Archive for February, 2007

A long and rambling post about marriage, money, joint accounts and feminism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 28, 2007
in Family, Feminism, Marriage and Relationships
. 28 Comments

Genimmcmahon at Ilyka Damen had a great post up yesterday about men, women, marriage, money, and housework. She writes:

My husband’s salary is now more than what we were originally pulling in together. In the past few years, I’ve sidelined at little things; real estate (briefly), Ebay, and now I’ve committed myself to art, and trying to get established as both a pop-surrealist and a fiber artist. Art doesn’t bring in money at this point, it costs money. And it keeps me up at night that I have no financial power in my marriage. My husband always claims that it’s OUR money. But, seriously, it isn’t. If he gets hit by a bus tomorrow, or leaves me for someone else, I have nothing to fall back on. I would lose everything if it got ugly. I wouldn’t even be able to pay my first husband the lousy $43 in child support I’m obligated to pay each month.

Hence, I would assert that there is no way for the traditional arrangement of Man=Wage Earner and Woman=Mother/House Bitch to be egalitarian, no matter how we dress it up with phrases like “our money” or “community property state.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. But before responding, I’ll also link to Amanda’s post that got Ilyka started: Salaries and housework and the whine of entitlement oh my! The inimitable Amanda does a fine job of taking apart this rather frustrating article by a Dan Kadlec: When She Makes More Money than He. Kadlec:

Not long ago my wife started making more money than me. There, I said it. Don’t think it was easy.

The male ego is strangely fragile when it comes to who brings home the bacon. So, I’ve found, is the female notion of who rules the roost at home.

In adjusting to our shifting roles, my wife and I have had to confront a lot of financial and emotional issues neither one of us saw coming. Who knew a little extra income could be such a burden?

It doesn’t get much better, but Kadlec does make the sensible point that open and honest communication is vital to resolving these “emotional issues”. While I have precious little sympathy with his claims of a “strangely fragile” male ego, I’m unequivocally in favor of frank marital dialogue.

And just to complete this quartet of links, here’s one to an article both Ilyka and Amanda note: The Romantic Life of Brainiacs. The piece, written by one of our leading historians of marriage, Stephanie Koontz, refutes the conventional wisdom that educated, “career women” will have less satisfying marriages:

THE MYTH OF THE BITTER, sexually unsatisfied female college graduate has never been true. Surveys from the 1890s to the present reveal that college-educated women have always been at least as satisfied with their emotional and sexual lives as their less-educated counterparts. But until recently, it was true that women who completed the highest levels of education or landed high-status, high-paying jobs were less likely than other women to marry and have children. They were often perfectly happy with their choices, but the fact remains that many women did have to choose between family life and achievement in the public sphere.

Koontz points out that statistically, highly educated older women are more likely, not less, to eventually marry. Part of the reason, she opines, is changing attitudes among men.

…in 1956, education and intelligence ranked 11th among the things men desired in a mate. The respondents were more attracted to someone who was a good cook and housekeeper, had a pleasing disposition, and was refined and neat. By 1967, education and intelligence had moved up only one place, to number 10, and still counted for less than being a good cook or displaying neatness and refinement.

But…

A 2001 Journal of Marriage and Family paper found that in mate-preference surveys taken in 1985 and 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to number 5 on men’s list of desirable qualities in a mate in both surveys, ahead of good looks. Meanwhile, the desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place in both surveys, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. And in choosing a spouse, males with a college degree rate good looks much lower in importance than do high school graduates. “In a high-achieving man’s definition of an A-list woman, the A increasingly stands for ‘accomplished”…

So, now we’ve really got a lot of things to unpack.

I often ask the female students in my women’s history class the following question:

How many of you were told to get an education specifically so that you “wouldn’t have to rely on a man”?

Percentages vary from class to class, but the raised hands average around 60-75% of the women in the course. I always ask the men the same question with the gender reversed, but that produces nothing but laughter. I’ve never met a guy whose parents urged him to “study hard so you won’t have to depend on your wife!”

Community property laws have been around for four decades. But as Ilyka points out above, even progressive divorce laws don’t offer equal protection to what she calls “house bitches” and what others prefer to call SAHMs (stay-at-home-moms). And the power imbalance isn’t just something that comes in to play if the marriage ends; Ilyka writes about being kept up at night worried about her own lack of financial clout in a marriage that is apparently thriving. And I hardly think that’s Ilyka’s unique hang-up; it’s something I’ve heard from a remarkable number of women. In the case of Dan Gadlec, it may apply to men as well.

First off, let me be clear that I am from the “blend everything” school of marital finance. And I don’t know if I get a silver star or not, but I’ve done it in each marriage. After each wedding, I always merged my finances with those of my wife. (My third and penultimate marriage was the only one with a pre-nup; that was at her father’s insistence to protect her assets from me, not the other way around. Pre-nups would never be my choice.) There’s always been one checking account, with complete financial transparency. Sometimes I made more, sometimes she did. The commitment to blended finances was not contingent on my being the “bigger earner.”

In my first marriage, there was very little money; we were both in grad school living on a TA’s salary. (Back in 1990, this was $1000 a month). But though my first, second, and third marriages all foundered early on, they never ended over money. There were plenty of other issues that caused them to fall apart. I’m told that quarrels over money end more relationships than fights over any other topic, and I’m prepared to believe it. It just hasn’t been my experience.

Yes, ending a marriage where one’s finances are all tied up with someone else’s is a problem. Opening up a new checking account under one’s own name, re-applying for credit cards, changing the title on the cars; been there, did that, over and over again. It’s expensive, it’s scary, it’s painful. (If I were a calculating sort, I’d figure I’ve lost something in the area of the low to mid-six figures, mostly on the third divorce.) And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’m going to get flamed for this, but I’ve always felt that separate accounts in marriage, like pre-nups, seemed, well, half-assed. Call me a romantic fool with a self-destructive streak, a mercurial ENFP Gemini, but I love the idea of marriage as radical partnership, in which nothing is held back.

My ex-wives were all college-educated. And the fact that our finances were blended didn’t mean that they couldn’t land easily on their feet after a divorce. Their job skills and their earning potential were such that they weren’t terrified to leave a bad marriage. And frankly, I’m glad of it. I would have hated the thought that someone would stay with me out of fear of financial insecurity; marrying educated, working women had, in a sense, a direct pay-off for me: it meant that I knew that if someone was going to be with me, they weren’t with me for my money or the security I offered. And while I have always been willing to share what I have, I dislike the thought of my money serving as a particular enticement to stay in an unhappy relationship.

Now, 17 years after my first wife and I lived on Top Ramen in UCLA married student housing, I’m in a marriage which is financially stable. We both work inside and outside the home. We both do laundry and shopping and chinchilla duties. My wife, who works in the financial world, handles most of the bill-paying. My money gets direct-deposited into our checking account; frankly, I haven’t the foggiest idea how much cash is in there right now. I’m only vaguely aware of how much we make a year, but I am clear on this: it is what we make. It is not what “I” make and what “she” makes. And by the time you average it all together, I suspect it’s pretty even.

In our current economic system, it doesn’t strike me as a viable goal to encourage total economic self-sufficiency for each individual. As we go through sickness and ageing, as we raise our children, as we navigate the vicissitudes of the global marketplace, the chances that we’re gonna end up partnered with someone who makes more or less what we do are going to be fairly slim for most people. Raising a family and maintaining a household on a single income is increasingly difficult, of course, despite the pleas from social conservatives that women should stay at home and families should reduce their economic expectations in order to make that possible. For many, that’s not only not financially viable, it’s downright unattractive.

I was raised by a single mother who saw her family as one source of happiness. She loved my brother and me very much, but she gave us the gift of making clear to us that we were not her raison d’etre. (I blogged this last year.) Not terribly surprisingly, I’ve been drawn to women who, while very different in a variety of ways, shared with my mother a belief that their own happiness mattered. My wife is a very strong woman who very much wants a family; she will be a marvelous, adventurous, spirited mother. Our future sons and daughters will be nurtured by both of us, cared for by both of us, cleaned up after by both of us. They will know that they are loved, but they will also know that their parents’ first commitment is to their individual spiritual growth, their second commitment is to their marriage, and their third is to the children themselves. That’s what I was raised with, and it’s what I want to bequeath to my children.

I have more to say on this, but need to wrap this post up.

I have no idea what the future holds for our marriage financially. I suspect we’re going to end up making a great deal of money. I suspect we’re going to give a lot of it away. That’s what we both want, and we have the skills and resources and faith to make it happen. And it’s going to be a “we” thing all the way.

Tuesday notes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 27, 2007
in Chinchillas, Faith and Vanity
. 5 Comments

My Lenten practices are still going reasonably well.

Each morning while I teach, my body aches for a diet Coke. So far, I’m restricting very well.

I’ve been getting up very early — earlier than usual — to take some time for prayer and spiritual writing. It’s definitely a stretch physically, but after nearly a week I notice it’s really starting to pay off.

And I’m trying to be completely vegan for Lent. That isn’t going as well as I’d like. I had a bagel on Sunday after my run; no cream cheese but no doubt plenty of egg in it. I had a bite of egg salad yesterday too, and on Friday, I had a protein bar with milk product in it. But for the most part, I’m doing okay.

In other news, the Matilde Mission has at long last won a quiet little battle we were having with the IRS. For eighteen months, the chinchilla charity that my wife and I helped start in honor of our first chin had been battling to be recognized as a non-profit. We were granted provisional 501(c)3 status, but the IRS kept coming back with bizarre and arcane queries, perhaps trying to make absolutely sure that the Mission is not affiliated with groups like Animal Liberation Front and other organizations that employ violence.

After spending a small fortune on lawyer’s fees (out of our pockets, not the Mission’s), we finally convinced the IRS that every dime we spend is for chinchillas, their rescue, and their housing. And we got all of our paperwork at last; we are no longer provisional.

So with that said, feel free to donate here! It’s tax-deductible, we’ve got a secure server, you can give as little as $5.00… We’ve saved the lives of a few hundred precious little ones, and we can save many more with your help.

The IRS approves.

A few more notes about flirtation and connection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 27, 2007
in Relationships and Sexuality
. 15 Comments

Last week, I wrote a post about flirtation.

Kate commented at length. She made an excellent point, and asked a good question along with it. The point:

This an area where male privilege works overtime. You can decide ‘not’ to flirt and that’s a conscious decision. When women decide ‘not’ to flirt, it often makes NO difference in some men’s minds - we talk to them, we’re flirting, whatever we say…

That certainly rings true enough. It’s a rare woman who hasn’t had her words and actions misinterpreted; few women grow up in this culture without having at least one experience of friendlness mistaken for frank sexual interest.

And for a man to stop flirting, particularly a man who made a habit out of flirting for years and years, may seem virtuous; for a woman, it might well be perceived as chilliness.

The question Kate asks:

I was wondering, if by giving up ‘flirting’ you were more able, in a way, to have your eyes opened to ‘other’ sorts of connection with people of all genders; or if you felt that you had to ‘close off’ that capacity to some extent in case it became sexual?

Well, once I stopped flirting, I found that my genuine friendships with both men and women improved exponentially. I became less inclined to see men as rivals once I stopped seeking validation from women. The relationships with women, of course, became far more transparent, honest, and ulitmately more intimate without that deliberate attention to a sexual undercurrent.

Potential sexual attraction can happen in all sorts of relationships. Most people who’ve lived a while on this planet have found themselves taken by surprise by the sudden emergence of either mutual or unrequited desire for someone who most decidedly isn’t their “type.” Living a life of accountability, which is what I’m trying to do here, requires a healthy respect for the power of sexuality and the habit desire has of appearing almost without warning. So I set some pretty good boundaries in my friendships.

In her comment, Kate quotes Forster’s maxim from “Howard’s End” (one of my favorite novels ever written, and one from which I quote habitually): “Only Connect.” Connecting with others is our most important task and for many, our greatest joy. But connecting with others is more about philia and agape then it is about eros. Indeed, too often sex is the very thing that makes true connection impossible, not because sex is inherently wicked but because sexual desire (or the desire for sexual validation) makes so many of us selfish and self-absorbed.

One classic defense of flirtation is that it makes other people feel good about themselves. I’m all for making other people feel good. But I’m convinced that we can achieve this without using sexuality as the primary vehicle for accomplishing that.

A note on Delta Zeta, DePauw, and sororities

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 26, 2007
in Feminism and Youth
. 20 Comments

Yesterday’s New York Times: Sorority Evictions Raise Issue of Looks and Bias.

When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

It’s a stunning and depressing story; to be fair, Delta Zeta has responded here.

The role that sororities have played in feminist history is a complex one. It’s worth noting that the first modern sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, was founded in 1870 at — of all places — the very same DePauw University now involved in the Delta Zeta hullabaloo. Many important leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century women’s movement were sorority members. On “co-ed” campuses still dominated by men, sorority houses provided emotional refuge, intellectual stimulation and support, and a genuine sisterhood. For decades, sororities were no less diverse than the female student body; until the latter part of the twentieth century, that meant that sororities were overwhelmingly white and middle to upper-middle class.

Many of the women in my family, particularly those who attended large public universities (like Cal) were sorority members. My grandmother was a proud Kappa Kappa Gamma, and met my grandfather, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, through mutual friends at a fraternity party. Throughout her life, my grandmother was close to some of her sorority sisters. Their bond was deep and profoundly influential. My grandmother had a first-rate mind; her passion at Berkeley was astronomy, and she preferred star-study to party-going (not that the two activitites were mutually exclusive). In the mid-1920s, she found plenty of peers in Kappa who shared her intellectual passions.

Many women in my family have continued to join sororities down to the present day. (In my generation, we’ve had a continued large crop of Kappas and a notable number of Pi Phis. My second wife was a devoted Pi Phi, active in alumnae activities during our brief marriage.) Most of these women I’ve known describe their sorority experience in glowing terms.

Prior to the recent purge, Delta Zeta at DePauw offered some of that same sense of community my grandmother spoke about:

“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”

It’s true that the legacy of many sororities is tinged with elitism, with not-so-subtle racism, and with an occasional excessive concern with appearances. But many outsiders make the mistake of assuming that “lookism” and elitism are inherent in all women’s Greek letter organizations. They are either unaware of or unwilling to admit the possibility that for well over a century, sororities have offered an increasingly broad cross-section of young American women an opportunity to find authentic sisterhood. Behind the stereotypes of pearls and sweater sets, of degrading initiation rituals and a preoccupation with popularity and sex appeal, there lies a more nuanced story: the story that says that real feminist work happens in sorority houses all over this country. While a sorority experience is certainly not for every young woman, for many it offers the first real opportunity to live in female-centered community. While some aspects of sorority life can reinforce traditional gender roles, other aspects of the experience actively subvert them, offering young women a chance to radically rethink their own lives and their own goals.

Clearly, some of the women of Delta Zeta at DePauw felt embraced and nurtured by their sisters. They grew emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. What apparently happened at DePauw was sad and indefensible. But it doesn’t take away from the main story, the story that says that for at least many women, sorority membership can be a cornerstone of a wonderful university experience.

(For what it’s worth, I thought long and hard about “rushing.” I went through the preliminaries, particularly with Delta Kappa Epsilon, the “drunken Dekes” as they’ve been known for a century or more. In the end, for a wide variety of reasons, I bailed out. I had the strong sense that I was being welcomed as a legacy rather than as someone who might fit as a brother. Had I not felt so compelled to rush one particular very conservative house, I might well have ended up as a frat boy for life.)

All Saints stands strong: a note on prayer shawls and worship music

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 26, 2007
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity and GLBTQ
. 5 Comments

In addition to watching the Oscars this weekend, I spent time both Saturday and Sunday at church.

We’re at a watershed moment in the history of the Episcopal Church and of its flagship liberal congregation, All Saints Pasadena. It is in our parish that the very first Anglican blessing of a same-sex union in the entire Communion took place back in 1991; almost sixteen years later, the global church is on the threshold of schism over this very issue of homosexuality, Scriptural interpretation, and inclusiveness. (I wrote a bit about this last week.)

Here’s a summary of the current debate from the Los Angeles Times.

After a meeting ten days ago in Tanzania, the primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion have directed the Episcopal Church USA to stop ordaining gays and lesbians and to stop blessing same-sex unions. The deadline to comply is September 30, 2007.

Though the ECUSA has not yet issued a formal response, at All Saints Pasadena, we’ve done so. Last week, our rector, Ed Bacon, issued this (PDF file) release.

“We have been blessing the unions of our gay and lesbian parishioners for 15 years and we have no intention of denying them blessings in the future”, Ed Bacon said.

On Saturday afternoon, I helped organize our “youth and families” 5:00PM worship service. This week Susan Russell preached; Susan is an internationally recognized spokeswoman for progressive Episcopalians (see her here on the Newshour, for example). Susan also blogs at An Inch at a Time.

Susan was preaching to a congregation of little kids and teenagers; she avoided bringing up the heavy theological issues that are at hand. But she didn’t make the mistake of assuming that children are incapable of understanding the core issue, which is the issue of who is welcome in the church. She unveiled a beautiful indigo prayer shawl, knitted by a group of parishoners who knit as a spiritual disciplne; each stitch and knot is carefully prayed over. The shawl has just been finished, and it will be sent this week to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. It is Jefferts Schori who must answer to the primates for all of us, it is Jefferts Schori who must choose whether to give in to heavy pressure from traditionalists abroad (and at home) or to, like Luther at the Diet of Worms, stand in courageous defiance.

Susan Russell invited us to pray over the shawl, that it might act as a covering for our presiding bishop, that it might give her strength to make difficult decisions, that it might help her to choose to stand up for the marginalized. I ran my hands over the shawl, remembering my brief sojourn among the Pentecostals, remembering the power of the Holy Spirit ought never be doubted or underestimated.

Susan assured us that whatever the cost, we at All Saints Pasadena will not change our stance on including women, gays, and lesbians in every facet of church life. We’re not going to sell out the most vulnerable among us in an effort to appease. Living in Communion means we have an obligation to listen to each other and pray together, but it doesn’t bind us to submit to what our conscience, our reason, and the Spirit itself tells us is grave injustice.

One reason I like our Saturday service: we often use contemporary praise music in worship, singing songs more often sung in far more conservative congregations. During communion, as the kids raced around the room, we sang that Jesus Camp classic “Every Move I Make”:

Every move I make I make in
You
You make me move, Jesus
Every breath I take
I breathe in You
Every step I take I take in
You
You are my way, Jesus
Every breath I take
I breathe in You
Waves of mercy
Waves of grace
Everywhere I look I see Your face
Your love has
captured me
Oh my God, this love
How can it be?

Whatever one thinks of the language of contemporary worship music (Jenell Paris, one of my favorite bloggers, has great article on this very subject in the latest issue of Mutuality, alas not online), there’s no question that it puts a personal relationship with Jesus front and center. And what I love about All Saints is that under the leadership of an exciting and dynamic team of professional and volunteer youth ministers, an ever more explicitly evangelical message is being lived out with our children and teenagers. Our commitment to full inclusion for gays and lesbians, our sense that God’s view of sexuality is richer than we had once imagined, in no way vitiates the intensity of our faith in Christ. We can have Jesus and justice.

So we prayed over the shawl, and we danced around during communion, and I left a bit teary-eyed, thankful that God put me in this place, in this church.

Oscar thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 26, 2007
in Movies
. 4 Comments

Just a quick note about the Oscars:

This was one of the more disappointing years for film that I can remember. Unlike last year, when I saw at least a dozen films I liked, I had a series of frustrating and bewildering movie-going experiences over the past few months. Highly-touted films like “Borat”, “Babel”, “Little Children”, and “The Departed” all left me decidedly underwhelmed. Though each featured marvelous individual performances, the overall quality of these celebrated pictures struck me as considerably less than the sum of their parts.

Hands down, the best film I saw all year was “Pan’s Labyrinth”, with “The Queen” taking runner-up and “Little Miss Sunshine” taking third. (Of all the major nominated films, I’ve seen each and every one save for “Half Nelson” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”) Though at times it’s difficult to watch, “Pan’s Labyrinth” was mesmerizing. It ought to have earned a nod in the best picture category.

If I had been giving out awards last night, and could have nominated whomever I liked, I’d have given these in the major categories:

Best Director: Guillermo Del Toro, “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Best Supporting Actor: Leslie Phillips, “Venus” (nipping Jackie Earle Haley by a hair.)
Best Supporting Actress: Adriana Barraza, “Babel”
Best Actor: Will Smith, “The Pursuit of Happyness” (nipping Whitaker by a nose)
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, “The Queen” (the only award given I agreed with utterly, though Penelope Cruz takes my breath away)
Best Picture: “Pan’s Labyrinth”

“His wrongness has overwhelmed his rightness”: Catholic conservatives turn on Bush

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 23, 2007
in Politics
. 8 Comments

First Things, the leading neo-conservative Catholic news magazine (and the only right-of-center publication of which I am a paying subscriber) has a devastating assessment of the Bush presidency this month. Written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, poet and essayist Joseph Bottum, the piece begins:

The noise has been overwhelming since George W. Bush took office. Abortion, euthanasia, stem cells, public Christmas displays, same-sex marriage, pornography in the movies, faith-based initiatives, immigration, visible patriotism: We’ve been warned by the media, over and over again, that Republicans are reshaping America into a Puritan’s paradise. But, at the end of the day, the media mostly won and the Republicans mostly lost. Social conservatism is in little better shape now than it was when Bush was first elected. In many ways, it is in worse shape.

As a liberal evangelical with a foot in several ideological and theological camps, I’m not experiencing any schadenfreude. What Bottum writes matches with what I’m hearing from many of my very conservative friends: the Iraq debacle has sucked all of the energy out of what they had hoped would be a dramatic move to the right in this country on the so-called “life and morals” issues. These social cons voted for Bush not least because of his own professed faith in Christ; they admit now that they still hear that language from our president, but have seen little in his policy that reflects it.

Bottum again:

Conservatives voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because they expected him to be the opposite of Bill Clinton-and so, unfortunately, he has proved. Where Clinton seemed a man of enormous political competence and no principle, Bush has been a man of principle and very little political competence.

Yikes. Okay, now I’m feeling the tiniest frisson of schadenfreude! The editor continues:

Again and again, he has done the right thing in the wrong way, until, at last, his wrongness has overwhelmed his rightness. How can conservatives continue to support this man in much of anything he tries to do? Iraq is not America’s failure, and it is not conservatism’s failure. We are where we are because of George W. Bush’s failure.

And this from the editor of the flagship journal of the neoconservatives. With friends like these..

Tangentially, if I were a Catholic conservative (I was, for a short while, just that, a long time ago), I’d be backing Sam Brownback with all my heart. For my money, he’s the most decent and consistent of all the Republicans in the race. He is to the GOP what Dennis Kucinich is to the Democrats — a politiican whose personal integrity is above reproach, and whose positions are firmly in keeping with the most fervent hopes of each party’s respective base. I’ll also note that Kucinich and Brownback are the two most devout Catholics among all the declared candidates for president, even as they represent the ideological poles in the current presidential process.

Friday Random Ten: first FRT of Lent

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 23, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 3 Comments

This week’s FRT has some old favorites, and some new favorites as well. I downloaded all of Springsteen’s “Seeger Sessions” recently, and two great tracks came up (I always loved the story of John Henry). #10 is gorgeous, and if Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris would always record together, I’d be a happy lad.

1. “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”, Patty Loveless
2. “Makambo”, Geoffrey Oryema
3. “Underneath Your Clothes”, Shakira
4. “Ghosts of Cable Street”, Men they Couldn’t Hang
5. “John Henry”, Bruce Springsteen
6. “Walk Forever By My Side”, The Alarm
7. “Traveling Again”, Dar Williams
8. “My Life”, Iris Dement
9. “Mary, Don’t You Weep”, Bruce Springsteen
10. “My Sweet Carolina”, Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris

Bonus Track: “Bad Reputation”, Joan Jett

A long post about flirtation, validation, and conversion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2007
in Age, Faith, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Vanity
. 20 Comments

I read a lotta blogs, and one I check in on from time to time is Amber’s. And a few weeks ago, she wrote a very brief, one-sentence post that brought me up short:

The deadpan flirtatiousness of certain married male bloggers is baffling to me.

Now, I was pretty damn certain Amber wasn’t thinking of me. I don’t know to whom she was referring, actually. But it made me reflect a bit about my past, about marriage, about neediness, and about unlearning flirtatiousness.

From early adolescence on, I was a student of flirting. I remember having the word defined for me in eighth grade by a girl named Jenny Nicholson. We sat together in math class, and I was a bit infatuated by her, a mild crush that was unreciprocated. But we chatted a lot, and one day she smiled and asked, in response to something I had said that I can’t remember, “Hugo are you flirting with me?” I said “no”, but obviously looked confused long enough for Jenny to throw out a definition: “It’s when you kinda like someone but don’t want to say it.”

I think I grunted out an “oh”, and left it at that.

I went home and asked my Mom about flirting. She gave me a more thorough definition, which I seem to remember as “Showing subtle romantic interest.” I also looked it up in a dictionary or two, and began to get the picture.

My mid-adolescent attempts at conscious flirting began not long thereafter, and they were predictably excruciatingly obvious, puerile, and unsuccessful. But my interest in girls was strong enough to help me overcome rejection after rejection, so I kept practicing what I thought of as my “technique.” I watched two of my older teenage male cousins, young men in college whose bodies were hard and chiseled and whose “patter” was smooth and (judging from their large number of girlfriends) successful. I watched their hand gestures, listened to their voices, studied their apparent effortlessness. Slowly, as my own body matured and changed, my confidence began to increase.

Bottom line, I spent years learning how to flirt. I suppose I only got good at it around the time I stopped consciously thinking about what I was doing and simply let myself “do what came naturally.” And for years and years, I did a hell of a lot of flirting. I flirted in and out of both of the disastrous marriages I had in my twenties. I found that my need for validation was stronger than any commitment I had made to any one particular woman. Even when I was physically faithful, I still loved the “intrigues” that had become second nature to me.

It was only in my early thirties, when I underwent my spiritual conversion, that I became willing to rethink my own flirtatiousness. Doing a written inventory of my romantic and sexual history, I realized that from 13 to 31 I had devoted a colossal amount of time and energy to flirting. The goal was rarely sex — the goal was validation of my own desirability. I was a first-rate narcissist, always eager to “stir the pot” to see if I could arouse a spark of interest in the various women I met in my life. It never mattered if I was single or attached, and I didn’t much care if these women were available or not. My ego needed feeding, and flirting was the best damn way I knew to get it fed. If the “intriguing” led to a short-term relationship or brief encounter, so much the better — but that was just icing on the cake. The “cake” in these instances was the knowledge that I was wanted. And knowing that I was desirable was the ultimate payoff.

I wrote last year about my 1998 “experiment with celibacy.” Not only did I not have sex or date, but for the first time since early adolescence, I consciously refrained from flirtations and intrigues. Cutting off that source of validation was extremely painful. I felt panicky and anxious. I was forced to do a lot of praying. And God was faithful. He brought me that sense of well-being that I needed so badly, that I had wanted so badly. My promiscuity and my addictive flirtatiousness had been all about filling a hole inside of me that only He could fill. But His grace could only fill that hole once I had made the decision to give up this habit that had sustained me and driven me for so long.

It’s been nearly nine years since that experience. And of course, I’m married once more, in a relationship that is deeper, richer, more challenging and more fulfilling than I have ever known. And finally, in this marriage, I can say that not flirting is truly second nature for me now. I still remember all of my old tricks, mind you. Even now, I often pause and examine my own words and actions to make sure that nothing I am doing or saying with any of the women in my life rises to the level of flirtation or intrigue. I’m gradually growing less hyper-vigilant as I learn to relax into my own skin. I’ve finally learned to stop using other people in order to feed that insatiable ego. And I’m finally in a marriage where all of those sparks, all of that heat, all of that “intrigue” is directed towards my spouse and my spouse alone.

Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent. I did it for nearly twenty years. It took several years more of hard work to break myself of the habit. Even now, I remain vigilant, knowing that it would be false pride to claim that I am forevermore immune from the temptation to soothe myself this way.

In my blog presence as in my “real world” life, I try and make it very clear that I am safe, romantically unavailable, happily married. I do this to honor my wife, of course, but there’s more to it than that. The other women in my life, be they colleagues, friends, or students don’t need me trying to pry out some sort of response from them. To put it vulgarly, using people sucks.

As it’s clear to regular readers, I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about getting older. 40 is just around the corner. And of course, there’s a little nagging voice that says “Hugo, whatever looks you’ve had are fading. Do you think you can still “pull” (as the English say) as you used to?” And it’s my job these days to quiet that voice and not let that ugly, poisonous, neediness back into my life.

When that voice comes into my head, I remind myself that my real validation comes from the truth that — just like every other creature on this planet — I’m God’s beloved favorite. That’s true whether I’m lean or soft, wrinkled or smooth, handsome or homely, 29, 39, or 59.

And my wife, bless her, thinks I’m hot. The chinchillas just want to know if I have their shredded wheat treats, and it’s time to fetch those for them.

Some thoughts on luxury, travel, tithing, and faith

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2007
in Christianity, Class, Faith and Traveling
. 22 Comments

On Tuesday, I wrote a brief summary of our trip last week to Paris and to Devon. In the comments, a reader named John (not my regular “John from New Zealand”) asked:

Sounds like a good trip. Could you perhaps sometime talk about how you balance your enjoyment of the good things in life such as travel when most of the world’s population does not have such opportunities available to them? How do we balance liberal guilt with a life of privileged affluence?

I’ll deal with the “liberal guilt” idea in a moment.

I’ve gone back and forth about issues of wealth (relative or absolute), travel, responsibility, and Christian commitment over the years. I spent several of my teenage years as a Marxist, sending small money orders to the Socialist Workers Party and hectoring my family members about the evils of private property. They rightly predicted that I was going through a phase, pointing out that it was a good deal easier for me to condemn wealth as a completely dependent high school student than it would be as an adult.

When I became a serious Christian, I began to think seriously about the demands of the gospel regarding money. As most of us know, Jesus has more to say about wealth and economic justice than about any virtually any other topic. His words to the rich young ruler, “sell everything you have and give to the poor” haunted me. I’ve never been convinced that those words were meant for this young fellow alone, rather than as general instruction to all of us.

My first step towards creating a “Christian relationship with money” began when I was first at All Saints Pasadena, and heard a sermon on tithing. Up until this point, I’d given a little bit to charity here and there, but the total would never amount to even 1% of my gross income. But I felt inspired by my pastor’s sermon, and committed to giving ten percent. (At that point, I gave 10% of my net, not my gross. That seemed a huge amount to me at the time.)

My wife and I tithe on our gross income today. 10% of everything that comes in goes out. And frankly, giving away that ten percent is incredibly liberating. It’s as good an antidote for guilt as I know, as it leaves me freer to make use of the remaining 90% of what we earn together. To put it bluntly, we pay God first, and then we pay the mortgage, the car leases, and the Amex bill.

But I don’t believe, as some do, that tithing on one’s income gives one carte blanche to do whatever one wants with what remains. In our marriage, we try and make thoughtful, ethically-informed decisions about what we buy. We try and ascertain where our clothes were made; we try (as much as possible) to buy “cruelty free” consumer products. It’s not possible to do this perfectly, and sometimes, when we’re rushing through Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, we don’t read labels as closely as we should. But my wife and I are committed to challenging each other to make ever better decisions about how we spend.

We both love to travel (my wife even more than I.) We’re good at playing various games with frequent flyer miles (we use credit cards for everything, accumulating redeemable points with every purchase.) We’ve both spent plenty of time in cheap hotels, and we’re in a position today where we’re able to afford slightly nicer places. We’ve worked very, very hard to earn the resources to make our brief (albeit frequent) trips possible, and we both are willing to spend a great deal on eating out and fine hotels.

Tangentially, there are other things we spend very little money on. We have zero interest in high-tech anything. I don’t need or want a flat-screen HDTV. We have one Ipod that we share, and that was a gift. Our cellphones have no cameras, no interactive features. I’d much rather drop a bundle on a truly fabulous dinner than on some upgrade to a computer system. I’d rather spend discretionary income on exciting experiences than on material objects.

I’m acutely aware that jet air travel contributes to global warming. And since we average 2-4 intercontinental plane trips a year, that means we’re very much part of the problem. I was very happy to discover the Climate Care website. Climate Care allows you to calculate the carbon emissions of any particular plane trip, and then purchase an “offset.” The offset is a direct contribution to a program that reduces carbon emissions around the world. (You can read about Climate Care’s projects here.) Part of me wonders if this isn’t a bit like purchasing an indulgence, of course, but it allows me to feel that I am indeed offsetting the negative impact I have on the planet with a corresponding positive one.

I don’t feel much of this so-called “liberal guilt” these days. Tithing and giving to organizations like Climate Care really does help. We also “tithe on our time”. Both of us volunteer with various organizations, and if we add up the time we spend in organized volunteer work (in my case, with All Saints Pasadena), it easily exceeds 10% of the time we spend at our jobs. When you’re giving at least 10% of your income, and “tithing on your time”, it does wonders to alleviate the nagging sense that you’re not “doing enough.”

Look, I’m not spoiled. I sleep on the hard floors at All Saints on our many overnight lock-ins, I’ve done the mission trips to Mexican villages where there’s no running water and I invariably come home with Montezuma’s revenge. I like new experiences, new places, new things — and that can mean a week on a rural Colombian finca or it can mean a couple of nights at a lovely five-star hotel and a seven-course dinner at a world-class restaurant. I never believe I’m entitled to these luxuries — but my tithing and my service means that I can enjoy a relatively small number of costly pleasures without guilt or doubt.

Thursday Short Poem: Auden’s “A Walk After Dark”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2007
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

This week marks the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, W.H. Auden. I’ve already posted most of my favorite shorter Auden poems before, but this one has not yet appeared on a Thursday. (See here, here, here for three of my old favorites.) He also wrote what I always say is my favorite poem, the one I want read at my funeral: Runner.

Auden is not always an easy poet, but he’s accessible enough to have been widely loved by both critics and the general public.

A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

The lines I always remember:

And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

That’s right.

A meme from Dan

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 21, 2007
in Blogging
. 3 Comments

This meme comes from Dan, and since I haven’t done one in a while, thought I’d offer it up today.

1. What is the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why?

When I’m teaching a really good class, I often walk out of a lecture feeling exhilarated and energized. I’m lucky enough to be paid to do something that seems as much like play as like work. And when my sense of what I love to do happens to coincide with something that needs doing, as I think it does in teaching, that’s a happy thing.

2. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did?

Honestly, I wish I read more novels. Now, the only time I read novels is on trips. I haven’t read a novel somewhere other than a plane or a hotel room in a couple of years. And every once in a while, to be very candid, I really miss drinking. I’ve been clean and sober for eight and a half years, but sometimes I still long for a special glass of something. I get great pleasure out of watching others sip really good wine, but sometimes, even after all this time sober, my own taste buds still dance in anticipation.

3. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? Train for and run a 100-mile endurance race. Up until very recently, I would have said starting work on a book, but that seems to be coming along at last.

4. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? My wife is eager to have me improve my woeful Spanish. Whenever we go down to Colombia, she handles all the translating. She would like to raise our future children bilingual, and I will need to have some facility in casteleno if that’s going to work out.

I’d like to work on my singing voice. With work, it could be halfway decent. I have vague aspirations of someday singin’ in the choir.

5. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn?

I’d like to go to a running camp led by Steve Prefontaine. I’d like to take theology classes from John Howard Yoder. I’d like to have Pete Seeger teach me the banjo, and I’d love to sit in on a feminist theory course with Simone de Beauvoir.

6. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

Devoted, mercurial, thoughtful.

7. Now list two more words you wish described you.

Patient, spontaneous.

8. What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes).

That’s easy. In no particular order:

Animal rights. I want to see an end to factory farming, animal research, and fur pelting. I am willing to commit time and energy and money to this cause above all others. I want to see us all embrace a radically new, cruelty-free diet and lifestyle.

Teenagers. I have known for years that I am called to work with teens. There’s something about that age group that strikes a chord in me. As both a teacher and a youth leader, I feel called to devote myself professionally and para-professionally to teenagers and their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development.

Running. I love working out, but there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like running in the hills. Just little old me, a beat-up pair of Asics on my feet, a water belt on my waist, and the sound of my own breathing.

Write and answer one more question that YOU would ask someone.

What’s your biggest goal for the next ten years?

As Lewis said, “further up, further in.”

Glenn Sacks, Jennifer Roback Morse, and another split in the anti-feminist coalition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 21, 2007
in Christianity, Feminism, Men and Masculinity and Politics
. 26 Comments

I’m committed to feminist values in both my public and my private life. But as I’ve written many times before, I have a wide variety of friends who don’t share those commitments, and indeed actively reject them. Most of my fellow evangelical Christians are suspicious of feminism, and I have a few acquaintances who are active in the “men’s rights” (MRA) movement that stands in vocal opposition to feminism.

There’s a common tendency among feminists to fail to draw key distinctions among our various anti-feminist opponents. That is often a mistake. While social conservatives and men’s rights advocates share a mutual hostility towards organized feminism, they often share little else. Most men’s rights advocates do not root their opposition to feminism in their faith, but rather in their own personal experience. (The stereotypical men’s rights advocate is a divorced dad who imagines he got a raw deal in terms of custody and child support.) Most men’s rights advocates, at least those in the largest MRA organizations, tend to be decidedly secular in their worldview.

I’ve often mentioned my warm association with Glenn Sacks, a leading “moderate” in the men’s rights movement. On his blog this week, Glenn points out one area of tension between social conservatives and men’s rights advocates. Glenn recently compared the plight of lesbian mothers and divorced fathers in child custody cases. (Glenn, like many in the men’s rights movement, is not particularly troubled by civil unions, not by same-sex couples adopting children. His focus on men’s rights doesn’t require a hostility towards widespread acceptance of homosexuality.)

Noted social conservative Jennifer Roback Morse took Glenn to task a couple of weeks ago:

I hate to disagree with my friend Glenn Sacks, but I think he has missed the boat in his recent comparison of lesbian “social” mothers with divorced fathers. Mr. Sacks, a prominent fathers’ rights advocate, is correct that in both cases, family law courts diminish the claims of people who want to maintain a relationship with a child. But he is very much mistaken in equating the validity of the two types of claims. And fatherhood is at risk, no matter how the court resolves particular disputes between estranged lesbian partners.

Glenn responds at his blog.

As someone who often enjoys some political rough-and-tumble, I’m rarely saddened when I see signs of fracture in the anti-feminist coalitions. And I think it’s vital that feminists and their allies take note of those areas where men’s rights advocates and traditional social conservatives break rank with one another. It isn’t helpful to the larger cause of women’s rights to see those who oppose those rights as monolithic. On the contrary, there is considerable strategic opportunity in exposing existing or potential rifts among various anti-feminist constituencies. It’s worth reminding our allies and our opponents alike that adopting an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” policy rarely turns out well.

We are some three decades into what Susan Faludi famously called the “backlash” against the gains that feminism has made for women. It has been nearly thirty years since the election of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of social conservatives as a potent political force in American politics. Despite the intensity of the backlash against women’s rights and against justice for gays and lesbians, we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress in the last quarter century. (Sometimes, I admit, I wonder how much more we would have made had the rise of the right been more effectively blunted.) And after so many years of staving off concerted efforts to undo the progress we’ve achieved, it’s understandable if we forget to differentiate between the various elements within the coalition that opposes the feminist project.

I spend a lot of time working with young men who are both largely ignorant about feminism and hostile to those aspects of feminism that they think they understand. I work to make the case to them that feminism offers much to men as well, above all the opportunity to liberate themselves from the burden of being the “sturdy oak”. And I spend a lot of time in irenic dialogue with conservative Christians, suggesting that radical egalitarianism in the household and in the public sphere may be more congruent with God’s plan than the traditional notion of separate, complementary roles.

It’s a different message to two very different groups, and the recent public split between Sacks and Roback Morse over the issue of lesbians and child custody indicates just how different these anti-feminists constituencies really are.

Note: In this thread ONLY, I’m permitting some push-back from MRA commenters. My new comment policy — one which bans those hostile to feminism — remains generally in place, but since I blogged about the MRAs specifically in this post, I’m letting them in here. Not any other thread. I will open up an occasional thread to them, but even then, basic ground rules of avoiding personal attacks apply.

A few photos…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 20, 2007
in Family, People, Photos, Traveling and Vanity
. 0 Comments

…are up at the Flickr account. I especially like this one from the bedroom balcony in our Paris hotel.

Same shepherd, different paths: a note on the current state of the Anglican Communion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 20, 2007
in All Saints Pasadena and Christianity
. 17 Comments

One thing I tried to follow while on vacation was news from the Anglican Primates meeting in Tanzania. In a world at war, with the Darfur crisis spilling into Chad, the glaciers melting at a faster rate than previously imagined, tensions ratcheting up with Iran, a depressing and ongoing stalement over the Palestine question — with all of that on the table, the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion spent most of their meeting in Africa (a continent with a host of pressing human and environmental problems) focused on how best to rebuke the Episcopal Church USA for its consecration of an openly gay bishop and its support for same-sex unions. Priorities are clearly straight (pun intended) in my global church.

Here’s the BBC story. And read more coverage at Kendall’s.

This is not to say that sexual morality isn’t an important topic, and one that the church ought to discuss. But it ought to make all of us in the Anglican church sad, regardless of where we find ourselves on the issue of sexuality, that yet another argument over “pelvic morality” is distracting us from so many other vital concerns. We must ask ourselves the question: in spending so much time and energy discerning God’s will on the question of homosexuality, what other vital issues are we ignoring? How many lambs are going unfed because we’re too busy trying to disqualify some of the very shepherds who want to feed them?

I’m convinced that for most straight people, the issue of same-sex marriage is an attractive one over which to argue and debate. It’s why we like to argue about it so much in the church. Most other issues call us to personal repentance and transformation. Christ calls us to think differently about how we eat, about how we spend our money, about how we interact with our neighbors, about how we live so many aspects of our lives. But if we’re straight, taking a position on homosexuality (whether or not it’s an affirming one) is ultimately pretty damned cheap.

No straight person gives up anything when he or she comes out for or against same-sex marriage. So we progressive heterosexuals get to feel virtuous and brave for standing in solidarity with our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters; conservative straights get to feel as if they are “defending the Gospel” by trying to bar the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of non-heterosexual unions. And whatever side we’re on, it doesn’t cost us much. The focus is off our own flaws, away from the logs in our own eyes. And so both right and left collude to make homosexuality the defining issue in the modern church.

But of course, for our GLBTQ friends and neighbors, this debate isn’t cheap. It goes to the very heart of their identity. And it is for the love of these friends and neighbors, my brothers and sisters in Christ, that I am willing to see a schism in the church I love. Unity is a good, but it isn’t anywhere near the highest good. To progressives, justice is a higher good than unity. To conservatives, fidelity to tradition and Scripture is a higher good than unity. If both sides can at least agree on that, then perhaps we can gently break apart the wider Anglican communion.

As my rabbi friend often says, “Sometimes divorce is a mitzvah.” I’ve often written that there are redemptive aspects to the end of a marriage, particularly when both parties become stronger and better people as a result. I believe that just as there can be both amicable and hostile divorces, there can also be amicable and hostile church schisms. While there’s still a chance to separate gently, with a mixture of regret, sadness, respect and relief, we should take that chance.

Our shepherd has told us he leads sheep from many folds; let’s let those who cannot be in our fold any longer follow our same shepherd on a different path.