Archive for May, 2004

Hugo on steroids, definitions of feminism, and what it might mean “to believe in women”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2004
in Feminism
. 17 Comments

My respiratory infection is only slowly getting better. I am now taking Prednisone, the powerful steroid; it worked the last time I had such breathing problems in 1999. It has a remarkably stimulating impact on my appetite, and it keeps me awake at night — but today I feel better than I have felt in two weeks, and that is progress. I’m hoping I will be able to run later this week — as any readers who are exercise addicts know, there are few frustrations comparable to being deprived of the opportunity to sweat recreationally!

Here comes the Monday rant/essay:

Last week, Rhesa from Creative Slips sent me a terrific e-mail, asking about feminism. With her permission, I’m going to make the attempt to respond publicly. Here’s an excerpt from what she wrote:

For the past few days I’ve been re-reading your posts
while trying to get a clear picture of what a modern
feminist is and what s/he believes in. Frankly, it’s
hard. For the most part, I’m really curious about
feminism because I don’t call myself a feminist…

What I’m looking for are
answers, basically. What are the goals for today’s
feminists? And I don’t mean for this to sound
condescending at all, but why should I care?

These are excellent questions, and they aren’t at all dissimilar from the questions my students in Women’s History classes ask regularly. At the beginning of each semester, I always ask students in that class whether or not they consider themselves to be feminists. For the past decade, the response rate has been more or less the same: 20% say “yes”, 20% say “definitely not” and the majority offer some variation on the time-honored phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Part of the problem is that the media has distorted the image of what it means to be a feminist. Despite the fact that “bra-burning” never took place publicly during the 1960s or 1970s (though there were public demonstrations where women discarded uncomfortable undergarments), my students still associate feminism with this non-existent practice. They also, as one of my students put it succinctly, see feminists on TV as “hairy, ugly, smelly, and angry”. Above all, they have become convinced that to be a feminist is to dislike men — both collectively and as individuals. Overwhelmed by media distortions, the majority are understandably reluctant to claim the mantle of feminism!

Another problem is that the word “feminism” encompasses an astonishingly broad range of theories and practices. There are “radical” feminists; there are “Marxist” feminists; there are “liberal” feminists; there are “separatist” feminists; there are certainly “Christian” (and Jewish, Islamic, etc.) feminists; there are many different varieties of “academic” feminists. Googling any of these terms can provide one not just with one definition, but with many — often contradictory ones at that.

Still another problem is that the organized feminist movement in this country has chosen, in recent years, to associate itself almost exclusively with the abortion issue. Last month’s March for Women’s Lives is a fine case in point. The title of the March was vague indeed, but the intent wasn’t. The Feminist Majority foundation not only has the web address feminist.org, but their agenda revolves almost solely around reproductive rights issues. (There are small pro-life feminist organizations, including the wonderful Feminists for Life, to whom I donate monthly.)

(On a tangential note, I’m always struck by the silence of pro-choice organizations on the primary use of abortion in India and China — as a means of sex-selection, where it is routine to terminate the lives of healthy girls in utero. Clearly, it is access to abortion — not the absence of abortion rights — that is literally the biggest threat to “women’s lives” in the two most populous countries in the world. But I digress).

So far, we’re not doing a great job of making the case for feminism! Rhesa’s final question, “Why should I care?” has yet to be answered. Well, if Rhesa sees preserving access to abortion as the great struggle of her life and of our time, then she has a cause to join. But polling shows that most young women are increasingly ambivalent about abortion, a cause for either celebration or alarm depending upon one’s views. So what else is there to feminism in general? Let me make the case here I make to my students:

To be a feminist is, at its core, to believe in women, and to believe them to be deserving of equal treatment at the hands of legal, cultural, economic, and religious institutions. (Let’s note in passing that “equal” does not mean the same thing as “identical”.) To be a feminist is to look back into the past, and note that for most of recorded human history, women have been accorded less influence, less power, and access to far fewer resources than men. Indeed, in most instances women have been — until recently — seen as the legal property of fathers and husbands. To be a feminist today is to undertake the task of making oneself aware of how far we in the prosperous West have come from a world where women were chattel. To be a feminist today is to honor our feminist forebears by remembering the names and re-telling the stories of those who struggled for equal opportunity.

To be a feminist today, however, is not merely to remember the “bad old days” and offer hosannas of thanksgiving. To be a feminist today is to be aware that acquisition of the right to vote, the right to education, and the right to own property (the three great goals of 19th-century feminism) are alone not enough to give women genuine equality in the public and private spheres. Modern feminists are concerned that we live in a society where “poverty has a woman’s face” (see here for some stats). Modern feminists note that in a world where women outlive men, and in a world where women remain the overwhelming majority of those who provide for the basic needs of the elderly, that the ageing of America is itself an issue with huge repercussions for women’s lives. Modern feminists also note that in much of the developing world, women remain in virtual slavery, sexually and economically exploited.

My own concern as a feminist has been with our cultural loathing for women’s bodies. I am troubled that we live in a culture where women enjoy unprecedented access to political and economic power, but are increasingly anxious about their own flesh. As I wrote elsewhere, I see no progress in moving from a world where girls undergo clitoridectomies to a world where girls undergo breast implants.

And as a feminist, I believe the whole notion of “choice” to be problematic. One only can “choose” from a limited selection of choices made available at any one time. Choices and desires are very different things, and feminists know this. The choice between an abortion and raising a child on one’s own in poverty and shame is not a happy one. Most young women who “choose” abortion might choose differently if our society were willing to provide young mothers with sufficient emotional and financial support so that they were not forced to choose between their babies and their futures. (And many of these young women might choose differently if the father of the child were willing to “step up” and be present for his new family emotionally, financially, and physically.) The choice between cosmetic surgery and being accepted as beautiful is not a happy one either — what most women really desire is to be loved and affirmed and wanted as they are. Radical diets, surgery, and hyper-sexualization are strategies of desperation rather than choices rooted in genuine desire.

I still may not have answered Rhesa’s question. But let me finish this extremely long entry (you can’t possibly still be reading, can you?) with this:

I want the women in my life, young and old, to be able to enjoy the same freedoms that their lovers and husbands and brothers do. I want them to be able to walk into parking lots at night without fear of rape. I want them to be able to use their voices in the pulpit, in the professoriate, and someday, lord willing, in the presidency, without being told that they have “stepped out of their place.” I want a society where women’s bodies are neither feared and shrouded (ala the Taliban) nor reduced to vulgarly displayed commodities to be ogled, fondled, judged and consumed (ala today). I want a society where certain innate differences between men and women are understood and honored, where flexibility in gender roles does not diminish what ought to be an enduring appreciation for women’s individual and collective capacity to give life and to nurture. I want a society where young women can laugh and jump and run around and have dreams, where they are valued for their minds more than for their bodies. I want a society where mothers feel that the society around them values their work as much as it values that of the police officer or the insurance agent or the soldier. I want a society where older women, who so often are left alone, are heard and valued and respected and cared for until natural death.

To be a feminist means that I must be committed, in ways large and small, to working to make this into reality. It means working in solidarity with other men and women. But above all, for me as a feminist, I must be willing all to identify those aspects of myself where my language does not match my life, and I must hold myself — and others — accountable to change.

Until Monday…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Blogging and Body
. Closed

I’m off for the weekend… my computer is broken at home, so no blogging until Monday. I’ve been sent some questions to answer about feminism, so I’ll be on to that next week. One task for the weekend is to explore buying a new computer system for the home, so I can blog every day but the Lord’s!

I’ll be resting this weekend; my lungs aren’t ready to let me run yet. My girlfriend is doing a race tomorrow, so I’ll be cheering her on madly while letting my body recover. It isn’t easy to walk away from training — the anxiety about losing fitness is almost maddening. Still, it’s one of those things that reminds me that my own self-worth needs to be grounded in things other than my own body’s capabilities.

Lunch happens!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2004
in Blogging
. 1 Comment

Well, it happened! I finally met a blogger for lunch. John Sloas of Crooked Line and I met for salad, pizza, and fellowship today. We’ve been reading and commenting on each other’s blogs for months now. What an amazing gift the internet has been! And how well it seems you can get to know someone whom you have not met in the conventional sense.

Cool beans.

Why I love my job.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 6, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Teaching and Vanity
. 9 Comments

I’m in a deeply good mood as I write this, so forgive the fact that the prose is gonna be overwrought and self-congratulatory.

I got one of those very special phone calls this afternoon, the kind that comes from a former student. Two years ago, the woman who called today had taken my “Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History” class, and she was calling to share some news and to say thanks.

At the time that she was enrolled, this gal — I’ll call her T. — identified as straight. Her appearance and her affect suggested that the fuller truth might be otherwise, but I (showing a rare degree of discretion on my part, it ain’t my strong suit) didn’t probe. T was from a very conservative Christian family in the Rockies, and had transferred to PCC from a small, nearby evangelical college. She was one of the best students in the class — always asking challenging questions, eager to do the reading and to push all of us deeper and deeper. What really intrigued T above all else was the reconciliation of Christian doctrine and homosexual identity. The day that the openly gay Pentecostal minister Jerrell Walls visited our class (see my post about him here), T was fascinated, and she asked him many excellent questions. In any event, she and I lost touch after the semester ended — at least until her phone call this afternoon.

T is now a member of a Metropolitan Community Church congregation in the greater L.A. area. (MCC doesn’t just stand for Mennonite Central Committee, it also stands for the world’s largest gay and lesbian, Christ-centered church). When T told me where she was worshipping these days, it was her way of telling me that she was “out” now — both to herself and to at least some of her friends. (Her family — whom she believes are not ready to accept her — have not yet been told). I rejoiced with her, and heard about everything from her new girlfriend (a former Mormon, it turns out, and also in MCC) to her desire to carry the message of Christ’s love directly into the heart of the gay and lesbian community. She is more “on fire for Jesus” than ever before (her particular MCC church is quite charismatic, happily enough), and she told me that she feels extraordinary peace at knowing that she is loved perfectly and completely just as she is. T thanked me for the role my class played in her journey towards discovering herself. Friends whom she made in that class have been with her to support her on the journey of the last two years. But above all (and forgive me if this sounds incredibly self-serving, but people, it’s my blog) she thanked me for all of the times I strove to make the case that the Christian life is not incompatible with identity as a sexually-active gay or lesbian. (And trust me, that was a point upon which I grew tiresome). She said it had given her hope — hope that previously had not existed.

I know I have more traditional brothers and sisters in blog-land who believe that I gave her false hope. They think my theology is rooted in the culture, when my view of the culture ought to be rooted in “sound” theology. Meanwhile, my secular liberal friends wonder why I spent so much time talking about Christian faith in a course on the history of the LGBTQQ civil rights movement. Some of my more conservative readers may wonder what on earth the community colleges in California think they’re doing, offering such damn fool courses in the midst of a budget meltdown. And some of my older gay and lesbian friends wonder what a thrice-divorced heterosexual Mennonite is doing teaching “their” history.

Anyhow, the upshot is that T is going to graduate soon from her local Cal State. She believes she may be called into ministry. And she called this afternoon to tell me how important that one course had been to her emotionally, academically, and spiritually. And God bless her, she made my day. You know, I’m not much of an intellectual, not really. I don’t really enjoy debating the arcane. I’m not really all that gripped by the search for logical truth, frankly. I’m quite aware that the list of books I ought to have read grows longer and longer, even as I while away the time I could be reading with my blogging, my girlfriend, my running, my chinchilla, and my kids at church. Rather than insisting on rigorous argument in the classroom, I probably spend far too much time trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and I know darned well that part of me just loves the controversy, but oh, how incredibly fortunate I am to do what I do. And in the midst of all of these apparent contradictions, I remain prayerfully convinced that in some small and odd little way, I am serving Him who gave me my strange and mercurial heart.

Thinkin’ about rats

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 6, 2004
in Books
. Closed

One of the few ways in which I still feel vaguely intellectual is my enduring devotion to the New York Review of Books. My mother has always read it (she gives me a subscription for my birthday each year), and I rarely fail to finish half the articles in a given issue.

Last night, lying on the floor of my bedroom, I supervised the antics of my chinchilla with one eye, and read this fascinating piece in the Review on rats. It made me disturbingly happy. Read it.

I think Matilde the chinchilla may need a playmate.

Thoughtful responses and the objectification of the male professoriate

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 6, 2004
in Porn and Teaching
. 3 Comments

Some fellow bloggers have had some thoughtful responses and disagreements with me this week. Anne writes in response to Monday’s post. I wrote (and continue to believe) the following:

If men were not willing to pay for porn, Lara Roxx would not have HIV. That means that all those within our culture who produce or consume porn –and even those who merely condone it — are complicit in her infection.

Anne’s reply:

First, it’s just wrong to say, “If porn didn’t exist, this woman wouldn’t have gotten sick.” Upon what does one base such a sweeping assumption?

If she hadn’t been filming that porn movie, she wouldn’t have contracted that disease in that fashion on that day. That’s as much as you can legitimately argue.

Moving on, the unspoken assumption (in the linked post) that it was natural for this young woman to choose making porn as what seemed to be the fastest or easiest route to wealth. This assumption is also a problem for me.

A lot of people on this planet are faced with life choices around work. Most of us would like to maximize our income as quickly as possible. Almost none of us choose to make porn.

If this young woman believed she had no other option, then maybe she was unprepared for life as an adult, but it’s absurd to blame the porn industry for her choice. I’ve skimmed a handful of the articles and if it says anywhere that she was shanghaied or pressured or kidnapped and forced to make porn, I didn’t see it.

It always comes back to personal responsibility.

You want to fix a problem, by all means deal with this society’s unhealthy attitude toward sex.

Excellent. I’m a new fan! For now, let me just argue for the possibility that when it comes to assigning blame for Lara Roxx’s HIV, it’s not an “either/or” but a “both/and”. I am not denying that this young porn actress has some culpability! I’m just laying the lion’s share of the blame at the feet of the sex industry and in the laps (forgive me, please) of the individual male consumers of porn who pay to see young women’s bodies violated as Lara’s was. Her lack of personal responsibility does not vitiate the porn consumer’s moral culpability! I see no reason to make blame a zero-sum game…

Amy has a superb response to yesterday’s post on victimhood. Read the whole thing, but here’s a brief excerpt:

I think I understand (Hugo’s) point, but to me it’s not about being or not being a victim. It’s a defiant refusal to allow the fact that I am a female to be my defining characteristic. Sure, there are challenges that I face because I am female that I would not have to deal with were I male. However, I don’t want everything I do or don’t do colored by the fact that I am a female. There are parts of the “system” that I do buy into and I won’t apologize for it.

Excellent. I’m genuinely humbled to get such thoughtful responses, and welcome vigorous disagreement.

And lastly, Jonathan Dresner sent me a link to this PDF File of University of Texas study on professorial attractiveness; it comes with the terrific title: “Beauty In the Classroom: Professors’ Pulchritude and Pedagogical Productivity”. Jonathan draws my attention to this part of the conclusion:

“the impact of beauty on professors’ course ratings is much lower for female than for male faculty.
Good looks generate more of a premium, bad looks more of a penalty for male instructors.”

Talk about subverting the dominant paradigm! I read the piece, but I still can’t believe that to be true. Then again, as a heterosexual male, I was rarely influenced by my professors’ looks (and with the exception of the splendid Marilyn Adams who taught me Duns Scotus at UCLA and served on my dissertation committee, I never had a significant female professor in my graduate career; I can’t even remember my undergrad profs).

Let me know what y’all think.

Beauty, culture, hot profs, the need for an endgame, and the importance of “being something different”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2004
in Body, Christianity, Clothing and Fashion, Ratemyprofessors and Teaching
. 3 Comments

What are we trying to accomplish?

Jonathan Dresner asks this question in response to my Monday rant on women and choice. Here’s his larger point:

…one of the things I think has been missing from the discussion is a sense of the direction in which this movement is pushing: what is the endgame, and how will we know if we are winning?

For example, I have never heard a colleague (male or female) comment on a students’ (male or female) attractiveness or lack thereof. Surely this represents progress, even if only within the oddities of academia. (On the other hand, I just heard of a colleague who recently married a student; I know, it may or may not be problematic, but it’s still questionable.) But ratemyprof.com includes a checkbox for “hot” profs.

(To pick up on Jonathan’s tangent, let me say parenthetically that the whole notion of evaluating professors on their “hotness” doesn’t strike me as problematic, largely because of the absence of a power dynamic. Perhaps I am naive, but I can’t imagine that students actually decide which courses to take based upon their professor’s looks, nor are they likely to de-legitimize what he or she is saying merely because he or she is “hot.” Honestly, I’ve always believed that those kids who thought I was “hot” were merely attracted to the fact that I was — and still am — relatively young. On the other hand, for a prof to comment on a student’s attractiveness — when the student is at a clear disadvantage — is inherently more problematic.)

But seriously, if we confine discussion of the “endgame” to the classroom, I’ll say that I long for an academic culture where women and men can come together and do their work in an atmosphere free from anxiety about their appearance. I wrote last week that “sisterhood is easier in winter“, because I noticed that the more clothes that my students wear, the more comfortable everyone seems to feel. When our bodies are more concealed, we are — perhaps paradoxically — liberated to focus on “what really matters”. What do I really want? I suppose I want the classroom to feel year-round the way it does when the weather is chilly (or as chilly as it gets in Pasadena): safe. How we do that without imposing impossible or absurd dress codes is beyond me, but I know it is, emotionally speaking, the “endgame” in terms of clothing in the classroom!

On the other hand, Christy (my twin) writes in a comment on today’s post:

Talk all we want - at the end of the day, nothing has changed. I don’t want to confine my choices to complying with or yelling about the system. I would rather work on creating alternatives - small spaces where we value interdependence, empathy, and justice, where we don’t talk or think about our clothes or body image that much because we’re too busy being something different to care.

It’s beautifully put. And it’s a nice reminder to me that part of my work as a feminist must be to help develop these alternatives. She’s right, too, that to build communities where men and women really can move beyond their own narcissistic issues will require that those communities be intently focused on a higher and more important cause. It’s important not merely to do something different; as Christy puts it, we must be something different. Trouble is, I’ve rarely seen that kind of intense community form and remain in place for long. The itinerant nature of our lives, where most of us expect to move away from families and friends, means that few of us will have sustained periods of living within those nurturing small spaces where our bodies are not our identities. Indeed, the less we remain connected to our families of origin, the greater the likelihood that we will spend a considerable part of our young — and not so young — adulthood immersed in the intense pressures of a “beauty culture” without a “safe place” to take refuge.

Honestly, from a Christian standpoint, it’s something we need to work on in the churches. We must ask, to what degree is our own church culture reinforcing insecurity and self-doubt and unrealistic perfectionism? To what degree does our church culture reflect rather than reject society’s larger obsession with appearance? Just because our churches frown on overtly sexualized self-expression does NOT mean that they are free from the very same ills that plague the larger culture! It’s something we need to work on in our small groups; it’s something I’m working very hard on with my teenagers at All Saints. And it’s gonna take a lot of work.

The marketplace and the “refusal to be a victim”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2004
in Body, Feminism and Mass media
. 7 Comments

More rantage:

I posted Monday on women’s choices and male desire; I appreciate the many thoughtful comments. One aspect of the problem that I did not address was the role of the marketplace in prescribing and preferencing certain “choices” for women.

The fashion, cosmetic surgery and diet industries are multi-billion dollar businesses. Their profitability hinges on women’s “choices” to “consume” their products, be those products diet books or Botox. But given that those choices are usually expensive and frequently painful, women are not “choosing” for pleasure. Rather, they exercise their choices in an atmosphere of insecurity — an insecurity which advertising and popular culture relentlessly reinforce. It hardly bears repeating that our cultural ideal for women is that they be young, thin, and beautiful; it is biologically self-evident that no woman can ever be all three of these things for more than (at most) a fifth of her life-span! If every woman can be made to feel that she is “falling short” of the mark most of the time, then her consumer “choices” will be a major boost to the economy!

Of course, as it becomes more and more obvious that good looks play a critical role in the working world (and, perhaps, in academia), the notion that the pursuit of beauty and desireability is a free choice loses even more of its credibility. Attractiveness becomes as essential as a college degree — and often, over a lifetime, almost as costly! To choose not to play the game is to place oneself in genuine economic jeopardy. And as more and more women plan to be self-supporting over a lifetime (rather than relying on a male partner/husband), their viability as independent agents is contingent upon making the necessary “choices” to remain youthful and attractive.

At this point, some readers are surely saying, “But we’ve heard all this before.” I note that my students, for the most part, are tired of feminist professors who are relentlessly critical of the media and popular culture. By the time they hit college, most of them think of themselves as fairly astute cultural critics, far more “aware” than their aging instructors! My teens have grown up on Oprah and other talk-show mavens who regularly bemoan our cultural obsession with sexual desireability. They also haven’t failed to notice that the very shows and magazines that seek to reassure women that they are “okay just as they are” are sponsored by the beauty, fashion, and cosmetic surgery industries! My brightest students, as a result, tend to be highly cynical; they react to the information shared in class less with outrage than with resignation.

I have a theory about why so many of my students participate in a system that they know perfectly well is oppressive and exploitative. They absolutely loathe the notion of victimhood. The great mistake of Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s was its reliance on the language of women’s collective victimhood. There was much in the work of that period that was of terrific value. But I note that most young women today find the idea that they are “victims” of men — or the media — to be tremendously disempowering. Popular culture, cleverly enough, has learned to play upon young women’s reluctance to identify their own exploitation. Instead, our popular culture flatters women with visions of their own independence and autonomy. “You’re not a victim”, the ads seem to say, “You are a strong and capable woman with a mind of her own who knows how to be successful and gorgeous all at the same time!” (Tangentially, one notes that rape crisis workers routinely disdain the word “victim” nowadays, preferring the more empowering “survivor”. That’s a whole other post).

For many of my young women, the word “angry” is almost synonymous with “victim”. They are extraordinarily anxious not to be seen as either of these! To be angry with the media, to be angry with men, is to admit that they have been hurt, and that they are increasingly reluctant to do. Traditionally, women were allowed far greater liberty than men to admit to emotional pain. But as women have moved into traditionally male spheres, I note that many have begun to adopt certain aspects of the male cult of imperviousness and silent endurance. To critique their sexualization and their exploitation is evidence of their own inability to compete successfully in the marketplace. To self-describe as a victim, these women believe, is to give evidence of one’s own failure. But to be an empowered, savvy young woman who is both an object of desire and an independent agent — that and that alone is real success!

What’s the upshot? The upshot is 18 year-olds in my classes in miniskirts, nervously tugging and adjusting themselves, absolutely insistent that their “choice” in attire was freely made, positively indignant when I suggest that they live in a system that is set up to exploit them. The upshot is 22 year-olds proudly sharing their stories of cosmetic surgery in their journals, arguing vociferously that the choice to enhance their breasts was “feminist, because feminism is about making women happy, and I’m happier with bigger breasts.”

And I gotta tell ya, it does make me question my own feminism when I — a 36 year-old man — find myself trying to convince young women half my age that they aren’t as autonomous and independent and liberated as they think they are! Something is wrong with this picture…

I was out…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2004
in Body and Teaching
. Closed

…sick yesterday with what I am fairly certain is a nasty upper-respiratory infection. I’ve been nursing it over a week, and have a doctor’s appointment on Friday. In the meantime, I am pumping in antibiotics (prescribed via phone) and bemoaning the fact that I missed another day of teaching. I’ve also got a stack of e-mails to catch up on…

I am grateful that the California community college system gives such generous sick leave allowances! I missed over two weeks last fall as a result of the hideous case of giardia I contracted in Colombia; it seems I can’t get through a single semester without falling victim to colds and flus (usually gifts from my beloved students). Dietary changes, vitamin supplements; nothing seems to boost my immune system.

Of course, I tend to push my body very hard athletically, deprive it of sleep during the week, and compensate with massive amounts of caffeine. This behavior might — just might — be linked to my recurring bouts with various and sundry illnesses.

Anyhow, I will try and post something more interesting today.

Monday’s rant on women’s choices and male desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 3, 2004
in Feminism, Men and Masculinity and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 13 Comments

Here comes the Monday rant on something other than Christians and history:

I’ve been realizing I’m a bit obsessed these days with deconstructing ideas about “choice”. Almost without exception, the “popular posts” these past three months (listed to your right, scroll down a bit) have dealt with various aspects of “choice” and individual responsibility. Whether I’ve been blogging about food, abortion, cosmetic surgery, or porn, it always seems to come back to the “c-word”.

My fellow Cliopatriarch Ralph Luker put it very nicely in a comment on my Porn and HIV post:

(It’s all) well and good to say “choice” if choice is not hedged about with many other factors.

Folks don’t make choices in a vacuum. Women don’t make choices about their bodies and their sexual and reproductive behavior without being influenced by “many other factors”. And for many young women in particular, one huge influencing factor in their lives is what I’d like to call the “omnipresence of male desire”.

It is axiomatic in American popular culture that men are highly visual creatures who are obsessed with sex. This obsession, conventional wisdom assures us, is biological in origin. Whether we attribute the physiological roots of this obsession to the penis or the Ychromosone or testosterone, the end conclusion is the same — male sexual desire is an indescribably powerful force. Social constructions aside, most contemporary American women are confronted with the reality of male sexuality by their teens, if not before. In both my women’s studies courses and in my high school youth group, I often have the girls/women share stories about the first time they became aware of themselves as “objects of desire”. It’s a tough subject (especially with a male leader or teacher), but a crucial and often painful one. Even for those young women who have not been victims of overt sexual abuse, the stories of being leered at by friends’ fathers at age 13 or whistled at on the street are nigh-on universal. We also talk about the strategies that women are taught for the control, mitigation, and manipulation of male sexual desire. We talk about the rules for avoiding eye contact, for parking in lighted areas, for carrying mace, for carefully crossing one’s legs. Often, young women refer to these rules as “common sense”, which is the perfect term indeed! It is our common cultural sense that male sexual desire is the great and omnipresent threat to women’s physical and emotional safety; it is our commone cultural sense that it is women’s responsibility to protect themselves from what at least some men will never be willing or able to control. (We can say over and over again that rape is a crime of violence not of desire, but that rarely resonates with our deepest intuitions and fears).

Of course, male sexual desire is not merely to be feared; it is also taught as a “tool” to be “used”. Most young women are keenly aware of other young women who receive extraordinary privileges merely for their “desireability”. By the time they hit college, many of my young women have heard (over and over again) that “looks shouldn’t count” and “it’s what’s on the inside that matters.” They also have already had plenty of experiences of male employers and teachers who offer subtle (and not so subtle) rewards and favors to those who are willing to “use” their desireability. At times, it seems as if making the conscious decision to attract and manipulate male sexual desire is the most empowering “choice” a young woman can make! Doing so can bring a variety of rewards; it can also bring condemnation. Both sexes in high school (and the community college) can be ruthless towards a young woman whose efforts to use her sexuality to gain advantage become too obvious!

Prostitution and pornography offer significant financial rewards to younger women. No 20 year-old woman can legitimately make as much money as she can through selling her body. I was told that my sympathy for Lara Roxx was misplaced; that she made her “choice” to appear in porn and now had to live with the consequences (namely HIV). But her choice was made in a world where satisfying male sexual desire was the most immediately lucrative professional decision that she could make. If men were not willing to pay for porn, Lara Roxx would not have HIV. That means that all those within our culture who produce or consume porn –and even those who merely condone it — are complicit in her infection.

Most young women, thank heavens, will not become porn actresses. But many will choose subtler, less dramatic (and less lucrative) ways of complying with the demands of a culture of male desire. They will get breast implants. They will choose to wear miniskirts and halter tops to school, even if it means that they must endure sneers and leers. They will choose to diet obsessively. And yes (you knew I was going here) some will “choose” to have abortions because they live in a culture where men expect sexual satisfaction without the concomitant responsibility to raise a child. And though I have never been a woman, I’m pretty damn sure of one thing: none of those choices really feel very good.

I am not absolving my younger sisters of responsibility. But when we speak of “choices” we fail to acknowledge that women’s bodies are, as Susan Bordo puts it, “politically inscribed entities, their physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control”. Be it the corset or the miniskirt, the porn website or “The Swan“, our culture has required and continues to require compliance with the imperious demands of male sexual desire. When women injure their bodies and their souls in “acts of compliance”, it is ahistorical and cruel to dismiss them as victims of their own poor choices. And it is incumbent upon men in particular — myself included — to speak and act in ways that clearly and radically undercut this dominant cultural message about our sexuality and our spurious lack of self-control.

Whew. Rant over.

McKenzie on Christian History and “Pre-Evangelism”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 3, 2004
in Christianity
. 3 Comments

I’ve been working at formulating a response to the critics of my post on Christian Historians. Obviously, I blurred together several issues. Reading the critics here and here and here and here and at HNN itself has been most illuminating. Basically, there are three questions that need to be answered, and I haven’t done much to answer any of them satisfactorily:

First, is there such a thing as “Christian History”? Do Christian historians do “history” differently because of their presuppositions about God’s role in human affairs?

Second, is there an equivalence between an explicitly Christian approach to history and a “feminist”, or “Marxist”, or “Post-Structuralist” approach? If we accept Marxist and feminist historians — and their ideological commitments — within the secular academy, why do we not also accept evangelicals? Or is there some explicit difference between Marxism and Christianity that makes the former more palatable than the latter?

Third, to what degree can a Christian historian in a secular academic environment honor both his obligations to his profession and to the Great Commission? Can we use history as an evangelistic tool in a public institution without betraying our commitments to Caesar, our employer and paymaster?

Let me do things out of order and tackle the third question — which is perhaps the most obviously “charged” of these — first.

Among other things, I’ve been “googling” about, looking for more on the subject. I came across this paper from 1999 by a Robert McKenzie of the University of Washington, entitled “Christian Faith and the Study of History:
A View from the Classroom”. McKenzie is discouraged by the rise of “postmodern relativism” within the culture and its impact upon students’ willingness to think deeply and critically about the “meaning of life”. He and I seem to have similar students:

…the most common type of student I have encountered appears to possess no deeply-held convictions of any kind, much less anything approaching a consciously articulated world view, however immature. I find it relatively easy to show such students the nihilistic implications of philosophical relativism, but getting them to care is a more difficult matter. And in spite of all the talk about the “angst” felt by “generation X,” I doubt that this is an entirely new phenomenon. More than a half-century ago, C. S. Lewis noted that, “for every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be guarded from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”

This does not make the job of the Christian historian impossible, however:

The good news is that, for scholars who wish to do so, it is a simple task to structure their history courses in such a way that they touch regularly upon “Permanent Things,” i.e., questions of explicitly religious significance. This need not be orchestrated artificially, furthermore, but rather develops naturally when students are encouraged to use history as well as understand it, to evaluate the past as well as describe and explain it. Indeed, I would argue that, at least for the teaching of history, it is the exclusion of religious questions that is artificial. This should not be surprising, of course, given that history as a discipline focuses so centrally on the experience of humans, including the ultimate questions that they have always confronted “about the nature and meaning of the world, and of [their] existence in it.”

But in our contemporary academic culture of what I choose to call “militant secularism”, the prospects are bleak:

Although it may be encouraging to note how relatively easy it is to inject religious questions into the history classroom, it is also essential to remember the larger institutional context in which those questions are raised. Therein lies the bad news. In the secular classroom, the believing historian may pose religious questions but never answer them, introduce religious perspectives but never endorse them, demonstrate the contradictions of other belief systems but never proclaim the good news of a consistent alternative…

Well might we contemplate, before closing, the sober query of Psalm 11:3: “If the foundations are destroyed, what will the righteous do?” At the very least, this is a question that every believing scholar on a secular campus must reckon with, implicitly if not explicitly.

Nine or ten years ago, when I was a pup, one of my older female colleagues asked me why I wanted to teach women’s history. Given that she was on my tenure review committee, I made some weak and diplomatic answer, stressing the goal of “teaching students about important women from the past whose stories have been neglected within the dominant narrative.” My reviewer shook her head, and asked me “Do you want to know why I teach women’s history? I teach it to raise up young feminists!” I’ve never forgotten that, and I have come to adopt her position wholeheartedly (though she and I disagree mightily about some of the finer points of what constitutes feminism!)

Now that I am a “born-again evangelical” (albeit one whose politics do not match the stereotype conjured up by that image), what does that mean for my teaching of Western Civilization? I would never say that I want to “raise up young Christians!” But I can say that I do intend to do the following in my courses: structure an overall narrative — and ask certain questions — with the intent of leading students to what McKenzie calls the “good news of a consistent alternative” to our culture’s thin diet of relativism.

Sizzling heat, over-teaching, and the firm handshake of Gene Robinson

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 3, 2004
in Christianity, People, Teaching and Youth ministry
. 4 Comments

I’m underslept with a lingering nasty cough, and feel less than prepared for the burdens of Monday. These include, but are not limited to, grading five women’s studies journals; preparing for my afternoon class on the body (we’re working on Andrea Dworkin today, a name that strikes terror into many a heart, but whose rhetoric is too delicious to ignore); dashing off two letters of recommendation; and (in addition to the body class) giving lectures at 10:25, 12:00, and 6:00PM on everything from the Pax Romana to Bismarck and German unification. It’s a rather absurd life, really, here in the trenches of the community college, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. At least I don’t have to go outside much today in the scorching heat.

I know that I need to work on a response to my post below on Christian history. I note that a new (to me, that is) blog called “The Little Professor” has a very thoughtful critique of my post, as well as some slightly tougher words for Mark Noll and George Marsden. I have much to think — and perhaps blog — about when time permits.

Yesterday, Gene Robinson, famed bishop of New Hampshire, came and spoke to my confirmation class at All Saints. (I am one of two lay volunteers who teach the class). There were about 25 kids and 15 adults present for his talk. Dressed in his episcopal purple, the slight but energetic Robinson entered our learning center with a beaming smile on his face, flanked by no fewer than four bodyguards. These immediately went to the four corners of the room, and tried to remain unobtrusive. Given how rarely armed security personnel visit our learning center at All Saints, this was a rather difficult task, especially with their dark suits and earpieces.

Our kids are getting confirmed in two weeks, and Bishop Robinson began by talking about the confirmation process, stressing that doubt ought not to be an obstacle to the process, but rather a prerequisite. Of course, when it came time for the kids to ask questions, the topic changed. One boy bravely asked the bishop “When did you first know you were gay?”, and received a lengthy, thoughtful, charming answer. In answer to other questions, he explained everything from how he received his legal name (”Vicky Gene Robinson” is what is on his birth certificate) to the details of various death threats he has received to the reasons why he and his partner Mark have not had their union “blessed” within the Episcopal Church. He had several of the kids, and one or two of the adults, in tears by the time he was done.

Robinson stayed to hear several of the kids read aloud letters of explanation as to why they were choosing to be or not to be confirmed. He laughed and clapped along with everyone else, until his security personnel gently reminded him that he needed to be off to his next appointment. He left with a grin and an affectionate wave, and what (I can officially report) was a firm and sincere handshake. The youth and the adults were all very impressed, and could not stop talking about him the rest of the afternoon.

For the sake of my more conservative readers, I am pleased to report that Bishop Robinson never once attacked or condemned his critics. He never used terms like “fundamentalist” as a pejorative, despite some leading questions from our kids that more or less invited him to do so. Whatever else may be said, he is as winsome and humble and articulate and appealing as he has been made out to be. And in Pasadena, he now has 25 teenagers who are his devoted fans.