting them to vote led to the passage of the 26th Amendment; a decade later, anxiety about other risks led to a Reagan-era mandate to raise the national drinking age from 18 to 21. These shifts don’t always make sense; they lead to the obvious silliness that a young soldier can operate a machine gun in combat but can’t buy a beer. That kind of arbitrariness grates. But the alternative to arbitrary line-drawing is far more grating: a kind of intellectual or maturational means testing that would be subject to abuse and overt politicization in a hearbeat. Continue reading →

From March 2011

After so many years of blogging, teaching, mentoring, and writing, you find yourself getting the same questions over and over again. (Questions about the wisdom of age-disparate and long-distance relationships, for example, are evergreen.) But there are other topics that come up often as well, like incompatible sexual desire. (See here, for example.) And as is often the case, I get multiple queries on the same topic at the same time from different sources; call it kismet or synchronicity, the topic of what happens when a woman has a stronger libido than her male partner has come up four times this week.

Our myths about sex drive tell us that men are supposed to peak in horniness in their late teens, while women only reach their full libidinousness on the high side of thirty. A lot of us suspect that to the extent there’s any truth to this at all, it has a good deal less to do with biology, and more to do with the long and difficult road so many women have to travel to discover and accept their own sexuality. Slut-shaming and sexualization work together to make girls acutely conscious of others’ wants and expectations while shutting them off from their own desires. It’s hard to hear one’s own “still, small voice” of longing if you’ve been raised to be a people pleaser!

But of course, so many young women don’t fit this model, just as the guys they date often don’t fit the male stereotype of constant randiness. And for many young women, finding themselves in a sexual relationship where they are the higher desire partner can be deeply confusing. One FB email this week from a former student of mine:

Before I had sex, my fantasy was always that a beautiful man would want me so much that he would lose all control, overpowering me. Not a rape fantasy exactly, just the idea of driving some hot guy crazy with lust. I guess you’d say my arousal was tied into how aroused the guy was by me. That was my number one fantasy for years and years. But Tom (name changed, of course) doesn’t seem to want sex nearly as often as I do. I’d like it almost every day, and he’d like it a few times a week. We don’t get much time together as it is, and this is driving me nuts.

I hear variations on that quite often (though rarely several times in one week.) And of course, my former student is hurt and confused. She knows enough to know how much of her own sexuality was shaped by cultural messages about uncontrollable male desire. She’s done a great job of leaving behind the message that “good girls don’t really want sex”. But while she’s given herself permission to want and to have, she’s still got the old tape playing that says that in heterosexual relationships, particularly among young people, the man should always be hornier than the woman. Continue reading →

This post originally appeared in 2009.

A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.

I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.

I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.

Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others. Continue reading →

From November 2009

Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.

One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ’87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ‘surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.

My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.

In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift. Continue reading →