This post originally appeared in August 2006.

Yesterday on campus, I ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen in several years.  "Max" and I were hired around the same time as adjuncts in the early 1990s; I eventually was lucky enough to get a full-time job.  Max (who taught sociology and psychology) was not.  He taught at PCC for a number of  years, and then gave up his dreams of teaching and went into the business world.  He told me yesterday, as we greeted each other, that he’s back to "adjuncting" again — his business success has allowed him to return to his original passion of college teaching, even if only part-time. He’s maybe a decade and a half older than I am, somewhere (I think) in his mid-fifties.

I never saw Max teach.  But I vividly remember a discussion we had a few years ago, not long before he left the college.   He was in the faculty lounge one morning, going over his class roster.  He stood up excitedly when I walked in: "Hey Hugo, look at what I’m doing!"  I came over, and saw that he had placed numbers next to the names of many of his students.  My heart sank; I thought Max was going to share with me some new and complex grading theory that would be very tedious to have to listen to. 

But it wasn’t about grading: "Hugo, I’ve ranked all the girls in all my classes!"

I was stunned, staring at the sheet.  He’d ranked them two ways.  One, "ordinally", from 1 (the "hottest" in his estimation) up to about #20 (there were that many women in the class).  Then, he’d put a second number (in a different color pen) next to the first number.  This reflected, he explained, where the girls stood on the classic 1-10 "objective" scale.  His #1 in the class, therefore, ranked as an 8.75. 

I was so bewildered, all I could think to ask was "Max, how long did this take you?" 

Max told me he did this with every class each semester.  It took him a few weeks to make decisions, he explained.  "I can’t make a final decision on where they rank until I see them in different outfits; it’s usually not until the midterm week that I am sure of what numbers they deserve. But hey, Hugo, you should try it — it’s objective and subjective grading at the same time!"  And with that, I got a slap on the back and off he went.

I really agonized for a while about confronting Max about this.  The temptation to "let it go" was overwhelming.  I was certainly still quite tentative in my commitment to challenging older men.  But after running Max’s story by a friend of mine who was an active feminist (and not on campus), I summoned up the courage to confront him.  Of course, it didn’t go well.

I invited Max into my office, and I told him how uncomfortable I was with what he had showed me.  I used words like "sexist" and "unprofessional".  Max became very indignant.  "This is bullshit, Hugo.  I’m only doing on paper what every man does in his head.  I’m honest about it — but you, you’re a fucking self-righteous fraud!"  And he stomped off.  Later, he came up and apologized for his language , but not for his "ranking system."  And having said my peace, I let it drop.  When I saw Max yesterday, I instantly flashed back to our fight over his "rankings".  Honestly, I’m surprised I hadn’t remembered it earlier to blog about it before.

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I wrote this in December 2006, long before I became a father. I’ve reread it in light of all the focus on child molestation this week (Sandusky, etc), and as a papa to two sweet, vulnerable children, I stand by every word.

Yesterday’s LA Times had a “column left” story by Peter Hong: On His Block, A Molester. Hong, a Times staffer, lives a bit more than a mile north of me in Altadena:

My neighbor was a child molester.

Michael Miletti’s face, name and address appear on posters lining Wapello Street in Altadena, with the admonishment: “Leave Our Neighborhood Now Child Molester.” Up since May, the signs are staked into lawns, taped to trash cans and nailed to tree trunks.

IT started in April with an anonymous mailer sent to houses on Wapello. The fliers pictured Miletti, 53, above the words “Registered Sex Offender Movement Alert.”

“We want to ostracize him,” said William Tell, 62, a retired businessman who lives across the street from Miletti.

Okay, first off, I have a hard time believing that “William Tell” is someone’s real name, but that’s beside the point.

The article, which is decidedly sympathetic to neighborhood residents and hostile to Miletti, made me very, very angry. Not angry at the sex offender who has done his time, but at the ugliness and hostility of his community — a community very close to where I live.

Let me be very, very, clear: from a Christian perspective, sex offenders are “our neighbors”; we are called to love them and to live in community with them. Should a registered sex offender wish to buy a townhome in our condo complex, I would welcome him as I would welcome any other neighbor. If I had small children, I might make certain that they didn’t spend time alone with the fellow. But I would not allow my fears to trump my responsibility to live peacably and amicably with my neighbors. Of course, if my neighbor is actively engaging in criminal behavior, then that’s something else; he belongs in prison or some form of intense, residential treatment. But if, like Mr. Miletti, his crime occurred years ago and he’s paid his dues to society, then I cannot imagine not treating him as I would any other neighbor.

Of course, I don’t have children. I have nieces and nephews whom I adore, however; I work with kids in a volunteer capacity. My concern for their safety is very high. Of course, I want to protect my future children from real and authentic dangers. But I will not allow my ungrounded fears about a man who once violated a child’s trust to override my higher call to love my neighbor. Just because someone becomes a father doesn’t mean he ceases to have vital responsibilities to the larger community of living creatures. If a sex offender came to hurt my kid, I would do everything I could to stop him — but preemptively lashing out at a man who struggled, fell, and has apparently amended his ways is not an acceptable way in which to provide that protection.

I hate the whole idea of making sex offender registries public. Let me be clear that I am not a sex offender, and indeed, most of the crimes that these men have committed appal and disgust me. But I can be disgusted by an action and still love, welcome, and live in community with the man who committed that act.

The sex offender is my neighbor. He is welcome on my street. And should I see any signs going up in my neighborhood, calling for his ouster, I will rip them down in the light of day.

From February 2006

There’s been a lot of discussion in the feminist blogosphere about this February 13 post at Definition: “An Open Letter to All the Liberal, Straight Men.”  As the comments below the post make clear, the author struck a nerve. (As of 2012, the link is defunct.)

I had a “yes, no, and hmmm” response to the open letter. Here’s what I liked: the author asks men to resist derailing feminist discussions by talking about the various ways in which males also suffer in contemporary society:

So, first of all, it doesn’t all revolve around you. If I am discussing sexism or the unique difficulties women face, I can understand and appreciate the frustrations that men also grapple with in our society. Really, the problem isn’t so much men and women as the fact that all powerful institutions want to make everyone feel worthless, so that we will do whatever they tell us to. But, for now, I am talking about women and women’s unique position in the world, and it is not about the big picture. It is about us. About me. Your tangents derail the conversation and shift the focus so that the issues I want to raise are ignored. This is the problem.

This is symptomatic of a greater issue: the fact that men are trained to keep the focus on themselves. It’s not the conscious insecurity of the male ego which causes this to happen, but rather, the result in living in a culture which focuses on men the majority of the time. When attempting to give women equal time, and an equal voice, the fifty-fifty split (or, since this doesn’t exist yet in reality, even the attempt to approach it) seems unbalanced and skewed to the minds of many men. Women trying to have an equal voice seem to be silencing the men, simply because the men are not the ones currently talking about the current topic.

Resist the urge to assert yourself in defense of the male voice. We’ve already heard it, and doubtless we will hear it again. Save it until we’re finished. Do it somewhere else.

That’s right on.  Many well-intentioned “liberal and straight” (and some not-so-liberal or straight) fellas I know do tend to enter a discussion about sexism as if it’s an Olympic competition.  If women are to be awarded a “gold medal” for suffering, some men want to ensure that they at least make it on to the podium.   They change the subject of the discussion to the various hardships that straight white men face, and while perhaps acknowledging that these aren’t as severe as those faced by their sisters, these guys still demand at least a bronze or a silver medal in the “suffering Olympics.”   It’s an understandable, but tedious strategy.

One reason why so many “nice and liberal” men tend to try and derail feminist discussions is that they are eager and anxious to prove that they “aren’t like other guys.”  Too often, young (potential) pro-feminist men seek to establish their bona fides by stressing the various ways in which they happen to be “exceptions to the rule.”   One way these guys think they’ll establish their feminist credibility is by explaining that they too know what it’s like to suffer from sexism and stereotyping.  The goal is not always to derail the feminist discussion, but rather to win approval and acceptance.

But saying “Yeah, I understand, but I’m a victim too” doesn’t help the feminist cause.  Men do need to do the vital work of coping with their own very real issues, but we can’t do that by introducing them into a feminist setting.  What we need to do is create specific spaces — like men’s studies classes — for focusing in on the myths, structures, and social obligations that create the “masculine mystique.”  We need to find healthy ways to express our very real pain and frustration — and we need to express that pain to other men.  Too often, traditional definitions of manhood force men to only open up to women, thus burdening our wives, girlfriends, sisters and daughters with doing our “feeling work” for us.  While we should indeed share our truest selves with the women in our lives, we need to do more of our emotional work with other men — and not make as many demands on the emotional energy of women, energy that might better be spent elsewhere.

An earlier version of this post appeared in November 2009.

In my reprint of a post about young conservative students, I made a crack about Ayn Rand. Since Rand has been the subject of a pair of recent biographies, and has been much discussed on the right as a kind of ideological mother figure of the Tea Party, I think it’s time to say a bit more about her work.

I discovered Ayn Rand at 16. A friend of mine finished “The Fountainhead”, and came to me one morning before class: “This book has changed my life, Hugo, and it will change yours. Read it!” I liked and respected Lisa, and accepted the thick and battered paperback she proffered. I took it home, and showed my mother, a philosophy professor. She took one look at the book, grimaced, and then said “Darling, I won’t say anything. Make up your own mind.”

It wasn’t until I read “American Psycho”, many years later, that I had a comparable experience of near-instant loathing of a text, an author, a prose style, and a worldview. I was a young lefty at 16, struggling through John Rawls and Herbert Marcuse. My favorite novel that year was Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” one of the most polemical works that the great local writer (I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula) wrote. Rand was ideologically and stylistically abhorrent to me at 16, and though it’s been years since I’ve picked up any of her work (I finished “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” through sheer acts of will in my youth), my general feeling of disdain on every imaginable ground remains.

Rand’s objectivist philosophy advocates for a kind of reckless heroic individualism, where what she calls the “second-handers” (those who lack the substance or courage to be great) can be ignored or used by the heroes who can and do anything they like to accomplish their dreams. It’s not just contempt for mediocrity, it’s contempt for mundanity, domesticity, and the lives that most people actually lead. Not to mention that Rand famously justifies rape (Howard and Dominique’s first sexual encounter in the book). It’s an ugly vision of women needing to be fucked hard by a strong and powerful hero in order to find herself.

But I’ve met many young people, more often women than men, who — like my friend Lisa in high school — find great inspiration in Ayn Rand. Generally, there’s a specific type of teen who falls in love with either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. She’s usually very bright, raised to one degree or another with the “pleasing woman discourse” (what I call “the Martha Complex.“) She often finds her classes dull and her teachers pedestrian. She suspects she’s destined for something extraordinary, that she’s somehow different from everyone else — but unlike the immensely talented dancer or athlete or actor, she doesn’t have one specific skill that stands out as a ticket to stardom. She vacillates between feelings of intense superiority — and feelings of equally intense guilt for the way in which she looks down on so many of those around her.

She picks up Rand, and suddenly it all makes sense. She is superior, one of the elect. She isn’t what a far more interesting and talented writer would call a “Muggle”. She has an exalted destiny, just as she had suspected. Rand inspires her; telling her that it’s time to throw off the chains of obligation and guilt which have left her confined and miserable. In an odd way, Rand — who would be exceedingly difficult to classify as a feminist — is often a gateway into feminism for some young women. It’s through reading Rand that not-insignificant percentages of young women begin to think seriously about what they want for themselves rather than what others want for them. Young women who have the false impression that feminism is about collective victimization find temporary inspiration in “The Fountainhead” — and in due course, when they encounter real sexism in the real world, they reluctantly concede that perhaps those nasty old feminists had a point after all. I’ve met a hell of a lot of strong young progressive feminists in their twenties and early thirties who were enchanted by Randian philosophy in their teens.

So yes, I think an infatuation with Ayn Rand is developmentally appropriate for adolescents. She flatters and inspires the bright and the isolated and the uncertain; she’s useful for helping some young people, girls in particular, break the deadly people-pleasing habit. So if reading “Atlas” or “Fountainhead” is what it takes to inspire the lonely, the introverted, and the insecure — then may the God that she rejected bestow blessings upon that poor unhappy soul that was Ayn Rand.

From May 2009

We recently debated the “problem” of men “never feeling hot.” (Note: The subject of my piece in Best Sex Writing 2012 as well.) Commenters of all sexes shared painful stories of feeling unattractive and unwanted. No question, it’s hard to live with the sense that one is physically undesirable, particularly in our beauty-obsessed culture. The psychic toll that sense takes on men and women alike is real and undeniable. But where it gets really ugly (intended word) is when we see flashes of male entitlement, part of what is often called the “Nice Guy” syndrome. That entitlement manifests as the angry, indignant claim certain men make that women “should” see past their physical shortcomings and their social ineptness: Why can’t they see what a nice guy I am? Why are women such superficial bitches? Many women have been on the receiving end of hostile, sometimes whiny tirades such as these. Whatever sympathy might be possible for the unlovely and the awkward vanishes utterly in the face of such astounding entitlement.

I wrote last fall against the tired old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” thesis peddled by an array of social conservatives from Brad Wilcox to Kay Hymowitz. The thesis is that men “need to be needed”, and in the absence of feeling needed (by women) they will behave badly. Therefore, women need to make themselves vulnerable and dependent, forcing men (or giving them the opportunity) to take charge, to play the role of the knight-in-shining-armor, to feel indispensable. To listen to the right-wingers tell it, once men are given the sense that they are indispensable, they will shape up and fly right, illegitimacy and crime will vanish, the rise of the oceans will cease, and all God’s children will say “Amen.” Or something like that. Of course, in order for men to feel indispensable, women will need to surrender, become docile and nurturing rather than independent and ambitious. We’ve heard this hooey a million times before, but like supply-side economics, this belief in the “responsibility for vulnerability” transaction remains a difficult bogeyman to slay. Continue reading →