Five years

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 02, 2010
in Family and Marriage
. 1 Comment

A personal post.

This Saturday, my wife and I will mark our fifth wedding anniversary.

As I’ve written at other times, I do as much as I can on this blog to honor my wife’s privacy. I am, at least in a small way, a public person. I write frequently about myself, not because I am so terribly interesting but because my experiences have played a vital role in shaping my world view. I have also been blessed to experience transformation and redemption; I am in an ongoing conversion process that continues to bring surprise.

My academic interests revolve around faith and feminism, God and sex; the personal and the ideological and the vocational are all intertwined in my work. That makes it more obvious that I would write about the personal — but that doesn’t make me an easy person to whom to be married. Though Eira herself only checks in on my blog on occasion, our friends and her family are among my regular readers. She fields plenty of curious questions, though fewer than she did when I first started blogging.

This fourth and final marriage has now lasted nearly as long as my first three put together. The temptation to draw comparison between this relationship and those that came before recedes steadily; my wife and I are in uncharted territory not just chronologically, but emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. We have had our storms and our stresses, including all the familiar trials that come with parenting. But we’ve navigated through those tempests, motivated as we each are by deep love and a relentless commitment to building something extraordinary.

If you know my wife, you know she’s a force of nature. Eira is tall and strong, a former soccer star and kickboxer, a jock and a businesswoman. She does confrontation better than anyone I’ve ever known; I’ve watched her intimidate prima donna celebrities and their agents into stunned silence during negotiations. One of my many nicknames for my beautiful partner is “Herschel”. It’s for Herschel Walker the former Georgia Bulldog and NFL running back. I remember that when he won the Heisman trophy in 1982, Walker was asked what he wanted to do after football. “I want to join the FBI”, he said. When asked why, Herschel replied “Because in the FBI, you get to go out and meet people — whether they like it or not.” That seems to capture my wife’s unyielding but indisputably charming gregariousness.

Eira is also one of the kindest and gentlest people I’ve ever met, and of course, those qualities shine most (though not only) with our daughter. There are few joys comparable, I think, to watching the person you love most in the world nurture the child you made together. As is common wisdom, becoming a parent changes a relationship dramatically. Heloise’s arrival in our lives 19 months ago turned everything predictably upside down, but it made us a stronger, better team. We’re actually accomplishing more together than we were before the baby came; parenthood has forced us to be ever better stewards of our own and each other’s time.

Intimacy changes. Last night, we both had loads of work to do when we got home. I got Heloise fed and ready for bed, and then Eira put her to sleep (a fairly lengthy process). She had late night conference calls with colleagues abroad; I had writing to do. Before disappearing into separate rooms, each of us clutching a baby monitor, we sat for a moment on the couch. We checked in, held hands, shared our days. Then we leaned in, touching foreheads, recharging together, resting in the certainty of everything we are and everything we’ve built. And with a whispered “see you tomorrow”, we went off to our duties and to our five hours of sleep.

Not everyone’s ideal of marriage is the same (and many, of course, don’t have a marriage ideal, nor do they need one). We have the requisite love and desire. But more importantly, what Eira and I have after five years as spouses and eight years as a couple is a sustained vision for transforming the world around us. For us, marriage is a kind of spiritual docking station to which we each return after running down our batteries in our many wonderful, interesting, occasionally tedious and often exhausting tasks. We are shoulder to shoulder and oar to oar more than eye to eye — but as it turns out, shoulder to shoulder seems to be the best way for us to be heart to heart.

I have been blessed by second, third, fourth, and ninety-seventh chances. I’m blessed by the gift of being able to learn the lessons of a troubled past without being incapacitated by the memory of pain. What was is not the best predictor of what will be, despite the conventional wisdom. I have never been happier or more confident, never felt more certain of what it is I am called to do in the world. My favorite poem these past few years has been Justice’s “Men at Forty”. These final lines are not just about me, but about Eira as well — she too feels what the poet describes here:

Something is filling them, something

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

We are being filled. Whatever image you prefer, we are climbing the mountain together, rowing across the sea together, pushing, as Lewis so famously said, “further up and further in”. Together, with our breathtaking daughter at our side or in our arms, we’re crossing over, ascending, answering the call we both hear.

My wife, my partner, my best friend, my love,my “Herschel”, my Eira. Thank you for your faith, your passion, your tenderness, your relentless, your stern conviction. Thank you for your forgiveness and your humor and your sweat and your fire.

Thank you for pledging your life to this “lightwork” five years ago. Happy anniversary.

Thursday Short Poem: “For the Sickbed of…”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 02, 2010
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

The great Christopher Hitchens is ill with cancer, as he himself reports so elegantly in the current Vanity Fair. To have the English speaking world’s most famous and talented advocate for atheism fall ill has presented a dilemma for believers of all sorts, who debate the appropriateness of praying for him — or, perhaps more importantly, of talking about and suborning prayers for him.

Roz Kaveney, in the August 19 Guardian, offers this helpful, touching take.

For the sickbed of Christopher Hitchens

Boswell went to Hume’s deathbed; let me see,
he smugly thought, if godless men can die
as well as Christians. Heaven is a lie,
Hume told him, confidently, peacefully.

“Some drunk, some foetus – what would be the worth
to them of life eternal? I care not,
for any state worse than the life I’ve got
that ends, is done with calmly.” And his mirth

at Boswell’s consternation, not unkind,
is how we hope to face our own last ends,
how hope to face the well-intentioned friends
who pray for us. And yet we are not blind.

It’s love that prays, and so we show respect
but to our friend alone, not to their sect.

Eros and its strange enemies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 01, 2010
in Feminism, Feminist theory and Politics
. 22 Comments

Monday’s post and yesterday’s post both have had excellent comment threads, for which I’m very grateful. Both posts were written at least partly in response to the work of Factcheckme (FCM), as well as to the ideas of Andrea Dworkin.

FCM and Dworkin belong broadly to the tradition of radical feminism, and FCM’s community belongs to what is sometimes called women’s nationalism. Radical feminists and liberal feminists famously disagree about many things, and that disagreement tends to be most pointed around issues of sexuality and individual agency. Liberal feminism (the tradition to which I belong) shares common cause with radical feminism on a number of issues, but often breaks with the radical tendency on a host of issues ranging from pornography to transgender identity to the role of men in the feminist movement. Obviously, “liberals” and “radicals” aren’t monolithic; the terms are used differently in different instances, and many feminists feel understandably uncomfortable with being pigeon-holed into one particular tradition. These are useful categories, but need to be employed with caution.

Going back to the early 1980s, liberal feminists have pointed out that many of their radical sisters sometimes seem disturbingly close to the religious right in terms of their views on sexuality. The birth of that criticism may have come in 1981, when Reagan was newly president and the Moral Majority was in its ascendancy. The late Ellen Willis wrote a very influential review of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women in which she made the case that social conservatives and radical feminists were becoming dangerous bedmates:

…in certain respects the arguments of the two groups are uncomfortably similar. If anti-porn feminists see pornography as a brutal exercise of predatory male sexuality, a form of violence against women (and an incitement to such violence), the right also associates pornography with violence and with rampant male lust broken loose from the saving constraints of God and Family. Nor have conservatives hesitated to borrow feminist rhetoric about the exploitation of women’s bodies.

This peculiar confluence raises the question of whether the current feminist preoccupation with pornography is really an attempt to extend the movement’s critique of sexism - or whether, on the contrary, it is evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.

Since at least 1981, that same argument has raged on between the heirs of Willis and Dworkin, and those of us in the liberal tradition have made the same point about the strange similarity between the far right and the radical feminist left. Even arch-conservative Maggie Gallagher (who has done more to fight to ensure a limited and narrow marriage franchise than anyone in America) wrote of her overlap with Dworkin in this touching tribute penned after the latter’s death in 2005:

I received a gift from Andrea, the kind of gift which, intellectually speaking, you can receive only from someone with whom you profoundly disagree. From the opposite ends of the political spectrum, we had each glimpsed a piece of the same truth. Against the backdrop of a pornographic Playboy culture that tried to teach us that sex is just a trivial appetite for pleasure, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that “sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal.”

I was not alone! Andrea saw it, too. As I wrote in “Enemies of Eros”: “In sex, persons become male and female, archetypically, exaggeratedly, painfully so. And to us, corseted in modern sexual views, femininity appears incompatible with the personhood of women. … What Dworkin observes is essentially true. Sex is not an act which takes place merely between bodies. Sex is an act which defines, alters, imposes on the personhood of those who engage in it. We wander through the ordinary course of days as persons, desexed, androgynous, and it is in the sexual act in which we receive reassurance that we are not persons, after all, but men and women.”

And as I later learned, to a lesser degree, Andrea Dworkin received the same gift from me. Standing in the local bookstore in Park Slope in Brooklyn (where we both then lived), she thumbed through my first book. “At last, someone who understands my writing!” she shrieked excitedly.

Then she, the infamous feminist, invited me, the unknown young conservative, to tea. I found her soft-spoken, pale, intellectual, anxious, motherly.

Motherly, perhaps, in more ways than one.

Gallagher suggests that she and Dworkin shared a revulsion at the “Playboy culture” that trivializes sexuality. The problem is, of course, is that both Gallagher and Dworkin assumed that a feminism that was sex-positive, that did see sexual liberation as genuinely freeing for women as well as men, wasn’t really distinguishable from the Hugh Hefner philosophy. Dworkin and Gallagher both assumed that a pleasure-centered ethos ultimately meant pleasure for men and misery for women. Both assumed that sex-positive feminists (what FCM calls “fun fems”) are ignorant, deluded, and naive. They both deny women’s agency. They aren’t alone; commenter MsCitrus, who blogs in the radical feminist tradition, wrote yesterday in the thread: “free will,” aka agency, is a load of western individualistic special-snowflake crap. (She’s challenged on that in comments by Lynn and Glendenb.)

In the end, I am much more optimistic than the Gallaghers and the Dworkins about the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from their acculturation, their programming, their biology itself. I am optimistic (an optimism rooted in experience as much as ideology) about men’s potential to transform, to overcome the “myth of male weakness”; I am equally optimistic about women’s capacity to unlearn the misogynistic toxicity that at times seems to be in the very air we breathe. This doesn’t mean I’m some sort of Ayn Rand disciple who imagines that individuals must do all this work on their own. We do this work in community, with support, with reflection and with a mix of resolve and doubt. But do it we do, and change we do. And we reclaim our sexualities, and we reclaim our relationships, and we remake our world.

Intercourse, suffering, pleasure, and feminism: more on “envelop” v. “penetrate”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2010
in Body, Favorite Posts 2010, Feminism, Feminist theory, Global Feminism, Sexuality and Teaching
. 95 Comments

I’ve gotten a few emails from readers in the past few days asking me to respond to something else Factcheckme (FCM) discusses on her blog. (See my post immediately below this one for an explanation of the disagreement she and I are having about the role of men in the feminist movement.) Though I don’t think FCM and I could have much of a conversation (a civil exchange requires a mutual recognition of good faith and legitimacy, and she’s made it clear she doesn’t think I possess either), her views are not unique to her and deserve a response.

One of FCM’s tabs is her Intercourse series, a lengthy set of posts exploring her reactions to Andrea Dworkin’s famous book by the same name. As even a casual reader of her blog will realize, FCM takes Dworkin quite literally in her insistence that heterosexual intercourse (penis-in-vagina sex, or PIV) is abusive to women. Women should generally resist PIV, FCM argues; any man who dares claim the label feminist ally for himself must renounce PIV if he wishes to be taken seriously. Refusing intercourse is the proof of one’s seriousness and credibility.

There’s a lot of debate among Dworkin scholars as to whether her work was meant to be taken literally in all instances, or whether she was often engaged in a complex and dazzling rhetorical performance designed to elicit shock and reflection. (I tend to hold the latter view, and I suspect that FCM leans towards the former.) I certainly think that feminists ought to challenge people’s conventional views about heterosexual intercourse. In my women’s history class, for example, I point out that until relatively recently, one of the leading causes of death for women was complications related to childbirth. (In some places at some times, pregnancy and childbirth have been the leading cause of female death.) The overwhelming majority of pregnancies are the consequence of heterosexual intercourse; therefore, it is logical to conclude that heterosexual intercourse has led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of women over human history, as well as to unimaginable pain and discomfort to those who did not die but were merely injured by everything from miscarriages to fistulas to prolapsed uteruses.

Though maternal death is far rarer today in the industrialized West (though troublingly higher here in the States than in Europe), it is still a very real danger in less developed parts of the world. But pregnancy is not the only consequence of PIV that can lead to death. In Africa the AIDS epidemic is primarily carried on through heterosexual intercourse; the vast majority of women who die of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa contracted the virus by having PIV. When fundamentalists speak of AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexuals, it’s worth replying that God has punished far more women with death for having PIV with their husbands than he has male homosexuals for having anal sex. And God is said to be a fan of PIV in marriage. Feminists do well to point these things out, and I do so in every class I teach.

(Parenthetically, heterosexual intercourse put me in the emergency room once, as I wrote in this post. There’s no comparison, of course, between the physical danger of PIV for women and for men. But PIV can bring everything from frenular tearing to broken hearts to males as well; to suggest otherwise is to be blind to the reality of male vulnerability. And vulnerability isn’t a zero-sum game.)

It’s also important to note that women’s legal right to resist intercourse with their husbands is very recent, and by no means universally accepted. The first successful prosecutions for marital rape in this country only took place in my lifetime; many traditionalists in many places still find the notion of marital rape itself to be an oxymoron. Empowering women legally and socially and psychologically to say “no” to their partners (including their husbands) is an essential part of the global feminist project.

But of course, there is another side to all of this discussion. As Dworkin’s critics have long pointed out, much of her objection to PIV is rooted less in physiological reality than in the language we use to describe it. I wrote about this last fall, describing an exercise familiar to all my women’s studies’ students. An excerpt follows.

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. Continue reading ‘Intercourse, suffering, pleasure, and feminism: more on “envelop” v. “penetrate”’

You took a job away from a woman: a preliminary response to “factcheckme”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 30, 2010
in Feminist Pedagogy
. 53 Comments

Eight days ago, I wrote a post about what I saw as one right way for men to work in feminist communities. In that post,I quoted from this piece by Amelia at Feministe, and I responded in particular to this comment by Factcheckme.

Factcheckme wrote a response to my response to her: On Credibility. By her own description a radical feminist (a term she uses to distinguish herself from what she calls “fun fems”), FCM rejects the case I made for responsible male participation in feminist groups. Her post is short, and she and her commenters develop the thesis at greater length in the thread that follows below it.

There’s a lot to unpack about Factcheckme’s views. She’s particularly concerned (some might say obsessed) with the problem of heterosexual intercourse (which she, like so many these days, abbreviates PIV for penis-in-vagina.) She cites Dworkin’s Intercourse a lot, though FCM’s conclusions seem more radical than the late great writer and theorist. (I’d like to address the PIV intercourse issue in another post.) What I wanted to deal with here is this comment she makes in the thread:

it bothers me very much that so-called “feminist men” are teaching womens studies. there is something so fundamentally wrong with that, its creepy, disgusting, its a violation and they fucking well know it. it also takes work away from women, who are going to be infinitely more qualified to teach it. and thats fucking inexcusable, it really is.

That’s a criticism I’ve heard many times over the years, and it’s a serious one that deserves a serious response. There are three parts to FCM’s critique of men teaching women’s studies, and it may be helpful to answer them in turn:

1. It’s a violation of feminist principles
2. It takes work away from women
3. Women are infinitely more qualified to teach women’s studies than are men

The answer to the first charge is, obviously, that it all depends on whose feminism we’re talking about. Feminism is a patchwork quilt, not a seamless garment; we speak rightly of feminisms. As FCM makes clear, the gulf between radical feminism and what she calls “fun fems” (what others might call classically liberal feminists) is a vast one; the gulf is equally vast at times between both groups and the womanist tradition with which so many non-white activists identify. For some feminists, encouraging men to live out feminist principles (not just in lip service, but in action) is an essential part of transforming society along egalitarian lines.

I’ve written before that the number of men in my women’s studies classes continues to rise. The number of men who claim the name of feminist (or pro-feminist, or feminist ally) has gone up as well. I was very isolated when I started taking women’s studies courses a quarter century ago; the young men in my courses today are not nearly so alone. This isn’t just because I’m a male professor; my female colleagues who teach their own sections of the same courses report a similar rise in male interest over the past decade or so. FCM will have her own conclusions as to why this rise is occurring (she might say that academic feminism has lost its bite, and “sold out”); my feeling is that we’re raising a generation of young people more committed than ever to the principle that biology is not identity. To at least one large bloc of feminists, the success of the movement lies in the adoption of uncompromising egalitarian principles by the broadest possible section of society. That “big tent” feminism can mean, of course, the cynical manipulation of feminist rhetoric by the decidedly anti-feminist likes of Sarah Palin. But it can also mean an increasing acceptance of feminist ideals. And one unimportant sign among many more significant ones of the success of those ideals is the willingness to hire men to teach women’s studies courses. Continue reading ‘You took a job away from a woman: a preliminary response to “factcheckme”’

Beginning again: updated

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 30, 2010
in Pasadena City College
. 4 Comments

The fall semester begins today at Pasadena City College. If you look back through my archives, you’ll see that I usually have a “first day of school” post up on the last Monday in August. This year shall be no exception.

It’s a cooler-than-seasonably normal day here in the San Gabriel Valley; though summer has three weeks left to run, autumn is in the air. It’s a remarkable change from the first day of classes last year, when we were in (literally) blazing heat as the smoke from the Station Fire saturated our campus. Last year, it looked like hell outside — today, things look genuinely lovely. But fine weather belies the general mood of gloom that is pervasive, perhaps more among faculty and staff than among students. California still doesn’t have a budget, our class offerings are woefully inadequate, and the reality is that a great many students who want courses will be unable to get them. If that has been the case before, it is all the more so now.

My mother tells me that my formal education began forty-one autumns ago, in September 1969. I was two when I first went to Santa Barbara’s long-vanished Humpty Dumpty Nursery School. Since that year of Woodstock and moon landings and the amazing Mets, I’ve been in school every fall without fail. I went from nursery school to graduate school without a break, and began teaching full-time at the community college while still finishing Ph.D. work at UCLA. I’m in my fifth decade in the educational system, which astounds me. And I’m beginning my eighteenth year as a professor at PCC; soon, my youngest students will have been born after I started teaching here.

In August 2004, I wrote about still having butterflies in my stomach the first time I met a class. Six years later, things remain very much the same in my innards. I wrote then of the reasons for my nervousness:

The obvious question is this one: why, after all this time, do I still get so nervous about the first day of school? It’s not stagefright — public speaking has never been a fear of mine. It’s not new material, at least not this year — all four courses I am teaching this fall are courses I have taught in the past. It’s not fear that my students won’t like me — though I do struggle with vanity, it’s not at the root of my jumpiness this morning. All three of these might be small factors at different times, but the core reason for this almost-pleasant state of anxiety is more basic: I still believe that I have the best job in the whole dang world, and I can’t believe they pay me to do it.

Even after all these years of full-time teaching (the last six with tenure), I still expect someone to show up, and with an apologetic and yet officious tone, tell me “We’re sorry, Hugo, we made a mistake hiring you. There was this terrible mix-up, you see; we intended to get someone else.” Though I can assure my readers that I did not lie or stretch the truth when I applied for this job, somehow after all this time I still suspect that I “got away with something” when I was hired to teach here.

I’ve talked about this with my parents and other colleagues who teach. My father (who taught philosophy for forty years at Alberta and UCSB) calls this feeling “the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence”. That phrase seems to sum things up nicely. Whenever I share these feelings, I note that it is often my most talented colleagues, students, and friends who say “Really? That’s how I feel too!” (One of the worst teachers I ever worked with, now thankfully retired, claimed never to feel this way.) I wonder if there isn’t some connection between periodic bouts of self-doubt and the drive to prove one’s self. Actually, that’s silly — I don’t wonder that at all, I know it with total certainty!

My office is a cheerful mess, I’m caffeinated and bepinked and readier than ever to begin the grand journey again.

UPDATE: Both in person in the hallways, and on my Facebook page, former and soon-to-be-current students have wished me “good luck” today. This isn’t new; I’m wished good luck each time a new semester begins. It might seem odd to wish it to the tenured professor; I’m not applying for anything, I’m not being evaluated this semester, and I’m not trying to get into a class. But I’m wished luck nonetheless.

I like to think it’s more than just a pleasantry offered when someone begins something new (or in my case, resumes an old and familiar task.) I like to think that it’s because even the very young recognize that there is an element of chance and mystery in teaching; some classes sizzle with chemistry while others, as we all acknowledge, are duds. Perhaps they are wishing me great students, or wishing me success in avoiding spilling on myself or teaching with my fly unzipped. Or perhaps they know that anything really can happen in the classroom, from the marvelous to the heartbreaking, and they are wishing me luck and grace and strength to cope with whatever comes, and to be as present and effective as I can be for all whom I will call my students.

Being passionately interested without arousing interest: on mentoring, flirtation, and safety (reprint)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 26, 2010
in Reprints
. 0 Comments

With classes about to start at the college next week, it’s a good time to be thinking once more about teaching and mentoring. This one comes from September 2008.

The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.

Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.

Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.

His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.

In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.

Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard. Continue reading ‘Being passionately interested without arousing interest: on mentoring, flirtation, and safety (reprint)’

Thursday Short Poem: Logue’s “Come to the Edge”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 26, 2010
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

This very short Christopher Logue classic, sometimes misattributed to Guillaume Apollinaire, is one of the great short poems about teaching, and a fine one for back-to-school season. It doesn’t reflect the kind of instruction popular in schools of education these days, where we’re all supposed to be tech-savvy “learning facilitators” rather than lecturers and inspirers. But it reflects the teachers who made me, and the teacher I strive to be.

Come to the Edge

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
Come to the edge!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.

“Sixes only date sixes”: of knights and rescuers, messiah complexes, and the call to grow

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 25, 2010
in Relationships
. 17 Comments

Below yesterday’s post, FormerWildChild asks:

Quick question: what if a woman is in a truly desperate situation, if she made a few stupid choices, but also caught some really tough breaks. She has figured out where she went wrong and how to stay away from the people who make the tough beaks happen, but it is a hard scrabble back into a decent life when you are doing it alone and without much money. So, a guy comes along who wants to help her. She says yes, even though it makes her feel a little guilty, because she is truly desperate. They have a romantic relationship, and she really likes the guy. But he also gives her what she needs, and she takes advantage of it to make her life begin working, to make changes that will significantly improve her life-chances. She works hard enough, that she can probably make a go of it without him…

The question becomes: did she take advantage of a good guy? Did she prostitute herself for an education and a chance at a good life?

Well, I can guess what the Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) would say.

In thinking about my answer to FWC, I refer back to this post on relationships from October 2008: 100/100, not 50/50: of percentages, insurance companies, men, women, and apportioning responsibility in relationships.
 I wrote:

Here’s something three divorces and four marriages have taught me: if I am doing 50% and expecting my spouse to do 50%, then the marriage will (one way or another) founder. It’s not 50/50, it’s 100/100. I need to be 100% responsible for my behavior. My wife cannot, cannot, cannot “drive me to drink”; I cannot “make her depressed” without her active consent. I am completely responsible for myself, and she for herself, and we need to do everything we can to make the relationship work. I say to people “We split everything 100/100″, because though that may not make sense in terms of arithmetic, it captures a basic truth about what it takes to make a relationship not only survive but be vitalized, dynamic, and ever-changing.

What that means in terms of FWC’s question is this: her “good guy” is 100% responsible for his choices, as she is for hers. At first glance, their relationship was founded, as so many seemingly are, on a transactional basis: she gave love in return for stability. Of course, as any therapist will tell you, transactions are almost never that simple. Rescuers and rescuees have the same basic set of motives in these sorts of relationships: a longing to be loved and validated. Many rescuers derive a powerful feeling of self-worth from the act of rescuing; by choosing to be with someone vulnerable, they feel as if they have inoculated themselves against the possibility of being abandoned. (I’ve never met a rescuer who didn’t have massive abandonment issues.) It isn’t just women who buy into the self-flattering “my love is so strong it can change anyone” narrative about which I wrote here. The rescuer looks for someone whose weakness (a history of sexual abuse, drug addiction, anorexia, and so on) provides an opportunity to practice rescuing. Rescuers generally don’t want folks who have their shit together, as it were; aspiring doctors don’t demonstrate their skills by healing the already well. Jesus didn’t improve the sight of those already blessed with 20/20 vision. Continue reading ‘“Sixes only date sixes”: of knights and rescuers, messiah complexes, and the call to grow’

Letting go of the Rescuer: on male feminists and knights in shining armor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 24, 2010
in Reprints
. 25 Comments

Originally published October 2005. Seems appropriate to reprint in light of this post and the ensuing discussion.

Gosh, I’m now averaging two letters a week from folks who have found this blog by searching for information about “older men, younger women” on the ‘net. Usually, I get letters from young women who are attracted to older men, or older men defending their interest in younger women, but yesterday’s letter from “Charles” was different. Here’s some of it:

The experience I am going through is a difficult one. I was very closely
involved with a (now) 23 year old for four years. We broke up this past
spring, largely because she was going to attend graduate school in another
country for several years and had not been faithful to me in the past. No
trust meant no relationship anymore, despite my great affection toward her
and bond with her. We still remain friends and I look out for her best interests,
which is why I was so distraught to hear that a 35 year old had
asked her out at a bar and she said yes.

I agree with you that, despite exceptions to the rule, younger women
dating older men is not very healthy. She is a beautiful girl who has no
trouble finding dates, so its not like this is the only opportunity she
has. She doesn’t seem to find it to be a big deal and kind of flippantly
says that guys are five years less mature than their age and girls are
five years more mature, so the ages (in her mind) kind of equal out. But
I have to disagree with that. His formative, adult experiences are much
more developed than hers. If you use the age of 18 as a baseline for
‘adulthood,’ than he’s been an adult about four times longer than she has.

She also has had many of the problems that many young women interested in
older men seem to have, as you alluded to. Her father was almost
completely dysfunctional as a human being and was not a substantive part
of her childhood. She was raped at 13 to lose her virginity and she has
had a breathtaking number of sexual partners in an equally breathtaking
variety of ways, all of whom (with the exceptions of a few close
boyfriends) she didn’t like.

Should I not feel concerned for her? Should I not feel angry toward her?,
because I do. I do not have a problem with her dating and I want her to
be happy, but I am convinced this is not the way to achieve that
happiness.

Charles writes an interesting and heartfelt note, and it’s the sort of thing I’ve heard from other young men on this subject.

First off, there’s nothing wrong with being angry at someone who has cheated on you. Anger, particularly when it is expressed in healthy rather than destructive ways, is a normal response to injury. Once that anger festers into enduring resentment (and slut-shaming), however, it’s a good deal more problematic.

I’ve known quite a few men who share with Charles what can only be described as a powerful desire to “rescue” damsels in distress. The tell-tale signs of a man with a “knight in shining armor” complex are clear: he “looks out for her best interests”, and he expresses deep — and perhaps justified — anxiety about her early experiences and their impact on her subsequent sexual choices. I’m sure Charles is a very nice young man, and I wish him well. But ultimately, I think he’s having a difficult time separating genuine love and concern from a desire to control! Continue reading ‘Letting go of the Rescuer: on male feminists and knights in shining armor’

Stunned by the summer of hate: accepting the reality of the culture war

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 23, 2010
in Politics
. 21 Comments

A few years ago, one of my favorite British ’80s bands, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, released a comeback album. The killer single was called “I Loved the Summer of Hate”, and it was as exuberant and singable a bit of pop punk as you ever did hear. I listen to it quite often on my iPod.

But I can’t say I share the sentiments of the song title. Though my family and I have had a wonderful summer (working on a book, trips to France and Israel, seeing friends and family), I’ve been increasingly worried and depressed by the tone of American political discourse. In the arguments over the health care plan, gay marriage, “birthright citizenship”, and above all, the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, the rancor has hit a level of ugliness I haven’t seen in my life. My political memory goes back about thirty years or so, and I’m enough of an historian not to substitute my recollections for the entire American experience, but still — I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve deleted Facebook friends whose anti-Obama, anti-Islam rants became too incendiary to bear; I’ve had more political arguments since Memorial Day than I had in the previous three or four years. It has felt to me very much like a “summer of hate”, and I’ve found it all deeply disheartening. Continue reading ‘Stunned by the summer of hate: accepting the reality of the culture war’

Step Up and Step Back: more on the role of men in feminist spaces

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 22, 2010
in Favorite Posts 2010 and Male feminists
. 61 Comments

The discussion of men in the feminist movement heats up in the comments below this post by Amelia at Feministe: The Masquerade: I call myself a feminist, therefore I am a feminist. She tells a story that is all-too-familiar to campus activists. A male student at Amelia’s university attempts to hijack a feminist student organization while claiming, with ever-increasing vehemence, to be a feminist. When his aims are thwarted, the male “feminist” insinuates he’s more committed to feminism than the women who lead the organization. The disruption he causes is more than exasperating, and raises serious questions about the role of men in the feminist movement.

There are many ways in which men who claim to be feminists can do tremendous harm. Two summers ago, we dealt with the infuriating and depressing story of Kyle Payne, an anti-violence campus activist, dorm adviser, and self-described feminist who ended up sexually assaulting a woman in his residence hall. But the problem isn’t limited to rapists who are “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Indeed, there’s a range of problematic male feminist behavior, with outright sexual assault at one extreme and well-meaning but utterly clueless insistence on taking on a leadership role in the anti-sexist movement at the other. Spend enough time doing anti-violence or other sorts of feminist work on campus, and you’ll meet young men very similar to the sort Amelia describes.

One commenter at Feministe suggests that the problem lies in having men take on any role in feminist organizations:

sorry, but you are going to have this problem constantly, and consistently be wasting your time with aggressive, entitled men and mansplanations, as long as you let men into womens and feminist spaces. full stop. there is no remedy for this problem, except to not allow them access. and unfortunately, theres really no way to limit membership and privatize groups when you are in a public school setting, even when its to deny men access to womens spaces DUE TO WOMEN NEEDING PRIVATE WOMEN-ONLY SPACE, DUE TO AGGRESSIVE, ENTITLED MEN.

I sympathize. But as a man who is committed to doing feminist work, I respectfully reject the commenter’s suggestion.

I’m a man who has spent close to 25 years working in feminist spaces, since I took my first undergraduate course in Women’s Studies at Berkeley in the mid-’80s. I was a member of a variety of feminist organizations when I was at university. I’ve taught women’s studies at the community college since the mid-’90s, and have been an adviser to campus feminist clubs throughout that time. And I’m particularly interested in this topic now as I’m working on the nascent Feminist Masculinities project within the National Women’s Studies Association. With colleagues from Harvard, Penn State, and USC, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on Men and Anti-Sexist Activism at this November’s NWSA conference in Denver. This will be a follow-up discussion to our very successful dialogue at last autumn’s NWSA conference in Atlanta, about which I blogged here.

As I commented at Feministe, I have a simple formula I’ve developed over the years to describe my thinking about men in feminist spaces. (I am perplexed as to why I’ve never blogged about it before.) Four words:

1. Step up.
2. Step back.

“Step up” means that men who choose to identify as feminists (or, if you prefer, as “feminist allies” or “pro-feminists”) are called to take an active role in the anti-sexist movement. Building a genuinely egalitarian and non-violent society requires everyone’s involvement. Empowering women to defend themselves from rapists and harassers is important; raising a generation of young men to whom the idea of rape or harassment is anathema is also vital. We need men of all ages in the feminist movement to “step up” and commit themselves to embodying egalitarian principles in their private and public lives.

Stepping up means being willing to listen to women’s righteous anger. That doesn’t mean groveling on the ground in abject apology merely for having a penis — contrary to stereotype, that’s not what feminists (at least not any I’ve ever met) want. That means really hearing women, without giving into the temptation to become petulant, defensive, or hurt. It means realizing that each and every one of us is tangled in the Gordian knot of sexism, but that men and women are entangled in different ways that almost invariably cause greater suffering to the latter. Stepping up doesn’t mean denying that, as the old saying goes, The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (TPHMT). It means understanding that in feminist spaces, to focus on male suffering both suggests a false equivalence and derails the most vital anti-sexist work.

Stepping up means, of course, being willing to confront other men. I’ve said over and over again that the acid test of a man’s commitment to feminism often comes not only in terms of how he treats women, but also how he speaks about women when he’s in all-male spaces. Many young men are earnest about living out feminist principles when around women (of course, some like Amelia’s troll and the lamentable Kyle Payne obviously aren’t.) But get them around their “bros” and their words change. Or, as is more often the case, they may not join in on sexist banter — but they fail to raise vocal objection to it. Stepping up means challenging the jokes and complaints and objectifying remarks that are so much a part of the conversation in all-male spaces. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a sine qua non of being a feminist ally.

Stepping back means acknowledging that in almost every instance, feminist organizations ought to be led by women. It means that men in feminist spaces need to check themselves before they pursue leadership roles. While that might seem unfair, arguing that biological sex should have no bearing on who wields authority in a feminist organization fails to take into account the myriad ways in which the wider world discriminates against women. Even now, we still socialize young men to be assertive and young women to be deferential. (Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but not enough to disprove that rule.) Part of undoing that socialization for women means pushing themselves to take on leadership positions even if they feel awkward about doing so; part of undoing that socialization for young men means holding themselves back from those same offices.

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men. Stepping back is a way of renouncing the “knight in shining armor” tendency that afflicts many young men who first come to anti-sexist work. Women need colleagues and partners on this journey, not rescuers or substitute father figures.

As a male instructor who teaches women’s history, I’ve always made sure that female colleagues feel free to critique my syllabus and teaching methods. As adviser to the campus feminist club, I’ve done everything I can to make sure not to assert any more authority than necessary, and I defer as often as possible (without shirking work) to my two feminist colleagues who co-advise with me. I recognize that “stepping back” can turn into a convenient excuse for not doing some of the more tedious work of feminist activism (like paperwork), and I do my best to make sure that I’m both “pulling my weight” and “hanging back” as needed.

I am keenly aware that a great many women are deeply cynical about men who claim to be feminists. This mistrust is rooted in real experience. The consequent desire to exclude men from feminist spaces is understandable. But I’m also convinced that men do have a vital role to play in transforming the culture and building a truly egalitarian society. Imperfectly, I’ve been doing this work for over half my life, mentoring as I was once mentored. I believe in engaging men in the struggle to end violence; to create new models for sexual relationship; to build a world in which one’s biology is not the primary determinant of one’s destiny. Women in the feminist movement have brothers and fathers and boyfriends and buddies and sons and husbands and nephews whom they love. Most women I’ve worked with very much want men in the movement, but are often understandably wary about what role we will play. And as we acknowledge both that need and that wariness, I think it’s a good time to reiterate the importance of stepping up… and stepping back.

UPDATE: Wanted to link to this post of mine from 2008, written from the WAM (Women, Action and Media) conference in Massachusetts: Some Thoughts on Changing Attitudes towards Male Feminists. I see a major generational divide in terms of receptivity towards men in the feminist movement, and I’m old enough to have seen a significant shift towards “inclusionary” views of men in feminist spaces.

Of Never Feeling Hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men (reprinted)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 19, 2010
in Reprints
. 45 Comments

This proved to be one of the more controversial posts of last year. Here’s a link to the original comments section, which was very helpful in offering a corrective to what this post may have overlooked.

From May 2009.

I’ve been thinking this week about the experience — or lack thereof — of being the object of other’s desire. Two different posts got the wheels turning: Girls, Both Real and Otherwise by Daisy B., and Figleaf’s Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen. Both Daisy and Fig, in different ways, talk about alienation from their own bodies, at least as they appear to others (and, in a sense, to themselves). I recommend both posts.

In feminist circles, it’s common to talk about the tremendous damage that objectification does to women of all ages and adolescent girls in particular. Many young women remember a moment (painful, terrifying, or, perhaps less often, full of wonder) when they realized that they were the object of another’s sexual desire. Even more women have memories of being sent the mixed message of how both to entice desire (lessons on how to apply make-up, how to dress “sexy” taught at a young age) and how to avoid appearing either “slutty” or “ugly.” (the distinction, of course, is a shifting and elusive one.) For better or for worse, most young women grow up with a cultural awareness that their generally speaking, women’s bodies (though perhaps not their own) are intensely desirable to boys and men; strategies for managing that desire are much-discussed facets of women’s magazines, the advertising industry, and conversation.

But we don’t have a culture in which many young men grow up with the experience of being seen and wanted, in which young men grow up with the sense that their bodies are desirable and beautiful as well as functional. Our cultural discourse about young men teaches that managing their own (presumably insatiable) sexual desire is the defining task of their adolescence. A “jock discourse” that encourages young men to “score” with as many women as possible and an “abstinence discourse” which encourages young men to restrain themselves heroically have essentially the same perspective: your job as a man is to channel your libido, either into sexual conquests or radical restriction. Both discourses center male desire, just as most discourses aimed at young women teach teenage girls how to gain, manage, and direct that same titanic force. The missing element, of course, is the idea that female desire can be directed towards men in general, and towards their bodies in particular.

There’s some explicitness below the fold. Use your own judgment about proceeding. Continue reading ‘Of Never Feeling Hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men (reprinted)’

Thursday Short Poem: Sexton’s “With Mercy”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 19, 2010
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

The Thursday Short Poem returns!

Though not one of her most famous poems, this has one of Anne Sexton’s most memorable lines within it, one with which resonated with me for many, many years:

I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it.

With Mercy for the Greedy

For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession

Concerning your letter in which you ask
me to call a priest and in which you ask
me to wear The Cross that you enclose;
your own cross,
your dog-bitten cross,
no larger than a thumb,
small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

I pray to its shadow,
that gray place
where it lies on your letter … deep, deep.
I detest my sins and I try to believe
in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,
its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

All morning long
I have worn
your cross, hung with package string around my throat.
It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,
tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.
Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

My friend, my friend, I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.

Can Feminism Liberate Men?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 18, 2010
in Male feminists
. 4 Comments

Ned Resnikoff briefly addresses the familiar question in this week’s Ms. Magazine blog: Can Feminism Liberate Men? His answer, of course, is yes:

I am a feminist man. While I can argue for that position on the grounds of moral responsibility and basic human empathy, I would be lying if I painted my position as some kind of noble sacrifice. It is in my own self-interest to be a feminist, because I know that I will never be a Real Man and that many of my own goals and priorities are decidedly un-Manly.

So rather than wander around in a state of perpetual self-loathing, I try to come to some other understanding of what it means to be a man. This is, I think, one of the great challenges for American men born in the wake of second-wave feminism. It’s a daunting project, because there are so few guideposts, but for the very same reason it is also a liberating one.

Amen, brother Ned. There are many other excellent reasons for men to consider feminism, places where self-interest and justice intersect in some surprising ways. (I’m enough of an Aristotelian to think that in the end, virtue and happiness are inextricable. Feminist men may know this better than most).

The male feminists category contains a number of posts on the topic. See these:

Tired of being coddled and feared: standing up to the myth of male weakness

Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do

What’s in it for men?

The Male Transformation Series