Archive for January, 2007

Why pornography bothers me more than depictions of violence: a response to Dethboy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 31, 2007
in Movies, Porn and Sexuality
. 62 Comments

In addition to this long one from yesterday, the other post I’ve had percolating in my head is about porn and violence. It comes in response to something I hear quite often from folks: why is it that so many Christians seem so concerned with pornography, and less concerned with violence. For example, in response to my post on “anxiety and arousal” last week, “Dethboy” writes:

…the dirty secret of porn (is) that most of it is actually not that bad…

The most graphic pornography I have ever encountered entailed a woman having needles inserted, one by one, into her breasts, and then extracted. There was a trickle of blood, and it was expressed that it was painful, but overall, the atmosphere was erotic but clinical, precise. Compare this to Saw II, or Hostel, or Turistas. Is seeing someone have sex as negative an impact as seeing someone get thrown into a pit full of needles, have their kidney cut out while their awake, or have their eye torn out in graphic detail? Is seeing a woman get facialed as upsetting as seeing a man impaled on a spike? Would you rather have your children see a woman having sex, or a man being shot in the face? Hugo stands in the middle of a burning house, demanding that, right now, the candle be put out on the night stand, because it’s the *real* problem, not the walls catching fire or the ceiling caving in.

I’ve missed the horror films Dethboy references, but I get the point. “Porn is just about sex”, folks say; “violence is so much worse.” Surely it’s misplaced puritanism to get so worked up about pornography and to be less concerned about violence. There’s a thoughtful response to that, one that others have made (one that my brother Philip makes quite eloquently), and in this post I want to get to it.

Let me be clear that I have little stomach for graphic violence. I hated pictures like Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction because of the violence — bloodshed so relentless that it vitiated any redeeming artistic qualities the films had. I went through a brief period in early adolescence where I liked scary movies, but that ended by the time I was old enough to drive. I view the current revival of low-budget horror films as a cynical attempt by Hollywood to maximize profits by working with C-list actors and D-list writers to produce films that can generate quick and massive returns.

I’m willling to sit through heavy violence as part of a larger story; I actully liked last year’s “A History of Violence”, and I’ve sat through my share of war movies in the “Saving Private Ryan” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” vein. And of course, I’m also comfortable with sex scenes in movies, particularly when those sex scenes serve the primary purpose of advancing the plot and providing a depth to the characters, rather than serving merely to titillate. (The graphic sex in “A History of Violence”, for example, fit that bill.) I’m not by nature prudish! I am reluctant to see the bodies of others exploited on screen for my pleasure, whether that pleasure comes in the form of chills (as in a slasher film) or arousal (as in porn). When bodies tell a story, that’s somehow radically different than when they serve only to arouse or shock.

But the thing about depictions of violence in films, television, or in print is simple: it is the graphic depiction of something that we know to be fundamentally bad. To use Dethboy’s example, everyone recognizes instinctively that throwing someone onto a bed of needles is wrong. There is never an instance where to do so is good and loving. In certain instances, killing a bad guy might be justifiable, but most of us are aware that violence itself, while perhaps necessary, is never an a priori good. The violence we see in these films is violence of the sort few of us will ever engage in, Lord willing. The violence we see depicted is what the vast majority of us would never want done to us, and would never want to do to another.

But sex is different. Most of us will have sex at some point in our lives, with ourselves or someone else. Most of us want to have sex, and most of us (it is to be most fervently hoped) will have very good sex at some point with someone we love very much. Sex is, at its best, spine-tinglingly, earth-shatteringly, transcendently good. And most of us know that, or very much want to know it!

Porn lies. Porn misrepresent sex. It takes something that is fundamentally good and joyful and mutual and makes it selfish. It teaches a strong connection between the bodies of others and one’s own pleasure without demanding an iota of concern for the well-being of the other. Ask women whose husbands and boyfriends regularly use porn: are they better lovers as a consequence? Though they might pick up a “trick” or two, they are also far more likely to be distant, remote, and concerned with their own pleasure as a consequence.

Pornography is ultimately more harmful than depicted violence because of the far greater likelihood that those who watch porn will want to imitate what they see. Dethboy refers to “facials”: the ubiquitous habit in modern porn of ejaculating onto a woman’s face. When I was growing up, facials weren’t common in porn. And none of my male friends with whom I talked in great detail about sex talked about the practice; now, I hear frequently from young women whose boyfriends are eager to “try it”. Most of the women, understandably, are at best ambivalent about having their faces and their hair splattered! “Facials” are just one example of a “learned behavior” from porn.

When we see axe murders in the movies, only a tiny fraction of us (thank heavens) will say “Gosh, I’d like to try that!” When we see porn, and particularly when the young watch porn, they are far more likely to draw inspiration from what is shown. (Think about it, people: A young man, watching “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with his girlfriend, is very unlikely to have an insatiable urge to trundle down to Home Depot, buy a Husqvarna*, and dismember her. Watching the male star of “Cum Bunnies of Cleveland VII” ejaculate on the faces of his co-stars may spark a more imitative response!) For those who watch porn regularly, particularly in adolescence, their sense of what sex is and of how it is supposed to work is deeply affected by what they see. And what they see is almost never loving or mutual. What they see, alas, is a lie.

So yeah, porn bothers me more than violence. And while watching a horror movie might give a teen a night of bad dreams, watching porn may help shape a whole worldview about men, women and pleasure. I’m pretty clear which is more harmful.

*Though you wouldn’t think if of effete little OKOP me, I know quite a bit about chainsaws, having spent much of my childhood on a ranch, clearing brush with an enthusiasm that would put our president (a famous brush-clearer) to shame. And based on years of experience, I’m a great and loyal believer in Husqvarna saws, another fine product from the socialist democracy of Sweden. This is the one I currently covet.

Amanda and John Edwards

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 31, 2007
in Blogging and Politics
. 17 Comments

More later, but I am delighted to report that Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Mousewords and now of Pandagon, is leaving to become Blogmistress for the John Edwards presidential campaign. Many wonderful and well-known feminist bloggers will be stepping in at Pandagon as Amanda assumes her new duties in North Carolina.

Amanda cites this interesting Kate Michelman interview; Michelman makes the case that Edwards (rather than Hillary Clinton) is the best candidate for the feminist vote. It’s an interesting read.

I’m still on board (if small amounts of money can be considered “on board”) with my boy Dennis Kucinich. But I’m as yet agnostic about the major candidates in the race (Edwards, Obama, Clinton), and might well end up joining the sublime and winsome Ms. Marcotte. I think a John Edwards-Bill Richardson ticket in 2008 would be pretty damn formidable.

More at lunch, baruch hashem, deo volente, if the creek don’t rise, and all that.

A very long post about Los Angeles, an Eagles song, nationalism, history, self-reinvention and the “club versus country” debate

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 30, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Favorite posts 2007, Memories, People, Politics, Race, Sports and Traveling
. 7 Comments

A week ago Sunday, my buddy Leo and I ran up the El Prieto trail and the Brown Mountain fire road. Though we’re usually part of a larger group, we were alone that day. Leo was recovering from a marathon, and I was feeling well-rested, so I was actually able to keep up with him for a change. (In his late 50s, Leo still regularly runs marathons just above the three hour mark and has finished his share of 50 and 100-mile races).

We talked about books, history, ideas. When I run with some friends, we talk about love and marriage and family; when I run with others, I argue politics or theology. A few friends, like Leo, are interested in all of these topics and more. In an early morning chill, we began by reflecting together on the burden of the past.

Leo was born just after the Second World War into a Polish refugee family. He was raised in West Germany. Much like my late father, a dozen years his senior, Leo has that sense that many war refugees have — a sense of never quite belonging, a sense that perhaps at any moment, he might have to pack his bags and leave again. My father, born in Vienna, raised in rural Berkshire, spent nearly fifty years of his life in California without ever truly feeling at home here. He didn’t feel fully at home in Austria or England either. Leo and my Dad knew each other, and were fond of each other. When I got married a year and a half ago, they spoke German together at our wedding.

But we didn’t just talk about my Dad or about Leo’s similar sense of not quite belonging. We talked about the San Gabriel Mountains we both love so much. As we neared the Brown Mountain summit, I said to Leo “Isn’t it interesting to think we are the only members of our family ever to be here? None of our ancestors ever stood where we are standing right now.”

“Yes”, Leo replied, “it’s liberating.”

And I’ve been thinking about that for nine days now. I’m a historian by trade, of course; I have devoted my scholarly and professional life to the study of the past. I’m a dual national, holding a UK passport, and am a regular visitor to the land that gave my father’s family shelter and the land my brother calls home. I love to visit what some folks call “old places”, filled with a rich sense of history. When I tramp through the hills of Devon, or run through the streets of Vienna, I feel as if I am surrounded by ghosts. Not evil spirits, mind — just an extraordinary cloud of witnesses of all who have lived and died in these places. And when I am in those places where my ancestors lived, I feel the weight of their fears and their hopes and their expectations all around me. It’s not always unpleasant, but it’s always there.

Even when I go home to Northern California, I feel surrounded by a sense of family history. On my mother’s side, my family came to the Bay Area for the Gold Rush more than a century and a half ago. We’ve had a country place in the hills northeast of San Jose since Rutherford Hayes was president; by the standards of this state, that’s some ancient history. My maternal great-grandfathers both went to Berkeley, and when I was a student at Cal nine decades later, I felt them all around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is a wonderful feeling to feel so connected to a place. But at other times, it is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe.

What makes me a Los Angeleno in my mindset is my fascination with self-reinvention. I love that I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who call somewhere else their truest home — but have nonetheless come here, to this basin with its beaches and valleys and hills — in order to start something new. They’ve come here to escape the burdens and obligations of the past, the sort that linger in the old places even after the old people have gone. They’ve come here to escape the “things are the way they are” mindset. They’ve come here to replace the fatalism and superstition of the old places with a relentless optimism about their own potential and the possibility of global transformation. They’ve come here to get away from the ghosts of Holocausts and World Wars and rigid class distinctions. They’ve come here to run on mountain trails upon which their ancestors never set foot.

(I’m listening to the Eagles “The Last Resort” right now on Itunes. Appropriate.)

As I’ve said, I love to visit the old places. My doctorate is in medieval history, for heaven’s sake; I spent many happy hours doing research in the shadow of my favorite building in the western world, Durham Cathedral. But it’s not just the damp and gloom of old Europe that makes me glad I live in this sprawling, metastasizing megalopolis. It’s the sense that I always get in the old places that humans and animals are limited and constrained by the story of the past. (As the Eagles sing in the song to which I’m listening: “where the Old World shadows hang heavy in the air.”) Their sense of themselves is related not only to place, but to the past story of the place. And just below the surface, there often bubbles a raw xenophobic nationalism that I find fascinating but repugnant.

Leo and I talked a lot about nationalism and place and history. We both love soccer, and we both are World Cup fans who go pretty nuts every four years. But especially after this last World Cup, I’ve begun to have some misgivings about “country” based sporting events. In professional football of the world kind, one great conflict that always comes up is the “club” versus “country” debate. When English players are playing for Premiership teams and training for a major international event, it’s hardly feasible for them to be 100% present for both sets of obligations. (Think of how angry folks in Newcastle are over the injury that an overworked and exhausted Michael Owen sustained last summer while playing for England in Germany.) The traditional wisdom is that athletes should put country over club, national pride over transitory professional obligations. I disagree completely.

I watched the England-Portugal World Cup quarterfinal match last summer in a state of grief and rage. My father, whose family had been rescued from Hitler by English generosity, had died days earlier. And England played a piss-poor match that they deserved to lose. But I, a dual national in SoCal, found myself working myself up into a nationalistic frenzy while watching the game. Under my breath, I said several embarrassing things about the entire Portuguese nation; my rage at a certain Cristian Ronaldo turned quickly into a temporary fury at all things Lusitanian. I calmed down within minutes, but from reading the BBC’s message boards after the game, I know that others were not so restrained. The racist bile that flowed last summer was appalling.

I’ve decided I prefer “club” soccer now. Though I am no fan of Manchester United, I love that Wayne Rooney and his nemesis, Ronaldo, play together. I love seeing a Premiership side take the pitch with eleven players with nearly as many passports. In the mercenary act of playing for pay rather than for national pride, these men do more to advance the cause of peace and understanding than they do when they wear their country’s jerseys on a global stage. Even when nation-based matches are played with mutual respect between the players, the fans themselves are often whipped into emotional frenzies in which ancient bigotries suddenly and shockingly reemerge.

I have my allegiances in sports. I “hate” the Dallas Cowboys. I “hate” Arsenal (of the London clubs, I support Spurs). But those aren’t ethnic hatreds. To put it bluntly, there’s a world of difference between cursing “those f-ing Gunners” after another loss in the North London derby, and cursing “those f-ing wogs” after England loses to a nation whose players (for the most part) have much darker skin than those who wear three Lions on their chests. Club rivalries have notoriously led to violence, but not to wars. In a club rivalry, you shout insults at another fan because of what he wears; in national rivalries, you shout insults because of who he is. There’s no question that the latter is more dangerous. (Now, OKOP don’t shout insults. Our disappointment is subdued, masked, drowned behind thin smiles and private tears. NOKOP rage is public, ours is sublimated.)

(Parenthetical aside: One of the things I love about Los Angeles: we don’t have an NFL team. Here’s an American football fan hoping we never get one! How delicious to live in a city where everyone’s allegiances are elsewhere! I get a smug satisfaction from living in a place that doesn’t need a team to call its own, but can rely on quirky whims to select which club to root for. My youth group kids are holding a Super Bowl party; some will root for the Colts and others for the Bears, but their allegiances are based on uniform colors or affection for a particular player rather than a loyalty to place. I like that.)

But even as I write this this morning, I know better than to claim that I live beyond history. My fascination with “personal growth” and transformation, my longing for new beginnings, my personal narrative of starting over — this is part of my own family’s legacy. What prosperity and success we have had comes from good luck (we got here first and stole more), but also from something that may be coded into our DNA: a longing to go further and further west. Pioneers and survivors are in my blood; I am descended from those who were willing to leave rather than stay. (This brings to mind a snippet from a Caedmon’s Call song: “I come from a long line of leavers.”) I am descended from those whose fascination with the new trumped their loyalty to the old. It would be hubris to suggest that I am the first in a long line to want to start over somewhere new, to liberate myself from old rules and old obligations and old animosities.

Leo and I had a good run that Sunday. And yes, we talked about all of this and more.

If I can’t post, I can at least…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 29, 2007
in Blogging and Links
. 3 Comments

…link. I promise a decent post on the morrow. For now, let me recommend three splendid posts worth reading elsewhere:

Jeff at Feminist Allies has a terrific post up in which he invites dialogue and discussion about masculine identity. He’s especially interested in talking about how we deprogram our own learned tendency towards violence.

Jen Lemen, whose return to blogging ought to be celebrated by all, has a fine post up about words, ways of knowing, trust and guts. Excerpt:

There are all those things you are supposed to do, supposed to know, supposed to believe. And then there is that other list–that tiny secret one called “Things I Know that I Know.” This list is little, but it packs a lot of punch. I have episodes of shyness about this list because it feels so strange and wild to be so sure of anything during times when so much seems to be falling apart.

Chris Clarke, a beautiful human being whose beautiful prose makes me consider abandoning blogging altogether, is facing the imminent decision to put Zeke, his long-time canine companion, to sleep. His post today is gorgeous and heartbreaking, as all truly important writing about animals ought to be. It’s NSFW, if we define “not safe” as encountering that which will make you weep.

I read his post just before walking into the second half of a lecture I was giving on Edmund Burke, the Congress of Vienna, and conservatism. I hope that students couldn’t see I had been crying.

Workaholism and posts deferred

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 29, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 10 Comments

I’ve got a couple of serious posts floating in my head, and no time to write them. I want to make a gently feminist/Christian case that we are right to be more upset by porn than by violence on TV. And I had a great run with a friend of mine a week ago, one that turned into a meditation not only on masculinity and ageing but also nationalism, the appeal of “country” versus “club” soccer, and the benefits of living in a place where your family has no roots, no ties, no history. Two long reflections, frankly, that I ache to write.

But no time again today. I learned last week that I teach more classes than any of my colleagues in the entire social sciences division, and more than virtually anyone else in the whole college. For the second straight year, I will teach 20 classes: seven each semester, three each intersession. No one else in my division exceeds 18, and few exceed 15.

Some might say I have an addictive relationship to work. How that jives with my spiritual commitments and my longing to rethink masculinity, I have no idea.

I’ll make time tomorrow. Promise.

Too many in college? A muddled reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 26, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 26 Comments

I’ve been meaning to blog about this fascinating Charles Murray piece from the WSJ last week: What’s Wrong With Vocational School? Too many Americans are going to college. (H/T; Rudy Carrasco). Murray starts off in fine incendiary fashion:

To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

Hoo boy. (Bold is mine). That sure got my attention. As a community college instructor, I teach courses in the humanities and the social sciences to a broad cross-section of students. Most of whom, I’d venture to guess, are of average intelligence. Some are clearly below, and a precious few are spectacularly above. I don’t administer the Stanford-Binet test, mind you, but I assign written work in all my classes.

One thing teaching has taught me: I can spot the differences that distinguish a bright but lazy student; a dim but hard-working student; and a bright but poorly prepared student in a heartbeat. All three might write flawed papers, but the flaws are distinctly different. (Those who are both dim and lazy usually drop my class before papers are due.) And of course, the bulk of my students are not particularly bright nor particularly dim, they are not hopelessly lazy nor obsessively committed to their work. They want to get by, they want to muddle through, and they have aspirations of ascending into the middle class. They’ve been told college is the gateway to prosperity, and thus they come to study biology and history, psychology and literature. The number of them who will be able to apply what they learn directly to their future professions is small.

Murray is spectacularly blunt in his 1950s-style love of IQ tests:

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college–enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

Well, I can think of one excellent reason for 40% of young people to go to college: it keeps lots of faculty members employed! There aren’t enough exceptionally bright students to go around, and some of us have to teach the average ones.

But Murray’s point is about the lack of adequate vocational training. Many students graduate college with the skills to “think critically” but without many marketable job skills. Last time I checked, outside of academia itself there was precious little demand for those who could merely think and write clearly; specific skills (of the sort that are taught in vocational programs) can guarantee a healthy, middle-class income. As Murray points out, who knows an unemployed plumber? I know lots of unemployed folks with humanities B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.Ds.

I don’t teach to give my students job skills. I teach to make them more well-rounded, thoughtful citizens with an understanding of the past and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. I give them a narrative that helps explain how we’ve ended up here. But I do not pretend to them that mastering what I have to teach (and not all master it, of course, most just muddle) will lead to riches or even modest comfort. And though I like being employed, I am not at all sure that what I teach will be remotely useful to many of my students. But if I could teach them to fix a drain or build a wall or use a plumb line, I might be giving them something more useful.

I’ll confess it: I live for my above-average students, the ones who show sparkle and promise and enthusiasm, the ones whose essays reveal imagination and wit and insatiable curiosity. I like ‘em hungry, and I like trying to make them hungrier. But such students are never a majority; in some classes, I have but one or two or even none at all. But I cannot make a living only teaching those who want to be there. I cannot make a living teaching only those who will be able to apply what I teach. And so I do my best to cast the seeds I’ve got, knowing some will fall on fertile soil and some will fall into thorns and some will lie around on the rocks for a few days and be blown away by the wind.

Murray concludes:

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults–perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen.

My head tells me he’s right. But my heart tells me that the furniture makers and the dental assistants and the insurance adjusters and the mechanics and the dope dealers will all be better for knowing about the causes of the Peloponnesian War and the impact of Paul Poiret’s sheath dress on 20th century fashion. And since my livelihood hinges on that belief, it’s one I will cling to.

Friday Random Ten: background music for letters of rec

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 26, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 5 Comments

I am writing a number of letters today.

Shouldn’t take you too long to figure out which one of these songs my wife downloaded. #4 and #9 are anthems that I associate with youthful indiscretions. #6 is an exquisite cover by two women whose covers invariably improve on the originals; #10 is a nice cut from a very reliable artist of whom the president is said to be a huge fan; the bonus track is my favorite off one of the first albums I bought when I first started getting serious about Contemporary Christian Music.

1. “Just Wait”, Blues Traveler
2. “Rockstar”, Third Day
3. “A Dios Le Pido”, Juanes
4. “Erotic City”, Prince
5. “The Green Fields of France”, Dropkick Murphys
6. “Uncle John’s Band”, Indigo Girls
7. “Buildings and Bridges”, Ani DiFranco
8. “Make it Happen”, Mariah Carey
9. “Don’t Follow”, Alice in Chains
10. “Billy Gray”, Robert Earl Keen

Bonus Track: “Faith my Eyes”, Caedmon’s Call

New chin photos

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 25, 2007
in Chinchillas
. 1 Comment

Eleven new chinchilla photos up in the Flickr album. Here’s our little rescue, Racheli Scrappy Doo; she’s doubled her weight since we saved her. And Dudley Doodles loves on his daddy.

Another long ‘un on pre-marital sex, faith, and the role of the Christian mentor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 25, 2007
in Faith, Pasadena City College, Sexual ethics and transformation, Sexuality, Teaching and Youth
. 49 Comments

My student Sarah has a new blog.

With her permission, I’m linking to a post Sarah wrote yesterday; she describes her longing to be able to tell her parents that she has become sexually active. Sarah first became my student a year ago, and was defiantly anti-feminist. She’s been on quite a journey since then, and though I may have played a part in pushing her along, her own hunger to grow and her relationship with God have been the primary catalysts for her transformation.

Sarah, like so many teens who embraced a conservative Christian ethos, took a “purity pledge” a few years back, promising to remain abstinent until marriage. As the research indicates, a healthy percentage of young people who “take the pledge” end up breaking it. Many do so impulsively, often unsafely; studies have shown that teens who did take abstinence pledges are less likely to use contraception when they do have sex than those who are sexually active without ever having made such a promise. Sarah and her boyfriend (whom I also know well) prayed about their decision. Sarah did a lot of writing, and she visited me several times in office hours so that we could talk about the theological, spiritual, physical, and emotional ramifications of both chastity and pre-marital sex.

My insistence that a reverence for Scripture and a vibrant evangelical faith can be congruent with sex outside of marriage troubles many. I’m aware that this stance flies in the face of much church tradition. But tradition is only one of four tools we use to discern the right path to take: Scripture is one, Reason another, and Experience a fourth. (The old Wesleyan quad.) And reading the New Testament, it’s clear that “sexual immorality” is prohibited — but what exactly constitutes that immorality is very rarely specified. There is not a jot or tittle in the Gospel or the Epistles that says: intercourse before marriage between two otherwise devoted partners is contrary to the will of God. We have prohibitions on adultery and divorce in Matthew 5, but those are very different sins from relations between two people who are not covenanted with others. Adultery and divorce are sins in which explicit promises to another person are abrogated. Premarital sex doesn’t involve abrogating the same sort of covenant.

Where Scripture is silent or vague, then we rely on tradition, reason, and experience. Tradition tells us that marriage is a constantly shifting institution; weddings were not held in churches or even necessarily sanctioned by the church for more than a millenia of Christian history. What is now a sacrament was not always so. Reason and experience tell us that marital sex can be abusive; the same tools tell us that sex outside of marriage can be joyous, mutual, and respectful.

As one of the relatively few openly Christian professors on a state campus, I take seriously my task to separate my faith from the content of what I teach. By the same token, I know that I have an obligation to give wise and prayerful counsel to those Christian students who do seek me out for spiritual as well as academic advice. I always remind these students that my views on some matters are at odds with certain strands of evangelical orthodoxy, and I urge them to seek out pastors and parents as well. But I do think Christian professors have a role to play in mentoring Christian students: my model here is the wonderful J. Budziszewski, who has written many fine things on natural law and whose “Office Hours” column is very popular with the Focus on the Family crowd. He and I don’t agree on much, but we do agree that Christian professors on a secular campus have a vital role to play in helping to shape the spiritual development of their Christian students.

Let me make it explicitly clear: I don’t tell my Christian students “Have sex.” I don’t dismiss the traditional conservative arguments about sex and marriage lightly. But I do pray with my students who come to visit; I do wrestle through Scripture with them, and I do share a variety of perspectives with them. I make it clear that choosing to wait is a viable option, worthy of celebration; I make it clear that choosing not to wait can in some instances be an equally wise decision. And I suggest that for many, an “everything but” approach may indeed be the best way of holding in tension a desire to both honor the mystery of waiting until marriage and the very real longings of the moment.

As a professor, youth leader, and former advisor to Campus Crusade for Christ, I’ve met with many students like Sarah over the years. Some are women and men who have taken purity pledges and are reconsidering them. Others have been sexually active and are filled with shame; others have had sex and wondering why they aren’t overwhelmed with guilt. Some are looking for me to buttress the idea that they should wait; some are clearly hoping a Christian authority figure will give them permission to do what they want to do anyway. I don’t let any of ‘em off easy. My job is to pray with them, reason with them, point to relevant passages of Scripture. My job is to listen to doubts and longings and fears.

And as I’ve said before, my job is to see that not every one of God’s beautiful children is the same. As I said to the All Saints kids, when I look at them I see them as precious individuals with different needs, different histories, different desires. And to slap a “one size fits all” recommedation on them, even on a subject as powerfully important as sex, seems to me to ignore the extraordinary emotional, spiritual, and psychological diversity I see in these young people. That’s my experience as a professor and a youth pastor, and it’s what I defend publicly and privately.

Sarah still hasn’t told her parents about becoming sexually active. And one sentence she writes stands out to me, and I commend it in particular to my Christian friends who are parents:

What I wish, though, more than anything, is a chance to tell them why I made the decision I did.

Sarah is scared. Yes, it is partly her job to work through her fear and tell her parents the truth. But it is also the job of parents to create a dynamic in which that truth can be shared easily. The more rigid our rules, the more definite our certainties, the less comfortable many of our precious young ones will feel coming to us to share that they have chosen a different path than the one we planned for them.

You know, I could be wrong. It is possible that I am missing something. It is possible that I am misrepresenting the Gospel, arguing for a freedom that isn’t really there. I fret about that, and I pray about that, and I talk to those who are wiser and older than I about that. But this stance wasn’t arrived at lightly, and with what I hope is the right degree of humility, it is the stance I share with the lambs I am privileged to help feed.

Pacifism and the siren song of liberal internationalism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 25, 2007
in Christianity, Faith, Pacifism, Politics and War
. 19 Comments

I’ve been blogging for over three years, and in all that time, have not produced a single post about our war in Iraq. My cyber-silence on the subject is not due to a lack of strong personal feeling, but rather to the sense that others (far better informed than I) have said most of what there is to say and said it better.

This week, I’ve been listening a lot to to the “speechifying” of the pro-war right. As I listen to folks like the Christian conservative Hugh Hewitt (who, compared to many of his ilk, has a surprising degree of eloquence, even in the service of a bad cause), I’m struck by how tempted I am to agree whenever someone stresses that America has a duty to keep fighting in order to save the Iraqi people.

This is not a post about the actual merits of staying in Iraq. Rather, I’m struck this week by my own inner conflict — one that I sense from conversations with friends is not unique to me. I’m a cradle liberal, anti-war almost from birth. My pram (I am old enough that folks didn’t speak of “strollers”) was pushed in anti-Vietnam protests through the streets of Santa Barbara in 1968. The last time I committed an act of outraged civil disobedience was seventeen years ago, when the first Gulf War began. And heck, I supported the solidly anti-war Dennis Kucinich in the last presidential campaign, and am tentatively doing so again for oh-eight.

But two different voices compete inside my head. (Only two?) One is the voice of the secular, liberal, internationalist. This voice believes military intervention has a place, particularly in order to forestall humanitarian disasters. This is the voice that is informed by Lincoln’s remark that America is the “last best hope of earth”. This voice is stirred by the King James Version of Luke 12:48, and this voice thinks that our Lord’s words might apply to us:

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.

Obviously, noblesse oblige has an instant and powerful appeal on my psyche, both in terms of my personal responsibility and in terms of my sense of how this most powerful of nations ought to act. This is the voice that tells me we ought to send troops to Darfur, and that we were right to send soldiers into the former Yugoslavia. And this is the voice that is seduced by those on the right who invoke the language of humanitarian relief and duty (rather than American capitalist hegemony) in the service of the current war. I’ve read my Pericles, and I know how easily words like “duty” and “burden” can get twisted — but while my head regards calls to battle with a high degree of suspicion, my heart beats faster when I hear that rhetoric employed.

The other strain that informs me comes out of Christian pacifism. I’ve read my Yoder, I’ve read my Hauerwas. I’ve worshipped, prayed, and marched with the Mennonites. The disagreements I had with the Mennonites — the ones that led me back to the Anglicans — were over issues of sexuality and liturgy, not theology or geopolitics. And the Mennonite pacifist view, the one that enchants me still, is the view that tells me that the Christian witness is always, always, a radically peaceful one. While the fallen world insists that only Caesar’s tanks can liberate the oppressed, the Christian pacifist is humbly certain that it is only through the renunciation of all forms of violence, even for a good cause, that peace can happen. Christian pacifism is not a theology of cowardice; true pacifism is always willing to die for a cause, just never willing to kill for one. The story of the cross is the story of how the death of a nonviolent man can change the world for the better, after all. Pacifism makes the claim that the blood of those who die without guns in their hands does more to save the world than the blood of those who do. That claim only makes sense in the context of the Gospel, of course, and is a “stumbling block and foolishness” to most.

My liberal internationalism feels desperately sympathetic to Tony Blair, whose rhetoric about the need for Iraqi liberation has always seemed kinder and gentler than what I hear from the American president. Part of me still believes that those of us who have power ought to exercise it for good in the world, intervening with force to protect the weak from the bullies who prey on them. The rhetoric that suggests we ought to act in our own self-interest has little hold on me, mind you; the suggestion that we ought to “take up the white man’s burden” and “send forth the best ye breed” does. I love poetry, and confess — with burning shame — to finding Kipling periodically compelling. Hell, I can recite “If” without a trace of irony, a revelation that makes me wince!

My pacifism, however, is stronger. What changed the world for good forever happened about 2000 years ago on Calvary and in a nearby tomb. John Howard Yoder was fond of saying vicit agnus noster eum sequamur: “Our Lamb has conquered, him let us follow.” The death of the Lamb is what liberates us, not our tanks and our missiles and our Cobra helicopters. It is the Good News of His message of peace, of justice, of mercy, of salvation that saves the world. And that message can only be carried effectively by those who use the methods He did: tears and prayers, a willingness to face death with courage, and a refusal to shed blod.

My faith in Christ and a life beyond this one trumps my liberal internationalism. It leads me to oppose this war — and every other one. It tells me that causes don’t matter nearly as much as methods do. It tells me that if you want peace, you must use peace; ends and means must be radically congruent. To my non-pacifist friends, this is incomprehensible, suicidal, self-indulgent, irresponsible, even nihilistic. But this is the heart of my faith, and all the eloquent speeches and terrorist attacks will not shake it.

Thursday Short Poem: Candelaria’s “Untitled”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 25, 2007
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Today’s short poem comes from Xochitl Candelaria, who wrote this when she was an undergrad at Cal a decade ago. My Berkeley and Candelaria’s Berkeley are different places, but this poem about those who make it to places like Cal — and those who don’t — haunts me.

Untitled

how can i make it up to you
the thirty two thousand
who will attend university without my sister
you who will never know
she can sing
with perfect pitch
draw your lips from memory
with a sharp number two pencil
how i wish you could hear her
answers
to problems
larger than her fifteen years

my sister already caring
for her pregnant friends
comprehending a woman must dilate
past nine centimeters
before it’s time for the baby

my sister
sometimes shy
the fifth girl
awful at math
can teach you
to listen

Busy day

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 24, 2007
in Blogging and Stuff
. 3 Comments

Today offers me no time to post. I’ve been up since 5 and will be up until very late tonight. I had eight miles to run this morning before dawn. Today, I’ve got three two-hour classes to teach; students to meet with at lunch; letters of recommendation to write; a boxing class to take; a book proposal to review; a youth group to lead this evening; and six chinchillas to take out, bathe, and amuse when I get home from all that.

And I’d like to have five minutes to hold my wife’s hand and just connect with her, without distraction.

I’m not complainin’, just explainin’. I like being busy. The devil makes work for idle hands, after all.

See you tomorrow.

Amended comments policy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 23, 2007
in Blogging
. 43 Comments

To update my comment policy, I’m stealing this from Amp at Alas, and altering it a bit:

I don’t want the discussions on Hugo Schwyzer dominated by anti-feminists or MRA (men’s rights advocates.). Although I like have a small number of well-written opposing views on this blog for spice, it’s my intention that most of the discussions here be dominated by egalitarian Christian and feminist-friendly views. For that reason, brand-new MRA and anti-feminist posters might not be approved to post even if as individuals they are perfectly reasonable and polite.

In other words, no more trolling. Trolling seeks to hijack a thread to attack the basic premises of feminism. While you don’t have to be a feminist (or a Christian) to post here, I am no longer willing to tolerate on my blog those whose views are fundamentally hostile to feminist principles. In other words, my MRA friends, I’m changing my comment policy. I have spent three years trying to evangelize men’s rights advocates, without the slightest success. All I have done is offered MRAs another forum to launch attacks.

I am not banning anyone. But I reserve the right to delete comments without warning.

Hall and Bales: my two current jock-crushes — UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 23, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness, People and Sports
. 2 Comments

Jock-Crush: The response one feels to an athlete of either sex, in any sport, who just makes your heart sing, if only for a moment.

While I follow major sports like soccer and American football, I also have some other particular passions: I love women’s college basketball, and I love distance running. Though my most enduring jock-crush in the former sport is Katie Feenstra, and in the latter, the sublime Scott Jurek, my current heroes are Alison Bales and Ryan Hall.

Ryan just became the first American to break an hour in the half-marathon. Even though the half-marathon is not an Olympic event, it’s one of my favorite distances to race. My best time was 1:30:00 to the second; I had raced to go under ninety minutes and missed my goal by one second. It’s a great distance in which to mix pure speed and endurance.

Alison is the rockin’ tough center of the #1 Duke Blue Devils. 6′7″ of blockin’-out, in the post-bangin’, free-throw nailin’ goodness. She played an awesome game last night in the Devils’ win over Tennessee; ’twas a thing to watch.

If anyone can get me an autographed picture of Ryan or Alison, that would be cool. In my life, I am frequently unimpressed by those who should impress me, and frequently awed by those who do not always attract the attention of the masses. Such is the nature of the jock-crush.

UPDATE: It is not entirely unnoticed by me that I tend to be drawn to female athletes who are unusually tall and strong. (I’m a huge fan of Serena Williams for example, as well as the aforementioned Feenstra and Bales). My male athletic heroes tend to be small and wiry, like Hall and Jurek and your average international class cyclist. Those who wish to psychoanalyze are free to do so. I am quite clear that there is nothing fetishistic about all this, but it is a pattern I recognize.

Anxiety and arousal: the lessons porn teaches

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 23, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Porn, Sexuality and Youth
. 27 Comments

If you are so inclined, you can download and listen to an MP3 of my appearance on Broadly Speaking last night. Click where it says “Listen Now to the Latest Broadly Speaking”. I’m on for for a full thirty minutes, and have a good discussion with the show’s two Canadian co-hosts about feminism, pornography, the Suicide Girls site, and larger issues around the objectification of women. I enjoyed the experience very much. I’m a multi-tasker; if you listen closely, you might hear me folding laundry in the background as I chat.

Both of the hosts of the show are college-aged feminists. One (I can’t remember which, alas) remarked that she first visited the “Suicide Girls” porn website when she was about sixteen. And we had an all-too brief digression into some of the various reasons why so many young women are curious about pornography, even porn that is produced primarily for the male gaze.

Those who defend pornography against the charge that it exploits women invariably point out that a sizeable number of women pay for and view pornography. Depending on who you talk to, and what statistics they claim to have, anywhere from 20-40% of viewers and subscribers to porn sites are female. While those numbers are hard to verify, and might be exaggerated for ideological reasons, I’m not a statistician and I don’t have contrary evidence, so I’ll take the claims at face value.

It is to be hoped that it is no longer revolutionary to declare that women have a visual component to their sexuality! Only a true troglodyte would claim that “women don’t like to look”. The evidence is clear that a substantial number of women do find porn arousing. Of course, that doesn’t make it feminist! It’s no more inherently feminist for a woman to pay for porn than it is for a woman to pay another woman to clean her toilets. The fact that a financial exchange takes place between women doesn’t mean it is completely free from anti-feminist implications. The problem of porn, from a feminist standpoint, involves both the impact on the “product” and the “consumer”.

But as the co-host last night remarked, a great many young women don’t look at porn merely to be sexually stimulated. As we talked about on the show, one of the things young women — particularly those just entering adolescence — look for in pornography is not their own arousal but cues to the nature of male arousal. Over and over again, we hear stories from young women who discovered their father’s Playboys (or, today, his browser history). We hear them talk about a mix of disgust and fascination with what they found. And I’ve heard from countless young women stories of how they carefully studied the centerfolds and the models, asking themselves “Is this how I need to pose? Is this what I should look like? Is this what I need to do to be desirable?”

Nothing could be more anti-feminist than having porn used as a teaching tool for young women. As we see with Suicide Girls, even porn that claims to be feminist-friendly is usually under the financial control and artistic direction of men, produced for a primarily male audience and reflecting primarily male sensibilities. Leaving aside the issue of how it impacts male viewers, leaving aside the issue of whether or not the women who pose are exploited, feminists ought to be troubled by the role that porn plays as a teaching tool for young women.

So many young women recall encountering porn just as they were in the process of beginning to discover their own sexuality; what porn too often taught was that they needed to think about their sexuality in terms of their visual appearance and their desirability to men rather than their own subjective wants and needs. I’ve often led discussions — with both college and high-school aged boys and girls — about the “first time” they saw porn. To generalize enormously, two very different words characterize their responses. From the boys, the stories I hear about the first time they encountered porn tend to revolve around arousal – most, but by no means all, confess to having been powerfully turned on by what they saw. On the other hand, while arousal is not an unheard of response from young women either, the most common theme I hear from them, over and over again, is anxiety. For many of these young women, their first experience looking at porn is shocking, even frightening. “This is what men think about? This is what they want?” It’s an experience that leaves many, many young women vaguely disheartened, confused, and often profoundly anxious.

I recongize that the plural of anecdote is not evidence. I’m not a social scientist, and this is not a refereed journal. I write about porn on many levels. I write as a Christian, concerned at the commodification of one of God’s greatest gifts. I write as a man, worried about the power of pornography to shape the fantasies and expectations of my brothers. I write as a husband who longs for his wife; I write as a husband who knows just how glorious sex can be and just how great the lies are that porn tells about it. I write as a feminist, deeply troubled by the frequent (if not universal) exploitation and abuse of those women who work in the porn industry. And I write as a teacher and youth leader whose heart aches for those young women who look in porn for clues about male desire, and who take from porn their cues as to how they ought to look and act and think.