There’s a better than average chance that the NPR story on Ratemyprofessors — for which I did a radio interview last month — will air this afternoon on All Things Considered. NPR can’t promise anything, given that news can change so fast.
UPDATE: It’s not listed on the list of stories for today. It may run tomorrow.
Apparently, some universities are considering offering a course in “fat studies.” When I taught my Humanities course on “Beauty, the Body, and the Western Tradition”, we spent a fair amount of time on the cultural history of fat. I recall some terrific, spirited discussions — and some painfully awkward moments.
In a vaguely related note, we learn that “cohabitation” is bad for women’s health:
Dietitians have found that women tend to gain weight once they move in with male partners. “Living with a male seemed to put pressure on females to consume more of the ‘unhealthy’ choices,” Amelia Lake, a research fellow at the Newcastle University Human Nutrition Research Center in Britain, wrote this year in the journal Complete Nutrition, “while females had a positive influence on the diets of the males.”
That’s intriguing. Culturally, we teach women to monitor the health of their male partners. Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets. Attention to food preparation and to nutrition is traditionally considered a female concern. Spend time with many couples, and you will often hear stories of what the guy “used to eat” back in his “bachelor days.” One tangible way to measure a woman’s success at “domesticating” a husband or boyfriend is to transform, or at least improve, his eating habits.
There’s a bit of the old “myth of male weakness” at work here. Both men and women buy into the myth (which is why so many folks don’t think it’s a myth at all). Call it the “men are big babies who can’t take care of themselves properly” topos; men “buy it” because it allows us to be irresponsible, women “buy it” because it offers the opportunity to measure one’s feminine power. A woman who can cause a man to change his diet is a “proper woman”. The worse he ate before they got together, the more impressive her achievement becomes. Obviously, lots of folks don’t buy into this, but the Lake study suggests that some people still do — and that it has real consequences for women.
And thirdly, I’m putting on a bit of weight. I’m cutting my exercise and increasing my food intake as we draw closer to Christmas. The exercise decrease is slight, and largely due to increased academic and social obligations. The food intake comes along with it. But I don’t mind putting on a few pounds, largely because I can look forward to taking them off beginning in January.
I’ve learned that my diet and exercise pattern is seasonal; I’m rigorous for a few months, and then slack off a bit. My joints need time to recover, and my body needs to rest. I “soften up” and then “trim down” at different times of the year. The softening up time is obviously pleasurable, but so too is the trimming down. For someone who loves setting goals and meeting them, it’s fun to put on a bit of weight and then take it off again. It becomes a challenge. Mind you, I don’t put on and take off huge amounts of weight; yo-yo dieting is never healthy. But I honor a certain rhythm and seasonality to my eating and my exercise. Though I expect to be ripped once more by Easter, from now until Epiphany, I’ll be in a more languid and indulgent mode.
In last Wednesday’s post about the virtues of studying abroad, I mentioned my own experiences as a professor and co-director of Pasadena City College’s Florence semester program in the autumn of 2000. In passing, I noted that we had a serious incident take place in which one of our students was very nearly killed in a fall from a sixth-floor balcony. He remains a pariplegic six years later, and the litigation surrounding the tragedy was only recently resolved.
For a variety of reasons (not the least of which is the continued possibility of litigation), I can’t discuss the fall and its aftermath in too much detail. I can say that the young man who fell so far and was hurt so badly was a bright, popular, athletic, hard-working student who had made many friends among his fellow Pasadenans in Florence. I can also say that the incident taught me a lot about college-age folks, and about the responsibility of someone who is leading a study abroad program.
With a few exceptions, most of our 45 students on the semester-long trip to Florence were of traditional age; almost all were between 18-21. They were all legal adults, if barely so. And before leaving on the trip, my co-director (a fellow PCC prof in the sciences) and I made it clear that we had no intention of acting as chaperones. If these students had been underage, we would have had a host of legal and moral responsibilities; given that they were old enough to sign contracts (and drink alcohol under Italian law), we figured that we were in no way in loco parentis. We saw our role as guides; we led tours of the city and gave lectures. We saw our role as friendly mentors, and were both more than willing to lend an ear to those who were homesick or quarreling with their roommates. But for the most part, we tried to treat our students as “junior scholars and peers”.
My co-director and I often went out to dinner with groups of students. We joined them for dancing. I formed a small running club, and we went running in and around the Cascine four or five mornings a week. A couple of students even came along when I got what turned out to be my last tattoo, from the renowned Giulio Tommaselli in the Via Della Mosca. (One gal even got her first ink there, so inspired was she.) In other words, I felt very much as if the students and I were good friends. I was 33 at the time, a dozen to fifteen years older, not yet old enough to be seen as a father figure. I thought of myself as a knowledgeable older brother, and it seemed a good arrangement.
And then came Rocky’s fall in mid-October. I was awakened by a phone call early on a Saturday morning from a frantic student; she was calling from the hospital where Rocky was in surgery and fighting for his life. I threw on some clothes, called a taxi, and was at the ER within twenty minutes.
And what I learned over the next few days changed my teaching forever. About eight students had been partying with Rocky at the time of his fall. When I reached the hospital, they were ashen, weeping, bewildered. And what struck me, in this moment of crisis, was that they all looked so very, very young. It was as if the shock and fear of the incident had caused them all to regress to early adolescence. They clung to me, clearly expecting that no matter what, I would do something to make things better.
I called my co-director, and she came to the hospital as fast as she could. I made the awful phone call home to California, waking the young man’s grandparents up from a sound sleep with the news that their grandson was fighting for his life. (The doctors gave him a 10% chance of survival). And once we knew that there was nothing more we could do for Rocky, we took the kids off for breakfast. They huddled together, weeping, but after protesting that they weren’t hungry, they all wolfed down huge amounts of food.
Over the next day, as word of the accident spread through our little community in Florence, the students gathered in apartments to pray and to talk and to wait for news. And again and again, I was struck by how small, fragile, and young they all seemed! I could feel that though they were only a dozen years my junior, they desperately needed me to be the competent, reliable grown-up. They needed a Daddy figure, most of them, because they needed to fall apart. And though they were brave and very good to each other, it was still evident to me that they weren’t all fully adult. They were in that strange transition time that is college, so full of maturity and sophistication on the one hand and so terribly fragile and uncertain on the other. Thousands of miles from home, away from their families, facing the possible death of a companion and a friend, that fragility became abundantly evident.
We made sure the kids ate. We gave them time to talk. We talked to their worried parents for them. We bought them coffee, and, I’m not ashamed to say, we bought them cigarettes. (For those who were already smokers, I figured now was the time to use abundant quantities of nicotine. I smoked more in the week after Rocky’s accident than in any other seven-day period in my life.) My co-director and I went from “older buddies” to “Mom and Dad” overnight.
Rocky’s family flew over. Rocky survived, and the student insurance company footed the astronomical bill for a private air ambulance to carry him and his family from Italy back to Los Angeles. We finished up the semester, and in the final few weeks we had in Florence, we got back to partying and dancing and going out together. But I was more careful to keep strict boundaries in place with my students. The gap between 33 and 18 was wider now, and the distinction between peer and professor was infinitely clearer to me. Frankly, one of the great silver linings of this tragedy was, I suppose, that it taught me not to confuse legal and physical adulthood with genuine maturity; it taught me to better honor my role as a mentor and a professor. And it taught me that in a time of crisis, I am well-suited to the role of Daddy, when I’m surrounded by folks who suddenly need a father figure on whom they can rely.
I can’t keep up. I just checked my email, and I have 46 emails from as many students in the past 24 hours. For some reason, the number of students who email me keeps rising each semester. If I take a while to respond, you know why!
I’ve written on this subject before.
I’m home from a gorgeous fifteen-miler in Griffith Park this morning. I ought to run in one of the world’s largest urban parks more often; I hadn’t pounded trail there in three years.
Last night, we decorated the Christmas tree. Growing up in a decidedly unchurched family, the tree was at the heart of what it meant to celebrate Christmas. My mother’s tree is a bejeweled work of art; it takes a day to do properly, and has well over 1000 ornaments upon it. The oldest pieces hung on her mother’s childhood trees a century ago.
For all of my life, we’ve been a “Douglas fir” family. (Call it the official tree of OKOP!) There are rules, you see; noble firs and colored lights are decidedly NOKOP. (One of my cousins once married a woman from a colored light family, and it caused quite a stir. Marrying across ethnic lines is one thing, marrying someone who appreciates “flocking” and blinking lights is another. A family has to have standards.) But yesterday, at the tree lot, the Douglas firs we saw looked rather pathetic and tired. And while the noble firs would have been beyond the realm of consideration, my wife suggested a very handsome Fraser fir. It was a fine 7-8 footer, green and healthy; most importantly, I saw no “bald patches.” All of his sides were good. And I decided to throw caution to the winds, throw one tradition out the window, and embrace change. For the first time in my nearly forty years of decorating trees, I decorated a Fraser fir last night.
My wife likes the tree, but she is happy to defer to my obsessiveness on the subject. She lets me do the lights; doing lights well is not easy, but I’ve learned a trick or two over the years. My brother-in-law came over, and he helped me do the vital work of hanging the colored and clear balls; those go on before the “special” ornaments. The balls get hung on the insides of the branches, and they serve to reflect and enhance the effect of the lights. Once we’ve put a hundred balls on the tree (clear, red, silver and gold only), then we can hang the more interesting ornaments. Over the years, I’ve inherited some old things from my childhood trees. I have a very special toy soldier that has been on every tree since I was born, and he always is hung in the front and near the center.
I’m always on the lookout for Christmas ornaments. My wife, who often travels without me, knows to buy unique ones when she sees them. My mother taught me that gaudy costume jewelry can often make interesting ornaments; I have a pair of dangling earrings, bought from a Venetian vendor, that do splendidly on the tree. (They’d be ghastly hanging from the ears.) The idea is that each ornament ends up telling a story. Each year, as we unwrap the tissue paper and pull an ornament out, we can exclaim “Remember when we bought this?” Or “Oh, it’s my old polar bear ornament that I got when I was eight!” No other Christmas tree in the world has quite the same mix of decorations as ours, and each year’s collection is different. Each year, we add ornaments, and in the decades to come, will surely have ever more elaborate and bejeweled displays. When we have children, we’ll buy ornaments for their “first trees”, and if we’re lucky, they’ll take the same degree of joy that I do in the decorating.
This morning, I got up just after 5:00 to get ready for my run. I said my morning prayers, poured my coffee, and then sat in the living room with the tree lights on and all the other lights off. I’m an impatient, fidgety man — but I can stare at a beautiful Christmas tree for half an hour. I’m a happy man today, with the scent of the season filling the house.
Oh, and the chinchillas are happy too. Each chin shall have his or her own stocking this year, and we shall squeeze them all above the fireplace. While I finished the tree last night, my wife decorated each stocking with each baby’s name: Dudley, Joonko, Ninotchka, Gabriella, Chihiro and Racheli shall each have lots of nuts, craisins, and chew toys come Christmas morn.
I confess to feeling uncomfortable with the tone of some of the comments beneath my post yesterday about welcoming the sex offender into the community. Several male commenters who normally disagree with almost everything I write were strongly supportive of my anti-vigilantism stance.
Now, I don’t automatically worry if my critics suddenly start agreeing with me. As they say, even a broken clock is likely to be right twice a day, and perhaps yesterday was such a day for my men’s rights advocate friends. But what does worry me a bit is the sense I get from some of the comments (and this is more implicit than explicit) that their support for my position is rooted in a sense that sex crimes are frequently exaggerated, and that those who are forced to register as offenders may often be those whose crimes were petty, or who were falsely accused.
One of the staples of the anti-feminist men’s movement is an insistence that rape statistics (at least those statistics that indicate that large numbers of women and girls are sexually assaulted by men) are exaggerated. There’s a widespread conviction, too, that false accusations of rape and molestation are common, and are a regular tactic in divorce and custody cases. There’s a lot of argument from anecdote, and relatively little solid evidence, but it’s something that I see my MRA friends return to again and again. And I’m wondering if they are piggy-backing on my sympathy for a man who is being hounded by his community to make a very different point altogether.
I think it’s possible to welcome a sex offender into the community and embrace him as a neighbor while simultaneously acknowledging the severity of his transgression. My support for Michael Miletti was not rooted in the sense that he was falsely accused, or that what he did to his daughter wasn’t terrible indeed. My support for him is rooted in the conviction that he is my fellow human being, a man who has (in the eyes of the state) paid for his crime. To use the well-known phrase, I’m arguing for the “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to sex crimes; it would seem that some of my commenters are arguing the “love the sinner, and the sin of which they are accused is frequently not serious, or false” position. That troubles me.
In a volunteer capacity, and as part of men’s group work, I’ve spent time with men who had committed rape, molestation, and other forms of sexualized violence. When I was in a Twelve Step program, one of my first sponsors was a man who had gone to jail for molesting a niece (years and years earlier). He was deeply aware of the wrong he had done, and made no excuses or attempts to explain his prior actions. He had made amends, done his time, and spent years and years on his “inner work” to make certain that he was absolutely, positively, safe. I could love him with all my heart, and still think what he did was wrong, and still be glad he went to jail for it. I rejoiced that he had been changed for the better by his prison experience, which doesn’t always happen. But I wasn’t sorry he went. Neither was he.
I want to be clear that I am not accusing all men’s rights advocates of being unconcerned with the victims of sexual predators. Yet I want to make it absolutely clear that I am combining a personal horror at the crime, a strong belief in justice, and a commitment to creating a world where both the survivors of sexual abuse and those who have paid the penalty for perpetrating that abuse can live peaceably. As someone who works with young people in a professional and para-professional capacity, I am deeply interested in their physical and emotional safety. And that can concern can happily coexist with a willingness to reach out to those who have offended, to bond with them and befriend them and welcome them into the neighborhood.
Stentor writes of me yesterday:
In short, Hugo Schwyzer would make the most anti-environmental Deep Ecologist ever.
That caught my attention. Actually, it’s part of a really interesting post (as are most of Stentor’s) on the conflict inherent in the world view of folks like me. I’m at once a self-proclaimed environmentalist who claims to love nature, but at the same time am relentless about wanting to transform and overcome the darker aspects of my own nature. I want to preserve and protect wild animals and wild spaces, while all the while working to tame and discipline my own flesh, my own behavior, even my own thoughts.
I’m a fourth-generation Sierra Clubber. When asked on surveys what the most important political issue to me is, I invariably check the box for the “environment.” Nothing seems more vital to me than protecting our natural resources, and allowing “wildness” to flourish. That world view, closely linked to my reflexive insistence on the dignity and worth of animals, is born of experience and reflection. It was bequeathed to me by my family, and by growing up in beautiful spaces — the rolling hills around Mission Peak, in Carmel by-the-Sea, in Santa Barbara. My favorite poet, both as a child and now, remains the vaguely misanthropic, vaguely pagan, Robinson Jeffers. I grew up half a mile from his little tower on Carmel Point, and share more than a few of his views.
I suppose I reconcile this apparent contradiction (leave nature alone, work to endlessly better myself and others) with a belief about free will. Animals don’t appear to have free will, and neither do plants. Humans do. While this doesn’t make humans intrinsically more valuable than animals, it does bestow on us a special responsibility — and that, it seems to me, is the responsibility to love, to care, to share. It is also the requirement to change those aspects of ourselves that block us from connecting with nature, with our fellow creatures, and with God. Our dominion over the natural world, made clear at the beginning of Genesis, is a mandate for gentle, just stewardship. We are called to eradicate within ourselves those aspects of our character that conflict with that mandate, and because we have free will and grace we can succeed in accomplishing this great transformation.
Those who want to pave over the earth and exploit its natural resources, it seems, have misdirected wills. The desire to “develop” and transform is a good one — but it ought to be directed inward, not outward. A developer and I can look at the same landscape of rolling hills, and he can imagine working hard to put in a row of tract homes; I look across it and imagine conquering it on a long trail run. He wants to change nature, and I want to use nature to measure my own change. There’s a distinction there, and it’s one that matters.
I’m very fond of Indonesian poet Li-Young Lee, not least because his relationship with his father is such a central theme in his work. We’re getting close to the six-month anniversary of my Dad’s death, and we’re also getting close to Christmas. That combination finds me missing him a bit more this week. This poem seems right to me today.
Eating Alone
I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can’t recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could 1, a young man, want.
I’ve had several students come to see me this year, asking whether or not I think it’s a good idea for them to participate in the college’s Study Abroad programs. For years, we’ve offered a fall semester program in Florence and a spring semester in Oxford; both have proved wildly popular. The three-month semesters aren’t cheap ($7-8,000), but financial aid (at least in terms of loans) can offset much of the cost.
I always tell the students that it’s worth it. I taught one semester in our Florence, Italy, program. It was the fall of 2000, and another Pasadena City College instructor and I took 45 students off for three months. The two of us taught the main courses of the program, and the students also took Italian language classes. They lived with roommates in apartments scattered across the city, and in general, they had a marvelous, life-altering time.
Several of the kids who went with me to Italy had never been on a plane before; nearly three-quarters had never left North America. Though they all suffered from temporary culture shock, for the most part they blossomed in the radically different environment. Many had never lived away from home, and merely having the chance to escape the watchful eyes of overprotective parents was liberation enough — being able to live out that escape in Europe was even better.
Of course, there were problems. Many of our students, most of whom were under 21, struggled to adjust to a culture where they were allowed to drink at 18. We had a few cases of alcohol poisoning, and one dreadful incident where one of our lads fell from a sixth-floor balcony while drunk and high. He nearly died, and ended up paralyzed. That was a horrible experience for all concerned. I did a lot of comforting and a lot of telephoning, and a lot of smoking (Gauloises, natch); the worst part was phoning the young man’s family back here in California to let them know that their son was in critical condition with major organ failure and a crushed spine. If I never have to make a phone call like that again, I’ll be happy!
Tragedies aside, it was a tremendously succesful trip. My students grew intellectually, emotionally, and culturally; they became more tolerant and less rigid. They ate better, they slept later, they read more, they walked more, they pushed themselves out of their cocoons. It was a wonderful thing for them.
If it were feasible, I’d love to see all of my students spend at least a semester, if not a year, in a foreign country. For my students reading this, if you’re considering borrowing the money in order to go to England or Italy, let me urge you to do whatever you can, within reason, to make this happen for you. You will not regret it.
Eventually, I’ll teach abroad again. Married to a woman who has an insatiable travel bug, I spend plenty of time abroad these days. (And we have chinnies to worry about). But there’s a difference between living out of hotels and living in an apartment for a few months. Perhaps when we have children old enough to appreciate the experience, we’ll take them.
First off, Ginger has the 28th Carnival of the Feminists up at her site. Visit and read.
Yesterday’s LA Times had a “column left” story by Peter Hong: On His Block, A Molester. Hong, a Times staffer, lives a bit more than a mile north of me in Altadena:
My neighbor was a child molester.
I know because of the signs.
Michael Miletti’s face, name and address appear on posters lining Wapello Street in Altadena, with the admonishment: “Leave Our Neighborhood Now Child Molester.” Up since May, the signs are staked into lawns, taped to trash cans and nailed to tree trunks.
IT started in April with an anonymous mailer sent to houses on Wapello. The fliers pictured Miletti, 53, above the words “Registered Sex Offender Movement Alert.”
Miletti had arrived a year earlier after marrying a widow who had lived for several years in a spacious Mediterranean house. Neighbors knew him mainly as a polite man who chatted with them while walking his two sheepdogs, Roy and Fiona.
After the mailer arrived, someone on the block checked out Miletti’s court record. It showed that Miletti’s 16-year-old daughter had turned him in to the police in 1993.
Miletti admitted repeatedly abusing his daughter — police said she was first molested at age 6 or 7 — and served three years in state prison.
Horrified, some residents began placing signs in an effort to warn others — and perhaps to drive Miletti out.
“We want to ostracize him,” said William Tell, 62, a retired businessman who lives across the street from Miletti.
Okay, first off, I have a hard time believing that “William Tell” is someone’s real name, but that’s beside the point.
The article, which is decidedly sympathetic to neighborhood residents and hostile to Miletti, made me very, very angry. Not angry at the sex offender who has done his time, but at the ugliness and hostility of his community — a community very close to where I live.
Let me be very, very, clear: from a Christian perspective, sex offenders are “our neighbors”; we are called to love them and to live in community with them. Should a registered sex offender wish to buy a townhome in our condo complex, I would welcome him as I would welcome any other neighbor. If I had small children, I might make certain that they didn’t spend time alone with the fellow. But I would not allow my fears to trump my responsibility to live peacably and amicably with my neighbors. Of course, if my neighbor is actively engaging in criminal behavior, then that’s something else; he belongs in prison or some form of intense, residential treatment. But if, like Mr. Miletti, his crime occurred years ago and he’s paid his dues to society, then I cannot imagine not treating him as I would any other neighbor.
Of course, I don’t have children. I have nieces and nephews whom I adore, however; I work with kids in a volunteer capacity. My concern for their safety is very high. But as I wrote last week in my post about animal research, there are certain principles that trump responsibilities to one’s loved ones. I would love to find a cure for cancer, and I would love to have been able to save my father’s life. But I will not support the search for a cure if it comes at the cost of animal life. Of course, I want to protect my future children from real and authentic dangers. But I will not allow my ungrounded fears about a man who once violated a child’s trust to override my higher call to love my neighbor. Just because someone becomes a father doesn’t mean he ceases to have vital responsibilities to the larger community of living creatures. If a sex offender came to hurt my kid, I would do everything I could to stop him — but preemptively lashing out at a man who struggled, fell, and has apparently amended his ways is not an acceptable way in which to provide that protection.
I hate the whole idea of making sex offender registries public. Let me be clear that I am not a sex offender, and indeed, most of the crimes that these men have committed appal and disgust me. But I can be disgusted by an action and still love, welcome, and live in community with the man who committed that act.
The sex offender is my neighbor. He is welcome on my street. And should I see any signs going up in my neighborhood, calling for his ouster, I will rip them down in the light of day.
First off, let me note that the Masculinity and its Discontents blog is NOT merely Dan Oppenheimer’s, I am corrected today by his co-blogger, Jamie Berger. Jamie also takes issue with my weltanschauung here.
I want to respond, at least in part, to Dan’s critique that I mentioned yesterday.
Dan suggested in detail what others have said in passing: that my vision of what it means to be a pro-feminist, Christian man is too demanding, too puritanical, too focused on the relentless quest for self-improvement, too intolerant of human (or masculine) foibles. As I said yesterday, I’m honored by the thoughtfulness and gentleness of his response to my writing.
One problem I notice in my writing: I find it remarkably difficult to keep my remarks for a secular audience free from a Christian worldview. My feminism informs my faith, and my faith informs my feminism, and the two are sufficiently intertwined so as to make it difficult for me to separate the two. (In my classes at a secular college, I can do it; I’m less inclined to do it on a self-titled blog which is, for better or for worse, designed to reflect my actual, uncensored beliefs.) And Dan, who isn’t a Christian, picks up on the evangelical undertones of my writing and finds them troubling — or at least exhausting.
I spent a few years worshipping with the Mennonites. One of the reason I joined a Mennonite church was because of something I read in the days after 9/11. I can’t remember the website, but what it said was something like this: “Mennonites take Matthew 5 as serious instruction, and believe we can fulfill Jesus’s call to radical peacemaking.” It’s in Matthew 5 that we read that the peacemakers are blessed; it’s in Matthew 5 we read that we are to turn the other cheek; and it’s in Matthew 5 that we are cautioned against even looking at another woman in lust. And it’s in Matthew 5 that Jesus says:
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Now, I am not perfect. I came to the Mennonites in the middle of my third divorce, and divorce is also condemned in Matthew 5. But I was attracted to the idea that no matter what our past, no matter what our weakness, through Christ we can become “perfect.” While other Christians tend to dismiss the idea that Matthew 5 could ever be normative human behavior, the Mennonites argued the so-called “Sermon on the Mount” represented an attainable (if tremendously difficult) goal for human beings in this life. And Matthew 5:48 does undergird a lot of my thinking about men, masculinity, and (to paraphrase Lexus) the relentless pursuit of perfection.
Of course I don’t expect non-Christians to be bound by explicitly Christian precepts. At the same time, I do think that Christian ethics, even when stripped of the idea of the divinity of Christ, often make good sense. That’s why I don’t hesitate to invite those who aren’t Christian to consider the insights of the Christian moral tradition, not as it is applied by the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the world, but as it has been lived out quietly and gently for millenia by the peaceful and the faithful.
Dan’s most powerful criticism is this one:
I fear, however, that there can be something destructive in ethical systems, such as his, which set purity as the standard. They create anxiety, and breed hypocrisy, because there’s never really a resting place, an equilibrium, from where you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m not doing so badly right now.” The chasm between the real, imperfect lives that most of us live and these Everest-high standards of moral purity is just too vast, and I don’t think the human psyche is well-equipped to process the cognitive dissonance that bubbles up in the chasm.
There’s some truth in what he’s saying. I know what it’s like to feel exhausted and overwhelmed and anxious. I’ve pushed my body to its limits, working out for hours each day while trying to meet an ever-growing list of private and public commitments. Every once in a while, I need a mental health day to find the very sort of resting place to which Dan refers; there are days I just need to lie on the couch, watch the Classic Sports Network, or nap with the newspaper on my chest. Those days aren’t often, but they are necessary.
Jesus, as His followers know, calls us to a very high standard. But He also invites us to come and rest; “my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” It seems contradictory, of course. How can we be relentless in our pursuit of perfection while at rest? How can this yoke of ongoing self-transformation seem light? One answer, the easy one for a Christian, is that God’s grace enables us to do what we did not believe possible. It is the Spirit that strengthens us, and the Spirit that refreshes us. But to my non-Christian friends and readers, that comes across as airy, condescending, gobbledy-gook.
But my experience has been that a commitment to continual growth can coexist with that place of balance where we can say, as Dan does, “I’m not doing so badly right now.” My own spiritual journey is a long and windy one, and I frequently need to visit the rest stops. I have a vision of the man I’d like to be, I am clear about the man I have been in the past, and I am comfortable with the reality that I am today somewhere in between. When I slip up, as I do, I don’t beat myself. I don’t wallow in the sense that I am a miserable wretch and a fraud. I simply say to myself, “Hugo, you fucked up. And that’s okay. Let’s take a step back, take a break, and find out ways to make sure that that fuck-up doesn’t happen again.”
As a trail runner, I’ve fallen a lot. If you were to look closely at my knees and hips, you’d see various scars and bruises sustained in tumbles on the mountain. And you know, I usually fall when I’m going uphill. Running downhill, I am very attentive to my foot placement, as I’m afraid of a spill; going uphill, I tend to be focused more on the difficulty of the climb and less on what’s beneath me. And when I fall, I don’t try and spring back up again right away. I let myself lie there for a minute. I’ve had some wonderful experiences, flat on my back, 5500 feet above the city, watching the trees and the birds and feeling the rocks and dirt beneath me. If I go too fast, I stumble. And when I stumble, I need to rest for a bit. But I don’t quit the climb. I get up eventually, dust myself off, inspect the scrapes and the blood, and, gingerly, continue the ascent. That’s what I do on the trail, and that’s pretty much how I live my life.
So yeah, I’m a bit of a Puritan. But as any good recent historian of the Puritans will tell you, the Puritans laughed more than we think. This latter day Puritan is not averse to pleasure; I’m averse to pleasure that comes at the expense of human or animal dignity. My right to delight must be balanced by my commitment to not use other creatures — in fantasy or reality — to meet my own needs. My opposition to porn, my opposition to animal testing and research, my commitment to feminism and vegetarianism; these are not tools with which to flagellate myself! They are views grounded in an intense desire to do justice. They are not at odds with pleasure, but they set the boundaries for when and how I experience pleasure. And within those boundaries, I find peace and fulfillment.
Call me the happy puritan, climbing an endless trail up a steep mountain, joyful in the ascent, joyful even as I know that the moment I reach the final summit is the moment I go home to God. And call me happy even when I stumble, and lie in the dirt for a while and watch the birds.
Daniel Oppenheimer has a regular blog on men and masculinity, called Masculinity and its Discontents. He’s got a long piece up today about, well, me. More specifically, he’s writing about my views on the vital importance of personal transformation.
Dan writes:
My difference with him (Hugo) is philosophical. The struggle, for him, is to be Christ-like. It’s not enough, as an older man, simply to treat the young women in your life respectfully, you have to act with “radical unselfishness, and that requires that we ourselves always refrain from sexualizing them.”
I don’t know precisely what that means in practical terms, but I don’t see what’s wrong with just treating the young women in your life respectfully, and making them feel safe and as if they are more than just the sum of their body parts. You shouldn’t leer at your young, attractive, female co-worker, but why shouldn’t you, discreetly, check out her pert, young ass once in a while? Or at the least, why shouldn’t you imagine her pert, young ass in your mind, or in your dreams, away from the office and away from her?
Dan’s quoting from my first older men, younger woman post.
He continues:
I don’t want to be like Christ. I have a hard enough time feeling okay about the Dan I happen to be. The struggle for me is be more Dan-like, is to have a holistic vision of myself, of the good and the bad and the in-between, and to like the whole self. The struggle is to understand myself—to understand, for instance, what misogyny there is in my psyche, and to manage it as best I can so that it doesn’t inflict too much damage on my relationships with women and girls. It’s to minimize the harm I do in the world, and try to be conscious of what harm I’m doing (I’ll always do some, since life is harm, as well as love), and to accept myself if I’m doing a decent job.
Ruthless, radical unselfishness isn’t really very appealing to me, and in fact sounds a bit frightening.
I promise a thoughtful response, and soon — Tuesday or Wednesday.
Saturday afternoon, my wife and I sat together on the couch, switching back and forth between the two rivalry college football games that absorbed our interest. I was delighted to see my Golden Bears beat Stanford for the fifth straight year (something that hasn’t happened since the Harding Administration.) My beloved was heartsick, as she watched her alma mater’s eleven fall to the UCLA Bruins. A happy “date night” followed, and lifted much of her gloom.
Since I care about all forms of football, I note that Anson Dorrance’s Tar Heels won their 18th NCAA women’s soccer title in 25 years; Dorrance may have a checkered record in terms of his relationships with the young women he coaches (it’s amazing that in this day and age, he’s held on to his job), but no one denies he’s superb at every aspect of the game, from recruiting to teaching. And my father, who taught at UCSB for nearly forty years, would have been vaguely pleased that the Gaucho men pulled off a surprise win in the championship game of the men’s college cup, knocking off heavily-favored UCLA.
Anyhoo:
My wife did some competitive ballroom dancing in her teenage years. I, on the other hand, have two left feet. She’s very patient with me, even as I trod on her feet while trying to pull off some cumbia moves at our wedding reception. Still,on occasion my exuberant clumsiness makes her laugh. Somehow, last night, as I was doing the dishes, I started singing to myself (not uncommon) and doing some solitary dance moves as I rinsed the dinner plates. My wife walked in to the kitchen, stared at me in wonder, clapped her hands in glee, and asked “Where did you learn THAT?”
So, a story about my first dancing experience.
It was early August, 1979. I was twelve years old, and I was spending four weeks at a summer camp in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was a riding camp, and though I had grown up in a Western saddle, this was my first experience learning “English” style. (It took me the entire time I was there just to grasp the different way of holding the reins and the strange phenomenon of “posting.”) Anyhow, at the end of our first week at this large, co-ed camp for junior high and high school aged kids, we had a dance.
The camp’s brochure had promised a dance. I was prepared, having brought some nice slacks and a button-down shirt. I was also terrified. I had never been to a dance of any kind, and I had no idea how I would ever summon the courage to ask a girl to step on to the floor with me. Equally worrisome, I had no idea how to dance; I had seen other kids gyrating and bouncing on television (disco was ubiquitous in 1979), but I had two left feet and had no sense of how to begin.
I confessed my worry to a guy in my bunk house named Dominic. Dominic was a year older, and to my eyes, a paragon of physical and verbal sophistication. Dominic was eager to tutor me, and on a Saturday afternoon, we had a brief dancing lesson. It’s difficult to describe, but I’ll try. Dominic said:
“Rock from side to side. Every once in a while, take your left foot and bring it behind your right one. Then bring it back, and take your right foot and put it behind your left. If you want, you can also take one or two steps to one side, and then the other. But mostly” — and here Dom was adamant — “mostly you just watch what the girl does and try and do the same thing.”
Twenty-seven years later, those same moves constitute the majority of my dance steps. Oh, I’ve had folks try and teach me more formal dancing. I was an escort to a Charity League cotillion in college, and tried to learn then. Utter failure. At my first two weddings, I tried to prepare for the “first dance” as best I could, and I suppose I didn’t embarrass myself too much. (Oh, FYI, at my first wedding, the first dance was to Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt’s “Don’t Know Much”; at the second, to Van Morrison’s “Someone Like You.”) And of course, my lovely wife has tried to teach me the basics of salsa many times. Mostly, I end up standing still and rolling my hips in a fashion that tends to promote hysterics. My wife’s Colombian relatives find my attempts at rhythm to be bizarre, tragic, earnest, and, apparently, touchingly captivating.
While I’m on the subject of that first summer camp dance, let me say it was a great success. It was a mixed dance for high school and junior highers; I was among the younger kids there. But several of the older girls took it upon themselves to ask the shy younger boys to dance, and after I had only been watching the hopping and bouncing for a few minutes, one gal — perhaps sixteen — suddenly took my hand and led me on to the floor. She was patient and immensely kind, and we danced two “fast” songs together. I don’t remember the second, but the first was Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”. I did as Dom had instructed, noting that my generous and pretty partner was doing more or less the same. I felt extraordinarily satisfied with myself.
At the end of the second song, the gal who had taken me to the floor thanked me — she thanked me! — and went off to dance with a handsomer, older fella. I didn’t care whether she had taken my hand out of pity, or kindness, or because her counselor had told all of the older girls to get a shy junior high boy to dance. All I cared about was that this nameless brunette with the warm smile had taken my hand, done the hard work of asking for me, and had stayed with me through not one but two songs. She’d be in her mid-forties now, whoever and wherever she is. But whenever I hear “Hot Blooded” on the radio — and I know every word, of course — I think of that foggy August night in a large cafeteria in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think of a long-haired cover band, who in my memory were magnificent. I think of the girl in the grey sweater who made me feel as if I belonged on a dance floor, who made clumsy, shy, inarticulate and chubby me feel wanted, if only for a few precious minutes. (God of infinite wonders, continue to bless this woman and her family.)
And I think of Dominic’s voice in my head, telling me to rock back and forth and slide one foot behind the other. Last night, I found myself doing the same moves as I washed and dried the dishes. And I know I looked silly, and I didn’t give a damn.
The real question is, will my ballroom-dancing, salsa and merengue-mastering wife let me pass on Dominic’s suggestions to our children? The early word on that isn’t promising, alas.
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