I know, fourth post of the day… but it’s just a link to the second piece I’ve had published at Inside Higher Education: the Joys of Faculty Self-Evaluations. Do have a look.
Archive for November, 2005
Third post of the morning, but it’s a quickie.
If true, this is happy news for progressives in California, and further evidence that Governor Schwarzenegger may be ready to swing to the left: Report: Schwarzenegger Appoints Lesbian Activist Top Aide.
In a move to shore up his sagging support among California gays and moderates Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has reportedly hired Susan Kennedy as his new chief of staff.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Schwarzenegger will make the formal announcement this week. The appointment of Kennedy is part of a major shakeup of the governor’s staff as he heads into an election amid plummeting approval ratings.
Kennedy is a longtime gay activist, a former official with the state Democratic Party official and was a top adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis…
She and partner Vicki Marti exchanged vows in a 1999 ceremony in Hawaii that was attended by many California political insiders.
She is highly respected by both Democrats and Republicans, although the far right of the GOP has expressed concerns about the reported appointment.
I’ll bet they have! Now all Arnold needs to do is grant clemency to Tookie Williams, and he’ll have won this liberal’s heart…
UPDATE: Uh oh, Arnold. The Campaign for California Families is really unhappy:
Arnold Schwarzenegger has become a liberal Democrat. By placing a leading homosexual, pro-abortion Democrat activist in charge of his entire administration, Arnold has taken a disastrous turn to the left. Conservative voters who supported him are waking up from their dream and stepping into reality – and the reality stinks. This is like George W. Bush appointing Hillary Clinton to be in charge of his administration. It’s utterly ridiculous. Why doesn’t Arnold get honest and just leave the Republican Party?
First off, I ask for prayers this morning for the safety of the four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams who were kidnapped this past weekend in Iraq. When I was actively involved with the Mennonites, there was no charity as near and dear to our collective Anabaptist hearts as the work of CPT. I’ve known several members of Pasadena Mennonite Church who have traveled with CPT to places such as Iraq and the Israeli occupied territories. For several years, CPT was my favorite charity.
CPT is made up of committed pacifists who take seriously the authentic meaning of pacifism: to "make peace" (from the Latin pax facere). (Here’s a BBC profile of the group.) Too many folks, both literally and metaphorically, confuse pacifism with passivity (a different Latin root altogether). Real pacifism, especially in the Anabaptist/Quaker/Peace Church tradition from which CPT sprang, is about actively "getting in the way". It is about protecting those who are most at risk, whether the threat comes from uniformed armies or insurgents. CPTers know the dangers they face; where others travel with armed guards or in Humvees, they travel light (without even the small sword Jesus suggested they take!) And of course, anyone working for CPT is particularly vulnerable to being kidnapped.
As a pacifist, I still find it possible to honor those who carry weapons to the world’s most dangerous places. But I honor still more those who leave the comforts of home, and armed only with the Gospel and a profound commitment to nonviolence and peace, place themselves "in the way" of destruction. They are my real heroes, and though they now face a not unanticipated danger, I am praying for their safety and for the larger mission of CPT.
I got an interesting email last week in response to this recent post on dating. A reader who asked not to be identified (I’ll call him "Malcolm") wrote a lengthy note on the subject of the dating in the college/graduate school world. With his permission, I’m quoting a paragraph from his note in which he discusses the interplay of his attraction to certain "types" with pro-feminist principles:
What I don’t like… is that I’ve become shallower in terms of who I go after - when other information is unavailable, appearance makes up the difference. Near the beginning of the year, I mentioned the physical type for which I had the greatest weakness, but mused that it had little or no predictive value for whom I might eventually pursue. Looking over the past year, every dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed girl with whom I had reasonable contact in (Large Public University Town) became a "person of interest". Those of paler hue did not attract my interest at the same rate. I’m not sure if that is actually a problem, but it’s an effect I doubt most feminists would approve of.
Malcolm had many other good and interesting things to say, but I want to focus in a bit on this.
There’s a widespread and patently false assumption that a heterosexual man who embraces feminist principles ought not to have a "type" to which he is drawn. Indeed, one of the issues that I see coming up in men’s discussion groups over and over again is the problem of physical attraction. Can one really be a pro-feminist if one is attracted to women based upon their looks? If one is more attracted to thin women, or blondes, or Asians, or whatever, do these specific attractions vitiate one’s principles? Many young men I’ve worked with think that in order to be an authentic feminist, a man must be only interested in a woman’s mind, a woman’s heart, a woman’s spirit. According to this line of thinking, to be too attracted to a woman’s body, or to find one type of body more attractive than others, is evidence of an insufficiently evolved pro-feminist mentality!
Here’s where a simple-minded pro-feminism risks turning into gnosticism. The gnostics rejected the idea of the body as good, seeing it as a prison for the soul. Various gnostic heresies continue to abound, and I’ve met some folks on the fringes of the feminist world who still cling to it. They look at the sexual exploitation of women in our intensely visual culture, and they long for a world where women are seen separately from their flesh. Dating and mating decisions, they maintain, should be based on intellectual, emotional, political, and spiritual compatibility — not on physical desire. According to this small but passionate group, those who make choices even partly based on external appearance have failed to evolve sufficiently, and are victims of a corrupted, carnal culture. And unfortunately, more than a few men and women who are trying to live with feminist principles end up feeling a nagging sense of guilt about what they believe to be their own "superficial" and "shallow" attractions.
But authentic feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.
Most of us — not all — have certain physical "types" to which we are often drawn. While I am not an arbiter of appropriate "pro-feminist behavior" (that would be a laugh!), I can’t say I’m troubled by the fact that Malcolm is attracted to dark-skinned young women. Now, if that attraction is linked to a belief that those with darker skin might be more submissive (and knowing Malcolm, I don’t think it is), then that would be a problem. A "type" does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an "Asian fetish" that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women "know how to treat a man better."
Ultimately, we are embodied people. Both my faith and my feminism tell me that our bodies are good and worthy of pleasure and respect. My faith and my feminism also tell me that our fallen culture sends unhealthy and limited messages about what sort of bodies are most beautiful and worthy of desire. It is an important part of "growing up" to learn to separate our own unique wants from those that are imposed on us by our peers and society at large. (My philosophically-minded friends will question where it is that these "original desires" come from, if not from external influences. Pace, folks, that’s an issue better left to those more inclined to theoretical discussions of the nature of the self. I’m not qualified or even particularly interested.) The human family is naturally physically diverse in appearance, and I am convinced we are equally diverse — at our core — in terms of what appearances attract us. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
An interesting article in today’s New York Times: Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales. Excerpt:
Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor’s waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.
Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.
Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.
But now that federal crackdowns and the industry’s self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients’ medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation’s doctors, still mostly men.
Read the whole piece.
There’s an obvious parallel, I think, to the college textbook industry. When I first started teaching at PCC, I was stunned by the large number of attractive young women who visited me regularly as representatives of one publishing company or another. At our college, individual professors are allowed total discretion in selecting textbooks for their courses. And this can translate into a great deal of money.
For example, I have three sections of Western Civilzation and two sections of Modern European History. Each has about 40 students enrolled. That’s 200 students who will have to buy the texts I pick. At prices averaging at least $65-75 per book, my text decisions are worth tens of thousands of dollars every year. (I teach intersessions too, of course!)
During my first four or five years at PCC, at least until the late 1990s, I got regular visits from publishing reps. I remember one man who was a regular, and one much older woman who had come out of retirement, but the rest were all young women between about 23-32. Almost all were stereotypically attractive and outgoing. Each repped for a different publishing house, and each of these houses published different textbooks for Western Civ survey courses.
I have always kept up with the latest textbooks in my field. Frankly, however, the top four or five publishing houses all put out remarkably similar texts. Most big companies have several titles in Western Civ; they have books with more of a social/cultural emphasis, books with a straightforward political emphasis, and "brief editions" of their larger offerings. But by and large, I’ve discovered that there’s precious little difference among them. They all cover more or less the same subjects in the same way, and they are all priced within a few dollars of each other.
Because the books are so similar to one another, the textbook reps needed strong and vivacious personalities to sell their product. And flirtation was obviously a strong selling point! I can say with a straight face that I never consciously ordered one particular text based upon the attractiveness of a publisher’s representative, but I won’t deny that in my younger days I did enjoy the visits. Several times, I was taken to relatively inexpensive lunches; I received a host of small, relatively cheap gifts. (I still have an old solar calculator from about 1996; it works just fine.) And of course, I was flirted with fairly consistently.
From a feminist standpoint, I was a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, I was — in my younger days — much more comfortable with casual flirtation than I am now. Though I never dated a textbook rep, I did enjoy the banter and the tension immensely. At the same time, I was always conscious of the fact that these women were paid on commissions; my decisions did affect, in not insubstantial ways, their livelihood. As a pro-feminist man, I knew I had to be very careful about deriving even casual pleasure from an experience with a woman that was based on her economic needs. Many years ago, I decided not to ask out the one textbook rep I found remarkably appealing. I was using her company’s books at the time, and I didn’t want to put her in the position of being afraid to reject me for fear that I would cancel my order. So we flirted and batted our eyes and all that, and I ended up going out with the woman who became my third wife instead. The flirtatious rep moved on to another job, and I switched to a new textbook.
About five years or so, the number of visitors dropped dramatically. Though the prices of textbooks have continued to rise, it seems the publishing companies have cut back on their expenses by hiring few sales reps. I now get only one or two visits a year. Most of the publishers seem to rely on relentless e-mail spam to get me to adopt their books. This never works. Honestly, I’ve stuck with the same text for three years now in my survey courses. It’s a solid one, it’s a tad bit cheaper than the competition, and I haven’t been given any incentive to change. No rep has taken me to lunch since early 2000, if not before — I haven’t gotten so much as a free pen in at least as long.
My boundaries weren’t bad back then, and they are better now. But I wouldn’t mind a new calculator. And I wouldn’t mind being taken out for sushi.
I cross-posted this morning’s piece over at Cliopatria, and Jonathan Dresner has a very strong response. Weigh in here or there as you please. He makes some fine points (even as he styles himself the "anti-Hugo" to do so). I may have been at this teaching gig for a while, but I’m always interested in hearing how my global colleagues handle their classrooms. Frankly, I know I’m a reasonably popular and entertaining professor — but I’m not always sure that I’m as good a teacher as I ought to be. Perhaps, in my effort to construct interesting narratives, I pander too often to my own interests and my students’ pleasure. Or, perhaps, Jonathan and I have two equally legitimate ways of approaching the same subject.
One of the pleasures of tenure is the ability to discuss one’s pedagogical weaknesses in a very public forum in the full confidence that one’s career is not on the line!
I’m back in the office after the long weekend. We’re into our final two weeks of the semester. Folks are returning to campus this morning in various stages of mid-holiday exhaustion, anxiety, and satiety. Few times of year in the academic calendar are as potentially frantic as the two weeks of school that remain after Thanksgiving and before the Christmas holidays! ‘Twill be a busy time.
Once again, I have failed to get as far as I had hoped in my Western Civilization courses. My ancient history class (History 1A) will, as it has every semester since I started teaching in the fall of 1993, stop well short of the mandated "end point." According to the catalog, History 1A is designed to cover, in one semester, all of Western Civ from the Mesopotamians up to the death of Louis XIV in 1715. 1B, the modern half of the sequence, merely covers the remaining 290 years of recorded time.
When I first started teaching here at Pasadena City College, I asked one of the older profs (long since retired) if he ever "got" to 1715. "No", he said thoughtfully, "I never have. I made it to the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) once, but that was a rare year." He told me to try my best, and accept that "falling short" (chronologically speaking) was part and parcel of what it meant to teach history survey courses.
When I first started teaching, I covered far more ground than I do these days. Fresh out of graduate school in the early 1990s (and still writing my dissertation), my knowledge was thin indeed. That first year of teaching at the college, I composed my lectures out of a few old textbooks, particularly this one. I was usually only one week ahead of my students. What I lacked in depth, I made up for in enthusiasm; I had learned early on that a good lecturer is not necessarily someone with a profound grasp of details, but rather someone who can weave a compelling narrative.
Still, in those early years, I worried about "filling up" my teaching hour. My greatest fear was of running out of things to say. I needn’t have worried — in the dozen years that I’ve been teaching, I’ve never run out of thing to say (though that may say more about my personality than my erudition.) Today, my biggest task is choosing what not to say! Especially in these final weeks, I ruthlessly cut out entire lectures, trying to decide what my students absolutely need and what they can do without.
For example, in my Monday/Wednesday History 1A course (the one that is supposed to get to 1715), I have four lectures left. One of those days is devoted to preparing them for the final, so really, I only have three lectures. And I’m just now reaching the fall of the Roman Empire. I’m a millennium short of where I ought to be. What must I say about the Middle Ages? The Renaissance? Do I cut out the Vikings? The Black Death? Feudalism? The development of the Western Church? So many vital topics, and simply not enough time. This is not unusual; in the last five or six years, this is where I usually am two weeks before the end of the semester.
Yes, I was absent a couple of days this fall. But even if I had given every lecture I had planned to give, I would still be centuries away from the prescribed goal. And it’s not as if I’ve wasted time in the earlier weeks of the course! I’ve whipped through Hammurabi, the Hittites and the Hebrews; I’ve given only cursory (if, one hopes, entertaining) treatment to Sappho and Socrates and St. Paul. I tell stories and relate anecdotes that consume time, it’s true — but if I didn’t, I would simply be spitting out a litany of facts and dates that would vanish from my students’ minds as soon as their finals were finished.
I know I "covered more ground" when I was a novice teacher. I covered more ground because, frankly, I knew a hell of a lot less about the subjects I was lecturing on. Though I don’t read new material vociferously, I do continue to explore the subject matter on my own time. Today, for example, I know infinitely more about the struggle between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the early first century of the common era than I did in 1995. I have more detail, and better stories, to share with my students. And I’m not going to sacrifice all the good stories for the sake of fulfilling the impossible demand of making it to the building of Versailles and the War of the Spanish Succession in the same semester in which I’ve been lecturing on the religious reforms of Amenhotep IV!
I’m not blithely disregarding the seriousness of the catalog descriptions. When my students transfer on to four-year institutions, those institutions will have the right to assume that the "History 1A" mentioned on their transcript covered all the material the college catalog promised. Transfer credits are awarded based on certain assumptions, and the assumptions are based on written descriptions that we who teach are pledged to follow. The easy answer to the problem would be to add an extra semester, dividing Western Civ into three terms (History 1A covering the West until the fall of Rome, 1B covering the fall of Rome to the Enlightenment, 1C covering Modern Europe.) But I’ve been told many a time that that idea is a complete non-starter. Community colleges are interested in getting students through quickly; complaints about how long it takes to transfer are already rife. Anything that might slow down the process (like adding another semester) is unthinkable.
So even as history itself expands with each passing year, and even as our knowledge of the human past grows, we must continue to teach this ever-expanding body of material within the same short two semesters. If I honor the letter of the catalog and rush to 1715, my students will be deprived of all of the stories, the anecdotes, and the details that make history "come alive." If I focus on keeping the narrative at a reasonable pace, and if I continue to include those fun tidbits that I know students enjoy, I will invariably fall well short of the required destination.
Sometimes, I think of my job as being like that of a tour bus driver, hired to drive folks from L.A. to San Francisco and show them the sights along the way. I’ve been given one tank of gas, and a prescribed time limit in which to get my passengers to their destination. But I’ve also been asked to keep the passengers awake and entertained, and I’ve also been told that my passengers need to see as many points of interest as possible. If I honor the commitment to get them all the way to San Francisco on time and on that one tank, I’ll take them straight up I-5 through the Central Valley. No Santa Barbara, no Big Sur. We won’t wander into any small towns; there will be no time for sight-seeing. We’ll push on when we’re tired, and we’ll get to our destination on time. My passengers will have seen nothing but flat farmland, and they won’t have had a chance to get a picture of the state in their minds, but they’ll get where they paid to go. On the other hand, if I drive up the coast, and stop in the little towns and cities, encouraging my passengers to walk on the beaches and in the redwood forests, we’ll be late. We’ll probably run out of gas. But my passengers will have had a hell of a more memorable journey.
As a teacher, my job is to make the past interesting; my job is to stimulate curiosity about the all-too-easily forgotten human story. In the time I’ve been allotted, I can either be effective in this task of making history come alive, or I can cover all of the required material, but after my best efforts for lo these dozen years, I’m absolutely convinced I cannot do both.
Regular posting resumes Monday, but some new pics that we took this week are up in Matilde’s new album. If you know chinnies, you know how rare a shot this is.
I don’t know if this Jane Yolen piece is the best choice for a Thanksgiving Short Poem or not, but anything that can encourage a little less guilt today is fine by me. It’s a good poem to read and say, as I did after the first time I read it, "Amen, sister!"
FAT IS NOT A FAIRY TALE
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted,
flinging herself down the stairs.
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.
I am thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.
Though I will have a Thursday Short Poem up tomorrow, this will likely be my last post until Monday the 28th.
It is the day before Thanksgiving, and thus appropriate to reflect briefly on what I’m thankful for. I have much about which to be grateful! My gorgeous beloved and I were married on September 4, and the last two and a half months have been joyous indeed. Nothing else in the past year can compare to that happiness. I’m grateful for her love, her patience, and her willingness to stay deeply connected to a personality as mercurial and exasperating (albeit entertaining) as my own!
I’m grateful that I still love my job! A dozen years in to my teaching career, I still get butterflies before meeting the first class of the semester. I still like telling the same old stories in Western Civ classes, and I still like "pushing buttons" in my gender and sexuality courses. And this year, as in years past, I am blessed with a few very special and dear students who visit me regularly, invite me into their lives, and wrestle through the material with me.
I’m grateful for the many new opportunities and projects that we’ve started this year. I’ve begun working on a book. We’ve started a chinchilla charity, completing the expensive and time-consuming 501(c)3 process. In various ways (such as radio appearances and documentary work), I’ve started to "put myself out there" more and more. I don’t know quite what will become of all of this, but it’s exciting to be doing new things — and I’m grateful both for the opportunities and for the challenges.
I give thanks for the continued health of my family; I don’t see them nearly as often I would like, but they are never far from my thoughts and prayers.
And above all, I give thanks for the rekindling of my faith this year. Like a lot of folks, my love affair with Christ has its ups and downs. I have my seasons of passion and my seasons of ennui, my days when I’m "crushing on Jesus" and my days when I wonder what, if anything, I really believe. This year, our relationship deepened a little.
Two years ago this week, when I was at Pasadena Mennonite, we had a community discussion of thanksgiving. We passed a microphone through the entire 80-member congregation one morning, and each person gave a quick thanks for something. I said what has always been my standard line: "I’m thankful that I worship the God of second, third, and ninety-seventh chances!" As an adult convert with a chaotic personal history, I’ve always been immensely grateful for God’s abundant forgiveness. Despite all the wreckage I created before my conversion, and the colossal mistakes I continued to make even after my conversion, I have never doubted God’s willingness to embrace me and hold me and forgive me, no matter what.
But this year, I feel as if I’ve started to move beyond a focus on the cycle of "regression and repentance." Yes, I’ve needed a God of "97 chances". (My cousin Dean, who has seen me through four marriages and countless theological transformations, calls me The King of "Starting Over Again"). And you know, frankly, I still may need a God of 977 chances! But in the past twelve months, I feel as if I’ve begun — at long last — to grow up a bit in my faith. I’ve long had a sophisticated theological vocabulary; I picked that up on the road to a doctorate in medieval Christian history. I’ve long been able to "talk the talk" of the convert — when called for, I "speak evangelical" pretty well. But as we all know (ENFPs especially), matching one’s language and one’s life is easier said than done! This year, since Thanksgiving last, I’ve found it easier than ever before to achieve a kind of coherence between what I say and what I do, what I believe and how I act.
Perhaps the greatest gift God has given me this year, next to my amazing wife, is the gift of liberation from one of my most nagging fears. This year, for the first time in my adult life, I’ve begun to lose that "fear of my own fraudulence." Like so many folks, I lived so much of my life — even post-conversion — with that awful sense that if my friends, family, students and colleagues only knew what I was really like, they would be appalled. I had a keen sense of myself as an actor playing a role, and I feared what I imagined would be my imminent and inevitable unmasking. I know many of my readers know exactly what I’m talking about!
Do I still have the sense, sometimes, that I’m playing a role? Of course. But I am less and less haunted by the sense that my language and my life do not match. Though I am still a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness, I don’t seem to need to pray, tearfully and fervently, for God to give me the strength to act in accordance with my convictions. For whatever reason — the natural aging process, divine grace, my wife’s influence — wholeness and congruence come much more easily these days. That’s a happy thing.
So I’m still grateful to the God of 97th chances. But I’m especially grateful this year to the God who gives the power, the wonder-working power, to transform our lives so that we no longer have to be asking for still another chance, another new beginning.
Happy Thanksgiving.
My family tells me that they frequently check in on the blog not to read my endless musings on gender, sexuality, masculinity, and the church, but rather to find out little details of my life. So, Mom, Dad, sisters, brother, here’s an update:
Physically, I’m better. At 8:30 on this Tuesday evening, I’m home from an hour’s run around the Rose Bowl and a shopping trip to Trader Joes. My cold/flu is almost gone, so I’m able to work out. I’m still keeping the weight off I dropped over the summer; the Pilates has really helped, but it sure is nice to be able to run again too.
Yes, my dear parents, I get sick a lot. Yes, it probably has to do with the fact that I try and convince myself that I can get by on six hours of sleep a night, night after night, during the week. I drink too much coffee, and I find too many interesting things to do. When I was depressed in my twenties, I wanted to sleep twelve hours a day. Today, I’m usually eager to get up and find things to do with my days. This is a nice change. But I could get to bed earlier.
But truly, I like getting up in the morning, because if it’s a school day I get to hang out with young people and I get to chat with my colleagues. If it’s a day off, I get to work out for a few hours and I get a chance to write. (The book that you know I’m writing, Mom, is coming along.) Lately, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up before the alarm, and even if my body is tired, my mind is racing with thoughts about the day ahead.
Professionally, I’m thinking tonight about reviving the college’s "History of Religion in America" course. It hasn’t been taught in a decade; it would be a survey of religious history from the earliest indigenous peoples up to the emergent church movement of the 21st century. In one semester. Once I finish teaching another semester of Gay and Lesbian History, I might give it a whirl. Where else but a community college could I teach so many things?
Domestically, we’ll be staying in Southern California for Thanksgiving this year. Alternating holidays is one of the obligations of marriage, and it’s one with which I am well familiar. When I was in my first couple of marriages, I always resented spending holidays with my wives’ families; I felt as if they ought to have known they were marrying into my family, and not the other way around! These days, our marriage comes first — wherever my wife and I are, there my family is. I miss our big Northern California Thanksgivings, but I know we’ll be there next year… this Thursday I’ll be with my new family, my family of choice through a marriage of grace, and I’ll be as happy — and as stuffed — as can be…
Musically, I’m listening to a strange Itunes mix that includes (in order) tunes from Dolly Parton, Sting, a South African gospel choir, Motley Crue, the Beach Boys, Sam Cooke, and the Indigo Girls.
To read tonight, I have the December edition of the conservative Catholic journal First Things. I never miss an issue. I suspect I may be one of the few people who subscribes to both First Things and Off Our Backs. A man’s got to keep his ear to the ground you know, and one of the great joys of my life is being able to move comfortably in circles right and left. Uncharitable people would call it a pathological need to be liked, but I prefer to think of it as an endless curiosity.
And since you asked, Matilde the chinchilla is well. I’ll try to get a new batch of pictures up soon.
Yes, it’s another long one. Feel free to skip.
Let it not be said I don’t "take requests." Artemis at the splendid Feminist Mormon Housewives had a very kind post about my piece yesterday. She also wrote:
The only thing I think is missing (but would be better addressed in a separate post) is more of the girls’ point of view and a validation of girls’ sexuality–letting girls know it’s okay for them to have (and enjoy and not feel guilty for) those feelings, as well as how they too are responsible for them. Which, I suppose, could lead to a discussion of whether men and their dress are responsible for women’s sexual desires, or–since there are double dress and sexual standards for women and men in our society–the repression or secondary-ness of women’s sexual desires.
For what it’s worth, here are two earlier posts some of you might have missed on women, dress, and responsibility: Propriety, Marie’s boobs, and the myth of male weakness and Sisterhood is Easier in Winter. I’ve also dealt with the issue of men and dress, and specifically how I dress for the classroom, here: The Male Teacher’s Body and Propriety. Here’s what I wrote at the end of the last of these posts: What I really care about is not using my body to make others uncomfortable. I don’t want my clothes and my flesh to arouse others, I don’t want them to scare others, I don’t want them to inspire economic envy, and I don’t want them to distract others.
So that deals a bit with the second part of the Artemis query. But what of the first part? What about the healthy, pro-feminist validation of young women’s sexuality? Let me take a lunchtime stab at the subject…
When dealing with young women and sexuality, I find it is always dangerous to confuse two issues: the joy of being an object of desire, and the joy of being a subject of desire. The former and the latter are two fundamentally different experiences. The former is the traditionally validated expression of female sexuality, and it’s the one with which young women are much more comfortable. From a very early age, most girls in this country are taught to dress themselves with a keen attention to their role as objects of scrutiny. Parents and grandparents praise cuteness long before boys and older men leer. Much more so than boys, girls are programmed to be alert to the various signals their dress and their bodies send. And indeed, for many girls — not all — the attention and the validation they get as young girls for being "cute and pretty" feels good.
And then comes adolescence. Is there anything as contradictory as the various messages that bombard young girls about their bodies? Parents and teachers and op-ed writers urge them to "Cover up!" Pop culture figures urge them to "flaunt it" (whether they have "it" or not). And as always, young girls notice that their peers who do dress in certain ways get more attention and validation than others.
Because of this, those of us who do youth work have to be aware that it’s never enough to ask teenage girls "What do you want?" We first have to ask them another question, one I regularly ask my girls: "How does it feel to be wanted?" In both youth group and in college groups, I’ve had my female students share their feelings about being objects of desire. The answers, of course, vary. As always, it depends on what form the "wanting" (or at least the "noticing") takes. If it’s what I call the "appreciative glance", especially if it comes from an attractive boy, then most of my girls say it makes them feel really, really good. Even more common than "good" is the word "powerful". Over and over again, girls report saying it feels exciting and empowering to be noticed and desired.
But if the "wanting" takes the form of a penetrating stare, particularly from an older man, then that doesn’t feel good at all. "I feel creeped out", "Gross", "Icky", "Like I want to wear a raincoat or disappear" — these are some of the typical responses to questions about reactions that are either flagrantly sexual or that come from considerably older men. (And of course, as I’ve written in "Sisterhood", there’s the whole other question of how other girls and women respond!)
So we’ve got to be honest here about the fact that many young women enjoy "being seen"! They enjoy being wanted, and they are keenly aware that what they wear can impact how they are viewed. As youth workers or parents, we shouldn’t shame this perfectly normal desire to be wanted. We can validate the fact that it feels good sometimes to be the object of another’s desire, even as we ask our girls to begin to take responsibility for how their clothing decisions make everyone else around them feel. Dress that makes other people feel inadequate, or poor, or envious, is not appropriate. And while we cannot always predict how our clothing choices will affect others, we can ask our girls to consider the well-being of the wider community, and balance that well-being against their own perfectly valid longing to be wanted.
But adolescent girls are not just objects. They are also subjects of desire. And here, of course, we tread on less familiar ground. While traditional cultures are accustomed to teaching young women to gain at least some validation from being wanted, they aren’t nearly as comfortable with telling our girls that it’s okay to want! Too much of what is written about teenage girls still insists that adolescent females don’t really have strong libidos; any apparent sexual agency that these girls display is really just a longing for attention. According to this tired discourse, a sexually aggressive teen girl never really wants sex for its own sake, she merely wants attention and validation from a man (perhaps due to her neglectful father) and is "using" sex as a tool. While there is some considerable truth to that stereotype, it’s also true that whether we like it or not, our daughters do have libidos of their own.
We live in a culture where even now, young women are very reluctant to talk about themselves as subjects of desire. A girl who confesses to looking and lusting still risks being labeled as a slut by her peers. From what I’ve seen, a conservatively dressed young woman who admits to lusting is far more likely to be ostracized than a scantily-clad gal who publicly denies her own sexual desires. If what I hear anecdotally in many college and high school groups is true, girls are infinitely more frank about what they do to please boys sexually (like blowjobs) than what they do to please themselves (like masturbate). Pleasing boys and men, no matter what it involves, still is part and parcel of a very traditional understanding of female sexuality.
I don’t write this to titillate or scandalize, but to make a larger point about our cultural messages about sexual desire. We all acknowledge the reality of the adolescent male libido, and indeed, we are likely to over-emphasize its power. Too many folks either shame boys for their sex drives, or see those same drives as so irrepressible that they are beyond the capacity of boys to control. This narrative of the unconquerable male libido is used to make girls and women responsible for male behavior, a point that I have rejected many times (explicitly in yesterday’s post).
But we need to face the truth that our little sisters and our daughters are sexual creatures. However powerful their socially sanctioned desire to be seen, they also have a very real desire to see. Again, as with boys, we must do everything we can not to shame our girls for these desires. Even more so than with boys, we’ve got to do a good job of communicating to them that it is okay to want and to look and to fantasize. Girls will, in general, be more reluctant to admit to their own libidinousness. While I’ve never heard of a boy put down another boy for being horny, I have heard girls say incredibly cruel things about a peer who admitted to having strong sexual desires of her own. This difference in peer acceptability is a key aspect of the discussion about boys, girls, and desire — and parents and youth workers and teachers need to be cognizant of that.
And of course, we live in a world where young women are sent the blunt message that their sexuality can get them hurt. According to the dominant narrative of the culture, sexually aggressive women not only risk assault and rape, they deserve whatever they get if they are victimized. Those are powerful warnings, and they serve to silence public discussion of the reality of teen girls and their own sexuality. As adults and pro-feminists, we have to redouble our efforts to transform the culture and help create a world where young women don’t see their sexuality as a weapon that will be used against them!
In the end, those of us who have teens or work with teens have to be willing to acknowledge the full and complete humanness of both our boys and girls. We have to admit that both our sons and daughters are sexual creatures. And as with boys, we must be clear that our daughters have every right to be both objects and subjects of desire, but they also have responsibility for their actions — particularly as subjects.
Too busy to post this morning, will try and have something up around lunch…
Three different people have e-mailed me since Sunday, telling me that my posts have been getting too long. I’ll admit, yesterday’s was a bit of a push — but the academic in me wants to see an idea nicely developed. (And that’s why I bold certain sections, to help out!) In the end, I’m writing less for an audience than I am in order to see my own ideas fleshed out a bit, and I suppose this blog shows that. I do apologize if I’ve been exceptionally verbose lately!
Some day, I’m pulling all of this into a book on sexuality, masculinity, faith, and justice. Just don’t ask me when or how, but the idea is percolatin’.
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