Archive for May, 2005

A follow-up on why I don’t protest

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 31, 2005
in War
. 10 Comments

In Friday’s entry about the ROTC, I mentioned that I haven’t participated in a protest rally in over fourteen years.  Let me explain why with this little story:

I grew up in a small, safe, resort town of fewer than 5,000 people.  To put it mildly, we didn’t have protests.  In sixth grade, I decided I was a Communist after listening to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (another long story).  I began to subscribe, while still in junior high school, to a variety of Communist and Socialist newspapers.  I joined the Socialist Workers Party, and supported Mel Mason’s campaign for governor in 1982.  I read about riots and demonstrations, and wished that something would happen in sleepy old Carmel.  I tried to start an activist group on my high school campus, but that went nowhere.  I dreamed of going to school at Berkeley, which I had visited often enough as a child, where protests were continual and where I would at once find many fellow radicals committed to building a more just and peaceful world (and so on).

As a college student, I took part in lots of demonstrations of the sort I described on Friday.  After my frosh year, however, I grew more cautious about taking part in violent protests, and as my Christian faith grew, I became less and less comfortable with confrontation.    But in 1991, I had a disturbing flashback to an earlier way of life:

I vividly remember the night in January when the bombing of Baghdad began.  My wife at the time and I were living in UCLA grad student housing down in Mar Vista, and in the late afternoon, we got a knock on the door.  We were told a major anti-war rally would begin that evening at the busy intersection of Veteran and Wilshire near the UCLA campus.  We hopped in our little car, drove as close as we could, and joined a large and angry crowd standing in front of the Federal building.  We milled around and chanted, and I could feel myself getting more and more angry; angry at the government, angry at the police, angry at everyone. Someone asked us to go into the intersection to block traffic; I grabbed my wife and we waded in.

My wife (this was my first marriage) was not the protesting type.  She’d never taken part in any demonstration in her life.  She was 5′2" in heels, and she was absolutely terrified.  As we ran onto Wilshire Boulevard, she clung to me and said "Please, Hugo, don’t."  I ignored her, half-dragging her with me.  I was so focused on doing something tangible to confront what I saw as the interconnected establishment (the Pentagon and the LAPD were often linked in leftist rhetoric) that I was utterly oblivious to her fears.  I was chanting and yelling just as I had back in 1985, lost in my own self-righteous rage and the madness of the crowd.  My heart was racing, the blood was pumping; I was having an almost out-of-body experience.

The cops waded in quickly, and started dragging people out of the street.  They were not interested in having traffic stalled in rush hour.  I couldn’t even sit down before my wife and I were shoved forcefully by several officers herding us towards the curb.  I started pushing back at the cops, and they started using their batons. My wife stumbled as she was pushed hard by one officer, falling out of her shoes.  I grabbed her before she fell to the ground, and we made it to the curb with only minor bruises.  She was sobbing.  If I had been drunk on rage just moments earlier, I was now sober and horrified — horrified, not at the police, who were clearing the intersection, but at myself.  I had heedlessly, needlessly, dragged my spouse into danger.  I helped her back to our car (she never got her shoes back) and we drove home.  I’ve never participated actively in a protest since.

I suppose after all these years, I still don’t trust myself.   I doubt very much I’ll ever again block an intersection to protest a war halfway round the world.  It’s not that protests don’t have a value; they do.  I’m just afraid, honestly, that in the heat and the excitement, I may do something that I might very much regret. I’m one of those otherwise rational people who doesn’t tend to cope so well in crowds. My ex-wife’s terrified and tear-stained face still come to mind whenever I think of civil disobedience, and to this day, that memory holds me back.

Sports and self-obsession

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 31, 2005
in Athletics and Fitness and Vanity
. 19 Comments

It was a long and happy weekend, and I spent very little time near the computer.  We’re headed into the last (and short) week of classes, with finals beginning next Monday.  I’m on taper for Sunday’s Rock n’ Roll Marathon.  I’ve also have made the resolution to get back in shape this summer.  I’m still reasonably fit, but I’ve let the pounds creep back on in the last few years, and it’s time to take some of them off.  It’s vanity, of course, but as my fiancee and I talk about having children, I imagine that it will be much tougher to get workouts in once I become a father. If I want maximum fitness, I ought to pursue it now.  I can increase my exercise only so much, however; the key for me this summer will be changing my diet.  I’m one of those people who can happily run forever — but I have a very hard time controlling what goes in my mouth.  After the marathon, I’ll be doing an eleven-day "cleanse" (details to follow, like it or not), followed by a summer of careful attention to restricting  sugar and fat intake.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about women and sports.  Like so many others, I watched the finish of the Indy 500 for the first time in years, rooting on young Danica Patrick.  As a passionate supporter of women’s sports, I spend relatively little time arguing for the inclusion of women in traditionally male activities.  (I’m more interested, for example, in making sure that sports for high school and college-age women are well-funded than in getting a few individual girls onto boys’ football teams.)  Most of the sports I follow, however, are sports where biological differences necessitate two different sets of teams, one for men and one for women.  That’s obviously not true in auto racing, one of the few sports where sex alone is unlikely to have any noticeable impact on an athlete’s performance.  Here, as in equestrian events, men and women can compete on a level field — though it will surely be easier for the likes of Patrick as more and more women begin to do well.

I’ve been thinking lately about Title IX and its impact on young women and their self-esteem.  Many studies (here’s one recent one) have connected participation in organized athletics and improved body image among young women.   I’ve noticed this as well, though it’s important to remember that this varies a great deal from sport to sport.  In events such as softball and basketball (where staying slender is not absolutely essential to success), it does seem that young women athletes have less anxiety about their bodies than their peers.  But those who compete in events where weight is closely linked to performance (cross-country, gymnastics) may not derive the same self-esteem benefits.  I was able to find one study that looked at female athletes in specific sports and eating disorders; predictably, gymnasts and cross-country runners topped the list.

As someone who loves distance running, this concerns me.  As I’ve written before, I’ve occasionally worked out with a local high school cross-country team coached by two dear friends of mine.  (It’s only May 31, and we’re already talking about gearing up for the fall campaign!)  I love running because, frankly, it’s the only sport I’m any good at. (No hand-eye coordination in this old body). But I also know that when I was at my most successful as a runner, I was also most acutely body-conscious.  My small successes on the track, road, and trails, fed a desire for faster times.  I knew that each pound I added to my frame meant more for my heart, lungs, and knees to carry.  I watched my weight scrupulously, and worried a great deal about my body.  In my case — and I suspect that this is true for both young men and young women who run — participating in my particular sport made me more anxious, not less.  This means, I think, that those of us who work with young people in vulnerable, weight-conscious sports (gymnastics, wrestling, cross-country, track, diving) ought to be doing a better job of monitoring eating patterns and self-esteem among "our" athletes.  Those of us who issue sweeping claims that "sport is good for young women" must remember that different sports make radically different demands upon the human body.  And those sports that prize leanness and lightness are sports where coaches and other involved adults must be committed to caring for highly vulnerable student-athletes.   It would help, of course, if we who compete in these activities from time to time had high self-esteem ourselves!  It’s a little difficult for me to proclaim the virtue of self-acceptance when it’s fairly obvious that I still struggle tremendously with my own body image.

I often wonder about the impact of Title IX on young women who don’t play sports.  Joan Brumberg (whom I quote monthly) suggests that prior to the 1970s, women’s dieting patterns rarely focused on developing fit, toned bodies.  In her Body Project, she notes that from the 1920s to the 1970s, the concern for millions of young American women was pure "thinness."  Few of the girls in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s from whose diaries she quotes report exercise as a means of weight control.  None whatsoever talk about "going to the gym" or "working out".   But as Title IX opens doors for female athletes (starting in 1972), Brumberg notes a gradual increase in concern not only for thinness, but for fitness.  By the 1980s, the ideal young woman’s body cannot be achieved through dieting alone; it must be built with light weights and cardiovascular activity.  Is there scientific evidence of a cause and effect relationship between Title IX and this change in women’s ideal body type?  No.  But chronologically, the connection makes sense.

Gym memberships cost time and money.  In one sense, dieting is free and fast; it doesn’t take many resources to restrict what goes in your mouth.  High school sports, on the other hand, are rarely truly "free"; parents are expected to contribute substantially in most schools for uniforms and equipment costs.  Gyms are not always available on high school campuses, and even on some college campuses their equipment is barely adequate.  As our cultural ideal for American womanhood moves towards an increasingly toned and fit physique, that ideal becomes more and more difficult to obtain, particularly for those who lack the resources to effectively pursue it.  What impact does this have on young women who, for whatever reason, aren’t athletic?

I know of no study that focuses on the question of how young women who don’t "work out" are affected by the bodies of their more athletic and active classmates.  I can’t say for certain, therefore, that an increased focus on women’s athletics has had a negative impact on the self-esteem of girls who don’t exercise regularly or play sports.  But as much as I love sports and physical activity (and believe them to be vital to a balanced life as I understand it), I worry about those whose own personalities or pocketbooks make building a truly fit body an unrealistic option.  And as much as I want young men and women to experience the joy of pushing their bodies to the limit and discovering their physical potential, I worry — with good reason, from my own experience — about the pitfalls of narcissism and self-obsession.

Learning to love the uniform — UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2005
in Faith, Rape, aggression and violence and War
. 61 Comments

It’s a busy day, and I’ve got to get a little run in before it gets too hot.  I hope to have a second post up later today, but am not sure I’ll have time to swing it.

One quick note, after a week of relatively long posts.  Yesterday afternoon, on the way home from the college, I stopped for gas at the Chevron station just across the street from PCC.  Standing in front of me in the line to pay was a young man in Army fatigues.  (We have a military recruiting center a block from the campus.)  I noticed the position of the American flag on his sleeve.  It seemed to face backwards, with the stars on the right hand, rather than the left hand, side of the emblem.  I’ve seen that image on other soldiers’ uniforms in coverage of the war, but never been able to figure out why.

So very politely, I spoke up.  "Excuse me", I said to the fellow; "Can I ask you a question?"  He stiffened as he looked at me, almost as if he were bracing himself.  "Sure", he said, without enthusiasm.  I wonder how many times others have button-holed him in his uniform in gas stations and check-out lines, and then berated him about US foreign policy.  He certainly looked as if he was readying himself for what would have been a familiar tirade.  I hurriedly asked him about the flag, and was amazed at the way in which his face visibly sagged with relief.  "It’s because we always want to be seen as going forward", he said.  "It’s positioned the way a soldier would carry a flag into battle."  (I confess I didn’t get it right away, and had to look it up on the Internet when I got home.)  I thanked him and we parted. (I had no idea what his rank was, I can’t identify military insignia, but I assume with his fatigues and a black beret he was Army, right?)

I left the encounter feeling oddly sad.  I was simply curious, and hadn’t the slightest intention in the world of rattling a man who, from what I understand, has one of the more difficult jobs in the country these days.    But it brought back memories of the  mid-1980s, when I was a freshman at Cal and participating in often-violent anti-ROTC demonstrations.  (The ROTC building was actually burned down at one point, and no, I had nothing to do with that!)  But years ago, I heaped my share of terrible verbal abuse at many a young cadet.  I sprayed more than one young man with spittle as I railed on about whatever the issue was at the time (I think it was opposition to the Contra war in Nicaragua.)  I overturned tables, ran from campus police, and took part in a variety of small acts of criminal destruction of ROTC property that seemed (at the time) to be enormously brave and today seem to me to be colossally juvenile.  Trust me, folks, if I seem gentle today, it’s an act of will and a gift of grace that have made me so.  I could be a vicious hothead when I was younger and filled with more testosterone.

I wonder if I owe some sort of collective amends to the military.  I don’t know how the young men at whom I yelled and whom I called names (unprintable here) reacted to what I did some twenty years ago when I was a teenager. I can’t imagine it was easy for them to remain stone-faced while I — and my fellow upper middle-class self-righteous radicals — directed apoplectic rage their way.  Today, I think what I did back then was wrong and pointless.  Alas, at eighteen  I was at an age when I was indeed "often in error, and never in doubt."   I’m ashamed of my past behavior, even though I haven’t hurled profane opprobrium at any one in uniform since my last protest, which was fourteen years ago at the start of the first Gulf War in January 1991.  (That story of my final protest — and why I’ve never gone to another one — is worth a post all its own.)

So folks, I’m not ready to abandon my Anabaptist pacifism.  But I have decided that I need to do something tangible to make amends for my past behavior.  I was shaken by my encounter with the guarded young soldier yesterday, and I felt overwhelmed by a need to apologize to him for all that I had yelled at men like him many years ago.  (Note:  I could never yell at the very few female ROTC cadets I saw back in the day; a strange mix of simple-minded feminism and in-bred courtliness made it impossible for me to ever raise my voice at a woman.  I simply ignored them and went after their male counterparts.  Embarrassing, but true.)

Folks, I’m open to suggestions.  A batch of cookies? A visit to the recruiters with a word of thanks for their hard work (and maybe a small number of gifts)?  Mind you, I’m not a supporter of this current war.  But I haven’t always differentiated between the cause for which men and women fight and those men and women themselves.  And I’ve got the feeling this morning I’ve got to take some small but tangible action.

I was wrong, and somehow, a debt still hangs over my head.

UPDATE:  Following a suggestion below, I visited Books for Soldiers and made a donation.  It felt good, as donating usually does.  It’s not the end of the amends, but it’s a start.  I still need to do something for my local recruiters.  Would Starbucks gift cards be a good idea?  Or would they worry that it was a joke,with no money on the cards?  Much to think about.

UPDATE #2 (Saturday 10:49AM):  Things seem to have gotten fairly heated in the comments section,  This is understandable, as my account of my own past behavior could be expected to strike many a nerve.  That said, folks, it is vital that you refrain from using profanity here if you wish to have your comments remain.  If you’re enraged by me, so be it — you’re entitled to your anger.  But insulting each other — and using ugly language that demeans entire groups of human beings — simply makes a civilized exchange impossible.   If you really need to spew, send me a private email (dochugoboy@hotmail.com).

Thanks.

Saying goodbye, teenagers, and thinking through one’s blogging

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2005
in Blogging and Youth ministry
. 9 Comments

Last night, we had our "farewell dinner" for those seniors who will be graduating from high school this year and leaving our All Saints Pasadena youth group.  We had fourteen seniors present, and several more who were unable to attend due to other commitments.  (Is it just me, or is being 17 and 18 a heck of a lot busier now than it was twenty or thirty years ago?)

One by one, kids got up to share anecdotes and offer praise to each of our seniors.  There was lots of silliness, hugs, kisses, and a tear or two.  Honestly, it was hard for me.   When I first started volunteering at All Saints, the youth in the class of 2005 were finishing up seventh grade.  I’ve watched these kids grow, literally and figuratively, into young men and women who make me so proud.  I’ve watched them make mistakes, and learn from them; I’ve watched them repeat the same mistakes and fail to learn.  I’ve watched their triumphs and rejoiced with them; I’ve seen their failures and their heartbreaks, and I’ve been lucky enough to have been by their side through some of these.  I’ve been to their school recitals; I’ve been to soccer games and track meets — and I’ve been to the hospital a time or two as well.  I’ve bandaged their cuts, listened to their romantic highs and lows, and ooohed and aaahed appropriately over so many prom pictures, I can’t even count.

I’m 38, and not yet a father to kids of my own.  So many guys my age have their own kids, but that hasn’t happened for me — yet.  I always expected that I would be a father at a much younger age than I am now.  If you had asked me twenty years ago what I expected by the time I was 38, I would have assured you that I would have three kids, with the oldest perhaps in junior high school.  I’ve always been clear on the concept that I liked children and young adults.  And yet, for any number of reasons (some obvious to my readers, some not) kids have not happened for me yet.  My fiancee and I have high hopes of starting a family someday, but for now, I am childless (save, of course, for the much-loved, much discussed, oft-kissed and oft-photographed Matilde!)

So my All Saints youth group kids are "my kids".  They are certainly young enough; the most senior among them were born when I was 19.  Just within the last few years, I’ve started to feel less and less like a loving older brother and more and more like a father figure.  (So far, all of the Dads of my youth group kids  at All Saints are older than I am, but given our particular demographic, that makes sense.)  I’m very, very attached to them, and I feel genuine sadness as I watch them grow up and move away.   (Most are moving away; we’ve got kids going off to places as diverse as Berkeley, Willamette, Bryn Mawr, and SUNY Purchase.  Though I’ll miss ‘em, I stand by what I wrote Tuesday.)

I hope when these kids are a little older, they’ll choose to work with teens themselves.  I hope that somewhere, perhaps (one hopes) in an Episcopal parish, they will give their time and energy to creating a safe space for other youth.  I hope they will remember how loved and appreciated and praised they were at All Saints; I hope that they will be eager to pass that on to a future generation.  My great dream is, of course, to continue to volunteer at All Saints until I surrender my position to some younger guy or gal who was once one of "my kids."  That would be very, very sweet.

Now, on a related subject:  teenagers and their blogs.  Most of my teenagers blog.  Many have "Myspace" or "Xanga" or "Livejournal" or "Journalspace"; few use Typepad (that seems to be for us older folk.)  Most of them eagerly proffer links to their blogs to one and all, and I do read them (when invited to do so, mind you.)  Sometimes what I read makes me wince.  Many of the high schoolers talk openly, boastfully, of sex and drugs.  Others share painful, personal details of their lives.  In some instances, I’ve made a decision not to read someone’s blog because I felt strongly that I only wanted to know that information about them if they shared it with me directly, not by reading their journals.

On the one hand, I’m so glad that they have the technology to stay in touch with each other and share their thoughts, feelings, funny stories, and photos.  On the other hand, I worry so much about the consequences of so little self-censorship!  Once posted, things have a way of surviving forever in cyberspace, and simply deleting a post may not eradicate it forever.  With their willingness to disclose so much which an older generation kept private, these kids are erasing the barrier between the public and the personal in a way that may not serve them well.  By documenting so many details of their intimate lives, many are losing the opportunity to start over, to change, to redefine themselves in the eyes of their peers, parents, and everyone else.  Their desire to have others read about and respond to their lives seems to trump the need to keep certain things personal and private and protected.

As anyone who reads this blog can tell, I leave a lot out.  I remember that a great many people, only some of whom I know, are reading.  I remember that every word and every image becomes public.  I owe it to myself, to my family, and to those in my circle to be judicious about what goes up here and what remains hidden.  If I could give one piece of advice to my kids at both the college and the high school levels, it would indeed be to be very, very careful about what you all share.  If you don’t want your parents, teachers, and future spouses to see it, don’t put it up.   Please.

Let me recommend a great post on this subject by someone much younger than myself, Corianne of Glamour Girl.  She’s right on the money.

Some quick thoughts on Mary Kay and Vili

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2005
in Sexuality and Teaching
. 84 Comments

Jenell Paris asked me if I had anything to say about last Friday’s wedding of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.  Most folks are familiar with their story; if not, the facts of the case are summarized in the hyperlink before this sentence:

The couple first met when Fualaau was in the second grade. Their relationship became sexual when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother of four, a teacher at a suburban elementary school.

Letourneau was pregnant with Fualaau’s first child when she was arrested in 1997. She pleaded guilty to second-degree child rape and was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison, with all but six months suspended.

Within weeks of her release, she was caught having sex with Fualaau in her car and ordered to serve the remainder of her sentence. She gave birth to the couple’s second daughter while serving time.

Letourneau also left her husband and children (from her first marriage) to pursue a relationship with Fualaau.  Jenell wrote:

I watched coverage (of the wedding) on Access Hollywood or ET or something like that, and it was soft-focused with people weeping and nice music playing. It was spun as a "love conquers all" story. I haven’t heard any commentary about her rejection of her other biological children or her husband, or of what it means to continue a sexual relationship with a person who had been a child when it began. I just think that if a man had impregnated a 6th grade girl twice, and then later married her, the public view would be very different. I don’t think people really believe that a boy can be abused, or at least that it isn’t as serious as when a girl is abused.

Let me say first that I’m not an expert on the facts of the case. Let me say also that my first inclination is to celebrate whenever two people (especially two who already have children together) choose to make a lifetime commitment to each other.  Given where they both are now in their lives, I’m not sure that this wasn’t the right thing to do.

That said, count me in the corner of those who believe that young boys can indeed be the victims of sexual abuse, regardless of the sex of their adult abuser.  But the Letourneau/Fualaau case raises some interesting questions (beyond presenting a challenge for those of us who can’t handle all those many vowels).  While still a junior high school student, Fualaau fathered two children with Letourneau.  Obviously, in order to impregnate her, he had to get an erection and ejaculate.  Presumably, he experienced considerable physical pleasure.  For some people, I suspect that it is this assumption of pleasure that makes it difficult to conceive of him as being a victim to the same degree as seventh-grade girl who was raped by an older male teacher!  Even I, when I first heard of the case, wondered if I ought to be as concerned for Fualaau as I would have been for a girl.  Wasn’t his orgasm — which was necessary for a child to be conceived — proof that he "enjoyed it", and if he "enjoyed it", was he truly a victim?  Fear not, I’ve progressed past that, but I know that many folks are "stuck" there.

One of the most common misconceptions about the sexual abuse of children and adolescents is that only the adult abusers experience sexual pleasure.  We assume, often wrongly, that female victims of sexual molestation never experience arousal or orgasm as a result of their abuse. Certainly many, perhaps even most, young women who are molested — particularly those who are forced into intercourse — find the experience painful and completely unpleasurable.  But the literature suggests that a certain number were excited by their abusers.  Indeed, I’ve been told by my friends who work in this field that this often makes things worse: a child who experiences some degree of pleasure at the hands of his or her abuser may be all the more likely to blame themselves for what happened.  Those who experience excitement as a result of their abuse may be particularly likely to re-enact abusive situations when they become sexually active as adults. 

Abusers, I’m told by my friends at Men Can Stop Rape, often try very hard to arouse their victims.  They do so for obvious reasons, the most salient of which is that their victims’ pleasure works to alleviate the abusers’ guilt:  "She/he liked it! I didn’t really hurt them!"  Again, I don’t know the facts of the Letourneau case, but I suspect that her pregnancies may have served that function in her mind and in the mind of many casual observers.   For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with sexual violation.  But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad Letourneau went to jail.  I’m glad that the state did see her actions as criminal.  But the fact that she deserved to be punished does not mean that I oppose this marriage. I wish this couple well.  I hope they have a lifetime of joy together.  I wish that joy on every married couple, particularly those with children.  Relationships that begin with colossal asymmetries often undergo a surprising shift over time, usually in the direction of levelling out the imbalances.  For their sakes and the sake of the little ones, I hope it will be so for these two!  But their future happiness and mutuality does not erase what was done, and it doesn’t change the fact that a very young boy was violated on a number of occasions.  And the fact that Fualaau enjoyed, perhaps even delighted in, his own violation does not mitigate the severity of what it was that was done to him.

Thursday Short Poem: Milosz’s “Love”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2005
in Poetry
. 6 Comments

I’ve had several poems up from the late Czeslaw Milosz; this is another fine (and brief) one.

Love   

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesnt matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

Those last two lines speak to me about two things:  marriage and faith.  It’s a fine reminder, isn’t it?

A very personal post about conscience, quoting Pilate, and the obstinate refusal to make judgments

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 25, 2005
in Christianity and Sexuality
. 31 Comments

As many regular readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of and subscriber to the brilliant, conservative Catholic journal First Things.   Last month’s issue is finally on-line, and in it, a very provocative (to me, at least) piece by Australia’s George Cardinal Pell: The Inconvenient Conscience.  It’s a relatively brief polemic, fiercely defending the primacy of church teaching over the modern definition of conscience as the "radical call to personal freedom."

Pell defines the traditional view of conscience in Catholic teaching:

We think well when we understand moral principles and apply them in clear and reasonable ways; we think badly when we ignore or reinvent moral principles, or apply them in ambiguous and unreasonable ways. “Good conscience,” in this way of understanding, means a good grasp and a good application of moral truth—for it is the truth that remains primary, the truth that is grasped and applied by the practical mind.

Every time I read an argument like this, I start quoting dear old Pilate:  "What is truth?"  You see, this is where I’m stuck at this point in my life (now three days past my thirty-eighth birthday):  a doctorate in church history, a huge resume of coursework in philosophy and religion, more than one "born again" experience, a personal history of peregrinations that have moved me from church to church, and I’m still with Pontius Pilate!  I read Pell’s article, and something reflexively resists this doctrine of absolute truth.

I confess that Pell nails me perfectly.  Heck, he also nails my progressive Anglican parish:

No one—at least, no Christian—believes conscience simply asserts the first thing that comes into our heads. Conscience looks for real answers to our questions, and where can it look except to the truth? But then the value of conscience surely lies not in conscience itself but in the truth to which conscience looks for answers. It is the truth that is primary, and it is from the truth that conscience takes its value—for the bare fact that something is my private belief has no moral significance whatsoever.  (Emphasis in the original).

You see, this is where on the "big issues", especially those around sex, that I fall down.  Even after all these years, when challenged, I find myself retreating not to Scripture (though I can proof-text with the best of them, for all that pastime is worth) nor tradition, nor the judgment of the community, but to my own "private moral belief", which tends to be grounded in my experience and my personal feelings!  Pell may not be speaking of all liberals, but he’s speaking about me when he writes:

So why would anyone try to oppose conscience to objective truth? Part of the answer lies in a distorted attitude towards the virtue of tolerance. “Tolerance” is often something of a weasel word. Of course, all human beings should tolerate the foibles and weaknesses of their fellows. But by “tolerance” many now mean “never judging.” And this is a much more debatable proposition. In fact, believers in tolerance themselves usually acknowledge unspoken limits. Tolerance rarely means refraining from judging racists, or sexists, or pedophiles, or political cheats—naturally enough: these are morally wrong and should be judged so. But the contemporary love of tolerance is severely limited. In effect, the only things we must be tolerant of are people’s sexual choices, or perhaps their choices about such life issues as abortion or euthanasia.

Why do people strain to accommodate absolute sexual freedom as a matter of conscience? Why does no one plead for the right to racism or sexism as a matter of conscience? Could it be because the liberal concept of conscience has been specially formulated in order to facilitate the sexual indiscipline that our culture upholds? (Emphasis is mine).

I chafe at the words "sexual indiscipline", even as I honor the importance of discipline in my own life.  But when I think about how we use the term "conscience" at All Saints, I confess that most of the time we do use it in the sense of "private moral belief".  We also, as Pell points out, are woefully inconsistent on the subject of tolerance.  We at All Saints are not particularly tolerant of Republicans, or those who oppose abortion, or those who support the war in Iraq.  (Though to be fair, we do have those who hold those views among our regular congregants.)  We would never tolerate someone who held openly racist views.  Most of what we mean by tolerance and inclusion is, frankly, about the sexual.  At my church, I’ve never heard any criticism of any possible private sexual choice in the bedroom; from the pulpit itself I have heard explicit criticism of people’s private political choices in the voting booth.  Pell’s last paragraph seems dead-on accurate.

My regular readers know I have always tried to maintain a civil tone on this blog.  I confess I’ve fallen short of that mark, and have myself been unkind, particularly to the group generally known as Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs).  One reason I’m such a stickler for civility is because I do believe that the world needs safe spaces, however small, for folks to exchange views without fear of hostile attacks.  Another reason is that I was raised to be polite; "a gentleman never makes another person feel uncomfortable", I was told growing up; I still believe that to my core, even when my Christian faith suggests that some people ought to be made to feel darned uncomfortable!

But I’m also leery of making claims about absolute truth, especially about sexual discipline, because I just don’t have any certainty in this area yet.  Let me be clear: I’ve worked out a very clear code of sexual morality in my own private life with my fiancee.  It happens to be congruent with what most folks would describe as mainstream biblical teaching.  But I’m still unwilling to suggest that what works for me ought to work for other people.  Even as I have moved from a life of indiscipline to a life of restriction and restraint, and even as I see the tremendous benefits from such a move, I am unable to even feebly suggest (at least in a public forum) that others ought to consider the same.  Sometimes I wonder if this is moral cowardice.  Other times, I think it’s a loving refusal to impose my views on others.  But more and  more, I suspect it’s the former.  More and more, I wonder if I simply want to avoid alienating those around me by making any sort of pronouncements about how folks ought to order their intimate lives.

Folks often ask me why I, a straight man, have such a long history of work on gay and lesbian issues.  (It’s one of the few things I’ve done consistently for a great many years.)  Part of the answer lies in my early childhood experiences, about which I blogged last year.  Part of the answer is a professional sense, as a historian, that gay and lesbian rights really is the great social justice issue of our era.   But another part of the answer is that I’m eager to defend the right of all people to make private choices, particularly romantic and sexual ones, without any criticism or societal restriction.  Even my support for gay marriage is based less on my belief that marriage is a fundamental good and more on my belief that people ought to be able to acquire public sanction for their private desires and commitments, whatever they may be.   Though I don’t intend to ever drop my commitment to full equality for my gay and lesbians brothers and sisters, I do need to do more work to ask what part my own reflexive dislike of making judgments plays in my support for their struggle.

So, folks, another long post about why Hugo is conflicted.  Rest assured, I’m not tormented by ambivalence all day long!  I have my little certainties in which I take comfort:  my relationship with my fiancee, my work, my "kids" at school and youth group, my chinchilla, and of course, my relationship with Christ.  But lately, I’ve been feeling that Christ is calling me deeper into relationship with Him.  Something tells me he’s calling me to more than powerful sentimental devotion.  And for all the reasons that I’ve laid out in this post, I’ve been resisting that call.

Remember Augustine’s prayer:  "Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet?"  Hugo has his own variation these days: "Make me certain, Lord, but not yet."  For a little while longer, let me hang out in this world where I can defy the principle of non-contradiction by embracing irreconciliables.  Let me hang out in the world where I don’t have to make quite so many hard choices, and offend quite so many people by proclaiming unerring truth.  Let me stand with Pilate, Lord, just a little while longer.

A long reflection on moving away from home

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 24, 2005
in Ethnicity and Teaching
. 63 Comments

This month, I’m writing two appeals letters on behalf of two students who were denied admission (inexplicably, in both cases) to UCLA.  Both students are very bright young women, but one of the two presented me with a bit of a dilemma: my alma mater accepted her, while the so-called "Southern Branch" rejected her.    I must admit that my Golden Bear pride was hurt.  I know that admissions decisions can be capricious; a few years ago, I had one student get into Stanford while being rejected from UC Santa Barbara.   But it stings a Cal alum to have UCLA appear to be more selective!

This young woman, whom I’ll call "Amy", would much rather attend UCLA than Cal.   She’s appealing her denial of admission to the former school not for academic reasons, mind you; she knows the education in Berkeley is world-class.  Amy is appealing because she wants to live at home while finishing up her college education.  She’s blessed to be in a position where her family could easily afford to have her live in on-campus housing anywhere she was accepted, but she still wants to be close to her parents.

I’ve had a number of students like Amy.  True, a very high percentage of community college students have limited financial means.  Living at home throughout their academic careers is a necessity, not a choice.  But I’ve also met many, many students whose families did have the wherewithal (or the financial aid) to send them away to college — but who nonetheless chose to remain at home, picking Los Angeles-area schools over superb colleges and universities farther away.

Even after a dozen years teaching in this multi-cultural greenhouse called Pasadena City College, it’s hard for me to fathom why folks who can afford to move away to go to college don’t do so.  In my family, no one lives at home while going to college.  Indeed, my brother and I bucked a long-standing trend by not leaving the state, though my brother and one sister did end up living and working in the UK.   Many of my cousins went as far as they could from California, to schools in Virginia or New York or Illinois.  Yes, they were blessed with the resources to do so.  But we were also raised with the belief that a truly worth-while college experience hinges on physical distance from one’s family!

Before I went off to Cal, parents told me (indeed, everyone in my family told me) that college was not just about getting a formal classroom education.  College, we were told, is about having new experiences, creating a new identity, developing one’s own emotional, spiritual, and intellectual autonomy without interference from one’s family of origin!  "Two-thirds of your education takes place outside the classroom", I was told.  And I believe it now.  If I had lived at home, I would have missed staying up until three in the morning arguing politics and religion with my roommates.  I would have missed the lessons in financial accountability (and doing my laundry) that were so valuable during my college years.  I would have missed the opportunity to find out who Hugo really was.  (Even as I write that, I recognize my own use of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.)

I’ve had this discussion about "moving away" with many people.  My office mate and I have radically different views.  He tells me that this obsession with independence and autonomy is "a white thing" (he’s Latino).  From what I can see, he seems to be right more often than not.  Students from families that have recently immigrated to this country, as well as Hispanic and Asian students, tend to be the ones most eager to live close to home.   Perhaps they aren’t eager to live at home until they get to the bachelor’s degree, but their parents are worried about them and pressure them to stay under their roof.  (I say again, I’m only questioning those who have the financial means to live outside the home while going to school.  I’m quite sympathetic to those who are forced by economic necessity to remain with a parent while completing their education.)

My colleague is on to something, though I suspect it transcends color.  For all of my professed evangelicalism (and my brief sojourn amongst the Anabaptists), I’m as fierce a defender of individualism as can be found.  My feminism, despite my own misgivings about it, is borderline libertarian.  I want to help my students and my teenagers in youth group develop their individual autonomy, their individual selves, their individual identities.  For all my professions of faith, I still see offering people "choices" as among the highest of moral imperatives in a good society.   I want my teenagers to be able to extricate themselves from the constraints of their families and go off to find liberation in the dorms and the leafy green quads of American colleges in, if not another time zone, at least another county!

But I’m smart enough to know there’s something shallow about all this.   I’ve had too many students in my classes who did leave home at 18, go off to colleges across the country, and then flunk out.  Sometimes their setbacks were purely academic; at other times drugs and alcohol (or eating disorders) knocked them for a loop and sent them home to their families.  In a few instances, these end up being my best students, largely because they’ve been humbled by their own failures and have resolved to make significant changes.  (I recently had one young man in class who had gone off to NYU straight out of high school.  Drugs and alcohol led to his flunking out within a year.  He came home, went to PCC, worked hard, and is now off at UC Irvine, doing very well, I hear.)  The point is, some young people may not be emotionally ready to handle the freedoms that come with living away from home and eighteen.   Young people mature at different rates, and some may simply not be ready for complete independence.

At the risk of getting flamed, I wonder too if recently-immigrated families are more mistrustful of the places to which they are sending their children.   In families where a college education is a multi-generational norm,  parents (such as mine) had their own experiences living away from home to reflect upon when they got ready to send their kids off to college.  Parents who have experienced the joys and freedoms of living on-campus themselves seem much more likely to be eager to offer that same privilege to their kids.  But families who come from parts of the world where kids rarely move out before marriage may be far more reticent to allow their daughters, or even their sons, to move away to a strange place in what may still be a strange land.  That "sounds right", but I don’t know of any evidence to back it up.

This morning, I’m thinking about my family, scattered as we are across this country and across the European continent.  I think of my sister in Leeds;  my other sister in San Francisco;  my brother in Exeter; my mother in Carmel; my father in Santa Barbara;  my cousins in DeKalb and Anchorage and Charlottesville and New York and Tucson and Seattle and Boulder and Montecito and Charleston and Karlsruhe, Hamburg, and Vienna. Does it sometimes make me sad that my family is so dispersed?  Occasionally.  But it also makes me proud, too.  My brother and sisters and cousins have pursued their dreams unconstrained by geography or guilt — what could be more worthwhile than that?  If we only see each other at weddings and funerals and other special occasions, it makes our reunions all the more sweet.  Once we moved off to college, we all began to make the series of choices that would shape our lives and carry us to the various corners of the earth. We traded physical closeness for the privilege of pursuing our individual dreams, and on balance, I’d say, it was worth it, though the distance sometimes weighs heavily upon us.

I look at my friends who went to college while living at home, who still live near their parents whom they see every weekend.  I think, of all things, of the film "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", which seemed, in a remarkable way, to capture (and caricature) some of the distinctions between what I grew up calling (with a touch of self-conscious irony)  "our kind of people" and those who arrived in this land more recently.  I remember watching that movie and shifting uncomfortably.  I felt suffocated just watching the Greek family’s emphasis on togetherness and community — but I also felt just the tiniest twinge of envy.  A focus on radical individualism and personal autonomy at the expense of community has a high cost, and it is a cost I have not always paid happily.

So, I wrote a glowing letter for this young woman who’d rather go to UCLA than Berkeley. I told Amy that in my personal opinion, she’d be better off moving out and "finding herself" in a very different environment; of course, that was just my opinion, and it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t try and help her.  Amy, born in South Asia and raised in America, simply smiled when I told her this.  She thanked me for the letter, and told me, very politely, "Hugo, you just don’t understand."

Sigh.  She’s probably right.

A long defense of Lauren Winner

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 23, 2005
in Faith, Sexuality, Youth and Youth ministry
. 47 Comments

Okay, after having defended the right of college students to produce pornography on Saturday, let me win back some of my conservative readership with this post.  (Fickle, fickle.)

A couple of weeks ago I posted two entries about Lauren Winner’s Real Sex, a winsome and compelling argument for pre-marital chastity written by a young Episcopalian whose own pre-conversion sexual life fell well short of the mark (as she now defines that mark.)  I didn’t agree with everyone Winner had to say, but I thought the book was valuable and challenging.

Today I followed a link from dear Kendall Harmon’s superb and invaluable blog to a piece by Astrid Storm, an Episcopal priest and blogger at the Society of Mutual Autopsy.  (On a side note, I’ve heard complaints from folks at All Saints that my blog links to Kendall Harmon’s; apparently, some are worried I’ll corrupt the young with my sympathy for traditionalist views.)  Anyhow, Storm’s article, entitled Lauren Winner:  Reformed Sinner or Canny Opportunist, delivers a vitriolic and unpleasant counterattack from a progressive perspective.  Storm and I share a liberal attitude towards issues of sexual ethics, but I found myself wincing at her language in her post:

Just because sex is performed outside the context of marriage doesn’t mean that it is automatically promiscuous, vacuous, and self-serving. In attempting to provide all of humanity with a blanket formula for sexual/marital bliss, Winner glibly disregards the diversity and uniqueness of the individual and is thus every bit as dangerous as a physician who prescribes the same antibiotic to all of his patients, regardless of their particular illness.

Hey, I’m all for recognizing that different people have different emotional and spiritual needs; my words to my youth group last month made that fairly clear.  But I also boil at the suggestion that advocating chastity is somehow dangerous!  Even I, someone who doesn’t oppose pre-marital sex in all instances, recognizes that there is considerably greater risk in pre-marital sex than in chastity!  Leaving aside all of the physical issues (pregnancy, STDs, etc.), a successful commitment to pre-marital chastity breaks few hearts.  Relatively few married folks I know — maybe I don’t know the right ones — torture themselves with thoughts of the pre-marital romps they didn’t have.  Plenty of folks I know (one whom I know very well) are, at least at times, haunted by memories of a gift recklessly and selfishly squandered.

But the Rev. Storm doesn’t stop there.  She goes after Winner’s own brave narrative of transformation and conversion, and she does with genuine viciousness in this extended quote:

As far as I can tell, Lauren’s brief flirtation with chastity encompassed the one-and-a-half year period of her courtship with her now-husband. She began having sex at 15, and kept in shape with a regular regimen of pre-marital bedroom calisthenics. Back in 2000, while I was in Divinity School, I actually became a temporary Winner fan when a friend sent me an article that Lauren had written for Beliefnet: “Sex and the Single Evangelical: The Church Lady versus the Evangelical Whore.” In it, Lauren boasted that she had been tumbling about recently in a king-sized hotel bed with her boyfriend. Maybe tumbling about with this particular boyfriend wasn’t the best example of thoughtful, premarital sex, but someone like Winner, I thought, just might be smart and bold enough to challenge the overly simplistic assumptions the church makes about sex outside of marriage.

So I looked forward to her next piece, which came out just months later in the decidedly more conservative Christianity Today. In “Solitary Refinement” she started talking more about chastity, even proclaiming that, at age 24, she might be called to a single and celibate life herself. Oh no. I waited in the hopes that she might still articulate a more nuanced theology of sex for young unmarried Christians like herself, but alas, Lauren did a turnabout, marching backwards instead of forwards, straight into the Dark Ages. Actually, she seems to have a history of flip-flopping; a devout Orthodox Jew, she converted to evangelical Christianity, and got a lot of journalistic mileage out of that role reversal. A year later, she published "Mudhouse Sabbath"—"a book about all those things I miss" about being Jewish. And now, the “evangelical whore” has morphed into her old nemesis, the Church Lady, and written a book about that transformation. Which leads one to ask what, exactly, is Lauren Winner—reformed sinner or trend-sniffing opportunist?

Short-lived beliefs and lack of credentials can be excused as just part of being young. But that’s why youth calls for some judicious withholding of opinion until one’s views are tested over time. Perhaps there’s no better place to learn that lesson than in the ordained ministry; when and if she starts mounting the pulpit as a priest (and from the tone of this book, preaching comes easily to her), Lauren may want to remember that credentials do matter when you’re standing up there, and they can make a big difference in how willing people are to listen to what you’re saying…

Am I the only one who finds this just plain nasty?

I’m particularly put off by the reference to Winner’s turnabout, marching backwards instead of forwards, straight into the Dark Ages, and the charge of "flip-flopping."  Gosh, where I come from, Rev. Storm, it’s called a conversion narrative.  These "flip-flips" happen with alarming frequency in Scripture and Christian history, Astrid, it’s really remarkable.   (The prodigal, Paul, Augustine, Francis, oh heck, our president himself.)  When Winner left behind a lifestyle of moderate late-adolescent promiscuity to come to Christ she was indeed marching backwards in the sense that all of us who repent and convert are returning home to the God who loves us.  To convert literally means to "turn-around", when we march forward, we continue in the same direction.  I can only assume that Rev. Storm thinks little of repentance and conversion. Then again, if she’s like some of my dear friends at All Saints, she doesn’t think most human sexual behavior is worth repenting!  Why make a u-turn when all the highways lead to the same happy destination, and have all the same lovely amenities along the way?

The bit about "trend-sniffing opportunist" hits especially close to home, because I’ve had that accusation thrown my way many a time.  I have my own conversion narrative, and I’ve been frank about my own very serious failings.  I’ve had a past, I’ve changed my life, and I’ve grown — I hope — in Christ.  I’ve changed churches several times, and even now, worship in an Episcopal parish that I love mightily but am not afraid to critique. Like Winner, I’m relatively new to the whole concept of Christian obedience.  Unlike Winner, I’m not yet ready to surrender to obedience wholeheartedly, partly because much of me is still invested in my old secular values and partly because I’m too afraid of offending those around me.  (How’s that for a candid assessment?)  Of course, my Gemini/ENFP soul is cursed by ambivalence, so maybe I am as much of a real "flip-flopper" as Storm thinks Winner is.

I don’t know how old Storm is, but I’m angry at her attack on Lauren Winner’s youth:

Short-lived beliefs and lack of credentials can be excused as just part of being young. But that’s why youth calls for some judicious withholding of opinion until one’s views are tested over time.

Gosh, C.S. Lewis just nails that old canard (about youth and maturity) in chapter five of The Great Divorce, when we meet the character of the Episcopal Ghost, who famously remarks:

I’m going to point out how people always forget that Jesus (here the Ghost bowed) was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been. A profoundly interesting question. What a different Christianity we might have had if only the Founder had reached his full stature! I shall end up by pointing out how this deepens the significance of the Crucifixion. One feels for the first time what a disaster it was: what a tragic waste… so much promise cut short.

And Storm forgets her bible on the subject of youth and truth: Jeremiah 1, and my beloved 1 Timothy 4:12:

Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.

Lauren Winner challenged me in a very good way; in her speech, life, love, faith, and purity she sets an example for me (and I am a decade her senior). I honor her story of conversion, and as far as I’m concerned, her pre-conversion experiences make her narrative more, not less compelling and convincing.  I’m oh-so-close to standing with her on the subject of chastity.  And frankly, if I read more pompous drivel like this offering from Rev. Storm, I just might complete that journey.

Matilde’s play date

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 23, 2005
in Chinchillas
. 1 Comment

Sharp-eyed readers will notice a new photo album on the right: Matilde goes visiting. 

For some time, my fiancee and I have been worried that Matilde the chinchilla may be lonely.  We’ve had her since January 2004, and since then we’ve lavished her with love and attention.  She’s had many friends and family come by to visit, and has become quite accustomed to being handled by humans.  But in these past 16 months, Matilde has not so much as seen another chinchilla.  (She does watch the squirrels who play on the patio outside, however, with at least a passing interest.) We’ve been thinking that she might be happier with a companion, though we have no intention of breeding her.  Any companion we chose would need to be another female.

We’ve heard from experts that introducing chinchillas can be a tricky thing.  Simply going to Petco and buying a new female and bringing her home could be disastrous; a fight for dominance could easily ensue and leave one or both chins seriously hurt — or worse.  Our advisors in the chin world told us that Matilde ought to be taken on a "play date" with other female chinchillas in a neutral setting, where she could make a friend without either animal having to defend her territory.

On Saturday afternoon (the first anniversary of our girl’s near-death experience), we drove through heat and smog to the glorious suburbs of San Bernardino County.  A very kind woman, "Mary", who has been rescuing animals for years, lives there with over thirty wonderful chinchillas of various colors and sizes.  Mary invited us to bring Matilde to play with a few of her female chins, to see if, well, a "companion match" could be made.  We put Matty in her little cat carrier, climbed into the car, cranked up the air conditioning and drove east for an hour and a half.

Over the course of a three-and-a-half hour visit, Matilde played with about half a dozen chins.  Her first encounter, with "Beauty", is depicted here.  A half-second after this photo was snapped, Matilde and Beauty chased each other around the room, with our girl horrifying her parents by trying to mount Beauty.  (Apparently this has less to do with sexual frustration than with establishing dominance.  Our little one wants everyone to know "who’s boss.")  Other chins came out, including long-eared Smokey, who also played briefly with Matilde.

But as we watched Matilde play, both my fiancee and I began to come to a clear conclusion: Matty wants to live alone.  it wasn’t that she didn’t interact with other chins, it’s that they didn’t interest her for long.  She was much more interested in taking dust baths in Mary’s fireplace (the living room of this home was a chin paradise), or playing in the "alfalfa basket", or having oatmeal and hay on the floor than in bonding with other chinchillas.  She spent more time crawling on the humans in the room than with her own kind, and we became convinced that we were getting a clear message from her:  "Mama and Papa, I want to be your only four-legged child.  I don’t want to share!"  Believe me, in our household we believe we can communicate very effectively with our little girl, and she with us.

Just to make sure, we may take Matilde back out to the Inland Empire for another play date next month.  We had hoped to watch her play more with the adorable little Sweet Boy, who’s still little more than a kit.  In this photo, he looks more like a koala bear than a chin; and in this, he shows how loving he can be.  This is just enchanting.  But he’s just too young to be adopted yet, and besides, we don’t want Matilde having kits of her own.  But holding a not-yet-full-grown chinchilla in our arms, and smelling his "kit" smell (if you know what puppy breath smells like, you know what we’re talking about), we very nearly made a commitment to surrender our little girl’s chastity.

Saturday night, Matilde and her parents returned to Pasadena.  Matilde was exhausted but happy, and very loving.  We haven’t ruled out a future companion for her, but her demeanor during her play date seems to suggest that she is genuinely content being alone at, (or at least near), the center of our lives.

Our "chinchilla charity" continues to move forward.  We’ll be traveling to the Midwest next month (without Matilde, alas) to meet with folks very active in the "pet homes for ranchies" movement, and we expect to have a fully incorporated 501(c)3 charity up-and-running by the middle of summer.  I’ll keep everyone posted.

Obscenity Crimes on Campus

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2005
in Feminism, Porn and Youth
. 32 Comments

Note:  I wrote this Friday afternoon, and then lost my internet connection.  I saved it, and thus am publishing a rare Saturday post.  (Hence the Friday date at the top.)

This morning, I noticed several "hits" to this site coming from Obscenity Crimes, the anti-pornography arm of the conservative Morality in Media organization.  Specifically, the hits came from an article by Sharon Secor entitled New Lows in Higher Education which linked to this March post of mine where I debated whether or not to offer a course on pornography.

Secor, in breathless prose, reports that American college campuses are filled with the decadent young who produce their own pornography, mentioning in particular Boink Magazine (link may offend some readers) which has just seen its second issue produced by students at Boston University.  Secor suggests that the students are only following their professors’ encouragement:

"That students are willing to participate in the production of pornography shouldn’t be too surprising in light of both our culture and the types of accredited college courses that have sprung up on campuses from coast to coast. Recent years have seen such offerings as the Wesleyan University class –discontinued after a public outcry – in which the final project, according to a May 8, 1999, Hartford Courant story by Eric Rich, required students to create their own work of pornography. An October 2001, Accuracy in Academia article by Joe Jablonski described a San Francisco State University course “which seeks to introduce them to the world of the Internet’s sexual underground. Students actually learn how to navigate the underworld of cybersex and get a guided tour through the world of porn sites.”

What Secor doesn’t mention is that most college classes that focus on pornography and erotica don’t focus on viewing and creating explicit material.  Rather, they focus on critical analyses of the historic and contemporary role of pornography in human culture, focusing on (depending on the instructor) a variety of different perspectives (feminist, Marxist, film studies, etcetera.)   Lots of folks who teach these classes use texts like Lynn Hunt’s magisterial The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity.   The human libido expresses itself in many and varied ways, but I’ve read Hunt cover to cover and I challenge anyone to find anything remotely arousing within its 400 pages.  Yes, it fits Secor’s agenda to pretend that these courses are taught by the irresponsible, the libertine, and the lecherous to the immature, the impressionable, and the horny!  Alas, Ms. Secor, a review of the syllabi of most courses on pornography at the college and university levels will reveal oodles of theory and precious few "dirty pictures."

Secor’s article also touches on the growing number of sex columns appearing in college newspapers nationwide.  She decries columns like Heather Grantham’s "Cornellingus" (not hard to guess the Ivy League university in whose paper that appears), and points out that dozens of other colleges have had explicit "sex columns" for years.  I’m told that UCSB — where my father has taught for four decades — was the pioneer in this field with its "Wednesday Hump" column.  (If any readers have contrary information, please provide.)  My own Pasadena City College has entered the sex advice world as well this semester, with our new "Sexpert".  (This week’s topic: straight men and anal sex; some readers of this blog may not wish to click the link.) 

By mixing together three only marginally related developments (the academic study of porn, student involvement in producing amateur pornography, and graphic advice columns in campus newspapers), Secor is failing to make some vital distinctions.  There’s a difference between teaching courses to educate, producing porn to titillate, and writing columns to infuriate! Though I am not, for the reasons I’ve given before, ready at this time to teach a class on pornography, I do think it a subject very much worth the time and attention of the academy, particularly from those of us who teach and write from a feminist perspective.  As far as the student production of porn (e.g. Boink Magazine) is concerned, I think there’s an enormous difference between erotica that is student-produced and distributed and porn that is produced by off-campus commercial entities using students as actors and performers.  Agency matters a great deal, and students are, I think, far less likely to be the victims of commercial exploitation when they are in charge of all the artistic and production decisions.  Of course, I see no reason why those students who do not wish to subsidize the creation of campus erotica ought to have to subsidize it with their fees.

As for the columns themselves, from what I can tell, they are a mixed bag.  Few are genuinely educational.  Most, and I think this certainly describes our own rather feeble effort at PCC, seem to be written more to infuriate conservative readers than to enlighten curious members of the student body!  Given the ubiquitousness of thoughtful, sound advice on the Internet about sex, it’s not as if many of today’s college students are likely to become better lovers as a consequence of reading these columns.  The raison d’etre of all of this seems to be the delight in tweaking the blue noses of the likes of Sharon Secor and Morality in Media.  Developmentally, that makes sense; I expect 20 year-olds to take genuine pleasure in horrifying their elders. 

I’m convinced that porn studies, as a field, will continue to grow.  As pornography, in all its many and varied forms, continues to exert a powerful influence upon our culture, examining it is worth our professional time and our intellectual energy. As we continue to talk more and more about the subject, some students might well be inspired to produce their own pornography; others might just as well be inspired to campaign against the commercial sex industry.  If I ever do teach a course on porn, I’ll be scrupulous about attempting to observe the distinction between education and titillation, recognizing that different folks will perceive different material in different ways. But if some students do seek to produce their own erotic material, as an amateur and authentic counterbalance to the glut of commercialized pornography, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.  And if some want to infuriate and exasperate their elders with graphic columns in campus papers, those of us old enough to know a little better ought not to take the eagerly proffered bait.

But the hits they keep on coming.

Instant adventurers and the need for community

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2005
in Athletics and Fitness and Vanity
. 12 Comments

Jonathan Dresner sent me this link to a story in yesterday’s New York Times: The Now or Never Athlete.  It’s an article about the phenomenon of "instant adventurers", folks who suddenly decide, often after years of sloth, to wake up one morning and train for an extreme endurance event like the 135-mile Badwater Race.

Casual athletes, if athletes at all, they suddenly vault from a lifetime of sporadic workouts to the workout of a lifetime. The adventures vary: summiting Mount Everest, swimming the English Channel, dog-racing the Iditarod. But the instant adventurers don’t; they are normal people who unexpectedly fixate on one of the world’s most grueling challenges.

"This year I bet I had five people contact me who’d never done anything like this in their lives," said Lisa Smith-Batchen of Victor, Idaho, an ultramarathoner and online coach who caters to novices. She has observed such a surge in first-timers that she calls her business Dreamchasers. Despite how often their sanity is questioned, these amateurs tend to be successful, focused people who feel they have mastered every other aspect of their lives - career, relationships, parenthood - only to discover their last unconquered frontier is the one they have carried around since birth: their bodies.

"From a psychological perspective, these are actually very healthy people," said Dr. Andrew Lovy, a psychiatrist in Mesa, Ariz., who also runs in ultramarathons. "You can’t wake up Monday as a novice and do the Iditarod on Tuesday. But you can wake up Monday and say, ‘I think I’ll start training for the Iditarod on Tuesday.’ That’s excellent; you’re not letting someone else define your limits or capabilities."

This is not a conventional midlife crisis, Dr. Lovy said. It is more a midlife convergence of heightened confidence, disposable income and a taste for travel.

"They’re at the top of their game," he said, "and what they want is an extraordinary achievement which will help define them."

Hmm.  Here’s where I’m going to get snippy.  I’ve been working out regularly for well over a decade, since making a decision in 1992 to start exercising (a resolution I’ve managed to keep, remarkably enough).  I didn’t run my first marathon until 1998, didn’t do my first ultra-marathon until 2003, didn’t do my first century ride until 2004.  Unlike these instant adventurers, I’ve built up my training very slowly. 

I’ve met these instant adventurers before, out on the trails as they train for their first 100-miler (having never completed anything longer than a 10K).  I’ll be the first to admit I have tremendous admiration for their focus and dedication.  But I also am bothered by the fact that their devotion is, as the article says, about "an extraordinary achievement that will help define them."  There’s a level of narcissism there that I find troubling.

To be fair, as my friends, family, and readers will at once point out, I have an unhealthy narcissistic streak all my own.  But unlike the instant adventurers, my friends and I who marathon and ultra (those are both verbs in our circle) don’t merely do so to prove something to ourselves and to other people.  We run as part of a community, understanding that training and competing is not about individual achievement so much as it is about creating a close-knit tribe of fellow endurance enthusiasts who will support each other through the highs and lows of not only athletics, but of life itself. 

No one I run with sets their sights on one enormous event,  We’re training to run for the rest of our lives, two or three long distance races a year with a smattering of shorter ones.  We train to keep our bodies fit, we train to find spiritual respite from the cares of the world, but we also train together because we see what we do as a communal, group activity.  In my group, there is relatively little talk of PRs (personal records), though most of us will happily share our best times if asked.  When we train, we’re more likely to talk about our relationships, our families, our pets, our careers, and our faiths than we are to endlessly discuss our next big event.

I’ve seen marriages fall apart over the kind of obsessiveness I read about in the Times story.  There’s a fine line between being really, really fit and being absolutely nutty, and I’ve seen lots of people cross it over the years.  In my early years of working out, when I battled with exercise anorexia (and yes, that was an actual diagnosis), my weight plummeted to 145 pounds. (I’m 180 now, and feel just fine at that weight, thanks.)  I lost the ability to think about anything other than eating (or more accurately, not eating) and training.  My relationships with everyone suffered.

Most of the folks mentioned in the Times article took up their athletic quests in the aftermath of personal tragedy: a divorce, a death of a loved one, a job loss, September 11.  It’s true that many of us who become distance runners first take up the sport after a loss.  We want to reassert some control over our lives because external circumstances have made our lives seem very chaotic indeed.  But sooner or later, we’re going to have to find another reason to run and train, or we’ll give it up altogether.  The drive to prove something is ultimately, I think, a short-lived one.  Successful training has to be about more than showing the world (and oneself) that one can master one’s own flesh; it’s ultimately a way of life that needs to be about connecting to others, to nature, and to the spiritual.

Then again, maybe I’m just envious.  Between my obligations at home, my teaching,  my volunteer work, my blogging, our new chinchilla rescue charity, and so on, I’m not willing to put in the time to train for one of the really long events.  Most of the folks in my running group have families, and they are not willing to sacrifice time with their kids for private glory. At this stage in my life, my plate is too full — and I’m just not willing to sacrifice other aspects of my life in order to complete one of the truly long events.  For now, 26.2 will have to be a sufficient distance.  But yes, I do fantasize about the "big ones", and perhaps, perhaps, I’ll turn my attention towards them someday soon,

Calvin, Bush, and Hugo on being an evangelical

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2005
in Christianity and Politics
. 18 Comments

Jesse at Pandagon linked to this interesting bit of news: President Bush will deliver the commencement address this Sunday at Calvin College, one of the flagship schools of evangelical higher education.  Along with Wheaton in Illinois, and perhaps Westmont here in California, and a couple of other places, Calvin is one of the "Christian Ivies", a school that combines passionate Christian commitment with first-rate scholarship.   

According to this story in the Detroit News, Calvin College is not safe ground for President Bush.  Contrary to the media’s depiction of evangelical Christians as monolithically Republican and supporters of the administration, more than 100 Calvin faculty (that’s a lot at a small liberal arts college) signed

..an open letter of rebuke to the president that’s scheduled to appear as a half-page ad in the Grand Rapids Press on the day of the president’s speech.

While welcoming the president, the letter delivers a carefully worded critique of administration policies from a Christian viewpoint. It calls the Iraq war "unjust and unjustified," expresses dismay at policies that "favor the wealthy … and burden the poor," challenges policies of intolerance toward dissent, and environmental policies that are at odds with being "caretakers of God’s good creation." The letter is one way to register the fact that even in the heart of Christian America, religion does not dictate politics. It reminds Americans that even at a conservative Christian school, where religious values are paramount, people have different social, political and cultural views.

Here’s today’s Detroit Free Press story.  Amen.  One of my friends and heroes, Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, taught at Calvin for 17 years.  He’s part of a long tradition of evangelicals with progressive commitments and Calvin connections going back at least as far as the Evangelicals for McGovern campaign of 1972.

I often identify myself on this blog as an evangelical, which leads some folks to wonder what it is, exactly, about my faith and my views that qualifies me to use that (admittedly ambiguous) term.  I call myself an evangelical because I love Jesus.  I don’t love Him because He was a great teacher, or a brave and dedicated fighter for social justice.  He was those things, but I believe Jesus is the Savior, one who died to save me and countless others from death and despair and emptiness.  I’ve come to believe that He — and He alone — gives me the "power for a new life".  I believe that the Scriptures contain the unique record of Jesus’ teaching and ministry, and I believe that in the broad sense of the terms, the Bible is both infallible and inerrant.  (Click here for a good, thoughtful definition of those terms.)  I call myself an evangelical because I agree with the bulk of the content of the Lausanne and Chicago declarations — which come as close to anything as defining what it is to be a progressive evangelical.

I’m conscious that I’m still on a journey. I’m still, chronologically speaking, a fairly new Christian.  My faith has waxed and waned since the first time I accepted Jesus Christ.  I’ve been "born again" more than once, in some sense, because I’ve fallen and repented and fallen and repented many, many times.  I’ve switched churches several times, and felt "tugged" by my friends to my theological left and my theological right, both sets of whom seem to have more consistency than I!  But the great blessing of my adulthood is that even in my failings and my shortcomings, I’ve never lost the certainty that God is faithful, faithful to me and to all of His people, many of whom worship Him by different names.

And when I read about those faculty, staff, and students who are peacefully and politely protesting the president, I’m reminded once more that even in a progressive Episcopal church, I am right to call myself an evangelical.

Wrapping up “Sex, All Saints Style”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2005
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Sexuality and Youth ministry
. 12 Comments

Last night, we had our fourth and final evening of "Sex, All Saints Style" with our kids at youth group.  Again, our turnout was high, which was very gratifying.

Our topic for this final week was "sex and spirituality."  Of course, as far as we’re concerned, all of the material that we’ve presented over the past three sessions has had a spiritual dimension.  But last night, we wanted to probe a little deeper with our teens.  We began by asking them a question:  "What do you think is the spiritual meaning of sex?"  They were quiet.  A group that a week or two ago had blithely and cheerfully talked about oral sex was — predictably — stumped by a question that asked them to reflect on something relatively profound.  After a few minutes, a few brave souls began to volunteer:  "Sex is designed to help us draw closer to another person."  "Sex is a symbol of complete unity with the one you love".

We praised their answers, and then took a break to show them a short film.  The Nooma project is a series of short (10-11 minute) and recent (2002) films by Christian evangelist Rob Bell.  We showed the second film in the series, "Flame".  In it, Bell slowly drives and walks towards an enormous pile of wood, which he will eventually set alight, all the while talking about the various Hebrew words for love and sex.  (A transcript, with pictures, is available in a PDF file here.) The language is non-judgmental; Bell never explicitly says "Don’t have sex outside of marriage."   He does say, quite clearly and compellingly, that God intended sex to be extraordinary, and he intended sex to be a union of not only two bodies, but of all three kinds of love that the Old Testament speaks of:  "raya" (strong friendship), "ahava" (enduring commitment), "dod" (sexual passion).   

Our kids watched with interest, but some were clearly uncomfortable.  A couple of the older girls remarked that what Bell was talking about was not the way sex had to be for young people.  While Bell’s video suggests that "dod" (the syllable is long, apparently, rhymes with "load") ought to be built on a foundation of "raya" and "ahava", a couple of our teens suggested that a relationship that began with "dod" could eventually blossom into one with the other qualities.  They insisted that it was perfectly possible, even common, for high-school relationships to begin with "hook-ups" and prosper into lasting, loving, commitments.  Other kids disagreed, as did some of the adults, and for a moment, we were in danger of sinking into the wretched world of warring anecdotes.

Fortunately, we pulled out of that trap.  We were able to address a very common adolescent misconception, however: the notion that experience is the best teacher.  Several of the kids talked about the importance (one even used the phrase "spiritual importance") of having lots of sexual experience in order to grow as a person.  It’s a common modern argument, and one I’ve addressed at length in this old post.    We pointed out to the kids that there’s no evidence that those who are promiscuous as youth have more successful relationships as adults, something one would expect to find if "experience" really were that salutatory.  Drawing on my own experience I reminded them of something I wrote in that December post:

In a different context, Yeats remarked that "too much suffering makes a stone of the heart."  He was right.  It has taken so much work for me to heal the literal and figurative scar tissue from unnecessary injuries I inflicted on myself.  The more I "did", the less I cared about those around me. Whatever little compassion or tenderness you see in me was and is a gift from God, not the consequence of living too much and too hard.

I actually got a bit emotional as I talked about getting ready for what will be my fourth marriage.  I told the kids that not only had I had to do a colossal amount of work to overcome the self-inflicted wounds of my past, but I’ve also had to ask my fiancee to cope with the prospect of Hugo being her first husband — and she becoming his fourth wife.  Only a remarkably trusting, forgiving, and spiritually strong woman of God would be willing to take me on, with all my baggage!  (And believe me, I’ve worked hard to dump as much of that baggage as humanly possible, and with God’s grace, my hard work, and my fiancee’s support, miracles have happened there.)   

On this subject, I briefly told the kids about my friend "Mike."  Mike and I are the same age.  We’re "gym buddies"  and fellow marathoners/ultra-runners, and I’ve known him for years.  Mike has been married to the same woman for over two decades.  He and his wife gave each other their virginity all those years ago, and have remained faithful ever since.  Mike and I have compared notes over the years.  We don’t talk much in terms of vulgar details, but we do share a mutual fascination with each other’s lives, because our experiences have been so different.  And though Mike might be a bit titillated by the details of my past, he wouldn’t trade places with me for anything.  I, on the other hand, am deeply envious of Mike.  I accept my past for what it is, I don’t shame it.  But I also know that when it comes to the tools of adult living, when it comes to knowing what makes a marriage work, Mike knows a hell of a lot more than I do.  His different experiences with one woman trump all of my past identical experiences with different women.  Only now, as I move towards marriage with my amazing, challenging, patient and persistent fiancee, am I getting a glimpse of what Mike has known for a long time.  The kids were very silent as I told them this, but I could see their faces — and I’d like to believe some of what I was saying sunk in.

Ultimately, we brought the conversation back to God.  (Some of my readers are most relieved to learn that!)  Though the youth leaders openly — and lovingly –disagree even with each other about whether or not any high school kids are truly ready for sexual activity, we all agreed on this:  as a church community, we want the best for our kids.  And we don’t want the good to be the enemy of the best.  We told them that they, our precious, beautiful, challenging, extraordinary teenagers, deserve to experience all the joys God wants them to experience.   We told the kids we won’t condemn any decision any one of them makes sexually; we reminded them that we will listen lovingly and supportingly to whatever it is that they have to tell us.   But we want them to remember that sometimes, their hearts and their bodies will lie to them  by promising that immediate gratification will bring enduring reward.  We want them to remember, as Bell points out, that the biggest and hottest burning bonfires take a long time to build.

Our fourth and final night of "sex, All Saints style" came to an end with a prayer circle and lots of hugs.  We still have some "kinks" in the program we might need to work out.  (For example, having frosh and seniors in the same discussion sometimes leads to the seniors, who naturally tend to be more experienced, dominating the discussion.  We may have to break kids up by age group in the future.)   Because even our youth leaders don’t all agree completely on issues of sexual ethics, it’s clear that we adults can benefit from continued dialogue within the church community about what it is that we want our kids to learn.  But we did exciting work this past month, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of it.

Thursday Short Poem: Justice’s Men at Forty

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2005
in Poetry
. 4 Comments

I’ll be 38 on Sunday, and I realize that though I’ve quoted the opening stanza of this Donald Justice poem, I haven’t had the whole thing up.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

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

I love this line:

Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense…

I know what that means now, thank God, thank God.