Tag Archives: Teens

The kids are all right: on awareness, sex-positivity, and political activism

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Academics are famous for their tendency to see the wrong more clearly than they see the right. Trained as we are in graduate school seminars to be critics, encouraged to elevate suspicion to the cardinal virtue, we’re often much more articulate in explaining the problems than in proposing workable solutions. And we often tend to forget to celebrate what’s right and what’s good.

After my flurry of recent posts on sexualization, my friend Elyse wrote me and suggested, tactfully, that while I had made a pretty good case for the negative impact contemporary culture is having on young women, I ought to focus as well on what’s exciting and good. Last Wednesday’s post on webcams and privacy was inspired by a query from a student about what changes I’d witnessed in my years of teaching. And it certainly isn’t the only major change I’ve seen.

So, three bits of good news about college students from my perspective.

1. Now in my eighteenth year of community college teaching, I’m excited by the way in which my students in recent years have embraced the Internet to become much more savvy about feminism and gender justice. In my introductory women’s studies course, I still get plenty of students who have no idea what feminism is or why it matters. It was always so. But each semester, the number of young people who enroll already possessed of a feminist foundation grows. Some already read Jessica Valenti and Courtney Martin years ago, or have been visiting feminist websites — famous and obscure — since ninth grade. When I started teaching, radical notions about women’s equality were confined to college campuses and specialty bookstores; they were largely inaccessible to, say, the daughters of immigrants going to high school in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, thanks to the ‘net, those ideas are widely disseminated, often presented in ways that click with a multi-cultural and economically challenged population of young women. By the time they hit my classroom, many of my newest students already have been given a thorough primer in gender justice. That’s a novel and exciting development, and it bodes well.

2. My students today are much more comfortable talking about sexuality than were students just fifteen years ago. In class discussions as well as in their journals, the young women I’m working with are far more willing to talk about issues like masturbation, birth control, enthusiastic consent, and exploring same-sex attraction than were the students I taught when I first came to PCC. (To be fair, I’m a much better teacher today than I was then, and a much safer presence. But I hear similar things from feminist colleagues who’ve been at this gig as long as I have, so I don’t think this new openness has much to do with my particular personality or teaching style.) For example, as recently as a decade ago, I very rarely had female students argue passionately in defense of pornography. When they did take that stance, they invariably took it on First Amendment grounds; today’s students, many of whom have explored visual erotica since the onset of puberty if not before, tend to take a much more positive view of the liberating potential of cybersexuality.

“Sex-positivity” among young women isn’t just an over-hyped media creation, it’s a real and growing trend in the lives of this particular generation of college students. This is the flip side to the Paris Paradox, the equally real problem of being “sexy” but not “sexual”. This is a generation of young women who’ve been able to buy vibrators online from sites like Babeland, and a generation that’s used the same Internet to get the truth about sex education concealed from them by noxious and stultifying abstinence-only campaigns. (Scarleteen is the indispensable source for detailed and authentically empowering information.) This generation of girls grew up more bombarded than ever with confusing messages about what it means to be a young woman — but they also grew up with more tools to decide the question for themselves than any generation before them. I’m excited for them, and excited for what they’ll do in the world. And I’m very excited to meet their younger siblings.

3. There’s been a huge upswing in political activism. I spent my adolescence as a lonely progressive in the early Reagan Era, surrounded by high school classmates who saw apathy as a virtue. The situation was not much better when I started at PCC, in the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Between 1995 and 2006, I served as an advisor to no fewer than six different feminist-themed clubs. Time and again, I tried to interest my students in gender justice activism. Time and again, a club would get started by a few wonderful young people — and then the club would collapse as soon as those leaders graduated. There was no sustained interest in having a presence on campus dedicated to exploring issues around sexuality, feminism, reproductive rights and so forth. But in 2007, with the help of Feminist Majority, we got another club — the seventh since I’ve been here — up and running. And for three years now, it’s thrived.

The club was active in the 2008 election, and when the inevitable hangover came, I worried that many young people would lose interest in feminist work. Instead, I saw the club grow in 2009, galvanized in particular by the assassination of George Tiller and by the campaign to end the disaster of abstinence-only education. In talking with feminist organizers from groups like Planned Parenthood and Feminist Majority, I discovered that our happy experience at PCC was being replicated across the country. We’ve seen a renaissance of feminist political activism on college campuses, a rebirth heavily assisted by social networking. (I have no idea how we’d put a Feminist Club meeting together on this campus without Facebook.) The confluence of these new social networking technologies with a more anxious and politicized era has given birth to a new generation of young women activists. The issues are largely the same as when I started teaching: economic justice, body image, violence prevention, reproductive freedom, the right to pleasure. But the percentage of students involved in the struggle has risen exponentially, and the tools they use to connect to fellow activists are astonishingly effective. There is much reason to hope, and much reason to rejoice.

No refuge: how webcams and cell phones ratchet up the pressure to be perfect

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In my women’s studies class yesterday, one young woman asked me about the changes I’d seen in my students over my years of teaching. I thought for a moment about how much the world has – and hasn’t — changed since I first came to lecture at Pasadena City College in 1993, and thought of all the possible answers I could quickly give. And then it occurred to me that one of the most troubling of recent developments about which I hadn’t yet spoken or written was the loss of safe space created by the advent of webcams and cell-phones.

Count me among those adults who think that the frenzied anxiety about “sexting” is both prurient and overblown. Frankly, I’m more worried about the motives of school principals who go through students’ cell phone photos than I am about the photos themselves. And as someone who rejects the “one mistake will ruin your life” warning that is foisted onto kids (girls in particular), I suspect that most teens whose naked photos make their way into the public domain will survive the embarrassment just fine. We’re only three decades away, at most, from a presidential candidate being confronted with images and video from her impulsive adolescence — and I strongly suspect the reaction will be a collective yawn. So my problem with webcams and cell phone pictures has very little to do with sex.

My problem is that for countless young people — again, particularly for girls — their “private spaces” are no longer as private as they once were. Just a decade ago, a girl’s bedroom or bathroom were hers alone (even if shared, say, with a sibling.) In the looks-obsessed culture of American teenagers, the bedroom was a refuge. A young woman who had been scrupulous about her appearance all day could return to her bedroom at night, change into what was comfortable, and have at least a little waking time where her looks didn’t matter. Since the 1950s (if not before) a high percentage of teen girls have had telephones in their bedroom, but until the past decade, those phones didn’t transmit visual images. You didn’t have to get dressed up to talk. That’s all changed.

A 2009 survey suggested that an astonishing 71% of teens used webcams in their bedrooms. In commenting on the study, the primary media concern was with the potential for sexually explicit video chat, as boys cajoled girls into stripping for the camera. No doubt the pressure to sexualize webcam conversation is real, and no doubt some young people end up doing what they regret — only to find that the images or video have gone viral. (By the same token, “webcam sex” — like phone sex before it — has a lot of potential good to it as well, allowing for the safe expression of fantasy and for connection in long distance relationships. I dealt with that topic here.) But the real problem has nothing to do with sex. The real problem is that the webcam has stripped the bedroom and the bathroom from their role as safe refuge from the beauty-obsessed culture. The real problem is that now, even with the door shut, a young woman’s looks still matter.

The self-portrait in the bathroom mirror is one of the iconic images of the 2000s. First on Myspace, and then on Facebook, these photos were — and to a great extent still are — de rigueur for young millenials. Some of the photos are sexy, some are silly, but because these photos are taken by desperately image-conscious teenagers, all are posed. In 2007, I asked the kids in my high school youth group about these self-portraits, asking how many snaps they took on average until they found the right one to upload as a profile pic. Most reported taken dozens if not more, carefully striving for that right balance of attractiveness and teenage insouciance. It’s not new that kids want to be seen as cool. It’s not new that kids study themselves in the bathroom mirror. It is new that they are expected to share those poses with everyone else. It is new that so many of us expect to see and share the contents of these bedrooms and bathrooms. It is new that these most private of spaces are now at least partly public.

I write a lot about the crushing pressure to be perfect which afflicts so many teen girls. (And I always recommend Courtney Martin’s superb Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.) There’s no question that technology has exacerbated that pressure. The ubiquity of cell phones has meant, for example, that young women are expected to be constantly available to their boyfriends — and to each other. Friendship maintenance, so crucial to so many young women, may require dozens of texts a day, each of which “needs” to be replied to promptly. For those who are raised to be people pleasers, technology simply means that the people one needs to please can now make demands more incessantly than ever before. Being at school, being in the car, being in one’s room is not an excuse any longer for being unavailable.

And being in that bedroom or bathroom is no longer a respite from the pressure to be pretty, to be sexy, to perform.

Homosociality and homophobia: why the distorted rules of “manhood” are the real problem

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As sociologists and others have noted for years, suicides, particularly among the young, seem to happen in clusters. In the last few weeks in North America, more than half-a-dozen gay or lesbian youngsters have taken their own lives in response to bullying or harassment. On this National Coming Out Day, I’d like to point towards a site — and a movement — that has gone viral in recent days, the It Gets Better project hosted at Youtube. It Gets Better features videos from celebrities and ordinary folks alike; the messages are funny, moving, and consistent in their reassurance that the pain and heartache and loneliness that GLBTQ teens suffer will not last forever. My favorite is BD Wong’s deeply moving contribution.

As it is National Coming Out Day, it’s important to point outthe role that homosociality plays in the harassment of gays and lesbians. Homosociality is a primarily male phenomenon, particularly common among young American guys. Simply put, it’s the idea that the approval of male peers (and male authority figures) is the driving factor in men’s lives. Well documented by sociologists, the theory of homosociality suggests that winning approval from other men is more important to young men than anything else, including validation from women.

A few years ago, C.J. Pascoe wrote a marvelous study that I reviewed here on the blog: Dude, You’re a Fag. A study of compulsory heterosexuality and gender norms in a California high school, it’s the best work I’ve ever seen on the role public displays of homophobia play in shoring up fragile masculinity. From that post:

Pascoe writes of what she calls the fag discourse. The discourse manifests itself in the almost incorrigible way in which young men label each other “fags” while seeking to avoid having that label applied to them. According to this discourse, fear of being called out publicly as a “fag” is the primary driving force behind what Pascoe cleverly calls the display of “compulsive heterosexulity.” Playing on Adrienne Rich’s classic notion that contemporary society functions with a discourse of compulsory heterosexuality, Pascoe notes that among young men desperate to establish their masculine bona fides with their peers, what we see in American high schools amounts to compulsive, almost frantic efforts by young men to prove their manhood.

Anyone who has worked with adolescent boys knows how much anxiety many of them feel about their own masculinity. It’s not news to say that our sons, like their fathers before them, often have to endure or participate in physical or at least verbal violence that we tragically and falsely believe is necessary to transition into manhood. It’s not news that boys torment each other with the “fag” epithet. And it’s not news that the real stigma in being labelled a “fag” doesn’t lie in the association with homosexuality, but with being seen as feminine. Continue reading →

Relationships, hook-ups, and GPAs: getting past the headlines

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The headlines out of the American Sociological Association’s Atlanta meeting this past week have been catchy: Love makes teen sex less academically harmful, study says; Teen sex not always bad for school performance; Sex in romantic relationships is harmless. There’s a nice summary of the conflict between social scientists and journalists in this Oliver Wang piece in the Atlantic.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before reading this very important discussion from Heather Corinna at Scarleteen. I might have written a very different piece had I read it first! Please do read Heather’s excellent analysis, based on having read the actual study quite carefully.

What the study showed, of course, is that encouraging teens to delay sexual activity in order to boost academic performance isn’t necessarily the most helpful strategy adults can take. The study did indeed find that sex within relationships did not have a deleterious effect on adolescent grades, but casual sex sometimes did. From the AP summary:

Teens in serious relationships did not differ from their abstinent counterparts in terms of their grade-point average, how attached they are to school or college expectations. They were also not more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent. (But) compared with virgins, teens who have casual sex had lower GPAs, cared less about school and experienced more problems in school. For example, female teens who have flings had GPAs that were 0.16 points lower than abstinent teens. Male teens who have casual sex had GPAs that were 0.30 points lower than those who do not have sex. Teens who “hook up” also were at greater risk of being suspended or expelled and had lower odds of expecting to go to college.

First off, in my experience (a couple of decades worth of work with high school and college students), students who are high-achieving tend to be the ones most likely to be dishonest (or at least, less than entirely forthcoming) about their sexual behavior. Teens are notoriously sensitive to reputation and image. One negative stigma that I’ve often seen teens associate with casual sex is that kids who do engage in sexual activity outside committed relationships lack ambition or seriousness. Remember the tremendous power of the “one mistake can ruin your life” narrative, particularly in the lives of adolescent girls. As a result, teens tend to associate casual sex with recklessness and the absence of motivation. Teens, especially young women, who are sexually active outside of committed relationships and are also intellectually serious and highly motivated tend to feel tremendous pressure (often self-imposed) to be quiet about that aspect of their lives. In the hyper-competitive world in which many bright adolescents live these days, someone who has casual sex isn’t necessarily immoral, but foolish. And for a certain kind of highly ambitious young woman who has been raised to be risk-averse, being called “reckless” or “frivolous” or “unthinking” has almost the same power to wound as “slut.” In other words, who is willing to admit to casual sex may well be tied not only to class and cultural background, but to important perceptions about one’s seriousness. I suspect some hefty underreporting. Continue reading →

16 is not 16 is not 16: of adolescence, different rates of maturation, and Abby Sunderland

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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.

We have no laws regarding the minimum age to operate sailboats on the high seas. (They are unlikely to come, as they would require an international convention that would end up banning teens from working in the fishing industry.) Abby’s parents broke no laws, but in the minds of many, they broke an unwritten rule about the diligence parents ought to show in protecting their children from harm. As a youth leader and a father, I’m emotionally conflicted about that charge. On the one hand, I can’t imagine being comfortable sending my own child off around the world on a sailboat by herself. But if I’m honest, I know full well that protectiveness won’t vanish when my Heloise turns 18; I’d worry just as much if she were 18 as if she were a few months younger. Lines of demarcation don’t have much effect on the heart. Continue reading →

We are always on the record: how the most interesting man in the world gets it very, very wrong

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Driving to school on Monday morning, I passed a billboard on Robertson Boulevard. Part of the immensely tiresome “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer, the slogan on this particular sign read “The Bulk of Your Life Should Be Off the Record.”

I’ve loathed some of the Dos Equis slogans. The worst one so far features an image of the hirsute interesting man and the words “He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.” My favorite: “At museums he’s allowed to touch the art.” Clearly designed to appeal to young men (though one suspects the boys most easily amused by this sophomoric humor are under legal drinking age in the USA), the Dos Equis campaign is typical of much modern advertising: it plays on young men’s longing for reliable, hyper-masculine father figures. The Most Interesting Man in the World dispenses something even more valuable than tips for how to get rich or get laid: he offers certainty about what it means to be a man. He is notable for a complete absence of self-doubt. Given that so many young men are crippled by the absence of mentors and a nearly paralyzing degree of uncertainty about their lives and their roles, the appeal of this sort of advertising is obvious.

But while most of the advice in the Dos Equis campaign is silly and puerile rather than truly misogynist, the suggestion that the bulk of one’s life should be off the record infuriated me.

At the very heart of what it means to be an adult — for those of you who like to gender everything, a man rather than a boy, a woman rather than a girl — is the commitment to matching one’s language and one’s life. To be a grown-up means to live with integrity; integrity literally means “wholeness” or “congruence.” Put another way, an adult lives his or her life as if they are always on the record, with no disconnect between public pronouncements and private practices.

This commitment to congruence doesn’t mean one speaks to toddlers the way one speaks to one’s lovers. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t save some behaviors for behind closed doors. To put it another way, the rest of the world doesn’t get to know what my wife and I do in the bedroom. The point is, if they were to find out or stumble in, they would see that how we connect intimately and privately is radically compatible with the public aspects of our lives.

The world needs grown-ups. And grown-ups know the shabbiness and the heartbreak of a life lived in compartments. They know that young people — and all of us, really — need role models whose words and actions match. And whether in the public eye or not, they’re always on the record.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from my comments as a response to those who think I’m taking this much too seriously:

As we all know, irony gets lost in translation (especially with American adolescents, who tend — despite their affected sophistication — to live in an irony-free zone). Think about the old Miller Light “Man Law” ads; the boys I knew in youth group adored them, quoted them, and, despite their awareness that the commercials were tongue-in-cheek,tended to take them very seriously.

All advertising is didactic. It teaches something, even as it flatters the audience into believing that they are in on the joke. That’s the thing about ads like this: they aren’t ironic. They appear to be; Dos Equis may want an urban educated audience to think “Hah, look at how we’re playing around with the problem of contemporary masculinity in a hyperbolic way”, but they know damn well that a substantial percentage of folks out there aren’t going to be able to do that kind of rapid meta-analysis. Particularly teens, who are always the target of alcohol ads, as they are the ones whose brand loyalties have yet to be firmly established.

And though I was never much of a beer drinker in my day, I drank a lot of Dos Equis in college. It was, for a long time, my favorite beer.

Your body is never the problem: a letter to a sixteen year-old on clothing, style, and creepy old men

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Rachel, who blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, poses this question from her 16 year-old self: how do I stop creepy old men from hitting on me? Rachel writes of a recent encounter with her favorite advice columnist, Melissa Hoyer:

Me: “OMG, I loved you column! When I was 16, I was going to write in to asking for advice. I wanted to know how I could dress differently to stop attracting creepy old men and start attracting guys my own age instead.”

Melissa Hoyer: “Er, I don’t think I would have been able to help you with that one.”

Rachel explains:

At the time, I had come to the conclusion that the reason I was attracting more attention from men who were 18 or 20+, right through to 40 or so, than guys my own age (the ones I was actually interested in) was because I dressed in manner that was too “adult”. I wanted to write to Hoyer because I was searching for a way to reconcile my desire to dress in clothes that I felt an aesthetic affinity with, with my desire not be designated an “adult” – an identity I was far from ready to take on at 16 – or a piece of meat because of it.

It was a question that was about far more than fashion, though – and I suspect that’s the reason Hoyer told me she wouldn’t have been able to answer it (although I like to think she would have been touched had I ever sent it off). At its heart, it was a question from a girl/young woman trying to come to terms with and navigate her own objectification.

As a feminist and a father, a professor and a former youth leader with years of experience working with teens, I thought I’d take a shot at answering Rachel’s query.

If I were writing to a 16 year-old named Rachel, I’d say:

Dear Rachel,

I wish that I could offer you specific fashion tips that would guarantee that creepy older guys wouldn’t hit on you. For that matter, I wish I could share with you how to dress in a manner that would assure that your peers wouldn’t frequently judge you, either to your face or behind your back. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to ensure those things — because the sad truth is that no matter how you dress, no matter what you wear, you will be perceived by some men as a target for their unwanted advances.

You may have heard people say things like “girls who wear short skirts are asking for ‘it’”. By “it” they may mean anything from rape to crude comments and penetrating stares. But as you may already have noticed, girls aren’t immune from harassment when they’re wearing simple or “modest” garb either. I’ve had plenty of students who’ve been accosted while wearing sweatpants or long dresses. I’ve had Muslim students who chose to wear head coverings, and they’ve been harassed both religiously and sexually. The bottom line is that there’s nothing you can wear that will guarantee respect from others. And the reason is that the root of this problem isn’t skin or clothing, it’s our cultural contempt for women and girls.

Have you noticed the way this works yet? If a girl is thin, she’s accused of being “anorexic”; if her weight is higher than the cruelly restrictive ideal, she’s “fat” and “doesn’t take care of herself” or “has no self-control.” If she wears cute, trendy clothes she “only wants attention” and if she wears sweats and jeans, she “doesn’t make an effort.” If she’s perceived as sexually attractive, and — especially — if she shows her own sexual side, she’s likely to be called a “slut.” If her sexuality and her body are concealed, she’s a “prude.” As you’ve probably figured out, the cards are stacked against you. You cannot win, at least not if you define winning as dressing and behaving in a way likely to win approval (or at least decent respect) from everyone.

The advice I’m going to give may sound clichéd, but it’s important nonetheless: you should dress in a style that makes you comfortable. Continue reading →

“I don’t want your amends”: of consensual relationships, happy memories, collective harm and Montblanc pens

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I wrote last Thursday about professor-student relationships, a topic I’ve turned to quite a few times. I had been inspired by this post at Alas and the subsequent comments.

As I often do, I posted a link to my own post on my Facebook page. A very small discussion then broke out on FB, and one of my friends, Carlotta, wrote about her own very positive memory of a sexual relationship with an older professor of hers:

Help me out with the unethical part though… honestly, for me my relationship provided me with an oasis of sexual comfort amid a desert of sterile academia. I remember mine with affection and (sincere) gratitude.

I’ve heard some stories like Carlotta’s. Heck, I had one in my own past. One of the last students with whom I had a sexual relationship, back in 1997-98, was a remarkable young woman, Marie. Marie and I were lovers for a brief period both while she was my student and immediately afterwards. She later transferred back east as a women’s studies major, a major she selected after taking my History 25B course the semester our affair began.

Not long after our relationship ended, I got a birthday card from — of all people — Marie’s mother. The note was attached to a box, and in the box was a fine MontBlanc fountain pen. Marie’s mother, who knew about our recently-concluded affair, wrote that she was grateful for my influence in her daughter’s life, and that as far as she could see, her daughter had changed for the better as a result. Though she admitted that she had had some concerns about her daughter’s involvement with a professor, Marie’s mom said that she could see that nothing but good had come as a consequence. She wanted me to have the pen as a token of appreciation. I still have it. (I need new ink cartridges for it.)

A few years later, sober and filled with repentance for my earlier behavior, I spoke to Marie and attempted to make amends to her for having “abused my power” with her. Marie was exasperated. “Bullshit, Hugo”, she said. “I was a legal adult too, and I’m not sorry that it happened. I had happy memories of it, and it pisses me off that now that you’re a ‘reformed man’, you’re trying to make it sound like it was unhealthy. It wasn’t. I liked what we did, I’m not sorry.” We’ve only touched base a few times since that conversation eight or nine years ago. What I do know is that Marie now lives in New York where she’s finishing a doctoral dissertation, and that now — well into her thirties — she remains adamant that she has nothing but fond memories of her relationship with me. I’m certainly not going to try and continue to convince her she shouldn’t. Continue reading →

“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire

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One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. Continue reading →

“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence

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I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named May, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading →