Archive for May, 2004

“Gilligan’s Island” and the seductive call of reality TV

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2004
in Mass media, Teaching and Vanity
. 10 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call in my office from a very cheerful man named Craig, representing an outfit called “Next Entertainment”. Craig is in charge of casting the latest reality show — a new version of Gilligan’s Island. Yes, there is a website for prospective competitors. The idea is to find authentic versions of the characters from the original 1960s TV show; they want a “real-life skipper, first mate, millionaire couple, movie star, professor and Kansas farm girl” for what will be a “Survivor-style” show set on a small island in the Pacific. Well, Craig has apparently been put in charge of hunting down “real” Los Angeles-area college professors, and he found me through Rate my Professors and this blog. He urged me to come in to his company’s Sherman Oaks offices for a video interview.

I’ll confess it: I was flattered and tempted. The mere fact that he called to ask me to come in made me happy, though I have absolutely no intention of following up. Craig schmoozed me so well, said such nice and complimentary things, and seemed convinced to the depths of his soul that I might well be the one professor they were looking for; by the end of our chat, I felt as if I were personally letting him down by declining to come in. I have neither the time nor the desire to go through what would no doubt be a truly humbling and unpleasant audition process, and even if I were chosen (I can’t imagine that really happening), I don’t want to be on an island for a month away from my girlfriend, my mountain trails, and my chinchilla! (The superficiality factor was high: Craig asked if the pictures he found on my blog were accurate, how tall I was, and so forth. More sleazily, he asked if I was married, and was pleased when I said no. When I said I had a girlfriend, he said “Well, that’s okay.” One wonders.)

Yet I’d be lying through my teeth if I wrote that I didn’t spend a few delicious moments fantasizing about temporary fame and modest fortune! I don’t watch reality TV (except for two horrific episodes of I Want a Famous Face), but like so many folks in greater L.A., I’ve spent years alternately repelled and fascinated by what is generally called “the industry.” Part of me is curious about what it would be like at my age to go through the process of trying to get on a television show, but the better part of me knows that I ought to keep my distance. Still, for fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon, I mused idly about things I had never fantasized about before.

By all means, if any readers here meet the requirements, do apply and let me know what happens.

Men, war, and victimhood

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2004
in Men and Masculinity and War
. 2 Comments

In a great comment on my post on Feminism and Abu Ghraib, Amy asked:

Hugo, are you worried about what the military will do to men? And if not, why not? If I may ask…

Valid questions indeed! I am always leery of those who seek to protect women from hardship and suffering and war by saying “men are better equipped to handle those sorts of things.” It’s not that I dispute the existence of innate difference! Surely, most young men are physically stronger than most women of the same age. But what troubles me is the denial that men, including soldiers, can be victimized and traumatized. From a pacifist standpoint, war falls short of the mark regardless of the sex of the combatants. From the standpoint of gender studies work, arguing for the exclusion of women from combat because men are somehow impervious to trauma does both men and women a profound disservice. There’s an old bumpersticker: “War is not healthy for children and other living things”. Well, men are living things.

I’m quite insistent on the point that men can be victims. On an only tangentially related note, I ws immensely troubled by reaction to the Mary Kay Letourneau case. (She was the Washington state school teacher who had a sexual relationship with her 14 year-old male student). Time and time again, I heard the same lines: “He (the boy) was lucky”; “He wanted it as much as she did”; “I wish that had happened to me”, and so forth. While we all seemed to be perplexed as to why a married woman in her mid 30s would desire a boy in his early teens, the notion that the boy could have been traumatized and violated to the same degree that a 14 year-old girl would have been by a male teacher seemed ludicruous. Both men and women seem reluctant to see boys or men as capable of being victimized. We minimize male trauma, whether it be inflicted on an adolescent (ala the Letourneau case) or on adult men in combat.

As a feminist man and as a Christian, I am increasingly aware that all humans are complex, vulnerable, broken creatures. Yes, adults must answer the call to be responsible. Yes, Christians must answer the call to take up the cross. Suffering will happen in this world despite our best efforts to avoid it. Those of us who aren’t pacifists believe that sometimes, suffering must be inflicted on a few to prevent even greater suffering from being inflicted on the many. Perhaps that’s true. But let’s let go of our precious illusions about men as invulnerable, and let’s recognize that real war when fought by real human beings scars everyone involved down to the depths of their soul.

Feminism and Abu Ghraib

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 18, 2004
in Aggression and violence, Feminism and War
. 21 Comments

Barbara Ehrenreich and Phyllis Schlafly, two stalwarts on opposite sides of the feminist fence, weighed in this week on the role of the three women guards (Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman) in the Abu Ghraib scandal. In the Los Angeles Times, Ehrenreich wrote:

The photos did something to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species’ tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.

But it’s not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral edge — or simply the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence, was more or less beyond debate.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman — a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military — is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle — the struggle for gender equality — when in fact we have many more. (Bold emphases are Hugo’s)

Meanwhile, dear old Phyllis Schlafly opines:

The pictures are stark illustrations of the gender experimentation that has been going on in the U.S. military. The images have lifted the curtain on a subject about which the public has largely been kept in the dark.

When he was still in office, Former President William Jefferson Clinton made clear his contempt for our military, but the Clintonista feminazis were more focused in their disdain. They were determined to give us a gender-neutral military or, as one of their representatives said, an “un-gendered” military.

That goal means masculinizing women and feminizing men… The result is a breakdown of military discipline and a dramatic coarsening of women and of men’s treatment of women.

I suspect that the picture of the woman soldier with a noose around the Iraqi man’s neck will soon show up on the bulletin boards of women’s studies centers and feminist college professors. That picture is the radical feminists’ ultimate fantasy of how they dream of treating men. Less radical feminists will quietly cheer the picture as showing career-opportunity proof that women can be just as tough as men in dealing with the enemy.

The gap between Phyllis’ expectation of feminist reaction and Ehrenreich’s more accurate understanding of the feminist response was too good to ignore! What I appreciated most about Ehrenreich is her proclamation that feminism cannot ever be satisfied with mere “gender equity.” Simply integrating women into male-dominated systems of power will invariably produce the Megan Ambuhls, Lynndie Englands and Sabrina Harmans. Ehrenreich concludes:

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

Ringing words indeed. (And let me plug, in passing, Camassia’s post on the subject). And while I am of course much closer to Ehrenreich than to Schlafly, I don’t think that “infiltrating” and “subverting” the military is either a viable or a morally acceptable answer for the women’s movement (even if it were possible to raise sufficient feminist consciousness among young American working-class females). As easy as it is to poke fun at Phyllis Schlafly, there is no denying that while the military may not feminize men (that seems absurd) it does coarsen women, because coarsening human beings of either sex is what the military does in order to accomplish its goals. Or perhaps it’s just the pacifist in me that leads me to be unable to rejoice when women rise in the ranks of any branch of armed service.

Nakedness and the Torah

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 18, 2004
in Faith and Modesty
. 1 Comment

Last week’s posts on modesty (here and here) led to some sharp exchanges in the comments section on the relationship between shame and the body and between sexuality and the visual. Yesterday, good Jonathan Dresner sent me this link to a Torah commentary by a Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld. The rabbi asks

How does the Torah describe Adam and Eve before their sin? How does it put into words the loftiness of these spiritual giants? “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not embarrassed” (2:25). Is this all the Torah has to say about them — that they were naked — and too naive to feel any shame? There is nothing more profound or complimentary for the Torah to say?

The answer is that after the sin of Man, Man realized he had to cover his body — and the source of his passions. As soon as Adam and Even sinned, the Torah writes that they realized they were naked. Beforehand there was no need for clothes. Man’s physical and spiritual sides were in total harmony. There was no temptation to misuse the physical. It was entirely pure; it was a reflection of the spiritual world. Man’s body was no more than a tool to serve G-d. And of course, serving G-d gave it the ultimate physical pleasure. Before the Sin, that which was spiritually good was physically pleasurable as well. There was no contradiction.

With the fall of the physical world, however, this was no longer the case. The physical obscured G-d’s Presence. It could possibly be seen as something capable of being misused, as something which lived on its own and for its own sake. It could be corrupted. One could obtain a sense of pleasure — albeit a fleeting one — from living for the physical alone. It could be seen as having a reality of its own. Adam and Eve could have been seen — and could have seen each other — as objects of passion — as sex objects. The room for confusion — and the temptation for misuse — was great indeed. Man would now have to cover himself to avoid this misconception — as well as to preserve society. His physical was no longer pure or spiritually-inclined. Man could never again be totally comfortable with his inner passions.

Bold emphasis is mine. Those who come from outside the Abrahamic religious traditions may find this all a bit nonsensical, but the rabbi’s commentary fits nicely with Christian interpretations of modesty and the fall. Obviously, what body parts are covered varies from culture to culture to some degree (though virtually all Western cultures cover the genitals, and almost all cover the female breast). What doesn’t vary is the conviction that at least some parts of the body ought to be covered publicly because when exposed, the person who is exposed will inevitably be reduced to, as he puts it, an “object of passion.” Such body parts can and should be exposed to the spouse, but only after that spouse has come to “know” one for one’s true spiritual nature, and thus not inclined to reduce one to a mere object.

Women, appetite, and male fear — UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 17, 2004
in Body, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 10 Comments

I know you’re all eager to know what I’m lecturing on this afternoon. Oh. You’re not? Here goes anyway…

We’re working this week on an interesting issue in body history: the relationship between the appetite, eating disorders, and female sexual desire. In her seminal (sorry) work “Fasting Girls“, Joan Brumberg traced the development in the 19th century of ideas about young women’s desire for food and their simultaneous sexual maturation:

The health of young women was definitely influenced by a general female fashion for sickness and debility… to the physician’s mind, a young woman caught up in the process of sexual maturation was subject to vagaries of appetite and peculiar cravings. Thoughout the medical and advice literature an active appetite or appetite for particular foods (especially meat or spicy items) was used as a trope for a dangerous sexuality. Mary Wood-Allen warned young readers that girls who masturbated ‘will manifest an unnatural appetite, sometimes desiring mustard, pepper, vinegar and spices, salt, etc.’ Because appetite was regarded as a barometer of sexuality, both mothers and daughters were concerned about its expression and control. A good mother was expected to manage this situation before it escalated into a medical or social problem.

With great understatement, Brumberg says that as a result of this Victorian conflation of sexuality and food,

Bourgeois society generated anxieties about food and eating — especially among women.

My students, initially, see little parallel between these notions and the contemporary American situation. But as Susan Bordo points out in Unbearable Weight (another instant classic in the field), that even in modern culture,

Eating is not really a metaphor for the sexual act; rather, the sexual act, when initiated and desired by a woman, is imagined itself as an act of eating, of incorporation and destruction of the object of desire. Thus women’s appetites must be curtailed and controlled, because they threaten to deplete and consume the body and soul of the male.

Bordo references the tiresome 1980s Hall and Oates song “Maneater“:

I wouldn’t if I were you
I know what she can do
She’s deadly man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter
Ooh, the beauty is there but a beast is in the heart

(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater
(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater

What’s the point? I’m convinced that even as we teach young girls ever more extreme strategies to make themselves objects of desire, we remain decidedly fearful about women — of any age — as agents of desire. To eat is to satisfy one’s body’s demands. A woman who feeds herself in response to hunger, who eats to satiety, may well be a woman who might make similar demands upon men. In a world where men are increasingly anxious about their abilities to satisfy women sexually (witness the veritable explosion of drugs to treat impotence), one unconscious strategy to cope with that fear is to depress women’s appetites. Given the longstanding connection between sexuality and eating in women’s lives, it thus follows (according to Bordo, Brumberg, and others) that our cultural obsession with controlling what women put in their mouths is, at least in part, a manifestation of a fear about the power of women’s sexuality. In this analysis, our culture “reads” a slender woman as submissive and undemanding; she is “safe” for a man who doubts his own ability to satisfy her. Thinness is thus less about aesthetics and more about a twisted combination of morality and anxiety.

We’ll see where the discussion goes.

UPDATE: Had a great discussion this afternoon, focusing on the phrase “too much“. I asked how many of my female students had ever been told that they were “too much”. When applied to a man, it refers to his sense of humor: “Oh, that Hugo, he’s too much.” When applied to a woman, it has a far more condemnatory tone: “She’s too loud, too obnoxious, too aggressive, too sexual, too hungry, too demanding, too much like a man.” Virtually all of my students had stories about being warned — usually early in adolescence — about eating too much, showing too much, talking too much, asking for too much. A few also related deeper fears that they were too much: too intense, too filled with emotion, too complex and needy to ever be loved or understood. We talked at length about how what we often perceive a woman as being “too much” when she makes reasonable requests to be treated like a human being and to be allowed to have the same desires (and the opportunity to satisfy those desires) as her brothers.

I realized today, not for the first time, that when we men tell women that they are “too much”, we are really asking them to lower their expectations for us. Often, the demands that “uppity” women make on men are demands not so much for sexual performance (or a nice meal) as they are that we men simply show up emotionally and physically and engage them as fellow rational human beings. That’s a scary thing for many men, and it is far easier to label otherwise natural and reasonable requests as evidence that a woman is “too much.”

Chinchillas, confirmands, and vacillating in the culture war

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 17, 2004
in Chinchillas, Christianity, GLBTQ, Marriage and Youth ministry
. 13 Comments

Thanks to Ralph Luker, I learn that celebrated comedian, actor, and director John Cleese is a fellow lover of the chinchilla:

INTERVIEWER: I heard that you had chinchillas on your property. What exactly is a chinchilla?
CLEESE: I’d say it’s like a cross between a flying squirrel and a rabbit. I should probably write an animated movie about them. They’re very, very nice little creatures.

This makes me very happy indeed.

Since 2000, I’ve been co-teaching a confirmation class at All Saints Episcopal Church. The class (in true modern Episcopal fashion it is called “Seekers”), runs from October until May, and finishes with confirmation. We had 26 ninth and tenth-grade youth start the course; 24 finished, and all but two ended up being confirmed on Saturday by our splendid new bishop, J. Jon Bruno. We stress constantly that confirmation is a decision for the kids to make themselves — not for their parents to make for them. We also honor those kids who complete the course and choose not to be confirmed. Usually, there is at least one set of parents who complain that we make a mistake by allowing the kids to “opt out” of confirmation so freely; this often leads to angry phone calls.

What I appreciated most about Saturday’s confirmation (besides seeing my usually scruffy teenagers in suits
and dresses) was Bishop Bruno’s insistence that confirmation ought to be thought of as a commissioning for a life of service rather than a recognition that one has chosen to affirm the church’s teachings. Out of the more than 20 kids who were confirmed, there were a range of opinions on the divinity of Jesus — but there was unanimity on the centrality of justice and inclusion. It’s easy for conservatives (and uneasy moderates like myself) to poke fun of these buzzwords of the liberal church. But on Saturday, I saw several of my kids weeping and trembling with emotion as they were anointed by the strong hands of Bishop Bruno, and I was reminded that for the young, words like “justice” and “inclusion” are still righteous causes for which to struggle and fight.

During his confirmation sermon, Bishop Bruno told us that he planned to perform his first same-sex blessing on Sunday (yesterday) since becoming Bishop of Los Angeles two years ago. He also alluded to the major financial hit that the diocese had taken in the nine months since the elevation of the openly gay Gene Robinson to the office of bishop of New Hampshire. Rightly or wrongly, he helped remind the kids that by being confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2004, they have stepped forward and taken sides in the culture war. I blanched a bit when I heard that; surely there is more to being a Christian than taking one side or another on the issue of gay marriage! But on the other hand, I wonder how much longer folks like me can do the delicate dance of trying to keep a foot in both camps. After a certain point, the insistence on not taking sides becomes less and less commendable, and becomes — I fear — evidence either of cowardice, or, in my case, an unattractive propensity for endless vacillation.

My teens — with the impetuousness of 15 year-olds — cannot imagine not taking what they see as the only side of justice. Sometimes, I think one part of my job may be to remind them, gently, that not all on the “other side” are wicked, bigoted, or intolerant. Is that the appropriate job for a youth leader? Well, my first and only real job is to love them unconditionally, listen to them continually, hug them frequently, and drive them everywhere. But perhaps my second job is to help them to see other sides to what they imagine to be settled issues. I’m staying with the confirmation program another year. And perhaps, in doing so, I’ve already picked my side.

Nick Berg again — forgiveness and revenge

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 14, 2004
in Aggression and violence and People
. 7 Comments

Yesterday, I wrote:

I know the only way forward is forgiveness, and that, as my Savior taught me and as my church teaches, that forgiveness must be expressed in action. And responding to Nick Berg’s death with violence is incompatible with that understanding of forgiveness.

Both XRLQ (in the comments below my post) and Christy (here) pointed out the problem of forgiving someone for the wrong they have done to someone else. XRLQ said:

No one has the right to “forgive” the monsters who butchered Nick Berg. Only Berg himself has that right, and thanks to them, he is no longer capable of exercising it. All you have the right to forgive them for is the pain that their heinous act caused to YOU. The rest is not yours (or mine, or anyone else’s) to forgive.

Christy noted, in a post that traveled on to other areas of forgiveness:

Other than adding to the general pool of human suffering in the world, they (Berg’s killers) did not hurt me, so it is not my place to forgive them. Jesus can issue a blanket forgiveness of sins. I can only forgive what has been done to me, not what has been done to others.

I tell ya, this is the week that I’ve been blogging in haste, and rethinking in leisure. As I reflect on the issue, and the points raised by commenters, I realize that the relationship between forgiveness and war is, perhaps, more theologically complex than I had realized. As I go to Scripture, most of the core texts that Anabaptists use to explain their pacifism are connected to the New Testament injunction to avoid responding to violence directed towards oneself with still more violence. I’ve always been fond of Romans 12:14-21:

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I put the words in bold that are troubling me this moment. To what extent, I wonder, are the men who did this to Nick Berg my enemy? I suspect that they might have well done the same thing to me if they found me on the streets of Baghdad, but I can’t be certain of it. If I advocate giving food and drink (spiritual and material) to Al Qaeda fighters as a response to their crimes, am I usurping a prerogative (forgiveness of enemies) that is not mine, but that belongs properly to Nick Berg and his family alone? What does it mean to not “repay” evil with evil, when no evil has been done to me in the first place? How can I advocate turning the other cheek when my cheek has not been struck?

It took me a long time to become a pacifist. Beyond giving intellectual assent to the principles of nonviolence, I am quite certain that it would be more accurate to say that I am in the process of slowly turning into a pacifist. I still have a violent heart; I frequently have bloody revenge fantasies (directed towards a remarkable range of people whose slights, real or imagined, have wounded me), and I really enjoy watching football and war movies.

Increasingly, the actual practice of pacifism seems to me to be only possible in community. I can’t possibly do it alone. It’s a good thing the Mennonite small group is coming over to our place tonight for hummus, pita, Orangina, and talk.

Nick Berg, anger, and pacifism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 13, 2004
in Aggression and violence, Christianity, Pacifism, People and War
. 25 Comments

Yes, it’s a bit of a rant. No, it’s not on porn or modesty or Christian historians, so that ought to be moderately refreshing:

In the aftermath of the terrible Nick Berg beheading video, I’ve been struck by the visceral shock and anger of so many of my fellow bloggers. Both Candace and Annika wrote lengthy and impassioned posts about the murder of this young American at the hands of Al Qaeda. Annika remarked:

Sadly, the liberal bloggers that i read regularly have all chosen to ignore this atrocity. It’s not a matter of left vs. right, Bush vs. not-Bush. Nick Berg was an American. How can anyone ignore his murder?

I can only speak for myself, but I haven’t ignored Nick Berg’s murder. I haven’t seen the video on the internet, either (only the images in the newspaper). What I have read about the murder makes clear that this was an appalling act of brutality, utterly without justification, an offense to human decency as well as to the essential tenets of Islam. I grieve for the family of this young man, and I am physically sickened by the details of his murder. And though I am also sickened by the images from Abu Ghraib, I am not going to make an indefensible argument that what was done to the folks in that prison is morally equivalent to what was done to Nick Berg. Is that enough, my conservative friends? Did you imagine that liberal silence on the subject indicated sympathy for Al Qaeda, or perhaps just ideological discomfort?

Look, I’m a Christian pacifist more than I am a “liberal”. My pacifism is not situational. And it is not rooted in idealistic illusions about human nature, either. Before the Nick Berg video, I was not under the impression that the boys in Al Qaeda were nice, reasonable folks, who just needed to be shown the love of Christ in order to bring them around to civilization. Real pacifists have no doubts about the reality of human depravity! Human beings do awful, disgusting, beastly things to each other — they’ve been doing those things for centuries; only recently have they insisted on filming themselves while they do it. So no, I haven’t “changed my mind” about anything as a result of being presented with video evidence of barbarism.

Most Christian pacifists throughout history have held to their pacifism in the face of incredible ugliness and persecution. I am tired of the accusation that Christian pacifism is a position of the “comfortably naive”, while just war theory is the position of the (apparently) “responsibly wise”. Pacifism flourished in the persecutions of 3rd century Rome, in 16th century Europe, and in 20th century South Africa. Sometimes the patient endurance of suffering impressed the oppressors so much that they rethought their oppression (the British in India), but most of the time, a lot of nice pacifists just got killed. I am a pacifist not because I believe that “love can change the world”, but because I believe that God can and does act dramatically in human history to change what we cannot. I believe that to follow Christ is to foreswear the use of weapons, even in self-defense. I believe that the victory over death and evil has already been won by Christ, and my only job is to follow Him.

Look, these are the musings of a childless man. (Pacifism, I’m told, gets a whole lot tougher when you have little ones). But despite what some of my more conservative and hawkish friends say (and they are truly friends), I am not a pacifist because I fail to comprehend the enormity of human wickedness, nor am I pacifist because I am a coward. I am a pacifist because my lord tells me that even while I grieve Nick Berg, and feel nausea and sadness and, yes, rage at his death, I must pray all the harder for the men who killed him. I must respond even to this unspeakable ugliness with love. If Nick Berg had been my brother, could I write those same words? In the short run, no; I would surely be overcome by an anger so intense that it blinded me. But in the end, no matter what my human emotions may be, I know the only way forward is forgiveness, and that, as my Savior taught me and as my church teaches, that forgiveness must be expressed in action. And responding to Nick Berg’s death with violence is incompatible with that understanding of forgiveness.

Pushing too hard

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 13, 2004
in Addiction and mental illness, Athletics and Fitness, Body and Vanity
. 1 Comment

Yesterday, I made the mistake of running. I’ve been immensely frustrated by this respiratory infection, and the concomitant coughs, wheezes, and pains. (I’ve pulled all the muscles in my chest from so much coughing). Yesterday, I did a six-miler, and my legs were fine — but I hacked and wheezed and was utterly exhausted from trying so hard to breathe. I definitely set myself back.

For all of my talk about accepting our bodies, I must confess that I am addicted to working out. Not so much for appearance’s sake (though I am not immune to vanity), but for the endorphin rush. I haven’t had a good workout in almost three weeks, and I am frustrated and fearful of losing my fitness. But instead of resting, I push and push and push myself and delay my own recovery… I am very human.

Still, my cough is better than it was, and I will be well soon. The hardest thing of all is remembering that the way I feel now is not the way I will always feel. If I can remember that, I’m in good shape. And if this is my biggest problem today, I am indeed blessed.

More on modesty

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 13, 2004
in Body, Feminism, Modesty and Sexuality
. 21 Comments

Anne Zook and Jonathan Dresner both take me to task (though I had my defenders — namely XRLQ) for my post on modesty yesterday.

Let’s review a bit.

I wrote: how empowering, not to mention erotically fulfilling, traditional sex roles can be for women!

Anne responded:

Far from accepting today’s world, far from dealing realistically with the growing problem of internet erotica, you’re advocating a return to “traditional sex roles.”

Might I remind you that “traditional” sex roles encompass men as the aggressors and instigators and women as near-passive objects? Men coaxing, persuading, and even forcing women into sex while the woman bears all of the shame, the guilt, and most of the potential consequences of the encounter?

The biggest problem with a woman’s “traditional sex role” is a man’s “traditional sex role.”

If I could rephrase what I had written, I would have said “it would be a mistake to assume that traditional sex roles did not hold powerful erotic potential for women.” That more accurately captures what I was trying to say, and I appreciate the corrective.

I am NOT advocating a return to traditional sex roles. Neither is Wolf, and neither (really) is Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, who elsewhere has written vigorously in favor of women’s ordination to the pastorate of evangelical churches. The same woman who reviewed “A Return to Modesty” in such glowing terms also wrote this:

That men and women are different somehow is undeniable, but pinpointing those differences often proves a difficult task. The moment we say “women are gentle” we instantly think of men who are more so and women who are not at all; as soon as we assert “men are aggressive” contrary examples come to mind. The very fact that we tend to associate certain traits with one group, and then are forced to apply them to the other, reveals the stereotype as a shortcut for thought, preferred by lazy minds and lazy societies. At the very least, we are hard pressed to say that any set of characteristics, especially so protean as those of human beings, can constitute an “ontological” difference.

But I’m digressing. What I ought to have made clear is that sexual modesty requires taking responsibility for the signals our bodies send. Women are responsible for how they dress; men are responsible for how they react to women’s dress. The reverse is also true. I see no reason why responsibility must be an “either/or” and not a “both/and”!

Anne is concerned that I am blaming women for men’s failure to exercise self-control. That was certainly not my intent! I agree completely with Anne that porn is primarily a male problem. Indeed, when I made the assertion that all men who consume porn were complicit in Lara Roxx’s HIV-status, I was arguing that male responsibility extends a good deal further than most are prepared to admit. And when men become so overwhelmed by pornographic images that they have difficulty being aroused by “real women”, the primary culpability is still theirs. But while we work against pornography and a culture that objectifies and exploits the female body, we can also point out that modesty offers tremendous rewards and benefits to women as well.

Here is something else I should have said, and it comes after 24 hours of reflection:

A culture in which the body is exposed and sexualized means a culture in which the individual inside the body is devalued. Concealing the body should not be seen merely as a strategy to enhance arousal (though it may have that salutary effect). Rather, modesty (for both men and women) is about the conscious choice not to distract, disconcert, or unnecessarily arouse those with whom you are interacting in the public sphere. We live in a culture in which both men and women have increasing difficulty distinguishing the appearance of their own flesh from the value they place on their own lives. To practice modesty is to make the individual decision to “opt out” of the game, to refuse to play by the cruel and capricious rules of our sexualized consumer culture.

Jonathan thinks I am — like most Christians — too enamored of the idea that the exposed body is always a sexual body. He writes:

The idea that the body should be hidden because of its sexual potential (not for warmth, or neatness, or because pockets are convenient, but for shame) is at the root of the titilating erotic power you claim is present in more hidden flesh. Exposure is bad because it seems to reveal our self-knowledge of our sexual nature, and creates an environment in which others are also aware of our sexual nature. But the question arises: why should they care? They care because we still think that the exposed body is inherently sexual, and we think that because we are ashamed or afraid of that sexual potential.

What if the exposed body were just the exposed body? What if all it revealed was flesh? What if we realized that to view was not to possess; that to expose was not to offer? (also that to cover was not necessarily to hide) ?

I like his second paragraph a lot. But my Christian theology tells me that men and women were created to desire each other; our bodies our inherently sexually desireable. Sex is, at some level, meant to be intensely visual. (Especially, but by no means exclusively, for men). This is true cross-culturally (though many cultures eroticize different parts of the body). Nakedness and sexuality are linked by design, Christians argue, even though exposure to too many naked bodies can lead to a drop in libidinousness (Wolf’s point). But Jonathan seems to be making a rather quixotic argument: that the display of the human body and an individual’s erotic potential are not inextricably linked. I’m fairly certain that for most folks in our culture, that “linkage” (whether cultural or divine in origin) is fairly well set in their minds. Responding to that link with a call to modesty and self-restraint for everyone seems like a far better strategy than trying to convince teenage boys that a woman’s breasts are really just utilitarian sacks of flesh!

Anyhow, the dialogue is going to continue.

Modesty, concealment, and the erotics of the hidden — updated

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 12, 2004
in Faith, Feminism and Modesty
. 20 Comments

I keep saying I’m not going to post on pornography any longer, and then I promptly break that vow. A friend sent me a link to this Naomi Wolf essay from last October’s New York magazine (written before the news broke of her “encounter” with Harold Bloom).

Wolf makes a compelling case that far from inflaming men, exposure to porn deadens them to real, flesh and blood women (I’m quoting her at length here, but it’s worth it):

Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.

To her great credit, Wolf not only recognizes this, but catches a glimpse of the spiritual nature of the solution:

I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Good stuff, Naomi! I rejoice when a secular feminist sees the practical wisdom in religious tradition! I rejoice particularly when a figure like Wolf — who in her younger years came close to advocating promiscuity as a means of liberation for women — grasps just how empowering, not to mention erotically fulfilling, traditional sex roles can be for women!

I’ve often recommended Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty. Shalit makes an eloquent case for the reclaiming of modesty not merely for the protection of women but for their liberation. Sarah Hinlicky’s review in First Things (back in 1999) makes a case — from a Christian perspective — that is identical to Wolf’s:

(Shalit’s) powerful insight is that modesty is ultimately more erotic than licentiousness. Men are more excited, she suggests, by the twinkling eyes behind the veil and the slender ankle peeking out from the long skirt than they are by casually exposed body parts and effortless conquests in the sack. The most telling example of this is her comparison (complete with photographs) of turn–of–the–century women lounging on the beach in their terribly demure bathing suits and positively wicked grins, with the dull, distracted expressions of dutifully unrepressed nudists on their beach. Mischievous and modest; bored and bare. Something more than meets the eye is at work here. Shalit wants the rules back because, without the rules, the unruly, the scandalous, the exciting, and the erotic all disappear into thin air. (All bold emphases are mine).

Wolf and Shalit both “get it”. If faith is the belief in things unseen, the erotic is the longing for things unseen. We’ve got secular Jewish feminists and evangelical Protestant feminists on the same page, folks.
Things may be looking up.

UPDATE: Anne strenously objects to the line of reasoning in this post, beginning her lengthy and heated reply to me: I am just so appalled by such limited thinking. One thing I’ve learned in teaching gender studies: the gap between my intent and other folks’ perception is often vast. I replied to Anne in her comments section, but I’m going to do some more reflecting.

I’ve also caught myself, and changed “Allan Bloom” to “Harold Bloom” in my opening paragraph. I’ve made that mistake before, and no one ever points it out. Given how different they are, however, it’s quite a boo-boo.

Mennonites and Hitler, teacher-student relationship policies, and struggling with self-righteousness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2004
in Christianity, Sexual ethics and transformation, Teaching and Vanity
. 6 Comments

Speaking of coming to terms with the past and one’s failings (see post below), I came across this fine essay by James Regier, entitled Mennonitische Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Prussian Mennonites, the Third Reich, and Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past. It’s a heck of a lot more interesting to read than the title implies. It tells the troubling story of Prussian Mennonites and their willingness to accomodate Hitler during the era of the Third Reich. Upon the German takeover of Poland, a Mennonite publication noted:

Our German peoples have endured unspeakable difficulties under the Polish yoke during its twenty-year foreign rule. The most difficult at the end. Then God, the Lord, helped them through the hand of our Führer and freed them. We thank our Führer for this act of liberation.

Even more upsetting, in June 1934 (a year after Hitler came to power) Regier tells us that military nonresistance was officially erased from the Mennonite confession. Thousands of Mennonite youth fought in World War Two; among Prussians (and most German Mennonites came from Prussia) there was not a single instance of a young man refusing to serve in combat. Ouch.

As an adult convert to Anabaptism, I confess I’ve idealized my theological forebears for their enduring commitment to pacifism, simplicity, and peace in the hardest of times. Regier — a Mennonite himself — does the hard and necessary work of “opening the books” and “telling the truth” so that even those of us who are proudest of our faith might be humbled by the all too human failings of those who shared our confession.

On a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT note, my work as chair of the college senate’s ad-hoc committee on consensual relationships is almost done. After three years (the committee formed in fall 2001) and countless drafts, we presented our final proposal to the Academic Senate yesterday. It will go to a final vote on May 24th. Here’s the key wording:

A consensual relationship, for purposes of this policy, is defined as one in which two individuals are involved by mutual consent in a romantic, physically intimate, and/or sexual relationship. A consensual relationship that might be appropriate in other circumstances is inappropriate when it occurs between members of the College community if one individual has power or authority over the other.

Accordingly, relationships of the following nature are strictly prohibited:
a. Between an academic manager and any student within the area with whom the manager is required to interact in an official capacity.
b. Between an instructor, coach, counselor, or individual in any other position of instructive, evaluative, or advisory authority over students and any student for whom the instructor, coach, counselor, or individual has direct instructive, evaluative, or advisory authority.
c. Between a direct supervisor and a student.

Most schools have their own versions; this is ours. When I presented it to the senate yesterday (for the fourth time, mind you) several of my colleagues objected vociferously to the premise that undergirds this change to our faculty code of conduct. One prof in the English department remarked that she had had her husband and her children as students, and she deeply resented the new policy’s implication that her conduct had been unethical. It was awkward, but as politely as I could, I looked this (very senior) colleague in the eye and told her that yup, I thought her conduct was inherently unethical. After all, I pointed out, we have to avoid even the appearance of partiality. I’m afraid I was rapidly heading towards a self-righteous sermon, and she was gearing up for battle when the chair of the senate quickly gaveled us back to order. Though I think I was and am in the right, I know I could have been a good deal more tactful with her. She’s a formidable figure on campus, has been so for thirty plus years, but I am going to have to screw up my courage and go knock on her door soon and apologize. I am not looking forward to it.

Honestly, at the risk of sounding very self-congratulatory(again, Hugo?) it was difficult work coming up with a policy designed to placate and please so many different campus constituencies, and dagnammit, I’m proud of this little thing. As a (relatively) young man who teaches courses on sexuality and gender studies, I know that maintaining safe and ethical boundaries with my students is essential to my legitimacy as a professor. But I also know that some folks (students, teachers, administrators) may well need explicit policies in place to remind them of the importance of those boundaries.

“Be proud at least that we know we were wrong”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2004
in Poetry and Politics
. 1 Comment

Watching coverage this morning on CNN of the Senate hearings on the Iraqi prison scandal, the lines of one of my favorite American poets, Richard Wilbur, came to mind. Here’s an excerpt from his poem written in 1986, for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty:

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…

There aren’t many patriotic poems and hymns which I can answer with a resounding “amen”. This is one.

Prisoners, porn, feminism, domination

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2004
in Feminism, Porn and War
. 5 Comments

With the home computer busted, I sure do miss a lot when I am out of the office. (I have ordered a new desktop system from Dell, and will finally get broadband at home — soon.)

One thing I missed was the discussion that began late last week about the prison scandal in Iraq and feminist comparisons between the Abu Ghraib photographs and porn. Ralph at Cliopatria posted about it on Friday, linking to several articles. Through HNN, I read this terrific piece by Donna Hughes (a Gender Studies prof in Rhode Island) in the National Review. Excerpt:

Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or “adult entertainment”? Why can we easily see the violations of human beings in one set of images, but miss it in others? What if the Iraqi men had been forced to smile, could we be convinced that there was a newly formed “publishing and film production” company in Baghdad instead of sexual abuse and humiliation being perpetrated?

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have condemned the acts and the abuse of the Iraqis. They said that these acts do not represent American values. I want to believe that is true. Yet, I see the common themes and methods used by other types of perpetrators on different victims. These similar images are what the young American soldiers from the Internet generation have grown up with and learned to call “adult entertainment.” Did they become desensitized to the harm of doing such things to people by seeing multiple images of similar abuse to women? Did they learn how to violate someone by being a voyeur to abuse, and in Abu Ghraib they had the chance to become perpetrators — and pornographers? Did they fully comprehend the harm they were doing?

Cliopatria then linked to a Clayton Cramer, who offered this response to Hughes:

I completely agree with her that a lot of pornography is degrading to the people involved–I see examples often enough in my in-box. There is one rather dramatic difference between the pictures from Abu Ghraib and the vast majority of commercial pornography–the question of choice. Unless there’s something that Professor Hughes knows about Abu Ghraib’s detainees that the rest of us don’t know, every single of them was there against his will.

One might be able to make the case that economic necessity “forces” some people to make pornography today–but only in the same sense that economic necessity “forces” me to work for my current employer, instead of doing what I would prefer–blogging all night, and haunting university library stacks all day.

And then my esteemed fellow Cliopatriarch, Jonathan Dresner, rebuts Cramer, saying that ol’ Clayton is

splitting hairs when (he) attack(s) the pornography argument, because the bulk of Hughes’ argument (which Cramer accepts) is about the connection between sexual humiliation and enslavement (sexual, political or otherwise), and the fact that there are “voluntary” (within the limits of social choice) subjects of pornography and “voluntary” prostitutes does not in any way rebut the existence of involuntary participants. Moreover, the inability (or unwillingness) of consumers to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary participants means that the sexual product/services marketplace is clearly tainted. The connection between political repression and sexual humiliation is even more powerful, and that’s clearly a way in which we should be loudly and clearly distinguishing ourselves from Iran, etc., not making excuses for diving (not falling) to that level.

Dang. Between Donna Hughes and Dresner, all the money quotes have been taken!

I agree completely with Jonathan that one of the most troubling aspects of pornography is that we eroticize the absence of consent. Those of us who are most disturbed by the porn industry recognize that the harm done to its perfomers is not the greatest of its sins, though the harm it does is deep and enduring to thousands (Hughes’ piece goes into details). The most destructive aspect of the porn industry is the harm it does to the culture by presenting images of degradation and domination as “fun” and “entertaining”. (Like many, I am fascinated by the role of American women guards in these pictures from Abu Ghraib. I don’t doubt for a second that they — like virtually every other American young adult — had seen plenty of porn that depicted women as victims in their lives. One cannot help but wonder if the opportunity to “turn the tables” as it were, and force men into traditionally female positions, was too irresistable to ignore. )

One of the most common subgenres of American porn is the “facial”, which features men ejaculating onto women’s faces. The recent New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib makes it evident that Iraqi prisoners were compelled to do just that with one another. “Facials” are something young Americans in Iraq have grown up with on the Internet, and I haven’t any doubt that many of the postures and positions they forced upon their captives were inspired by pornography. Porn was the text from which the torturers learned their techniques; what is normally done to young and vulnerable women was now done to imprisoned, vulnerable men. But beyond that, there isn’t a heck of a lot of difference.

At its core, porn is less about pleasure than it is about power. Most women spend their young adulthood trying to “show just enough, but not too much”. Most young men are denied total and unrestricted visual access to the bodies of their female peers. Lots of young men, who hear endless “nos” and experience numerous rejections, fantasize about dominating and controlling the very young women whom they cannot physically possess. Porn offers these young men — and older men too — an alternative world where women’s legs are spread instead of crossed, where their bodies are receptive instead of closed, where a “no” can always be overcome and ultimately, no woman can hold back her own ecstatic “yes!” Porn doesn’t just make its consumers feel sexy, it makes them feel powerful. And when one suddenly finds oneself in a position of total power over another human being, is it any wonder that one might be tempted to force them to recreate the very images and act out the very scenarios that made one feel so wonderfully, near divinely, strong?

Two must-reads

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2004
in Links
. 0 Comments

If you can’t bear the idea of slogging through my post right below this one, here are the two must-reads for the day, both far better-written than my own:

Jen Lemen posted this breathtaking mother’s day piece yesterday, it includes a gorgeous mini-sermon. Here’s the final paragraph, and it ought to inspire you to read the rest of it (it made this boy cry):

I want to say to you today, as a mother, as a daughter, as a woman deeply aware of everything other and beautiful dying to be broken out from inside of me, that being in a state of need, that not being enough, that having a mother who carried this kind of burden and who maybe still does–this has fundamentally changed me. I wonder, I wonder today, what miracle might be wrought in us, if we dared to hope so deeply, if we dared to dream so much. Sometimes it is in our great need itself that the miracle happens. That in owning up to our desperation that Jesus comes to us, turning crumbs into a feast, letting us know that he is with us, no matter where we come from, no matter what our shame.

You also need to head over to Candied Ginder and read this splendid post on “morning-after” contraception. Here’s why Candace posted:

Why am I going to the trouble to write about this and post it? Because I’m pro-life. Because I do not believe I have the right to tell anyone not to have sex if they’re not willing to have the baby. Because I know what restricting access to birth control can do to a woman. Because I believe in other options. Because I believe in a society that can reduce abortion through compassion, through prevention, and through community support…

Amen to that!