“Be Proud at Least that We Know We Were Wrong”: a Richard Wilbur Reprint

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 2, 2009
in Holidays and Reprints
. 1 Comment

Just as I like putting up AA Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”, I like this Richard Wilbur bit for every Independence Day. Here’s a reprint of what I had up last year:

Richard Wilbur is one of our greatest poets. 22 (23) years ago, he wrote a fine long poem for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. These two stanzas from that poem move me still, and they describe perfectly a most imperfect and yet not-unpraiseworthy country. If the great E.M. Forster could give two cheers, not three, for democracy, then we who call ourselves citizens of the world first can give at least one solid cheer for the USA.

From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.

Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time and in Washington’s shadow,
Their invincible hope to be free at last…

Be proud at least that we know we were wrong. And only those, perhaps, who acknowledge the depth and the scope of the wrongs can have an honesty to their pride.

A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2009
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Friendship and Politics
. 5 Comments

It might surprise some readers that the students in my women’s studies classes are as politically and religiously diverse as the students in my other general education courses. The widely-held stereotype that feminist-themed courses only appeal to those on the left-hand side of the spectrum has not proven true, at least not for me here at Pasadena City College. (And is it possible that this fall I will begin my seventeenth year of teaching here? Where does the time go?) Though my women’s history classes do tend to attract slightly higher numbers of white students, and correspondingly lower numbers of students of color compared to the college average, those students who do take the class and submit journals and participate in discussions do run the full gamut.

Creating opportunities for honest, non-condemnatory and respectful dialogue isn’t particularly easy, particularly when the issues we discuss (like abortion rights, or the merits/drawbacks to abstinence, or the intersectionality of race and gender) are so potentially explosive. As diverse as my students are, most come from backgrounds where women are conciliators and peacemakers; many come from the “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. And as a result, while we sometimes have very charged discussions in class in which emotions run high, my students tell me that outside of school, they tend to seek out friendships with those who are ideologically like-minded. The young woman committed to abstinence until marriage, for example, seems to find it hard to form a honest frienship (rather than a mere civil acquaintanceship) with the young woman who volunteers as a sex educator and talks openly about the physical aspects of the relationship she has with her boy — or girl — friends.

Labels like “prude” and “slut” have genuine power to wound. (Some women, of course, are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of both.) Those on opposite sides of the “abstinence divide” frequently imagine that it’s harder to be wherever they are; those who advocate for or live by a more progressive sexual ethic often carry the scars from words like “slut” or “whore” or even the surprisingly not-yet-dated “tramp.” Those who remain virgins (or who become born-again virgins) insist that theirs is the tougher cross to bear, that living in a sexually permissive environment where the pressure to fit in is enormous requires courage and resilience. There is an element, I note of the old “suffering Olympics” problem, in which various constituencies compete for the title of “most maligned” and “most deserving of sympathy.” Continue reading ‘A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars’

“I Have So Much Love to Give”: Young Women and Self-flattery (Reprint)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2009
in Reprints
. 1 Comment

This post originally appeared April 9, 2008.

In my women’s history class yesterday, we were making our way through Lynn Phillips’ Flirting With Danger, a text about which I have written before and which I have used in class for the last several years.

Phillips talks a great deal about discourses that impact the lives of contemporary young American women. Among these is what she calls the “Love Conquers All” discourse:

The love conquers all discourse does not limit itself to the notion that long-term heterosexual relationships are necessary for women’s fulfillment in love. Indeed, it suggests that finding the right man will somehow solve all of life’s problems.

Fed by Disney movies and pop songs, magazines and movies, most girls run into the notion that love conquers all early on. Some fiercely resist it, of course. The discourse suggests, however, that those who most fiercely resist making romantic love a priority are fooling themselves; from Jane Austen’s time to our own, we have countless fictional heroines who are initially dismissive of love, but in the end, succumb to its all-consuming power.

My students know all this, of course. It’s not news to any group of college students that they live in a culture that tries to impose a vision of happy heterosexual fulfillment on each and every one of them. But I’ve found another aspect of the “love conquers all” discourse that Phillips largely ignores: a great many young women (usually younger than typical college-age) go through adolescence with a vast over-estimate of just how much love they have to give to the “right person”.

When I first started working with youth group kids, particularly ninth and tenth-graders, I was struck by how often I would hear the same thing from so many of the girls with whom I worked. In group discussions or in writing, many would say something more or less like this:

I have so much love to give. I’ve never been in love, not really, but I just feel like I have this huge amount of passion inside of me. If I could just find someone whom I could really trust, then I could give him (usually, it’s a him) everything I have inside of me. I know it sounds corny, but I really believe love can heal all our problems. I feel like I have enough love inside of me to change the world, if I could just find a way to let it out. Continue reading ‘“I Have So Much Love to Give”: Young Women and Self-flattery (Reprint)’

More on avoiding infidelity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 30, 2009
in Infidelity and Links
. 13 Comments

Following up on the recent posts about fidelity and marriage and the possibility of platonic friendship, I’d like to build on something a commenter wrote below yesterday’s piece. I’ve included several links to older posts as well. A former student of mine writes today:

until both men and women realize that being faithful is a choice one has to make everyday for the rest of their life and not just some mountain top romantic promise, the temptations will always win out.

I think there’s some good sense in that. Being monogamous comes “naturally” for some, and presents more of a challenge for others. I don’t suggest that lifelong monogamous commitments are best for everyone, and while — as I’ve said almost ad nauseam — I do think marriage is a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth, I don’t think it’s the only such vehicle. Certainly, one of the ways in which marriage presents this opportunity to grow is through the practice of active fidelity. And fidelity is, as the commenter says, a choice one makes every day.

I know very well how affairs happen, having been recklessly unfaithful in earlier marriages. As someone who “performs” for a living, I know all too well the particular temptations inherent in this and similar professions. My wife and I are exhausted much of the time; these days, we’re busy raising our precious baby girl, co-parenting as best we can, working on our respective careers, finding time to volunteer. This week, we’re also in the throes of moving, buying one house and selling another. It’s very easy for the obligations to pile on top of each other until it seems as if every waking hour is about doing the next task, responding to the next call to duty. And while my wife and I make time to validate and connect with each other, we don’t have the leisure we might once have had to do much mutual soothing and reassuring. There’s too damn much to do, not to mention a little creature in the house who really does need lots of soothing.

So if I’m not careful, I can start to feel a bit crestfallen. If I’m not careful, I might start to think “My wife doesn’t appreciate me the way she once did”. (She might say the same about me.) With my body suffering the effects of not working out as I once did (there is very little time for exercise), my ego might begin to look about for some source of validation, something or someone to tell me how good and wonderful and handsome I still am. And of course, I work as a college professor surrounded by young people; I blog and Facebook and interact with colleagues in my usual ENFP way. Lots and lots of people see the “surface Hugo”, and the surface Hugo can come across rather well. And without being conscious of asking for it, I get lots of validation from students and colleagues and readers and friends who don’t know me as well as my wife does. Continue reading ‘More on avoiding infidelity’

Men, women, friendship, and fidelity: revisiting the issue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 29, 2009
in Affection, Friendship and Marriage
. 13 Comments

In the aftermath of the Mark Sanford debacle, Laura at the conservative Pursuing Holiness blog asks the old question: Can Men and Women be Friends? Her answer is the expected one: no.

Can men and women be friends? Certainly. My husband is my best friend – the ultimate “friend with benefits.” But it is unwise in the extreme to invest your emotions and build an intimacy with someone with whom you can’t complete that intimacy. Even if you are never physically unfaithful, is there any way to have an intimate friend of the opposite sex without depriving your spouse of the emotional investment to which they’re entitled?

I wrote a post four years ago on this subject. I re-read that piece of mine this morning, and as is so often the case with my “older” musings, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself in equal measure. As I mark eleven years clean and sober this week, I note that my own spiritual journey since 1998 has been a rapid and occasionally turbulent one — and as a result, my thinking on a variety of issues continues to evolve and shift as I grow and learn. The posts I put up in my first two years of steady blogging (2004-05) tended to be much more conservative in tone than the ones I’ve put up more recently. Four or five years ago, I was only just coming out of what I call my “boundary-learning” stage; after so many years of what might best be described as exuberant transgressiveness, I was until recently perhaps over-sensitive to the potential for a sexual charge in virtually any relationship. I’m glad I practiced that level of caution; it was a needed corrective to an earlier way. I note that by last year, when I put up this post about controlling boyfriends, my views had already begun to shift.

But in light of Laura’s post, and my own words from 2005, I’d like to revisit — briefly — the issue of male-female non-romantic friendship.

First of all, like Laura, in my 2005 post my approach was blindly heteronormative. If men and women can’t be friends because of the possibility of sexual attraction, then it follows that lesbians and straight women can’t be friends, nor gay men and straight guys. And bisexuals? Clearly a group for whom radical introversion and isolation is the only possible course. One mistake we make around these issues, over and over again, is that we can predict with certainty what sort of people we are going to be attracted to. The anecdotes are legion of women and men falling in love with people of their same sex after living — in many instances, quite happily — in heterosexual relationships for years and years. As a man who has been generally drawn to women throughout his life, I’ve been surprised once or twice by an unexpected twinge of attraction to a male friend. It is culturally imposed homophobia rather than biological hardwiring that prevents more men from admitting the same thing. Continue reading ‘Men, women, friendship, and fidelity: revisiting the issue’

Thursday Short Poem: Moxley’s “Epithalamium”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 25, 2009
in Poetry
. 2 Comments

In any list of great living American poets, native Californians are well represented: Kay Ryan (America’s poet laureate) and Sharon Olds have appeared on the TSP more than a few times. One of the rising stars of American poetry is surely San Diego’s Jennifer Moxley, whose recent verse displays a dazzling command of different forms as well as a passionate fusing of the personal and the political.

Moxley’s not a sentimentalist by any means. This is one of her gentler pieces, but it has its own bite.

Epithalamium

This union shall not be a contract,
the joining on whim in a frightened time,
entered solely for the benefit of those
who would wish their mistakes visited
upon the bright and the young.
This union shall not take place
beneath a passive veil of fear.
This union is a reunion — the crown
on a longed-for joining –
the final touch on the temporal cage,
the material completion
so many times dreamed of
in the cold sheets of critical youth.

In ancient times, Aristophanes described
three types of mythic beings
joined together at the back (two men,
two women, a man and a woman).
They wobbled through the primordial world
happy and whole, devoid of culture,
until they were violently split asunder
by what could only have been
an arbitrary and lonely God. The halves
thenceforward drifted through history,
riven by emptiness, passing for whole.

Yet you, in defiance of this tragic
history, have found each other anew.
Now you may dwell in the vision
of the face you felt you lost forever.
Stand before each other, self, but other,
separate yet one, a missing measure found,
a mirror in which no flaws reflect:
join and quell this exhausted drifting,
join that your kiss might align the stars
and stop the planets from their wandering.

A note on cornerstones and the heresy of marriage worship

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 24, 2009
in Christianity, Faith and Marriage
. 10 Comments

Note: I wrote this post before Governor Sanford of South Carolina, another staunch social conservative, admitted his affair today. The field for 2012 to run against Obama is being winnowed fast as those who wish to deny marriage equality for all are quick to break their own pledges of fidelity. One is trying, oh how one is trying, to avoid schadenfreude.

Summer school is upon us, we’re planning a move from Pasadena to West Los Angeles, and dear little baby is back to waking up several times during the night. I certainly spend more time lecturing than sleeping, and as a result, whatever dim wit I normally have with which to blog has grown even, well, dimmer. I’m not complaining, of course; this is the exhaustion that comes from happy duty, not grim obligation. But still, when I sit down at the computer all I seem to want to do (when I’m done returning legions of emails) is read the news.

The comments below yesterday’s post in response to Kathryn Lopez got sidetracked into a discussion of “cornerstones.” A bit more explanation of the image is needed. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the reference to cornerstones goes back to Psalm 118, verse 22: The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. In the Jewish or Old Testament context, the rejected stone is a reference to King David himself; for Kabbalists, it’s a reference to the Shechinah, the feminine aspect of the divine. Continue reading ‘A note on cornerstones and the heresy of marriage worship’

Of hypocrisy and hairshirts and John Ensign: a reply to K-Lo

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2009
in Christianity, Infidelity, Politics and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 14 Comments

Kathryn Jean Lopez, who will soon be leaving the National Review Online for other, yet-to-be-named pastures, has a piece up this week about John Ensign (the latest in a long line of GOP senators whose public pronouncements proved to be wildly at odds with his private predilections) and the nature of hypocrisy.

We on the left, you see, frustrate K-Lo with our suggestion that Ensign’s infidelities undermine the case for the traditional and limited marriage franchise, a case near and dear to both the senator and the arch-conservative pundit. K-Lo wants us to know that Ensign’s inability or unwillingness to remain faithful is a private failing that ought to have no bearing on the public discussion about the meaning of marriage. She writes:

A politician’s failings do not render the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. Facts remain. Marriage is a cornerstone. Under a bastardized and unfortunately widespread understanding of hypocrisy, it is “hypocritical” for someone who is not a perfect person to ever make a statement grounded in conscience, morality, or natural law. Presumably, then, all Christians should throw out their Book. The Bible is and always has been directed to sinners. And, save for the star of the show, the preaching comes from sinners, too. Christ warned Peter in Gethsemane, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” In Romans, Paul said: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” Men (and women) believing something and falling short has a long history.

I agree with all but her third sentence in that paragraph. The history of marriage, as any scholar will tell you, is less cornerstone than constantly shifting sand. And cripes, enough already with the idolatry of marriage; calling it the “cornerstone” — a term with Christological significance — is sloppily inaccurate at best and blasphemous at worst.

K-Lo is right that a politician’s failings do not make the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. For example, think of Barack Obama’s struggle with smoking. As someone who has proved supremely self-controlled in so many areas of life, it is striking — and humanizing — that he has been unable to kick the nicotine habit entirely. But his own addiction doesn’t mean that he can’t hold a strong position in favor of regulating tobacco; indeed, his sense of his own weakness gives strength to the argument that this is a dangerous substance deserving of greater regulation. He has pointedly not called for a ban on smoking either.

But while a politician’s failings do not mean he forfeits a right to speak out on issues, his failings aren’t incidental to his politics. K-Lo is wrong to suggest that Ensign’s fall from grace is completely unrelated to his views on marriage and sexual matters. It is axiomatic, after all, that we rail and splutter with the greatest indignation against those things we loathe inside ourselves. Those who combine great political power with an acute consciousness of personal sinfulness are particularly dangerous because of the overwhelming temptation to displace their own shame on to others. Private spiritual frailty is turned into an all-too-public club with which to beat those who, in the eyes of a guilt-ridden senator, live openly at odds with traditional morality; the zeal with which he wields that club is fueled by his own awareness of how far he has fallen from the mark. The flame of self-reproach kindles the fire to burn the heretics; the Inquisitor usually wears a hair-shirt.

Self-reproach is not only a right, it is a responsibility; people — especially, in our culture, men — could do with a good deal more self-examination. If we don’t like what we find, we need to go to therapy or confession or a Twelve Step program to heal and to grow. What we don’t get to do is to externalize that self-reproach into a sanctimonious defense of the traditional values we ourselves lack the capacity to follow. This doesn’t mean that the privately virtuous have more of a right to be judgmental, of course. But as most of us have come to find, those whose private virtue is deep and genuine are, as a rule, particularly disinclined to condemning others. And as the cases of Larry Craig, John Ensign, David Vitter or any in the legion of powerful men whose public commitment to biblical values was radically at odds with their intimate lives have shown, the reverse is true as well.

The form and content of kisses

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 22, 2009
in Movies, Sexual ethics and transformation, Theater, Youth and Youth ministry
. 16 Comments

One of my former youth group kids, “Holly” contacted me last week. Holly’s 17, an aspiring theater actress, and just landed her first lead role in a summer production. She has a boyfriend, Ferdinand — and Ferdinand isn’t happy about the part Holly’s taken. In one scene in the play, Holly’s character needs to kiss her “husband”; it’s an indispensable part of the show. Ferdinand has been in a funk ever since he found out Holly was going to do the show, and until he relented last week, threatened a break-up if she went ahead with her plans to take the role.

Holly and I talked on Friday about her relationship, the problem of ultimata, and what it meant to play a part on stage. This little quarrel raises some important issues about trust and fidelity, of course, but also about the vital distinction between the form and the content of a physical act. (I blogged at length about “form” and “content” in this post about faith and sexuality from July 2008.) To be concerned with form is to be concerned with a particular act, like kissing; to be concerned with content is to be concerned with what that act signifies to the two people involved. These aren’t mutually exclusive concerns, of course, but understanding the distinction is vital, as I explained to Holly.

For example, touching another person’s genital region generally has the form of sexual intimacy. At the same time, there’s a world of difference (one does rather hope) between the way a woman might be touched by her OB/GYN and by her lover. Even if both doctor and boyfriend (or girlfriend) touch her vagina in an act of similar form, the content of the touching is radically different. Even Ferdinand, surely, doesn’t object to Holly seeing a physician. Anyone who’s been to the doctor intuitively grasps the form/content distinction.

Another example lies in art: in a figure drawing course, one is often required to draw a a picture inspired by a live nude model. In our puritanical culture, where the body is so often concealed, steadily gazing at a naked human being has the form of something sexual. But the content of the act (drawing from a nude figure) isn’t sexual; the concern of the student artist is usually something like “How the hell am I going to get that calf muscle right?” and not “Oh my goodness, I’m so turned on right now.” That doesn’t mean sexual arousal can’t happen in a figure drawing class — it may. But sexual arousal can come in any number of unexpected ways and in unexpected places. It would be unreasonable, I think, for a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse to say to their beloved “I don’t want you taking a studio art class where you draw naked people”, just as it would be unreasonable to say “I don’t want your doctor touching your private parts.” Form and content are, in these instances, distinct.

And the same, of course, is true in Holly’s situation. Those who have little experience with acting may marvel at the apparent ease in which movie stars portray passion on the screen; one reason why actresses in particular (Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, etc.) win Oscars after making films in which they did explicit scenes is because we marvel that anyone, particularly a woman, could so expertly separate form and content. (Winslet, whose husband is the director Sam Mendes, has talked often about the inability of some folks to accept her ability — and her spouse’s — to separate the brilliant realism of her “form” from the content of her heart.)

An actor is as much a working professional as a doctor. Each may be called into close proximity with the naked flesh of another human being as part of their professional responsibilities.. Obviously, Holly isn’t a professional actress yet, and she isn’t doing a nude love scene: she’s merely kissing an actor on the lips. Everyone will stay clothed; it will be at most a PG-rated act. But Holly, who is head-over-heels in love with Ferdinand, is quite clear about her own ability to distinguish between the form and the content of what it is that she will do. And it seems as if her beau is slowly coming around to seeing things her way.

Of course, in a romantic relationship one generally wants form and content to go together. When we make love with a partner, for most of us the goal is to have the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts be radically congruent with what we are doing with our bodies. Though that isn’t a universal ideal, it’s certainly a widespread desire. For many of us, monogamy is also an ideal. We don’t want our partners being sexual with other people. But we need to understand what Kate Winslet understands: not everything that has the outer appearance of being sexual really is.

When two actors feign passion, their on-screen or onstage kisses and caresses are no more authentically sexual than a pelvic exam down at the women’s clinic. That doesn’t mean co-stars can’t fall in love with each other; they often do. But when two teenage actors in a summer stock production embark on a romance, it’s usually because the experience of working together on something each believes in so passionately is itself a powerful aphrodisiac. Onstage kisses are hardly the cause.

Off until Monday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 19, 2009
in Stuff
. 4 Comments

I’m off to the city of my birth for the weekend, marking my beloved step-mother’s 60th birthday and my first Father’s Day. Posting resumes on Monday, the third anniversary of my own Dad’s death and the first day of summer school.

Recent posts are once again open for comments.

Rights, desire, responsibility: Sandra Tsing Loh’s divorce and America’s cognitive dissonance on marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2009
in Divorce and Marriage
. 33 Comments

Sandra Tsing Loh is getting a divorce, and in her incomparable way, telling us a bit about it in the new issue of the Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off (thanks to Harvey for sending me the link), the witty social commentator whose 2005 CalTech graduation address remains one of the finest I’ve ever read announces that she’s left her husband of twenty years after falling in love with another man:

I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, “Good relationships take work.”

I admit that I have little patience for the kind of narrative of infidelity that Loh offers here; falling in love with a man other than your husband is not something that happens to you while you stand idly by. The language of “surprise” suggests a lack of accountability; Loh’s use of the passive voice (”my commitment to monogamy, at the very end came unglued”) neatly avoids a full claim of responsibility. She’s one step away from, as J.M. Coetzee puts it, “resting her case on the rights of desire”. That’s troubling indeed. Someone who runs a red light might describe himself as “surprised” that an accident happened, but it’s obvious to everyone else that a poor act of decision-making preceded the “unexpected” crash.

But then again, I don’t know that claiming responsibility means all that much; most male politicians caught with their pants down do as John Ensign did this week — they claim “full responsibility”, which sounds laudable. It’s the politically wise thing to do: admit a mistake, come clean, and throw yourself on the mercy of your wife and the American public. It’s also a rather stereotypically masculine thing to do: by claiming responsibility, you assert control. You may be thought a wretch who made a bad choice, but you still get to present yourself as a strong person; you recast yourself as a brave man tough enough to “do the right thing”. When the Ensigns and the Spitzers of the world claim “full responsibility”, they imply that bad things don’t happen to them unless they let ‘em happen — which suggests a kind of manly sovereignty over actions and emotions. I’m willing to concede that it’s possible that Loh’s being more honest here in acknowledging that in the end some of us — maybe many of us — aren’t as in control over what we feel and even how we respond to those feelings as we imagine. Loh isn’t running for office; she’s telling a story about what it’s like to be us right now through the imperfect prism of her own life. She can afford a frankness about weakness that a politician can’t. Continue reading ‘Rights, desire, responsibility: Sandra Tsing Loh’s divorce and America’s cognitive dissonance on marriage’

Thursday Short Poem: Merwin’s “Butterflies”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2009
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

This TSP is from W.S. Merwin’s wonderful new collection, The Shadow of Sirius. In his eighties now, Merwin’s voice is as strong as ever, and his talent for writing about beauty and memory and time remains undiminished. This is a lovely one.

One of the Butterflies

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain

By request, some more thoughts on feminist fathering

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 17, 2009
in Having children and Housework
. 12 Comments

Four days shy of my first Father’s Day as a parent to a human child, and nine days shy of my daughter reaching five months of age, it’s a bit premature to declare myself a master of Feminist Fatherhood. Still, each passing week brings new insight and experience, and my learning curve remains wonderfully steep.

Heloise is rolling over now, her personality and her energy shining through more and more each day. She’s growing rapidly, still on breastmilk only. And we’ve developed a family schedule that works well for us at this point, revolving around three essential caregivers in baby’s life. Our weekdays look like this:

I get up early, somewhere between 4:45 and 5:45 depending on the day. Heloise is restless at night, but often does her deepest sleeping just before and just after dawn. I go running while my wife and daughter rest. While I’m out, my mother-in-law comes over and takes the baby (if she’s up) so my wife can sleep in later. I shower and go off to school. My wife wakes up, feeds the baby, and goes to work for a few hours, coming home around noon to relieve my mother-in-law. My wife is with Heloise most of the afternoon until I get home. Once I’m home, I’m the primary caregiver; my wife gets more work done or heads out to the gym. Heloise usually goes down sometime after 9:00PM — and my wife and I get a bit of time alone together. I’m usually in bed by midnight, my wife a bit afterwards.

Heloise sleeps fitfully at times, but is usually down for most of the period between 10-7. When she wakes up in the night, I’m in charge of changing and soothing; my wife (obviously) in charge of feeding. We average two waking episodes a night now; each one lasts about 30-40 minutes. (Yes, as a result, I’m probably getting only four hours of sleep a night during the week; I get more on weekends.) And during the day, my wife, mother-in-law, and I each take an equal share of the time being the primary caregiver, though obviously my wife alone can get breastfeed; Heloise can go four hours comfortably without eating. Some days, my wife takes the baby in to work with her, and my mother-in-law is less involved.

Folks, I’m not soliciting advice about how to “do a schedule”; I’m simply sharing what works for us. There’s no one right way, surely, to work out a co-parenting routine. The point is that while it’s a bit tiring, it’s a routine that works for us right now. We get done what needs getting done, and we let slide what we can let slide, and we (my wife and I) do everything we can to make sure that we’re bonding with our daughter and meeting all of her needs and then some. And gosh, I don’t feel disposable or irrelevant! Who are these men who feel as if they have no role to play in an infant’s life? When I get home from school and see my daughter’s face light up at my return, I’m ecstatic; her sweet smile is a better antidote for exhaustion than any other I’ve known. Continue reading ‘By request, some more thoughts on feminist fathering’

The faithful remnant rises: a moment of opportunity for progressive Republicans?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2009
in Politics and Progressive Republicans
. 9 Comments

In February, I put up a post called The quixotic faithful remnant: on being a happy liberal Republican in which I explained my commitment to the tiny but still potentially relevant left-wing of the Grand Old Party. Lately, I’ve encountered a number of fellow progressive Republicans through social networking sites like Facebook. As the battle rages on for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, the widespread assumption is that the struggle is primarily between those on the center-right and those on the far right. But this ignores the reality that there remain — particularly on the West Coast and in the Northeast — a large number of socially liberal, environmentally concerned, fiscally responsible folk who continue to identify with the GOP.

The fact is that on a great many issues, particularly around the environment, gay rights, and reproductive health, large contingents of the Democratic majority in Congress are well to the right of center. Indeed, until Arlen Specter rather cravenly switched parties this spring, Pennsylvania had the distinction of having as its two senators a pro-choice Republican (Specter) and a pro-life Democrat (Bob Casey, Jr.) While it would be a stretch to call Sen. Specter a feminist (we remember his shameful behavior during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings), his record on reproductive rights as a Republican was substantially better than his Democratic counterpart. We see the same thing in the House: Shelley Capito, a fine moderate Republican congresswoman from West Virginia is well to the left of her Democratic counterpart from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, on virtually all reproductive rights issues. Put simply, the Democrats became a majority party once again by actively recruiting socially conservative but economically populist candidates to run in swing states. (Think Heath Shuler, Jon Tester, Jim Webb, the aforementioned Casey, and so on.) From the standpoint of those who see women’s right to choose as a central issue, this is immensely troubling.

And what of President Obama himself? I continue to have reasonably high regard for him, but am more than a little disappointed by some of his decisions in the three critical areas of women’s rights, gay and lesbian inclusion, and environmental protection. And it occurs to me that progressive Republicans can make a case for criticizing the president by challenging him from his left. Below the fold are three issues where prominent Republicans are to the president’s left. Continue reading ‘The faithful remnant rises: a moment of opportunity for progressive Republicans?’

Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 15, 2009
in Father, Feminism, Having children, Housework, Male feminists and Working
. 41 Comments

This post by Jessica at Feministing, responding to this risible Neil Lyndon piece in the Daily Mail has revived many of the familiar arguments about feminism, the men’s rights movement, and gender essentialism. It’s all part of a response to the latest flurry of op-ed pieces (far too numerous to which to link) suggesting that feminism has proved a failure, largely because so many women today (especially middle-class American and European women, presumably those most likely to have benefitted from the movement) report being exhausted, overworked, anxious and, well, unhappy.

If you follow the feminist blogosphere, this topic has been debated over and over again in one form or another since the earliest BBS discussions of the mid-1990s. I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments, though the latest round of anti-feminist bromides seem unusually poorly constructed. Most are guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if women are anxious or frustrated or unhappy after the coming of the first three waves of feminism, then they are anxious and unhappy because of the first three waves of feminism. One might as well make the same argument about the arrival of the cell phone, electrolysis, or the designated hitter rule. Repeat after me, class: correlation is not causation.

What made me want to write today was the comment thread below the Feministing piece, a thread in which a number of classic MRA (men’s rights activist) arguments were raised. The basic thesis: feminism has created a world hostile to men (at least in the industrialized West). Feminists have co-opted judicial, political, and educational institutions in order to advance what the MRAs call a “victim ideology”. Men and boys are alternately harangued and ignored, viewed by the feminist elite as either dim-witted oafs or dangerously calculating and predatory. Men are dying earlier and committing suicide more frequently because of their alienation from these woman-centered institutions, say the MRAs; the legions of young men hooked on pot or porn or Playstation (or all three) are the inevitable result of their cultural and social emasculation at the hands of a shrill and craven matriarchy. Or so say the MRAs.

So let me say this in defense of feminism, not only from the perspective of someone who makes his living in no small part by teaching it, but from the perspective of a new father: my relationship with my infant daughter is, in a very real way, made possible by the critical work feminists did to reframe traditional gender roles. It is thanks to the gains of the feminist movement that I was encouraged and expected to go through every aspect of the pregnancy and birthing process with my wife. It is thanks to the cultural shift initiatied by feminists and male allies that I was able to take the time away from work to be there for my wife (a right alas not yet universal). It is thanks to the feminist movement that a generation of committed and dedicated fathers has emerged, fathers who actively practice co-parenting with the mothers of their children. Though men neither get pregnant nor breastfeed, these biological inadequacies are no impediment to developing the capacity to nurture, something I am living out as best I can every day. Continue reading ‘Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege’