Archive for April, 2007

“The average guy who can compartmentalize, disconnect, and then come back”: a response to Ethan on porn

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2007
in Men and Masculinity and Porn
. 38 Comments

I like Ethan, who writes at Crucial Minutiae. But his post today in defense of pornography left me, well, disappointed. Ethan writes:

The male sex drive can feel oppressive, more like a visceral need than a casual desire. Moreover, I think our biology is geared to make men seek variety over consistency. Guys can A) bug their girlfriends/wives for more sex (maybe with crazy outfits or roleplay) B) seek it elsewhere from strangers, prostitutes, or mistresses or C) simply satisfy themselves with Internet pornography.

That’s as good an articulation of absolutely everything I disagree with as I’ve read in a while! The “discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire” is a foundation stone of anti-feminist thought. Since it’s used to excuse date rape and infidelity, I suppose we ought to be grateful that it’s only being used here to excuse porn use. Now, I agree completely that men — particularly young men, and I was young not so very long ago — can perceive lust as “visceral need.” But feelings are not facts, and not every desire, no matter how powerful, requires a concomitant outlet. Ethan listed three options above, and conveniently leaves out at least two others:

D. Masturbate without pornography, focusing the fantasy on the absent partner

E. Refrain from masturbating altogether until he can be with his partner again, a seemingly impossible task that I see lived out regularly by men I know well and trust profoundly.

E is surely a level of self-denial and commitment that goes beyond what most folks, male or female, might be willing to offer. I’ve argued that it’s perhaps the best of all possible options, but a great deal of compassion and charity is needed here. Option D seems perfectly reasonable to me, however. If I were to concede that in singleness or a long-distance relationship, masturbation was a positive good, it still wouldn’t follow that porn was necessary in order to achieve arousal and satisfaction. Porn only reinforces the great lie of everlasting novelty, about which I have posted at length before.

Let me repeat what I wrote last May, this time in response to Ethan:

Ultimately, the great tragedy of porn is that it teaches the men who use it to pursue “everlasting novelty.” Ask any man who uses porn — does he want to see the same pictures over and over again of the same women? No. If looking at one beautiful naked woman was enough, Playboy could put out one issue a decade. Internet porn sites could update annually instead of daily. But as most porn users admit, what was an intense turn-on the first time quickly becomes stale and boring. The seductiveness of internet porn in particular is that some brand new woman, one you’ve never seen before, is just one or two clicks away on your computer.

The pursuit of everlasting novelty is the enemy of actual relationship. Real relationships are built on a very different premise from porn — the notion that what is really sexy is not “new skin” but radical connection with one other person. Porn says that happiness is found by having the same experience over and over again with lots of different women; true eros says that happiness is found by having different experiences over and over again with the same person.

Ethan claims that men can compartmentalize with near-impunity:

But for the average guy, the one who can compartmentalize, disconnect, and come back, I think they really can watch the ice cream every day, then come back to the frozen yogurt. Know why? When they are watching porn, the girlfriends are tucked away in their minds, safe from the taint of the unattainable images. And when they are with our girlfriends, the porn stars are unseen, unheard. It’s not a perfect arrangement. But it’s better than the alternatives.

I’m sure this is immensely comforting to your girlfriend, Ethan, and you seem like a nice young man trying to make a sincere case — for the indefensible. She may buy it; I don’t. (And um, wouldn’t she rather be ice cream than yogurt? How did that image go down with her?)

I’ve been doing men’s work for many years now. And while I may not be the average bear, I do believe this with every fiber of my being: no one, no one, no one, can just “compartmentalize, disconnect, and come back.” Many men think they do so with impunity, but it’s the consensus of both the theologians and the marriage and family therapists that no good life can be lived well in compartments. We are called to wholeness, Ethan; men — all men, even in their late teens in the throes of lust — are capable of matching their desires, their behavior, their hearts. Is it easy? Heck no. But is it possible? Yes. Is it desirable? You bet it is.

I lived my life in compartments for years, not because I was a slave to uncontrollable, visceral lust but because I was fundamentally selfish. My conversion experience and my commitment to fidelity (and not using porn) did not come about because my libido suddenly declined in my early thirties; it came about because, among other things, I realized that I wasn’t nearly as weak as I had once imagined. I could make the choice to be the same man alone in front of the computer as I was in front of the classroom. It wasn’t easy, but I did it, inspired by other men who made the same decision.

When we “compartmentalize” and “disconnect”, we stop seeing women — real women, and porn stars are real women — as actual human beings who have needs that go beyond our own pleasure. And as a pro-feminist historian, I note that when men “disconnect” from a recognition of the essential humanity of any woman, it rarely turns out well for her… or for anyone else.

A note on virtue, exercise, and disability: a response to Mr. Soul

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness and Body
. 19 Comments

Last week, a reader named Mr. Soul sent me an email:

I see that you have blogged extensively about what you
call “mental illness”–but you never use the word
“disability”–and have zero entries (in how many years
of blogging?) about disability or disability rights
politics. Do you think your dislike of using the term
disability, or the subject of disability itself (as
evidenced by the way you have consistently ignored the
topic) has to do with your fitness obsession, and the
way you conflate a healthy, fit body with godliness?

I’ll take it as a fair request, even though I think that there are some whopping and false assumptions behind the question he asks.

It’s true I don’t blog about disability issues. To be fair, I never intended this blog to be about all possible social justice issues. At its core, this blog reflects my own passions and interests, which tend to revolve around sexuality, gender, faith, and animal rights. I hardly ever blog about the Iraq war, for example, because I don’t think I have anything original to say on the topic. (My views are generally in line with those of, say, Dennis Kucinich, but he knows more about the topic than I.) The same is true of disability; it’s not something with which I am wholly unconcerned, but it is a topic about which I am sure I know less than many other fine bloggers.

Still, I do blog a lot about fitness. And at times, I admit, I do suggest that there is something inherently virtuous about paying close attention to diet and committing to regular exercise. Yes, I do believe that we are called to be both stewards of our bodies and stewards of the earth, and that — to me — means that what we eat and how we keep fit are issues of justice and responsibility.

Eating vegan (and whenever possible, eating “local”) is about taking responsibility for animals, for the earth, and for my own health. If I am to be of maximum service, I need to be as fit as possible. If my diet shortens my life, leaves me short of energy, and has me nauseated or depressed much of the time, then my food choices are holding me back from doing important work. If I eat such a big meal that I have to collapse into bed, leaving myself unavailable to my wife and friends, then my eating habits aren’t just hurting the planet, they’re hurting those to whom I am responsible. If I eat in such a way that I take years off of my life, then I steal from my future children time with their father. Heck, I won’t be a Dad until well into my forties — I have a moral responsibility to be fit, because being fit is one of the best guarantors I know that I will be around for my children as they grow.

So yes, I think that God calls us to eat justly and to keep our bodies fit. I do think vegetarianism (and better yet, veganism) is more than just one lifestyle choice among many: I think it’s a morally preferable choice because of its undeniable benefits both to the “eater” and the creatures of the earth who are not eaten. A meat-free, dairy-free, egg-free diet requires far fewer natural resources and far less land to maintain, and it involves far less cruelty to animals. A program of regular exercise keeps the body stronger, and thus more “available” to the world.

Mind you, it’s very easy to let exercise addiction become selfish. I work out much less than I would like. Left to my own devices, without outside commitments, I would happily train for an ultramarathon by logging 120-140 miles a week. I’ve got the build to do it, the determination to do it, the huge desire to do it — but it would eat into the time I spend with my wife, with my students, with my youth group, with my other (growing) volunteer activities, with my writing. I try and walk a thin line, one in which I maintain lifelong fitness (and get high on endorphins) without compromising my commitments to God and to His creatures. I’ve seen people abandon their families in order to run or bike or train for extreme fitness events; I understand the temptation to do so, but I cannot justify such single-mindedness.

I am absolutely convinced that working to live a healthy (or healthier) life is something virtually everyone can do, including those with severe disabilities. Those who are wheelchair bound or who face other huge physical challenges are no less fully human in my eyes — and I am deeply sorry if anything I have written has suggested otherwise. The ability to run marathons does not make me any more enlightened than someone who can’t walk. We are all called to do the best we can with what we have been given, and as the Paralympic Games have made clear, great fitness and profound disability are not as incompatible as we sometimes imagine. What matters is this: within the context of the choices we have, we ought to do whatever we can to gain or maintain health, with the caveat that that health ought not be bought at the cost of suffering inflicted on innocent creatures. (Hence my opposition to animal research.) What that specifically involves will look very different for different people, which is a very trite thing to say but is the most truthful and thoughtful thing I can contribute on the subject.

The twelfth of Iyar

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2007
in Age and Vanity
. 2 Comments

I was born on May 22, 1967; in the Gregorian calendar, that means my fortieth birthday is just over three weeks away. But I would like to point out that May 22, 1967 was also the 12 of Iyar, 5727 in the Hebrew calendar. Given that the Hebrew calendar is lunar, it means my Hebrew and Gregorian birthdays rarely match up.

And today is 12 Iyar 5767, so by that ancient method of reckoning time, I am forty today.

Plugging Tara and Meg

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2007
in GLBTQ, Music and People
. 0 Comments

I know I have readers in Austin. I’m gonna plug my old friend and former student, Tara Craig; she’s got a free gig tomorrow night at Austin Java; other upcoming gigs are listed on her Myspace page. I’ve seen her perform many times, and I wrote a short post about her a couple of years ago. Hey, there aren’t many lesbian Christian folk singers out there, at least not many with talent — and none of whom I am as deeply fond as I am of my buddy Tara. Check her out.

She’ll be performing next month in Austin with another singer/former student of mine, Meg Baier. Check out her site as well.

Friday Random Ten: in randomness, there is often order

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 2 Comments

It’s a busy day of grading, book proposals, meetings, and exercise. No time for blogging. I’ll be back on Monday…

Several songs on today’s FRT are oldies recorded before I graduated college. #1 is from my hair band days; #2 just showed up a short time ago on an FRT, my favorite song from my favorite new group; #3 a classic from an old junior year favorite; #4 is Emmylou doing bluegrass at its most transcendent; #8 is Patty Griffin’s song, and she and Burke both turn this tribute to MLK’s final speech into a three-hankie number; #9 is one I played a lot when I was single again, thinking my last chance had passed me by; #10 is a song of which I have at least three downloaded versions, and with Kottke and DeMent, you can’t go wrong. For all of his periodically faux sentimentality, I have a soft spot for Randy Travis, and the bonus track today is off my favorite of his albums.

1. “Breaking the Chains”, Dokken
2. “Things that You Know”, Wailin’ Jennys
3. “Mandela Day”, Simple Minds
4. “Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn”, Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs
5. “When You Awake”, The Band
6. “Windfall”, Son Volt
7. “Your Embrace”, Shakira
8. “Up to the Mountain”, Solomon Burke
9. “Table for Two”, Caedmon’s Call
10. “Banks of Marble”, Leo Kottke and Iris Dement

Bonus Track: “What’ll You Do About Me?”, Randy Travis

My brother and Shakespeare’s grave… UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2007
in Books and Family
. 4 Comments

… are making news.

Shakespeare, who employed grave robbery in many of his works including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, was deathly afraid of what was to be after his death, and Dr. Philip Schwyzer says that may be the only thing keeping the tomb intact.

Etched on his stone at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, as a warning to gravediggers following his death in 1616:

“Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare/ To digg the dust encloased heare/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones/And curst be he that moves my bones.”

Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter, said: “Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation. The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave.”

The argument is put forth as part the lecturer’s new book “Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature,” and he adds: “His epitaph marks his final, uncompromising statement on a theme that preoccupied him throughout his career as a writer for the stage.”

Anxiety about the mistreatment of corpses is found in at least 16 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, with the concern actually more pronounced than the fear of death itself in many instances.

Another version of the story here, and the longest version of the story is done by the local paper, the Express and Echo. Read it all here. There’s even a little picture of the bro.

Little bro is doing interviews; his book will be out in the USA next month.

UPDATE: Go to Google News and type in Schwyzer. Stuff comes up by and about just three people in the English-speaking world: my brother, my sister, and me. Coolness.

I wish my Papa could see it.

A misunderstanding about youth ministry, boys, and the meaning of “work”: a response to Toy Soldier

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2007
in All Saints Pasadena, Men and Masculinity, Relationships, Youth and Youth ministry
. 27 Comments

I often refer to what I do, professionally and avocationally, as my “work.” I talk about “youth work” and “pro-feminist work” and “men’s work”. I had thought that everyone would understand that what I meant was clear, but a recent comment by Toy Soldier below my “Sheer desecrated hurt and anger” post makes it obvious that I need to be more explicit.

I wrote:

Real men’s work is about reaching young men where they are. Not just the ones who are obviously willing to be reached, either. Real men’s work — especially in school settings — is about initiating relationship with the shy, the bookish, the brooding and the hostile. It is frustrating, difficult, painful, and very tiring work. It is also joyous, especially when the breakthroughs happen. I’ve been working to do this for many years now, with a wide variety of young men. And it may be the most important thing I do.

Toy Soldier replied:

If one considers it work to aid a young man in need then one has already missed the point. Speaking as a “brooding” young man from Cho’s generation, I think the above attitude is one of the many reasons why Cho’s hurt and anger remained suppressed. As John mentioned above, one must approach helping young men with the intent to actually help them because it is the right thing to do for them. It requires respect, which the above–no offense–selfish, self-serving attitude completely lacks.

Whoa, cowboy. I’ll ignore the “selfish and self-serving” bit and focus instead on the misunderstanding of what I mean by “work.”

Sometimes, it’s fairly obvious that (at least on my mother’s side) I am descended from a lot of Scots-Irish Calvinists and North German Lutherans. The “Protestant work ethic”, stripped of its theological nuances, is one of my family’s secular religions (the other being good manners). Somehow, early on in life, I picked up the idea that there was no greater sin than idleness. Sin was, I believed and still often do believe, more about what you didn’t do than what you did. From my cousins, I picked up a “work hard, play hard” ethos. As long as I was doing the former, I was allowed great (perhaps too much) latitude for the latter. Getting straight As or making money weren’t vitally important, mind you — but having focus and goals were.

So I end up talking about almost everything as “work.” I’ll be the first to say that my marriage is blissful. It is also challenging work. Indeed, if my marriage wasn’t sometimes a hell of a lot of work, I’d figure that there was something amiss. If I’m too comfortable, I’m stagnating; the only way to fight decay is to keep in constant motion, in near-constant effort. My teaching is work. I am good at what I do, I think, but I know I could be better. I could be kinder, more sympathetic, even more passionate. Teaching is joy — teaching is hard work.

I “work out” every day. I do it for the thrill of the endorphin rush to which I am most definitely addicted, but I also do it because I like working at physical things. I like pushing up mountain trails and doing ever-more difficult positions in Pilates. Is there an element of playfulness, of creativity, of fun in all of this “working” out? Of course there is. But is it also mental and physical work? Abso-flippin’-lutely.

And my youth ministry is also “work.” I work at being a better, kinder, more intuitive mentor to girls and boys. I work at new ways to reach the kids who are toughest to reach. Is it often exhilarating and fulfilling? Sure. But it is also often tiring and disheartening. If I only did youth ministry in order to be adored, to be wanted, and to be validated, I’d be a piss-poor volunteer. If I only did youth ministry with the kids whom it is easy to reach, I’d be a fraud and a coward. Every danged week, I have to push myself out of my comfort zone to try and connect with the sullen, the angry, the hurting, the defensive. I have to be willing to have my initial efforts at connection rebuffed, knowing that building trust with a wounded, alienated kid takes a long time and is frequently hard work.

Toy Soldier — and some other men’s rights activists — think that pro-feminist men have only one motive to work with boys: we want to make sure that they don’t hurt women. The implication, and it’s one that I hear often, is that men like me don’t really like or care for other men or boys. Yet because as pro-feminists we see the colossal harm men and boys inflict on women and girls, we apparently consider it our distasteful duty to reach out to our little brothers in the hopes of molding them into respectful egalitarians like ourselves. According to this theory, men like me have no interest in working with boys as boys, only in working to “defuse” their toxic masculinity. It’s a cute theory, but it’s simply not true.

I work with girls, and I work with boys. Ask anyone who has seen me do youth ministry: my time is evenly divided with all of “my kids”, and my joy in their growth and my concern at their setbacks is equal, whether they are male or female. I do youth work because I want these teens to grow up into empowered, socially responsible, authentically happy human beings who delight in their own createdness and who feel a strong desire to help heal the world. I want them to do justice and love mercy. I want them to know that they are loved and adored no matter what they do or who they do it with. And I am willing to do a hell of a lot of work to help get them there. And make no mistake, it is frequently very hard work.

There’s a lot of work to be done, people! The earth needs savin’, the animals need protectin’, the poor need housin’, the naked need clothin’, the rivers need cleanin’, the kids need lovin’. We need God’s help to get all this done, but we are His co-workers, His commissioned agents, His proxies. There’s too much pain in the world for us to be self-indulgent or lazy for too long. Let’s get crackin’.

Thursday Short Poem: Collins’ “The Only Day in Existence”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2007
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

I am not sure there is any poet writing in America today more popular or widely known than Billy Collins; happily, in his case, his growing fame is well-deserved. I like this poem, even as I revolt against its theme. A true man of Los Angeles, a disciple of the Church of Endless Self-Created Possibility, I often have a hard time accepting that sometimes, some days, I need to be the pensive student of the day, as quiet as the goldfish in winter. The role of poetry, like Scripture, is sometimes to hearten, sometimes to chasten, and sometimes to remind of our own limitations. This is such a poem.

The Only Day in Existence

The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But the morning light is only the first line
in the play of this day—
the only day in existence—
the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
the thin bedroom curtains

as the beginning of a lecture
I will listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.

More on young women and perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the enduring fear of the “slut”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 25, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Sexuality, Teaching, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 15 Comments

It’s a busy day here, and the great disappointment of the next few hours is that I won’t get to see any of the Liverpool-Chelsea Champions League semifinal.

I saw Courtney Martin on MSNBC this morning, talking about her book. I’ve got her book, and Jessica Valenti’s new one, both coming in the mail. I look forward to reviewing them both on this blog. Based on excerpts that appeared here, I had some comments here and here about the Martin tome.

I am so glad that a larger discussion of women’s perfectionism and people-pleasing is really taking off in the blogosphere. Of all the posts I’ve put up this year, my Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary is perhaps the one of which I am most proud. And I was delighted to read an outstanding take on this same subject, also inspired by the Martin book, from Amanda Marcotte. Read the whole post, but this insight is key:

My theory is that perfectionism is the tribute that women with opportunities pay to sexism.

Read the rest of the post to see that idea fleshed out.

One of Amanda’s commenters got me thinking, asking:

Any thoughts, Amanda, on the connection between perfectionism and purity? I sometimes feel as if perfectionism is the new purity, or the traditional demand for female purity in new clothes, or women’s response to still-current demands for female purity, but I’m wondering if you see this connection as well.

Amanda hasn’t answered yet, but I’ve been mulling it this morning.

One aspect of perfectionism and people-pleasing that I haven’t touched on is related to the “purity” obsession, and that’s the tendency I’ve noticed in many young women for perfectionism (and compulsive dieting) to be closely connected to sexual guilt. Bear with me, as I’m musing here — this is a theory in process of being developed, but it’s grounded in years of teaching and youth work.

A disturbing number of young women still seem profoundly conflicted about sex. Statistics tell us — and my own experience as a pro-feminist gender studies professor and longtime youth leader tells me as well — that a great many teenage girls and college-aged women are “having sex.” Some of them come from conservative backgrounds in which pre-marital sex is seen as immoral and sinful, and some come from more liberal environments where “safety” rather than “purity” is emphasized. Some speak (and write in their journals) enthusiastically and positively about their sexual decision-making, while others seem tormented by ambivalence, anxiety, and guilt.

It’s remarkable how persistent the notion that “good girls don’t” has proven. Young women born in the last two decades, a generation after the sexual revolution, and raised in tolerant, even feminist households, still sometimes quietly report (and again, folks, this is all anecdotal based on my teaching and mentoring experience) guilt and conflict over their sexual choices. Even when they didn’t absorb the “True Love Waits” message from parents or pastors or peers, they couldn’t help but pick up the romantic ideal of “waiting ’till marriage” from somewhere in the broader culture. Though Disney movies never explicitly reference virginity before marriage, the girls I work with “assume” that the “princesses are all virgins.” And the number of high school and college-aged young women whose views were partly shaped by the “princess” culture — which is surely part of the “purity” culture” — is stunningly high.

Again, all anecdotal: I think there is a connection between guilt (or at least ambivalence) over pre-marital sex and an intensified perfectionism. Far too many of our little sisters, far too many of my students, still internalize the message that having sex too early makes them into “bad girls” and “sluts.” And whether or not they articulate that sense of undeserved shame, it seems to me that many of them overcompensate by trying all the harder to be “perfect and pure” in other areas. The desire to mold the body to more closely meet an unobtainable ideal often seems to intensify once a young woman becomes sexually active, and I don’t think it’s always because of an anxiety about pleasing a boyfriend. It seems at least partially linked to a desire to prove that “even if I’m having sex, I’m still a ‘good girl’, and I prove my ‘goodness’ through self-denial, through exercise, through even more of an effort to live up to a societal ideal.”

Even in our own relatively liberated era, pre-marital virginity remains an explicit ideal for many and an implicit ideal for many more. Many of my students talk boldly and confidently about their sexual decision-making in one breath, and express occasional wistfulness about “a white wedding” and “waiting until then” in the other. (Some, of course, are completely unconflicted, and I don’t mean to diminish them. Then again, there are some young women who don’t feel tortured by the ideal of slenderness either. Would that their numbers were greater!) Many of them seem to feel as if by choosing to become sexually active, they’ve fallen short. And some of these seem to compensate for their own perceived failure in this one area by redoubling their efforts in another. Call it the “if I’m earning straight As and I’m volunteering 20 hours a week and I’m on this committee and president of that club and playing this position on that team and keeping my body at that weight, then I can’t possibly be the bad girl that somewhere inside of me I’m afraid that I am” syndrome.

Some of my secular feminist allies may doubt that this guilt (and the concomitant compensation with perfectionism) is linked as closely to sex as I suggest. My conservative friends may embrace the theory as further “evidence” that pre-marital sex is bad, particularly for young women. If even women who weren’t pressured to “wait” by their families still seem sometimes to feel conflicted about their sexual choices, my right-wing buddies will no doubt argue, isn’t this evidence that pre-marital sexual activity violates some natural desire on the part of all women to save themselves for their husbands? I am reluctant to give that old canard any credence at all, and I fear that I may be doing so here. (After all, it’s obvious that chastity is no prophylaxis against anxiety or people-pleasing; spend time in any conservative evangelical community, and you’ll run into lots of exhausted, weight-obsessed virgins.)

I write as a professor and a mentor who has been teaching classes on gender and sexuality for well over a decade; I’ve read countless student journals and led innumerable small group discussions with both college and high-school women. I am convinced, as Courtney Martin is convinced, that guilt, perfectionism, anorexia, and people-pleasing are epidemic among young women today, and that that epidemic extends to every strata of American society. I am worried that despite generations of progress to create a more egalitarian society, many young women today still feel a crushing pressure to live up to unobtainable ideals. The shame and guilt they struggle with is different, perhaps, from that with which their grandmothers wrestled, but it is no less debilitating. And I am at least somewhat convinced that the ancient, ugly, lingering stigma of the “slut” and the “dirty girl” plays a considerable part in the “perfection projects” of a great many young women today.

A note about leather, veganism, and the slow pace of transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2007
in Animal Rights, Food and Veganism
. 20 Comments

I’ve been promising more posts on the vegan life, and here’s another one. Today’s topic: what to do about leather. First, a general update:

I’m as close to being fully vegan as I’ve ever been. No eggs, no dairy, no meat, no fish. More fruit, more vegetables, more nuts, more seeds. I’m wary of how easy it is to turn into a “junk-food vegan”; I take it easy on the wheat products and the textured soy protein. There’s a limit to how much soy I want to pump into my body.

I pack a lot of snacks wherever I go. When I was simply vegetarian, I could always count on being able to find a protein bar or a prepacked salad somewhere. Being vegan means being very intentional about what I have with me; I don’t like being caught with no vegan options in the midst of an afternoon snack attack. Careful planning — careful shopping, careful filling of tupperware with nuts, fruit, and other fun things — helps prevent the tempttion to fall.

As for leather: I own a lot of it. I have a dozen pairs of nice leather shoes, leather belts, a leather wallet, a suede jacket. I don’t have the resources to immediately replace them all. I am committed to not buying any more leather items, and to asking my loved ones not to give me anything leather. As these items wear out, I can replace them one by one with vegan alternatives. But it seems wasteful to throw them all away, and I can’t afford to instantly replace them all even if I were to give them to charity. I’m aware that as a teacher and youth leader and “public vegan”, wearing leather sends a mixed message. My goal is to get to the point where I’m not wearing any animal product (and that will mean, I suppose, foregoing the pleasures of a silk shirt or boxers). It will mean not only buying vegan clothing, but doing my best to ensure that the human producers of that clothing were well-paid. It narrows my shopping options, but I’ve found some excellent sources for good things. In the meantime, I’ll have some leather on me more often than not.

I am a great believer in incremental change. I ran a 5K before I ran a marathon. I gave up alcohol and drugs before I gave up cigarettes, and I still haven’t given up caffeine (and may never do so.) I gave up reckless promiscuity before I gave up “flirting”. I worked on meditating for five minutes before I tried going for ten. And I gave up red meat before I gave up chicken, and I gave up chicken before I gave up cheese. I’ve given up buying leather before I’ve given up wearing it. Progressing in slow stages works for me.

Those who don’t want to see us change will be eager to point out where we’re not yet perfectly consistent. They try and convince us that we must do everything perfectly, or not at all. They try and discourage folks from making positive changes by emphasizing that it will be hypocritical not to change everything all at once. Their goal is to keep us stuck, to keep us believing that transformation is too difficult, too painful. They scare off the aspiring vegan by saying, “If you still wear leather, you’re a fraud.” Well, no. If you still buy leather, you might want to think about your values — but continuing to wear a useable item until it is no longer so is hardly proof of weak principles, only of financial limitations.

My veganism, like my feminism, like my faith, is rooted in the cry of Aslan at the end of the Narnia books: “Further up, further in.” There’s always more growing to do, and it won’t be finished for a long, long time.

Ms. hits the stands

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2007
in Feminism, Links and Memories
. 3 Comments

The spring issue of Ms. Magazine hits the stands today. After nearly forty years and many editorial changes, it still remains vital, intelligent, essential reading. (How many other folks out there subscribe to both Ms. and First Things?)

There’s an interesting article on “what you can do with a women’s studies degree.” I’m happy to say I’ve inspired quite a few young women (and one or two fellas) to consider a women’s studies major, and a great many of them have asked me that very question. Here’s an answer I’m happy to give them: with a women’s studies degree, you could become president of Harvard. Drew Gilpin Faust, the first woman to head this country’s most celebrated university, was formerly the head of the women’s studies department at Penn. You could also end up on a reality show:

Becky Lee is representative of this
new generation. After acquiring a
B.A. in women’s studies from the
University of Michigan in 2000, Lee
went on to law school and then
worked as an advocate for domesticviolence
survivors. While doing this
work, she was approached to audition
for the popular reality TV show
Survivor. Thinking it could serve as a
good platform for her cause, she
joined the cast, and while she found
that most of her statements on domestic
violence got left on the editing
floor, she has used the Survivor experience
to expand her advocacy.

“I came in third and used my
$75,000 prize to found a fund for
domestic-violence prevention with a
special focus on immigrant women
from marginalized communities,” she
says. “Now when I make public appearances
for the show, I talk about
the fund as a way to raise the issue of
domestic violence for mainstream
audiences.”

Cool.

I have an affection for Ms. Magazine. I grew up with it, you see. My mother was an early member of the National Organization for Women and a Ms. subscriber from its inception. I’ve inherited from her an interest in subscribing to lots and lots of magazines (yes, I recycle them.) As a child, I remember that Ms, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books enjoyed prominence on our living room coffee table. I still read the first and last of these, but long ago tired of TNR.

My mother very briefly considered dropping her Ms. subscription when I was about eight, after a front-page article on women’s sexuality caught my eye. It must have been about 1974 or ‘75, and my mother was somewhat discomfited when I came to her, innocently waving the magazine, asking, “Mom, what’s an orgasm?” My mother, raised in a generation of feminists who did not see an open and cheerful discussion of the clitoris as essential to women’s liberation, wondered if the Schwyzer family ought to take a break from the magazine for a while. Somehow, I got the idea that Ms. Magazine had things “I wasn’t supposed to read yet”, and thus eagerly sought out copies.

Many of my friends tell me that they pored over their father’s Playboys when they were children, curious to discover what “all the fuss was about.” I didn’t see a Playboy (or any other kind of porn) until I was in the throes of adolescence. But I darn sure studied Ms. Magazine very closely in the mid-’70s, and though much of what I read went right over my head, it surely formed part of my very early sex education. And perhaps it helped make me what I am today.

The system worked for me: more thoughts on Cho Seung-Hui and the response to serious mental illness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Memories and Narcissism and Borderline Personality
. 23 Comments

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings and the revelation that the culprit had been hospitalized in the past for profound depression, the conversation has turned to the various ways we treat mental illness. Some have called for draconian measures. Jill at Feministe provides this quote from someone named Beth:

If you ask me, if we are going to let these crazies run free, not forcing them to be institutionalized, then we need to goddamn well do a better job of protecting the public from them. There’s a reason why they used to be locked up, and it was to protect society. Virginia Tech totally dropped the goddamn ball with this guy; there’s no reason why they should have to educate dangerous people. I know, it’s all about wishy-washy liberal ideals–can’t deny someone with mental illness their “right” to a college education…

I have only occasionally touched on my own battles with mental illness. (See here, here, here, here).

I was first diagnosed with mental illness in college, back in the spring of 1987. After a very violent episode of “cutting”, I was placed on the first of what would be many “5150s”. A 5150 takes its name from the California code that allows 72-hour involuntary “holds” in locked psychiatric facilities for those who are considered a danger to themselves or others. I was 5150ed in April 1987, April 1990, June 1996 (two separate occasions) and June 1998. I was a voluntary admit in June 1989. It totals half-a-dozen stays in locked facilities. (My worst time of the year has always been spring; I tend to be at my lowest between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. I have many theories why, but this ain’t the time.)

I was lucky, so lucky: all the hospitals I was locked up in (both in Berkeley and Los Angeles) were private. They were good places, for the most part. In most I stayed only a few days, but in June 1996 (after two suicide attempts three weeks apart, the second nearly successful) I was placed on an “extended” fourteen-day hold. I talked about my various diagnoses in this post; as I said then I was usually described as having a heavy-duty case of “cluster B’ disorders: Narcissistic, Antisocial, and above all, Borderline Personality Disorder… Doctors frequently added phrases I remember vividly, like “with psychotic features or “prone to micro-psychotic episodes.”

At Feministe, a reader named Psyche wrote:

The real problem is that there aren’t really intermediate states between involuntary commitment (the experience of which, at least the way our mental health systems works now) is comparable to being arrested in terms of humiliation and unpleasantness. Perhaps worse in terms of the dehumanization and total loss of agency. And locked wards in mental hospitals, even the best ones that money can give you access to, are pretty much the last places you want to spend any time, especially if you’re a borderline functional person, you’re surrounded by people who are by and large incapable of sustained social interaction, in an environment with very few distractions, and with no privacy and no control over how you spend your time.

Well, yes and no. Mostly “no.” The locked wards I’ve been on (for, as I said, as long as a few weeks at a time) weren’t Club Med. But they weren’t prisons, either. I’ve spent time in five different locked facilities (I was only hospitalized in one place twice), and I was always thrilled to leave. But while I was there I generally felt safe, cared for. Each time I was locked up, it was after an episode where I had done something so self-destructive that it was obvious to me (and to everyone else) I couldn’t care for myself. Yes, these “psychotic episodes” were brief in my case; I was able to return to functioning (including working on a dissertation and teaching) within a short period of time after release. (I even wrote a paper in one psych ward.) Though I was fortunate in the sense that my illness was more episodic than chronic, I am also clear that all five of the locked wards on which I found myself were places where I got good, competent, even loving care.

I can still remember the faces of the various psych nurses who took care of me. I often ended up in the wards with physical injuries that needed attention (usually cuts or burns); once it seemed likely I had damaged my heart and my kidneys and my liver with one particularly nasty overdose that led to an extensive stay in the ICU before being “released” onto a 5150. (A whole lot of Ritalin and Anafranil and Klonipin, if you’re keeping tabs — quite a cocktail of about 100 pills. I’ve had my stomach pumped three times, and vomited up that charcoal stuff they give you another time or four.) The nurses who took care of me were sometimes loving, sometimes brisk, but always, always, they made me feel safe.

I ate a lot of fruit cocktail (always served in locked wards, it’s a staple.) I made moccasins in occupational therapy. I sat in community meetings with the paranoid schizophrenics and the bipolars in the full bloom of their manic episodes. I read back issues of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Two years apart, I watched England lose two heartbreaking matches (to Germany in Euro ‘96 and Argentina in the ‘98 World Cup); I was hospitalized for both. I was in a locked ward for Tiananmen Square in 1989, and watched the coverage of Khomeini’s funeral. (I was lucky — most of the wards had cable.) I read all of Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy”; even now, rereading it as I have a couple of times, it brings back those days. And oh my, did I smoke. I had my visitors load me up with packs of Parliaments and Marlboro Reds (and once, a few Djarums.) I haven’t smoked in years, but I puffed away with the best of them every time I went behind the locked doors.

I know I was lucky in many ways. I was a young white, not unattractive male with insurance. I was well-spoken and articulate, and tried always to be polite. (Once, when I was in restraints, I apologized profusely to the nurses who catheterized me, saying that I felt “dreadful” that they had to do this for me.) I was also obviously no danger to anyone other than myself. When I was in Northridge Hospital in 1998, I wandered the halls in Tigger slippers which the staff seemed to find cute and endearing. My illness often made me pathetic, but it rarely made me nasty when I was in the acute stages. (Outside the hospital, I could be very antisocial.)

I was lucky too, in a sense, that when I was “in an episode” my behavior was so bizarre and dangerous that I was instantly 5150ed. Had my illness been less obviously destructive, I might have resisted voluntary hospitalization (something I only consented to once). I know many people struggle with family members who refuse to seek help; I am so fortunate that my disease left me with no illusion that I could function or survive without treatment!

I am grateful that privacy laws kept my condition from Cal when I was an undergrad, UCLA when I was a grad student, and PCC when I was a professor. I can disclose my medical history now because I have been healthy for nigh on nine years, with little fear of the darkness returning. I am very concerned that the reaction to the Cho Seung-Hui situation may lead to calls to deprive those who seek treatment for mental illness of these basic and essential rights. What good would it have done to have me removed from school, fired from my teaching position, held longer than minimally necessary? Am I more of service here where I am or rotting in an institution? After eleven years and six hospitalizations, I might well have been considered a prime candidate for long-term commitment to a mental facility. Blessedly, the system allowed me to return to my life, to my family, to my duties as soon as I was able to do so. In my case, folks, the system really worked.

Medication, intensive therapy (including a couple years of analysis on a couch), growing older, and a Twelve Step program (or three): all of these played vital roles in my recovery. God’s grace allowed me to get still enough to make use of these tools. My story turned out very differently than that of Cho Seung-Hui. But if he is the face of where the system failed, let mine — for those who know me — be the face of where it worked.

Some thoughts on Courtney Martin, young women’s exhaustion, “if/then” thinking and the corporate appropriation of feminist language

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2007
in Feminism, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 25 Comments

Since I posted yesterday on this excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book, I’ve been thinking more about this one phrase of hers that troubled me:

We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

On the one hand, I recognize the truth here — so many young women do hear the first message as the second. And Martin is right that for a particular generation of feminists — those raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the mothers of today’s young perfectionists — the “you can be anything” message was absolute gospel. But (and I say this not having read the entire book yet, only this excerpt) I’m worried that casual readers might come away with the impression that organized feminism is somehow chiefly to blame for the crushing, exhausting burdens our little sisters now carry in their hearts and in their bodies.

I worry about this interpretation because it’s one I sometimes hear from my more conservative students in my women’s studies course. These young women are keenly aware of the pressure to be thin and beautiful, independent and multi-faceted. Like their sisters, they are often raw and tired and frustrated. But somehow they’ve picked up the impression that feminism is to blame for their exhaustion. They come into the course with a sense of the past (picked up from both the mainstream and conservative media) that is idealized and sanitized. And their sense is that not so long ago (usually, they point to the supposed halcyon days of the 1950s), women had fewer pressures. One young woman wrote in her journal a year or two ago (I remember her words fairly vividly, though this is surely a paraphrase):

I wish I lived fifty years ago. I would then only have to be a wife and a mother. I could be curvy, like Marilyn, instead of super-thin. I wouldn’t have to worry about both a relationship and a career. I wouldn’t have to cope with the mixed message of “love is all you need to be happy” and “don’t rely on a man, stay single and free.” I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to please everybody, instead I could just focus on pleasing my husband and my children. Yes, I would have much less freedom to do things, but I would have so much more freedom from pressure. And maybe this course will prove me wrong, but it seems to me that feminism, by asking us to do everything men do as well as what women do, has made things worse for us.

(By the way, perhaps in honor of FDR, I often talk about “freedom from” and “freedom to” in the context of feminist history. That dyad comes up early in the course, and my students get sick of hearing about it.)

My student — and perhaps Courtney Martin, though I can’t gauge the latter’s intent until I read the whole darned book — makes a serious and common mistake. On the one hand, many young women today have no authentic sense of just how rigid, stifling, and fundamentally unsatisfying domesticity was for millions of American women two generations ago. I give them excerpts from The Feminine Mystique, but many of them remain captivated by the fantasy that a good marriage and healthy children (perhaps with a nice house, white picket fence, and so forth) is all that any woman needs for deep and enduring happiness. While they admit to considerable cynicism about the chances of finding “a good guy”, many of them speak wistfully and nostalgically of a golden age when women could be softer, rounder, and less pressured to perform in the classroom and the boardroom. Trying to convince them that that “golden age” existed only for a privileged and fortunate few is sometimes hard work. Some folks just don’t want their bubbles burst.

I call these students my “if/then” kids, because so many of them say something like “IF I met the right guy, THEN I would consider getting married and staying home with the kids. It’s what I’d really like to do, but I just don’t think I’m likely to find someone. But if I did, then…” If/then thinking depresses me no end, because it seems to suggest that women’s pursuit of independence is only a response to the lack of honorable, decent, reliable men. If/then thinking suggests that “if only more men were reliable and willing to settle down and stay committed, then feminism wouldn’t be necessary.” It suggests that the goals of the women’s movement were developed entirely in response to bad male behavior, and though there is some historic truth to this, the “if/then” analysis completely underestimates what many feminists (including this one) argue is the healthy and perfectly natural desire for women to be self-determining agents in every aspect of their lives.

So back to the point about feminism and pressure. It’s absolutely true that feminists have told young women “You can be whatever you want to be.” It is absolutely true that the feminist movement has opened up extraordinary possibilities for women, possibilities that simply would not otherwise have existed. And it is true that with more choices there comes the inevitable pressure to make a choice; that’s part and parcel of growing up But no feminist I know now or in the past forty years has pushed the “superwoman” complex onto her daughters! That complex is pushed by a variety of decidedly non-feminist forces (big media, the consumer products industry, big fashion) which realized that women’s spending patterns are heavily driven by insecurity. A woman who is happy in her own skin is inclined, all things considered, to spend a good deal less on clothes, make-up, accessories, diet pills, and so forth. Women’s anxiety and corporate profits are clearly, almost inextricably linked at this point.

Feminists did, as Martin says, tell their daughters “You can be all that you want to be.” But it was Vogue and Elle, MTV and the WB that told those same young women, “yes, you can be anything you like, but here’s our narrowly defined, elusive, unobtainable ideal. Come chase it!” The magazines and the televison programs learned that cloaking their marketing in a thin veneer of feminist rhetoric made it exciting, edgy, palatable. And not surprisingly, many young women today feel alienated by the language of female empowerment because for as long as they’ve been alive, that language has been used to sell them something else that is “indispensable”. They confuse authentic feminism, which is desperately concerned with women’s happiness and self-determination, with a corporate culture that skillfully appropriated that language of personal fulfillment merely to increase its own profits. They don’t fully trust the message because the message has been stolen.

It is undeniable that young women are under colossal emotional pressure these days. The guilt about food, the guilt about failing to people-please, the guilt about letting down everyone around them; it’s all crushing. And it’s true that many of these overworked and anxious young women wouldn’t have the same pressure to succeed if there hadn’t been a feminist movement. But the anxiety they feel isn’t rooted in women’s liberation, it’s rooted in young women’s susceptability to the overwhelming pressure from media and market forces, forces that see a bottomless gold mine in the increased buying power of women. But that buying power will only lead to corporate profits if young women can be kept anxious, unsatisfied, and filled with self-loathing.

“We carry the world of guilt” — an excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 22, 2007
in Feminism and Youth
. 1 Comment

I’m delighted to promote Courtney Martin’s new book (just published this week), Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, from which a substantial excerpt is available here. Here’s the bit that really grabbed me:

We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers. We carry the world of guilt — center of families, keeper of relationships, caretaker of friends — with a new world of control/ambition — rich, independent, powerful. We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

We must get A’s. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless.

We grow hungrier and hungrier with no clue what we are hungry for. The holes inside of us grow bigger and bigger.

Martin’s got it almost right. (Bold emphasis was mine, by the way.) It jives with what I was trying to say in this post last month about the girls in my high school youth group. Speaking for a generation of supportive, hovering, encouraging parents and teachers, I wrote: we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation.

The one thing I am leery about is Martin’s passing, mild indictment of feminism. At its best, contemporary feminism is more than a “you can have it all” message. It is concerned not only with giving a message of empowerment, but with how our little sisters hear and internalize that message. There is plenty of blame to go around for the current predicament — but I don’t think much needs to be shouldered by feminism.

I can’t wait to read Martin’s book. I do hope her description of the solution is as accurate and compelling as her diagnosis of the problem.

“Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower”: Brad Wilcox and patriarchal religion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 20, 2007
in Christianity, Faith, Marriage and Men and Masculinity
. 12 Comments

I’ve often mentioned my fondness for the conservative Catholic journal, First Things. I agree with, oh, 5% of what I read within its pages. But my goodness, the quality of the writing is invariably top-notch. Sometimes what I read raises my blood pressure a bit, but that’s not always a bad thing.

The May issue (not fully available online yet) has a short piece by the current boy wonder of the “traditional family” movement, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox. (I reviewed his “Soft Patriarchs” book here.) This month’s article, “As the Family Goes”, predicts (without much regret, I note) that the decline in attendance at liberal, mainline Protestant churches will continue. Wilcox’s theory is moderately interesting: the most reliable church attenders are adults with young children; by focusing on non-traditional families, gays and lesbians, and single folks, the mainline denominations (like my own Episcopal Church) have signed their own demographic death warrants.

Though I disagree strongly with that analysis, that’s not what grabbed me. It’s this zinger that Wilcox drops in:

Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower.

I read that, and choked on a very nice fruit smoothie. I have long railed against the culturally pervasive “myth of male weakness.” (See here, here, here). The myth of male weakness takes many forms, of course: it’s often used to blame women (or their “immodest” clothing) for bad male behavior. If men are weak, then women must be strong, the theory goes — and women must do for men what they can’t or won’t do for themselves, such as setting healthy boundaries. The myth of male weakness is an odious lie, peddled by those who are eager to excuse bad male behavior and to force women into the traditional straitjacket of nurturer and defender of virtue.

But Wilcox takes a different tack. Men, he believes, have “fragile faith” that needs “wifely encouragement to flower.” While the evolutionary biologists (or their popularizers) argue that men are sex-crazed, incapable of initiating restriction without women’s help, Wilcox the sociologist argues that women have to do more than save men from sexual chaos: women also have to nurture our weak spirituality. Wives, apparently, are gardeners; they must tend and prune and fertilize what is small and frail. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife that I am just a little seedling, and that it’s her job to make sure that my relationship with Christ continues to grow! (The image of the gardener — of making things flower — is ubiquitous in the New Testament. But women aren’t the gardeners, God is, and we are all called to equal relationship with our God).

Traditional, orthodox (small “o”) Christianity often collapses on its own contradictions. On the one hand, women are “stronger” than men; men’s faith is “comparatively fragile.” On the other hand, women are supposed to submit to men (but not vice versa), and men alone are to hold the role of pastor. So, to stick with Wilcox’s metaphor, the gardener ought to submit to the headship of the plant. It makes my head hurt.

Patriarchal culture has often tried to appease the women whom it oppresses by reassuring them that “women really are stronger than men.” Women are told, over and over, that “behind every great man is a woman” and that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Women are sometimes even told that they are morally superior to men; while men “need” to exercise overt power in order to feel “like real men”, women can be content with the more subtle powers of the nurturer, the adviser, the mother, the wife, the gardener. Thus in a very real sense, the survival of patriarchal values depends on sustaining the myth of male weakness. The idea that a woman’s role is to complement and nurture (and gently submit) only makes sense if we believe that men are too fragile, too self-destructive, too vulnerable to lust or pride to make healthy, wise, faithful decisions without a woman’s help.

I love my wife. I love that she and I share a vibrant faith in God, and that we are each committed to our individual and mutual transformation. We encourage each other, nurture each other, support each other on the journey we are taking together. Somedays my faith is more fragile, not because I am a man, but because I’m having a hard day. On those days, my wonderful wife bucks me up with her wise words and her warm hugs. On other days, my wife’s certainty grows more frail — and I am there for her, tending to her, standing behind her to offer her my unconditional support.

All of us who believe will be fragile at times. All of us are capable of extraordinary strength. And our chromosomes and our anatomy have nothing to do with it.