…I practiced skipping rope last night in the driveway after getting home from my run. I’m determined to master it. I’m up to seven rotations without a hitch, but have a long way to go still. Any suggestions on how to master jumping rope are most appreciated.
Archive for January, 2006
Coretta Scott King and Wendy Wasserstein have left us, much too young in both cases. Readers can easily find many obits and tributes on the ‘net.
I’ve long been a fan of Wasserstein, and remember the birth of her now seven year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, as the occasion of a bitter fight with a dear friend. As is well-known, Wasserstein spent many years in her forties in fertility treatments, anxious to have a child. In his obituary in today’s Times (rather annoyingly titled "Witty Voice of Feminist Self-Doubt"), Mike Boehm writes of her as a woman whose need to nurture led her on an eight-year journey through fertility treatments that culminated in motherhood at the age of 48. Somehow, that description bothers me a bit, and I can’t figure out why. Is it vaguely condescending? Would I mind it as much if the obit was written by a woman? I’ll mull it over. Is it the verb "need?"
Anyhow, when Wasserstein’s account of her journey to motherhood appeared in the New Yorker back in the summer of 1998, I got into a huge fight with a buddy about the ethics of becoming a single mom at Wasserstein’s age. I enthusiastically supported Wasserstein, while my friend accused her — and other older women like her, who conceive children artificially and while single — of profound selfishness. It was strange how heated the argument quickly became, and my friend and I realized that the story of how Lucy Jane came to be exposed a basic fault line in our worldviews. At the time, I was in the midst of my conversion process; my friend was a much more conservative Christian than I. While I was genuinely moved by Wasserstein’s steadfast refusal to let either aging or singleness deter her from her dream of motherhood, my buddy saw her actions as evidence of narcissism and upper-middle class privilege. My friend — at the time a recently divorced father — said bitterly: "Women like Wasserstein think men are expendable. We’re more than sperm donors, you know."
I’m not a bio-ethicist. My recollection of the fertility techniques Wasserstein actually used is vague. I thought I had her book "Shiksa Goddess" somewhere (it has the original New Yorker essay about Lucy in it), but apparently it got misplaced in my last move, or lent to a student, or it walked off into the ephemera. But even now, as an evangelical Christian, I am — at least in principle –untroubled by the notion of a woman in her late forties conceiving, bearing, and raising a child without the help of the child’s biological father. Yes, certain fertility techniques that involve the destruction of embryos bother me enormously, but I can hold that discomfort in tension with my firm belief that the role of science in allowing women to bear children at an older age is a good and positive one.
So many men in my family were only ready for fatherhood in their forties or fifties! The older fathers I know are, for the most part, infinitely more patient and more involved in their children’s lives than those guys who had children in their twenties. I can only imagine how disastrous it would have been had I had children in my early marriages when I was still lost — like so many of my brothers — in an angry, inarticulate, self-absorbed and quite extended adolescence! I’m fifteen months from 40, and only now do I find myself longing for children; only now do I sense within myself the reservoirs of patience and selflessness that I know good parenthood will require. Of course, as a man, I have relatively little to worry about in terms of fertility. (Yes, I know about sterility and tight bike shorts, thanks.)
And I know so many women in my life whose journey has also been a long one! Some chose motherhood young, while others — for countless reasons — chose to wait. And like many folks my age, I have lots of friends struggling with the anxiety and heartbreak of infertility. It’s true that biology is not kind to aging women who long to bear their own children, but it’s also true that one of the chief tasks of science and medicine is to alleviate the cruelties and the injustices of the natural world. Social conservatives urge women to have babies young, and some — like my friend seven years ago — make nasty jabs about forty-somethings who will go through hell for the chance to become mothers. They call it "unnatural", forgetting that our resistance to countless diseases is the product of innumerable "unnatural" modern medical treatments. Nature calls for a quarter of women to die of complications from childbirth; nature calls for 40% of children to die before reaching adolescence; nature tells us that women can’t have babies at 48.
As a man who longs to be a father, I don’t feel myself rendered superfluous by artificial insemination. The way in which Lucy Jane Wasserstein came into the world was not a reflection on men’s collective shortcomings. Wasserstein — as her plays and writings make clear — genuinely liked men. Many women who choose as she did also like men. But love and marriage are but one path to parenthood. To put it in Christian terms, the agape love of parent for child need not be connected to the eros love of parent for parent. Wasserstein went through hell to have Lucy Jane, and then endured considerable criticism after her child’s birth. But her commitment to creating new life and raising her daughter reflected a vital feminist principle: the insistence that women’s lives are not governed by inexorable and unalterable biological processes, and that marriage to a man — for all the joy it may bring to some — is not the only road to motherhood and happiness.
The Academy Award nominations are out, and for the most part, I am well-pleased. I’ve seen almost all of the nominated films with two big exceptions: "Capote" and "Constant Gardener", but I’ll offer my own "top ten" list of the past year regardless.
10. War of the Worlds
9. Crash
8. Squid and the Whale
7. In Her Shoes
6. Matchpoint
5. Good Night and Good Luck
4. Syriana
3. A History of Violence
2. Brokeback Mountain
1. March of the Penguins
"Penguins" was an easy choice. Yes, I know #7 will surprise a few folks — but I’m a huge, huge Toni Collette fan. I’d have loved to see her nominated, frankly; I also think Jeff Daniels (for "Squid") and Viggo Mortensen (for "History") deserved nods. My top five would have been my choices for best picture nominees. Again, I’ve yet to see the two important films mentioned at the top, and that might change my list. Yes, I saw "Munich" and might have stuck it in at #11.
In rereading this morning’s post, and thinking more about feminism and the body, I went hunting about for more resources on Christianity and feminist views of sexuality. I found this very nice resource: The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project hosted by Brandeis University. A project of the Near Eastern Studies department, the FSEP explores the intersection of Western (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) theology with feminism and sexuality. What a pleasant surprise to come across it, and what a colossal embarrassment not to have found it earlier! I especially liked their bibliography resources.
They have a mission statement, and it concludes with this:
We envision an ethic of sexuality rooted in freedom, mutuality, consent, responsibility, and female (as well as male) pleasure, and we are working to make that vision reality.
Freedom, mutuality, consent, responsibility, and pleasure. Five well-chosen words that perfectly describe a spiritual feminist ethic of sex. Pleasure is a vital good, but only in the context established by the four preceding requirements. What I like about these five words is that they capture the essential middle ground between selfishness and self-sacrifice. Too much of what is now generally called the "theology of the body" (started by John Paul II and now popular with many evangelicals) emphasizes the central role of sacrificial giving in sexuality. In conservative theology, one’s own pleasure is at best a secondary good; freely offering oneself to one’s spouse and concerning oneself with his or her pleasure first is considered a higher good.
One of the best insights of most feminist theological writing about sex is that it refuses to see pleasure as "secondary" to anything. For feminist theologians, pleasure is not a mere byproduct, a nice bonus one receives for having shared with one’s mate or having done one’s procreative duty! Pleasure — even removed from procreative purpose or from connection with another human being — is a good of the first order, a gift of Creation. This is where I break with my many dear pro-life friends and my fellow fans of the "theology of the body". I don’t think entirely separating pleasure from procreation frustrates the divine intent for of our bodies; as I’ve pointed out (and a hell of a lot of feminists have pointed out), the very existence of the clitoris outside of the vagina raises all sorts of questions about "design"!
For feminist theology as I understand it, the requirement of "mutuality" is not the same as insisting that pleasure always take place in community. Conservative theology emphasizes that the only sexual pleasure a husband should feel should be given by his wife, and vice versa — this emphasizes our interdependence and our mutual trust in marriage. Similarly, many folks today bemoan the habit of "eating alone", and suggest that if we’re really going to do food the godly way, all of our meals ought to be prepared and eaten communally. In this worldview, food and sex are two great sources of pleasure that ought never, ever, be indulged in entirely alone.
That’s a seductive way of seeing the body and pleasure, and for about six months in late 2002-early 2003, it’s a view I held. It seemed a nice corrective to consumerist messages about food and sexuality, messages that seem to disregard the joys of making love and eating in community. But though I’m still working through lots of my own beliefs about this, I’m at a point now where I’m ready to say that food and sex are gifts of God meant to be enjoyed in a wide variety of ways. The greatest and most sublime moment we Christians have with food may be when we take communion together around the altar, sharing the experience of eating with our community; the greatest and most sublime moment we may have with sex is with a life partner. But the fact that these are the "peak experiences" of food and sex that we have as Christians does not mean that enjoying these gifts in other contexts is outside of God’s plan.
Freedom, mutuality, consent, responsibility, and pleasure. With all respect to my Muslim friends, I’ll start calling ‘em the "five pillars" of feminist theology. Perhaps I ought to try blogging each one of them independently.
I’m doing something today I wouldn’t normally do — reprinting an old (October 2004) post of mine. I know several of my current women’s studies students have recently started reading this blog, and the subject of this post was the subject of today’s lecture.
The final paragraph continues to sum up my beliefs about pleasure and the body, but I’ll try and write more about it soon…
Feminism, Food, Pleasure (first published October 25, 2004)
My students, particularly but not exclusively my female ones, report a great deal of fantasizing in classes. No, silly, it’s not about their teacher.
It’s about food. In journal after journal, I read about my students’ love/hate relationship with food. Compared to food fantasies, sex comes in a distant second as the subject about which so many young people are preoccupied. And though I’ve touched on this before, I feel compelled at this point in the semester to bring it up again: food is a feminist issue.
A number of feminist writers (Susan Bordo chief among them) have noted that in recent decades, our eating behavior has been increasingly couched in moral terms. Only far-right social conservatives use terms like "decadent" to describe contemporary culture — but we all use it to describe rich, fattening desserts. We speak of "devil’s food" and "tempting tastes." More basically, my students talk about themselves as "good" and "bad" in terms of their eating behavior. When I hear a girl say "I was so bad today", I can be almost certain that what will follow is a food-related confession. When I hear another say, "I was good all morning", I am fairly confident that she will not then relate a story of volunteering at the homeless shelter! Good, in contemporary parlance, means abstinence, self-control, self-denial; bad means indulgence, eating to satiety, pleasure.
Of course, there are always those students of both genders who claim to be blissfully unaffected by our cultural preoccupation with thinness and concomitant food restriction. I suspect that some of them are in denial (the old "refusing to be a victim" bit), while a lucky few may be genuinely untouched by concern about eating. They are fortunate, but they are also rare among American tween, teen, and twenty-something women.
I am a great believer that one of the most important narratives in feminist history is that of women’s struggle to gain the right to pleasure. Broadly speaking, patriarchal culture tells women that their only source of permissable pleasure and happiness is centered on others: one can derive joy from feeding one’s child, but not from feeding oneself; one can derive joy from pleasing one’s husband in bed, but not from masturbation; one can derive joy from putting one’s husband through law school, but not for putting oneself through. And so on. This is what feminists call the "doctrine of contingent happiness" — the old fancy that virtuous women only derive real, enduring joy solely through sharing with others.
As a Christian, I am a profound believer in the importance of self-sacrifice. There are times and places where self-denial is indeed virtuous, particularly when self-indulgence would cause obvious harm to others. But traditional culture makes the mistake of turning self-sacrifice into an idol. Self-denial is blessed when it draws us closer to God or when it benefits others — but it is not blessed in and of itself. Dieting for the sake of beauty is a form of destructive self-denial that follows an old pattern: "good women" repress and control their base, physical desires.
To paint with broad strokes, earlier periods in American culture demonized women’s sexuality. (Certain elements in our culture continue to do so.) But a healthy percentage of American society has, for better or worse, become reluctant to use moral terms to describe their own sexual behavior or that of others. The language of "to each his or her own" has become dominant, and I’m fairly confident that that is something of a good thing. But today, we demonize women’s appetite for food using the same language our forebears used for sex: "sinful", "decadent", "bad." We have stopped condemning one essential human activity and begun to attack another.
Food is our first pleasure, I tell my students. Our first experience of joy as children may be of being fed, of having our hunger satiated. In our old age, when we are too feeble to do much else, one of our final pleasures will be our meals. (I note that my great aunt, 95 this year, has one daily event she anticipates above all else: lunch.) Far more often than sex (presumably), delicious food will bring us delight over and over and over again over the course of our lives. Therefore, any ideology that seeks to limit that pleasure for the sake of beauty or conformity is inherently anti-feminist and anti-human.
I am not advocating over-eating as a feminist act. Eating far more than is healthy is an act of self-loathing, not self-love. But I am arguing against what I see as a "war on pleasure" in our contemporary culture. I want the young women I work with and teach to be unashamed of all of their natural, healthy, appetites. I want them to see that their own desires for food and sex are good in and of themselves. I want them to see their bodies as their own, and I want them to understand that while pleasing others is indeed a source of joy, it ought never be the sole source of delight in their lives.
And so this week, I’m giving them the following optional assignment: While out with friends or family or others whose opinion they value, I want my students to eat as much as they want of something they truly, deeply, crave. And they need to do so without describing themselves as "bad". (This is a tough one for most of my students, I’ve found.)
Again, I’m absolutely convinced that real liberation comes in the bold assertion of one’s right to pleasure — and pleasure ought never be solely about bringing joy to others. Women’s bodies are not merely for making babies and pleasing husbands (or parents, or peers, or fashion designers): they are gifts of God intended first and foremost for the delight of their occupants! And when we as embodied persons delight in our flesh, we honor the extraordinary gift that is Creation itself.
I’ll try for a more thoughtful post later this morning.
Some assorted Monday morning odds and ends:
My wife and I have started attending the brand-new "family eucharist" at All Saints Pasadena; it’s every Saturday afternoon at 5:00PM (upstairs in the learning center for folks who might consider coming). It’s targeted to families with young children, but all are welcome. The service is far more informal than our Sunday morning offerings, and as one with a strongly evangelical low-church streak, I’m over the moon with pleasure to have guitar music and modern praise songs (actual Vineyard tunes!) sung in an Episcopal church! The homilies are tailored to a child’s attention span, which is excellent news for me — most of what I need to know from the Gospel is comprehensible to a six year-old (though Scripture also offers enough mystery and subtlety to satisfy the most theologically curious adult). The service lasts only forty-five minutes, and juice and cookies are served afterwards. I’m a happy camper indeed! So folks in the Pasadena area looking for something different than the button-down Sunday morning experience, and those wondering whether you can have an inclusive, progressive church but still jump around and clap to guitar chords — come to All Saints Saturdays at 5:00PM.
On an utterly unrelated note, I started my boxing classes this weekend, working one-on-one with a trainer. I last took boxing classes back in 1998, so I need to relearn everything. Key goal for the next few weeks: learn to skip rope. I couldn’t do it when I was a kid, and I can’t do it now. Something about the hand-eye coordination… I’ll be practising lots.
Working on the jabs and crosses and other punches was exhilarating, of course. But at the same time, it reminded me of how complicated my own relationship is to pacifism and violence. I remain a committed pacifist (even after having left the Mennonites), and my interest in boxing has much more to do with fitness than with self-defense. But I won’t deny that there’s an extraordinary pleasure that comes with hitting things! I’ve hit plenty of punching bags before, but yesterday, as I stood in the ring and hacked away at my trainer in his big mitts, I felt a different sensation. There’s no question that for me, there’s a big distinction between hitting a punching bag and hitting another person, even if there is no chance that I can injure the very man who is trying to teach me to spar.
It reminds me of a long debate that was held at Pasadena Mennonite Church over whether the church ought to offer self-defense classes as an "educational option." I only heard about the debate after the fact, but remember being told that the largely pacifist congregation was quite torn over the issue. Some thought that self-defense (learning boxing techniques and other martial arts-related skills) did not compromise one’s pacifist commitments; others felt that even sparring or practising self-defense technique was a violation of Matthew 5’s injunction to always turn the other cheek. (It was pointed out to me, on a parenthetical note, that the debate split on gender lines — it was mostly men who objected to the classes as incongruent with the peace church tradition, while a number of the women — perhaps in recognition of their greater vulnerability — were more willing to defend the suitability of Mennonites learning to box and punch. That’s a whole other post, I realize!)
Anyhow, I realize that for me, learning to box is different than my other physical activities. In the act of hitting — even a bag — I feel a charge inside myself that I don’t feel when I run or bike or swim or do Pilates. Though it shares with these other activities the happy function of reducing me to eventual exhaustion (and concomitant exhilaration), it also gives me a visceral pleasure that the other forms of exercise do not. Perhaps it is simply a healthy outlet, or perhaps it is something darker. Most folks outside of the peace tradition probably don’t worry about the ethics of joining a private boxing gym, but while I’m excited with my new activity, I’m also reflective on what it is within me and within others that takes such delight in hitting things. I know I’ve got a huge reservoir of aggression in me; I know that I’ve dealt with it for years with exercise. Perhaps by choosing such an aggressive form of working out, I’ll do an even better job of taming that rough beast within me.
Typepad is very wonky today. Comments are hard to post, so keep trying…
Much has been made recently of Naomi Wolf’s confession to the Glasgow Sunday Herald of her recent vision of Jesus. The iconic figure of 1990s feminism, author of the important "Beauty Myth", and a number of less compelling follow-ups, was by her own account raised a "nice Jewish girl". But she told the Sunday Herald:
“I actually had this vision of Jesus, and I’m sure it was Jesus,” said Wolf. “But it wasn’t this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being that there could be – full of light and full of love.”
More bizarrely, she experienced this as a teenage boy. “I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him and feeling feelings I’d never felt in my lifetime,” said Wolf. “[Feelings] of a boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven’t talked about it publicly.”
Wolf emphasised that her spiritual renewal strengthened her commitment to feminism as her life mission. “I believe that each of us is here to help repair the world,” she said. “My particular mission seems to be about helping women remember what’s sacred about them or what’s sacred about femininity .”
She’s been subjected to a fair amount of ridicule, the latest example coming in this Rosa Brooks column in the LA Times. Brooks doesn’t take issue with Wolf’s vision so much as she laments what she sees as a disturbing trend to spirituality and "unreason." She writes
Given our history, perhaps it’s inevitable that many a modern midlife crisis will culminate in a spiritual awakening. But in our religion-saturated culture, I worry that we’re losing touch with another great American tradition: the tradition of skepticism, rebellion and good old-fashioned orneriness.
Raised by atheist philosophers who worshiped reason, Brooks’ frustration is familiar to me. What bothers me is that Brooks connects feminist history to skepticism and unbelief, with the not-so-subtle implication that a genuine commitment to women’s rights rests uneasily with a faith in Jesus. Brooks concludes her column by writing about the
…early American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had little time for religious cant. Stanton mocked the biblical account of Eve’s origin in Adam’s rib as "a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is on this allegory that all the enemies of women rest their battering rams."
As for Wolf, it’s hard to argue with a vision. But if Wolf, who insists she’s still committed to feminism, really needs a great American tradition to help her through her midlife crisis, she could do worse than emulate Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
It’s true that Stanton had little time for "cant". But Brooks is dead wrong to suggest that she was a woman without religious faith. It is Stanton who wrote the famous "Women’s Bible" in 1898, not to mock Christianity but to re-frame it in feminist terms. With the text, she became the "mother figure" for later theologians who would be both feminist and authentically Christian, writers like Rosemary Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson and countless others. Stanton writes in the forward to her BIble:
Thus, the Old Testament, "in the beginning," proclaims the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the eternity and equality of sex; and the New Testament echoes back through the centuries the individual sovereignty of woman growing out of this natural fact. Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." With this recognition of the feminine element in the Godhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the sexes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman occupies in the Christian Church of to-day.
Rosa Brooks is right that Stanton had little patience with the organized churches of nineteenth century America. But there’s a whopping distinction between dissatisfaction with institutional Christianity and a rejection of the Gospel message. Stanton insisted that a vibrant and strong faith in Jesus was congruent with an enduring belief in women’s equality and in feminist activism. To claim her as a "freethinker" or an "agnostic" is to badly distort women’s history and to do a profound disservice to those of us who see, as Stanton did, that in Christ there is "no male or female."
From the Sunday Herald interview, I don’t know if Naomi Wolf has come to Christ or not. Brief visions are important, but they are not — in and of themselves — real conversion experiences. Still, I’m glad that she’s interested in helping integrate feminism and spirituality in the task of tikkun olam, the "healing of the world" so essential to the Judeo-Christian vision. In doing so, Wolf is connecting to a long-standing tradition in American feminism that goes back to the abolitionists and the suffragettes, back beyond Stanton to the likes of the Grimke sisters — a tradition of championing women’s complete and radical equality while embracing a real and living faith in Jesus.
Rosa Brooks, your women’s history professor called. You need to repeat the class, my sister.
Friday Random Ten, trying for extra "unhip" points. Itunes party shuffle brings up the following evidence of a lack of both consistency and taste:
1. "Runaway Train", Rosanne Cash
2. "Give a Little Bit", Goo Goo Dolls
3. "Why Does my Heart Feel So Bad"? Moby
4. "Theme from the Dukes of Hazzard", Waylon Jennings
5. "Shout to the Lord", Randy Travis (I kid you not)
6. "Streets of Love", Rolling Stones
7. "Captain Jack", Billy Joel
8. "A Change is Gonna Come", Sam Cooke
9. "Step in the Name of Love", R. Kelly
10. "The Zoo", Scorpions
Three of these songs belong to my wife, seven to me.
A long day of giving midterms to my long-suffering winter students is done, and I’m ready for a hard-core Pilates session followed by a dusk run through the streets of South Pasadena and San Marino.
I’ve signed up to start taking kick-boxing classes for the first time in years. I think this will blend well with my pacifist convictions as long as I don’t actually try and hit anyone else.
The first batch of Matilde Mission letters have gone out and we’ve already begun to get our first responses — very exciting and encouraging. Again, do let me know via email if you want to be on our chinchilla charity mailing list!
And the snarkiness: As a fairly regular gym rat, I hate January. The "New Year’s resolution" crowd make it a chore to get a free bench, a free mat, a free set of 25-pound dumbbells. It’s not that I don’t want folks to transform their lives and get fit; I do very much want everyone to experience the joys of better health and muscle tone. But I also know that most of them will drop by Easter, if not before… I just wish that those who aren’t going to stick it out anyway would give up sooner, rather than later, return to sloth, and allow me to use the lat pull-down machine without having to wait.
Not a very nice man, Hugo, when he can’t get his regular workout in.
This post serves as a nice counterpoint to this morning’s on caritas, don’t you think?
The first encyclical from Benedict XVI is out: Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). Many progressives, as well as many familiar with the former Joseph Ratzinger’s image as "God’s Rottweiler", are a bit surprised that the topic for his first major theological statement as pope is such a winsome and unobjectionable subject.
But Benedict XVI is, at least so far, not turning out to be as reactionary as many on the religious left had feared, nor as tough as some of conservative supporters had hoped. In the February First Things, the influential Catholic neo-con Richard John Neuhaus writes:
Among those who greatly admired Cardinal Ratzinger and were elated by his election as pope, there is a palpable uneasiness. As of this writing, he has not made what are perceived to be needed personnel changes at the top levels of the Curia. Benedict’s first major appointment, that of Archbishop William Levada to succeed him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, occasioned widespread puzzlement. With particular pertinence to the present discussion, Levada, for all his considerable gifts, did not distinguish himself in his teaching, and his seeing to it that others taught, the Church’s moral doctrine during his ten years as archbishop of San Francisco, a city commonly called the gay capital of the world.
Troubling also to those who watch this pontificate with hopeful concern is Benedict’s appointment of George H. Niederauer as Levada’s successor in San Francisco. While in Salt Lake City, Bishop Niederauer had a reputation of being, as it is said, gay-friendly. He broke with other religious leaders in opposing a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The announcement of his appointment to San Francisco was met with great public rejoicing by Dignity, New Ways Ministry, and other gay advocacy groups.
Hey, if Neuhaus is experiencing "palpable uneasiness" and describes some of B16’s appointments as "troubling", then we on the religious left ought to be "genuinely heartened" and "cautiously encouraged." I like Neuhaus very much, not least because when I read him, I can know reliably that I am called to believe the precise opposite of what it is that he is saying!
Anyhow, the encyclical. I read through it all this morning, and loved this bit about avoiding mixing charity and proselytism:
Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends… Those who practise charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8) and that God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. He knows—to return to the questions raised earlier—that disdain for love is disdain for God and man alike; it is an attempt to do without God. Consequently, the best defence of God and man consists precisely in love. It is the responsibility of the Church’s charitable organizations to reinforce this awareness in their members, so that by their activity—as well as their words, their silence, their example—they may be credible witnesses to Christ.
Bold emphases are mine. Rock on, your Holiness!
This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my youth group teens this past weekend during the thirty hour fast relief. One of "my girls" said to me, "Hugo, what I like about you is you only talk about Jesus some of the time, not all the time. I don’t like to be preached to." I thanked her, and said,
"Actually, in a strange way, I am trying to preach to you about Jesus all the time. But I’m not nearly as interested in telling you about Jesus as I am in trying to show you how much He loves you. And the best way I can do that is through action, by "loving on" you guys without judgment or conditions. And if you ever ask yourself, ‘Why is Hugo spending so much time with us?’, consider the possibility that I am excited to share the love of Christ. That sharing happens more through a listening ear and an enthusiastic hug than through anything else."
It sounds self-serving, I know. But I’m a great believer that the Gospel is successfully preached in action. As the pope says so beautifully, God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. As someone who tries very hard, in my own weak and insufficient way, to love and feed His lambs as best I can, this letter is a very real surprise and a real encouragement.
As we get ready for another bout of sex education with the youth at All Saints, this Denise Duhamel poem seems marvelously appropriate. I might get around to reading it the teens this year.
Buying Stock
"…The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not
guarantee total protection and that while
there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in
transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission
would be absolutely impossible."
–The Surgeon General, 1987
I know you won’t mind if I ask you to put this on.
It’s for your protection as well as mine–Wait.
Wait. Here, before we rush into anything
I’ve bought a condom for each one of your fingers. And here–
just a minute–Open up.
I’ll help you put this one on, over your tongue.
I was thinking:
If we leave these two rolled, you can wear them
as patches over your eyes. Partners have been known to cry,
shed tears, bodily fluids, at all this trust, at even the thought
of this closeness.
That oughta get the kiddies talkin’.
I’ve come across what has to be my favorite internet "meme" ever: list Ten Views I Hold Without Evidence.
1. That a passionate evangelical faith in Jesus, the sort that sees Him as Savior of the world and of each of us as individuals, is easily reconcilable with the principal of universal salvation.
2. That wearing Paul Frank gear head-to-toe is quite acceptable teaching attire for an almost forty year-old college professor. (Secret goal: to have Paul Frank make and market a line of "Matilde the chinchilla" themed clothes, ala what he has done for "Julius the monkey.")
3. That the Democrats will reclaim majorities in both the House and Senate this fall.
4. That one could buy all of one’s meals at 7-11 for a month and nonetheless remain svelte and cheerful. (Actually, I think I did accomplish this more than once when I was single.)
5. That the Cal Golden Bears will win the college football National Championship next year after an undefeated 13-0 season.
6. That the Motley Crue reunion tour, was, on the whole, a good idea and a noble contribution to Western culture.
7. That Matilde the chinchilla has a secret double life traveling the world as an angel of mercy while her guardians sleep.
8. That a consistent-life ethic that opposes all forms of violence from abortion to capital punishment to war to factory farming is consistent with liberal feminism, consistent with the needs of a growing global population, and realistically achievable within our lifetime.
9. That the ratings and comments on "Ratemyprofessors" are actually mostly written by my colleagues and other non-students.
10. That working out twelve to eighteen hours a week has nothing to do with vanity, and that schedule will be easily possible to maintain after my wife and I have children (while I meet all of my household responsibilities with enthusiasm and pleasure).
Bonus view held without evidence: That one can honestly, enthusiastically and without shame embrace the principles of Christian simplicity and humility and do so in a Hugo Boss shirt, Diesel jeans and David Yurman jewelry.
I tag everybody.
Addendum: I suppose I’d especially like to tag those out there who work in the academy. After all, the Enlightened tradition suggests that holding views without evidence is a fairly significant intellectual failing. And knowingly and cheerfully embracing irreconcilable views is anathema. So I’d like to know I’m not the only over-educated bundle of contradictions out there!
In my post below on the AAUW report about sexual harassment, I made it clear that I’m troubled by those who claim that men and women are , statistically, equally likely to suffer the consequences of such behavior. I’ve gotten three e-mails in the past 24 hours from three different men, all writing with a sense of anger and anguish, each detailing to one degree or another his own story of being victimized sexually. Two of the three report being seriously harassed by a woman while at university; one incident sounds closer to assault and battery than harassment.
The AAUW report makes clear what most folks who work around issues of rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence already know: women are much more likely to suffer the serious physical and emotional consequences of these crimes, even when in the overall population we see that both men and women self-report being victimized. But speaking as a man who likes and loves men (pace, my MRA friends who still insist I am filled with self-loathing), I am absolutely clear that individual men can be very deeply hurt by sexual harassment and gender-based violence. The fact that they are statistical exceptions to the general rule ought not to invalidate their very real suffering.
No serious feminist whom I know believes that women are entirely incapable of sexually harassing or sexually assaulting men. I have never subscribed to the "all women are innocent angels, victimized by brutish louts" school of gender relations, and frankly, I don’t know many folks in the feminist movement who do. Indeed, it is often the most conservative enemies of feminism who insist on claiming that women are naturally passive, submissive, and disinclined towards sex. In an odd but obvious way, here’s where feminists and men’s rights advocates can stand together: we both agree that women have the capacity to be sexually aggressive, as well as violent and cruel.
But where feminists and MRAs part company is over the issue of equivalence. The MRA contention is that our institutional policies on sexual harassment and other similar crimes ought to be gender neutral, even in the face of statistical evidence. According to the MRAs and their allies, the fact that some men are raped (occasionally even by women) means that we must devote an equal amount of time and energy and money to protecting men from women. We must ensure that an equal number of slots in shelters exist for men, no matter how small the percentage of men is who actually seek out such protection. And, ignoring the general rules about differences in physical stature, MRAs insist that we acknowledge that men are as easily and as frequently injured by women as women are by men.
It is true that there are some folks out there who still have trouble imagining that a man can ever be sexually assaulted by a woman. They focus obsessively on biomechanics, arguing that an erection and ejaculation are proof of consent. Feminists already know that that’s a silly argument; we know of numerous female victims of sexual abuse who report being brought to orgasm by their abusers. Physical enjoyment can coexist with profound emotional shame, and the pleasure of the victim does not disprove rape or abuse. Feminists know this better than most folks, which is one reason why few feminists and pro-feminists actually argue that men are never, ever, sexually violated by women.
But the anecdotes of a small number of men, as serious as they are, are not evidence of a widespread pattern. Women are still far more likely to be raped and assaulted than are men, and both sexes are far more likely to be abused by men than they are by women. Though we teach self-defense courses to women, and offer sexual harassment prevention seminars in the corporate world, we still do too little to teach young boys and girls how not to become harassers themselves. Our popular culture still signals the acceptability of sexual assault against women, and all too often, our institutions (including schools and colleges) still offer a safe haven to harassers (the vast majority of whom are, as the AAUW study reaffirms, men).
Reaching out to the survivors of rape, harassment, and other forms of sexual violence is not a "zero-sum game." I know of no one in the feminist world who thinks it ought to be! The vast majority of us are eager to expand campus resources for both men and women. Few if any of us have an ideological commitment to the old canard that women are always "sugar and spice" and blameless victims. As real advocates for full equality for women, we are not oblivious to the possibility that some women do, on occasion, harass and harm men. But we will not let ourselves be sidetracked by anecdotal evidence of exceptions to the general rule, a rule that makes clear that even now, women are far more likely to suffer serious harm from sexual harassment than are men.
Let me be very clear: every feminist I’ve ever met or whose work I’ve read believes that sexual harassment is wrong, regardless of who is perpetrating it. We all acknowledge that men can be victims, though we point out that men are much more likely to be victimized by other men than by women. We do acknowledge that women are not incapable of harming men sexually. But we’re adamant that in our current climate, even on campuses where women constitute a clear majority of the student body, women are far more likely to suffer the most serious and most painful consequences of the soul-scarring crime of sexual harassment.
A major new study of sexual harassment on college and university campuses has been released today. Here’s how CNN reports it:
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. college students are affected by sexual harassment — ranging from offensive jokes and gestures to touching and grabbing, according to a study released on Tuesday.
Men are more likely to harass than women, but women and men are equally likely to be harassed on U.S. campuses, according to a report by the American Association of University Women.
Researchers found that 62 percent of college students experienced sexual harassment, and 32 percent of college students said they were victims of physical harassment.
Intrigued by the assertion that men and women are equally likely to be harassed, I went to the AAUW website. After fiddling around a bit, I downloaded the PDF file of the whole report. You can get it from them, or you can get it from me here: Download DTLFinal.pdf
CNN’s report makes the assertion that men and women are equally likely to be victimized, but the report itself (as summarized in the press release here) makes it clear that sexual harassment on campus inordinately burdens women:
Sexual harassment is affecting both male and female students. More than half of college students who’ve experienced harassment—both male and female—say they were upset by their experience. Yet the impact of sexual harassment is markedly differently for young women. Female students are more likely than their male peers to have negative behavioral and emotional responses to sexual harassment. Female students are more likely to take measures to avoid their harasser (48% versus 26%), to stay away from particular buildings or places on campus (27% versus 11%), to find it hard to study or pay attention in class (16% versus 8%), to have trouble sleeping (16% versus 6%) and to find someone to protect them (16% versus 4%).
The negative emotional responses are equally striking… female students who are harassed are more likely than male students to feel embarrassed, angry, less confident, and afraid. Nearly one-fifth of female college students who are harassed say they feel disappointed with their college experience- compared to eleven percent of male students.
Notably, our research also shows differences in the experiences and responses of lesbian, gay and bisexual students, who are not only more likely than heterosexual students to be harassed (71% versus 63%), but are also more likely to be embarrassed, angry, afraid and disappointed in their college experience as a result.
CNN mentions none of this.
I’m very concerned by the tone of the CNN report, and worried that other media outlets will simply broadcast a message of false equivalency: "both men and women are harassed." But will they also report that the overwhelming majority of harassers (of both men and women) are men? Will they report that women perceive the harassment as more serious and threatening, and are more likely to endure significant consequences that affect their education and their emotional health? CNN doesn’t explore that (or offer a link to the actual report), and most of the folks who read the online news sources are unlikely to follow up.
One of the most destructive tactics of men’s rights advocates has been to take certain issues that primarily concern the victimization of women (rape, domestic violence, divorce law, sexual harassment) and claim that men are — at the least — equally likely to be hurt by these. They will now gleefully point to stats that suggest that men and women are equally likely to be harassed on campus, without bothering to discuss the severity of the harassment or the long-term consequences for the victim. The AAUW study makes it clear that no legitimate argument for equivalency can be made when we take into account the actual impact sexual harassment has on the day-to-day lives of its victims. The question is, will the press get it right and report the full results of the study, which make abundantly clear that the vast majority of those who suffer the most severe consequences of campus sexual harassment are women.
It looks like the University of Florida is backing away from its poorly-worded policy that appeared to mandate sex between registered domestic partners.
I don’t have time for a long post, but did want to mention that in eleven years of teaching my Women in American Society class, I’ve noticed quite a fluctuation in student attitudes towards abortion and reproductive rights. Every semester, I always ask my class to divide into groups, and come up with a list of what they agree are the three most pressing issues facing the contemporary feminist movement. (We do this after the lecture on the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, where it’s clear that the three most pressing issues are the vote, the right to property, and the right to education.)
In the mid-1990s, ensuring abortion rights always came out on top as the number one priority. My students seemed more uniformly liberal on such issues a decade or so ago. But around the turn of the millennium, I began to notice two phenomena: first of all, the number of pro-life young women who still wanted to be called feminists was growing; second, the sense of urgency about protecting access to abortion seemed to be waning. This was odd, of course — regardless of one’s politics, one would assume that that sense of urgency ought to have been increasing as we transitioned from the Clinton to the Bush administrations! But I can remember a couple of semesters in 2001 and 2002 where my students wouldn’t even mention "choice" issues on their top three agenda items. In those years, working to overcome media stereotypes about women and beauty always seemed to top the list, with equal pay just behind. I began to wonder if abortion was something that my students thought of as irrelevant, an issue more important to their mothers’ generation than their own. The conservative side of me was heartened by that apparent trend; the liberal side of me was worried.
But this 2006 winter intersession continues a different trend I first began to see a year ago — a renewed interest in seeing abortion as the defining issue of the feminist movement. The last three times I’ve asked the old question, "choice" has come back out on top. More of my students are once again willing to define themselves as pro-choice, and — at least for now — the number of students identifying themselves as "feminists for life" seems to have retreated from its high water mark. I know that even for my less well-informed students, coverage of the Supreme Court (and this week’s 33rd anniversary of Roe) has had an impact. I also know that many of my pro-choice students were energized by last fall’s surprising defeat of Prop. 73, the "parental notification" initiative.
As someone who has famously complex and contradictory feelings about abortion, this all presents a challenge for me. Though I am still, after all this time, trying to sort out my own feelings on the matter, I’m absolutely convinced that whether we like it or not, the struggle over abortion rights will remain the defining issue of our time. Even when I try and soft-pedal the topic, a new generation of young women is reminding me that this is an issue that they regard as vital. And though I continue to mull my own opinions, my students don’t need to hear me hash out my own beliefs. They need a compelling narrative account of how and why we’ve arrived at this point, where the bodies of the young, the female, and the fertile — and the smaller bodies they have the potential to carry — remains the key social and cultural battleground of our time.
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