… include articles with titles like 24 Hours in Tijuana, my little sister’s latest piece in the Santa Barbara Independent. Elizabeth is 28 years old and capable of kicking her eldest brother’s butt, but still, I feel obligated to fuss. Actually, it’s a post about youth ministry, something for which she and I share a passion.
Archive for May, 2007
I’ve been getting a number of queries from folks who want to know my response to the recent spate of “death by veganism” stories in the national press. I will get there, I promise — I’m just a bit burned out from writing about food and animal rights issues. Soon.
I’m not burned out writing about men.
If you watch sports, you may have seen the ESPN News ads (here’s one at Google Video). The premise of the commercial is that without the help of ESPN News, a fella may find himself “talking out of his ass” when discussing sports. The ads feature groups of men gathered together playing cards, or at a barbecue; one makes a demonstrably false assertion about sports (such as “They finally got the college football rankings right.”) The other men look at him with a mixture of pity and harsh judgment, and the camera closes in on the buttocks of the poor lad who made the horrible error of speaking in ignorance. ESPN News — with its 24/7 coverage of American sports — is offered as the best prophylaxis against what I suppose we ought to call “homosocial humiliation.”
As a sports fan and a gender studies prof, I appreciate the candor of the ESPN ads. They knowingly and honestly point to the way in which a great many men use their knowledge of sports as currency with their male peers. Being able to discuss football, baseball, NASCAR, basketball knowledgeably is surely one of the most ubiquitous markers of masculinity in contemporary society. Men who don’t know each other well often use “sports talk” as a way of maintaining conversation and avoiding awkward silence. Sports talk becomes a social lubricant for an extraordinary variety of men; it has the happy ancillary benefit of uniting men of different social backgrounds and ethnic groups. In contemporary American culture, is there any topic that so quickly binds and unites men (who might otherwise be divided by class status, race, and so forth) than an enthusiastic discussion of sports?
I love sports. But before I loved them for their own sake, I loved them for the way in which they brought me closer to the men I admired. When I was growing up, I had no greater hero than my cousin Scott, eight years my senior. When he was in his teens and I was a child, I tried to follow him everywhere, no doubt much to his annoyance. In June 1975, I had just turned eight and Scott was not quite sixteen. We were at my family ranch in Northern California to begin a long vacation, and Scott showed up one day clutching a small black and white television. (We had no permanent TV at the ranch in those days; now we’ve got the satellite dish and accompanying gadgets.)
As any Bay Area basketball fan will tell you, 1975 was the year the Golden State Warriors won their only NBA title to date. And Scott wanted to watch the final match at the Ranch. We huddled in one corner of the old house, watching the tiny, fuzzy images on the screen. I remember hearing names I had never heard before — Al Attles, Rick Barry. I remember Golden State won, beating the Washington Bullets (now Wizards). But mostly, I remember that I got to sit next to my hero Scott. I remember that Scott, normally taciturn, was quite vocal. I realized quickly that in order to get Scott to talk to me, I had to ask him questions about something that meant something to him. So I asked him about the Warriors, about basketball, about the game we were watching. Patiently and at far greater length than on any subject, Scott explained the NBA to me. And I was hooked.
For years and years in my childhood, sports were the way in which I connected with my male cousins (and my dear late Uncle Peter, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago.) I learned the rules of every major American sport by sitting next to them on the couch. And I learned that I could have a much better conversation with them if I read the sports page in the newspaper or listened to the sports report on the radio before a family gathering. I grasped quickly that being able to talk about sports was the admission price to the masculine community I craved.
As an adolescent and an adult, I discovered that I cared about sports in their own right. I learned that there were some sports I didn’t care for (baseball), and some about which I was downright passionate (college football). I discovered I had an interest in sports that weren’t particularly popular with other men (I folllow women’s college softball, and I keep very close tabs on high school and collegiate cross-country). I became a soccer fan, and find that when I am in England (or among soccer aficionados in the States), that knowledge serves me well. And I’m not afraid to admit that I don’t know much of anything at all about hockey or NASCAR, and don’t have any desire to learn. In other words, slowly but surely, what I enjoy watching and talking about has become increasingly my own and correspondingly less about connecting with other men.
But in my relationships with men today, I still use sports as a way to build up a connection with fellas who might otherwise be guarded and unapproachable. And believe me, I’ve used this in many places. When my wife and I were honeymooning in South Africa a couple of years ago, we had a rather truculent tour guide for one portion of the trip. I discovered he was a cricket fan, and the next morning, I frantically scoured the newspapers for the latest cricket news. I didn’t want to impress him with my very limited understanding of that bizarre game, but I did want to be able to ask him intelligent questions. Once I started asking him about the Proteas (the South African national team), he lit up with pleasure. For the remainder of our time with him, he was especially warm and friendly towards me and my wife. I didn’t think of what I was doing as manipulative, because I wasn’t trying to “get” anything from him. I just wanted to build a bond with another man, and in this case, cricket was the way to do it.
It saddens me, of course, that so many men find it difficult to connect with each other over anything other than sports. It saddens me that those men who aren’t interested in sport are either forced to fake it (in which case, they risk being “revealed as an ass-talker”, the fate of which the ESPN ads warn), or they are simply frozen out of these vital male-bonding rituals. And of course, many women experience exactly the same thing. I know a great many women who love sports, and for some, their love of sports began as a way to grow closer to their fathers or older brothers. That’s not to say that many women don’t love sports in their own right, but it’s surely true that an exceptional number of girls realize early on in life that sitting on the couch with their dads watching baseball, hoops, or footy is an excellent way to connect with a man who is otherwise emotionally unavailable.
Though I use sports talk to connect with men (often in the hopes of subtly moving the conversation to deeper topics), I am also careful, when I’m in groups of guys, not to let sports talk become a yardstick for measuring masculinity. I try and be very good about sensing which men are and which men aren’t interested in talking about whether Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame, or the relative merits of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, or whether Tottenham’s acquisition of Gareth Bale can finally lift them to the Champions League. Too often, men use sports knowledge as a way of establishing a hierarchy, a rigid social structure in which those whose opinions that are grounded in “fact” and expressed most loudly trump those whose views seem less certain, whose insights are less clear.
I love sport. I like talking about sports — some of the time. And I very much want to help my brothers move beyond the use of sports talk as the primary way of forming bonds with each other. I’m saddened by how limiting that reliance on sports is; it’s ultimately a pretty thin glue to bond men together. I’ll still use sports talk as a way to disarm men (before I subtly foist my radical pro-feminist, evangelical Protestant, vegan animal rights agenda upon them), but I always remember that sport is a starting topic, not a finishing one. Sports talk can serve as a promising trailhead into much deeper, and much richer conversation. But it will only be that trailhead if we’re willing to push.
Update:
Here’s the confession (you know how much my Puritanical soul loves to wax eloquent on my myriad shortcomings). There are times, especially when I’m coming somewhere to speak to a group of anti-feminist men about feminism, that I enjoy surprising them with my enthusiastic willingness to talk sport. People who only know me by reputation — or from my blog — often expect someone who fulfills a stereotype, and the stereotype of pro-feminist men as effeminate (and hence not interested in sports) is fairly entrenched. To the extent that it’s fun to break stereotypes, that’s cool, but I must be very careful to not reinforce the notion that those men who are “sports-literate” are thus more deserving of being taken seriously by their peers.
Auden is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest of all poets whose entire life-span was contained by the boundaries of the twentieth century. His references to animals are fewer, say, than those of Ted Hughes — but Hughes has a grim, thoroughly unsentimental detachment that I find a little terrifying. Auden’s reference to the “sinless world” of a sleeping dachsund shows up in his marvelous “Love Feast”, which was a Thursday Short Poem in December ‘04.
Auden wrote this poem in the summer of 1973, just months before he died. It is much less often anthologized than many of his works, but it is one of my favorites — even if I vigorously dispute his contention that animals are unconscious of God.
Address to the Beasts
For us who, from the moment
we first are worlded
lapse into disarray,
who seldom know exactly
what we are up to,
and, as a rule, don’t want to,
what a joy to know,
even when we can’t see or hear you,
that you are around,
though very few of you
find us worth looking at,
unless we come too close.
To you all scents are sacred
except our smell and those
we manufacture.
How promptly and ably
you execute Nature’s policies
and are never
lured into misconduct
except by some unlucky
chance imprinting.
Endowed from birth with good manners
you wag no snobbish elbows,
don’t leer,
don’t look down your nostrils
nor poke them into another
creature’s business.
Your own habitations
are cosy and private, not
pretentious temples.
Of course, you have to take lives
to keep your own, but never
kill for applause.
Compared with even your greediest
how Non-U
our hunting gentry seem.
Exempt from taxation,
you have never felt the need
to become literate,
but your oral cultures
have inspired our poets to pen
dulcet verses,
and, though unconscious of God,
your Sung Eucharists are
more hallowed than ours.
Instinct is commonly said
to rule you; I would call it
Common Sense.
If you cannot engender
a genius like Mozart,
neither can you
plague the earth
with brilliant sillies like Hegel
or clever nasties like Hobbes.
Shall we ever become adulted
as you all soon do?
It seems unlikely.
Indeed, one balmy day,
we might well become,
not fossils, but vapour.
Distinct now,
in the end we shall join you
(how soon all corpses look alike),
but you exhibit no signs
of knowing that you are sentenced.
Now that could be why
we upstarts are often
jealous of your innocence
but never envious?
I gave up Myspace a couple of years ago, and my reasons were explained here.
I decided this week to go on Facebook, largely because I had been told by many that it had all the good stuff of Myspace and (mostly) none of the bad. I like the way it’s based on networks and communities.
But I really joined because the Pandagon and Feministe blogs have Facebook groups now, and that’s too good to pass up. And I found some groups for people who love John Edwards and chinchillas, and that’s cool too. (So far, not many who are really passionate about both.)
I’m assuming that I won’t regret this. But it could turn into a time-waster, and time is not something I can afford to waste.
I’m saddened to learn that shoe manufacturer Adidas has successfully lobbied the California State Senate to permit the importation of kangaroo skin for use in the production of soccer (football) boots. Here’s the Los Angeles Times story
After years of assertive lobbying by Adidas, the California Senate voted Tuesday to legalize the import and sale of kangaroo skins so that soccer players can buy shoes made from the marsupials’ coveted leather.
Of the 55 species of kangaroos in Australia, six are commercially harvested and exported, and would be allowed if the bill is approved by the Assembly and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those species include red and eastern and western gray kangaroos.
Animal activists are fighting the proposal, which they say will lead to the deaths of endangered kangaroos because hunting is done at night and the species are difficult to differentiate. They also object to the rules of kangaroo hunting, which dictate that if a mother is killed the baby must be killed as well.
PETA’s press release is here, and it notes that David Beckham chooses to wear synthetic leather rather than anything made from animals. After being contacted by animal rights organizations, Beckham (who had not realized his Adidas Predator boots were made from kangaroo hide) chose a different shoe to wear.
The Times article notes that Beckham’s new team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, joined Adidas in lobbying the state Senate for passage of the kangaroo skin bill. Given that their future star has rejected kangaroo hide, and has gone on record explicitly against other footballers wearing kangaroo kit, this seems a poor choice on the part of the Galaxy.
The bill, SB 880, now goes to the state assembly. Californians, please contact your assembly member. (Contact info, and info on how to figure out who represents you, is on the left hand side of the page.)
Vanessa at Feministing takes issue with Naomi Wolf’s cover piece this past weekend in New York Magazine: The Porn Myth. It’s not a new article, it just seems to keep getting recycled. I commented on it back in May 2004.
One of the things about blogging for several years: one’s opinions and views evolve, and one is then left with the interesting archival evidence of that evolution. While consistency is surely a virtue, so too is a willingness to rethink one’s stance on key issues, especially in light of new information or further reflection. So, since Wolf’s piece reappeared online this week, I’m going to revisit what I said in 2004. More to the point, I’m going to reject much of what I had to say three years ago.
I am as thoroughly anti-porn as it gets, as any visitor to my pornography archive will quickly read. (That sounds more titillating than it us.) I agree with Wolf’s view that pornography tends to destroy authentic sexual appetite. She writes:
The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
Wolf talks of chats with college-aged women who relate their anxieties about competing with pornography, and what she writes rings true with me. Where Wolf falls down — and where Vanessa was right to challenge her, and I was wrong not to do so in 2004 — is that Wolf urges women to adopt modesty and concealment as a strategy for reenergizing the male libido. Wolf is enchanted by the story of an observant Jewish friend of hers, a woman who allows only her husband to see her hair, and the rest of the time, keeps it concealed under a wig or a scarf. Wolf writes:
I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.”
The red flag for me in 2007 (which wasn’t there in 2004) is the verb in bold. The implication is that in and of themselves, men lack the incentive and the ability to maintain a strong and vibrant sexual focus solely on their wives. It’s a great passage from Scripture she quotes, mind you, and one I love. Married men are called to direct all of their sexual energy towards their wives, even as both they and their wives age. But it’s not women’s job to “create mystery” in order to keep men excited! While marriage is surely a partnership, it is deeply misguided (if very traditional) to suggest that wives must strategize to keep their husbands from straying in act or thought, with flesh-and-blood mistresses or with cybersex.
The story Wolf tells of her bewigged friend Ilana is frustrating for this very reason. Wolf is on awe at what she imagines is the steamy eroticism of this very traditional Orthodox marriage, and is convinced that it is Ilana’s modesty that is the cause of the continued strong sexual charge between husband and wife. Coming at the end of an article about porn, it’s hard to miss the implication that Wolf is convinced that if more women would simply be more like Ilana (creating “mystery” by hiding themselves), more boyfriends and husbands would be more sexually excited by enduring monogamous relationships.
What’s wrong with this seemingly commonsensical analysis is, of course, that it’s rooted in the notion that men are hardwired to pursue “everlasting novelty.” The everlasting novelty thesis of male sexuality suggests that women who want monogamy from their male mates need to pursue an aggressive strategy in order to overcome a man’s “natural” programming to stray, to seek out what is new, to become fascinated with seeing (or touching, or possesing) new skin. According to this thesis (so memorably satirized in Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale) women need new outfits, new hairstyles, new transformations on a regular basis in order to fool their husbands and boyfriends into thinking that they are somehow a series of different women. Call it the “familiarity breeds contempt” theory of enduring sexual attraction.
Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for two people experimenting with new ideas for keeping their sexual life fresh and exciting. I understand completely that routine is indeed the enemy of eros. But there’s all the difference in the world between urging men and women not to get stuck in sexual ruts, and suggesting that women need to conceal themselves in order to capture and hold male attention. The former bit of advice doesn’t place any gender-based onus on one partner more than the other. The latter suggests that the male longing for everlasting novelty is women’s problem to solve, and that’s absolutely, shockingly, indefensibly wrong.
Whether or not promiscuity is hardwired into the male brain is ultimately irrelevant. Humans have free will strong enough to trump any programming. Just as we can learn to pee in toilets rather than wetting ourselves, we can learn not only to practice monogamy but to do so with enthusiasm. What I find so wonderfully challenging about monogamy isn’t just staying faithful. Not sleeping with other people, not flirting with other people, not fantasizing about other people — heck, that’s just the beginner’s class! (All good stuff, mind you.) The advanced class in monogamy work is maintaining strong and enduring sexual excitement. Monogamy is not merely about what you don’t do with others, it is also — at its very core — about what you do do with your partner. It is a mandate for both parties to be creative, to be persistent, to be brave. As a husband, my responsibility is to keep my sexual energy focused on my wife no matter what she wears, no matter what she weighs, regardless of whether or not she covers her gorgeous hair with a wig or a baseball cap or lets her curls down in public. My wife has the same responsibility towards me. This doesn’t mean we are obligated to please each other; it doesn’t give either of us the right to demand sex. But, practicing the mutual submission that Scripture calls us to, it means we don’t expect the other to be in charge of keeping us excited, aroused, hot.
Nothing exasperates me more than the enduring myth of male weakness. Nothing infuriates me more than the suggestion that it is women’s responsiblity to keep men focused, to keep men faithful, to keep men aroused. Naomi Wolf is, as far as I’m concerned, spot on accurate in her indictment of pornography. But her suggestion that women ought to adopt modesty as a strategy to keep their present (or future) boyfriends and husbands on track and away from porn is dead wrong.
Note: this thread is for feminist or feminist-friendly comments only.
Saturday night, my wife and I went to the wedding of some dear friends of ours. The groom works in the music and entertainment industries, and so it wasn’t at all surprising that dancing constituted the chief activity for most of the wedding guests.
(Parenthetically, I’ll note this: secular wedding receptions are longer than religious ones. I’ve gone to a heck of a lot of weddings in my day, and all things being equal, it seems that those couples who have never slept together, having waited dutifully until the Blessed Day, are understandably more eager to leave the reception early. They’ve got business to which to attend, business that may seem somewhat less pressing to those who’ve been lovers for a long time. I don’t know if there’s a study on pre-marital sex and time spent by newly married couples at their reception, but it does seem — based entirely on anecdotal evidence — that the newly married who are most interested in “dancing the night away” with their nearest and dearest are those who have spent lots of time together naked.)
In any case, we had a lot of dancing on Saturday night. And I watched as a number of the groom’s male friends clowned around on the dance floor. The mood was silly and playful (helped along by plenty of alcohol). A few of the guys began to engage in what I can only call the ritualistic mimicking of gay male behavior. Two or three of the guys would start “freaking” each other, rubbing their rears into the crotches of their friends, accompanied by lavish hand movements. Others broke into intricate, graceful, dance steps, twirling and dipping their male partners. All of these men, whom I know quite well, are straight. And they were all joyfully playing to a crowd of fellow dancers who gathered round them, hooting and laughing at the increasingly silly antics of their buddies.
I haven’t posted before on the ways in which straight men engage in “faux homosexual behavior” in order to reaffirm their masculinity. I wrote a long time ago about the ways in “faux bisexuality ” has become chic, even de rigeur for many teenage girls today. But I haven’t posted about the ways in which their male peers engage in similar behavior — albeit for a much different purpose.
Spend time chaperoning a high school dance these days, and don’t be surprised to see two or three girls not only dancing together but rubbing against each other with an exaggerated and entirely unconvincing eroticism. These displays always draw male attention, which seems to be their purpose. When I ask my high schoolers how often they’ve seen girls get pressured (by boys) to kiss other girls, they groan with familiarity. This is, of course, hardly an uncommented-upon phenomenon.
But spend time with boys and even men in their twenties and thirties in certain social situations, and you’ll see something that is almost analogous. It’s hardly new, of course. Going back decades, the heterosexual alpha males of college campuses have dressed up in drag at frat parties. What greater staple is there of the college or high school spring social than having football players dress up as cheerleaders, doing ridiculous imitations of can-can dances or dance routines? This behavior is seen at countless high school assemblies all across the country (CJ Pascoe recounts one such event vividly in her marvelous, Dude You’re a Fag.)
As any social scientist or gender researcher will tell you, boys don’t play at “faux femininity” or “faux homosexuality” in order to arouse their audience. This isn’t about “turning on the girls” in the way that young women’s ersatz bisexual displays are often aimed at gaining male attention. Rather, these young men dance together and rub against one another and put on women’s clothes in order to reinforce their masculinity. Their displays are always greeted by gales of laughter and cheering. The boys who pretend to be girls (or who pretend to be gay, which in high school often amounts to the same thing) see the laughter as validation. The audience laughs at the husky offensive lineman in his cheerleading skirt because, after all, it is supposed to be utterly absurd for anyone to question his raw masculinity. Much of what is funny is rooted in what is incongruous and contradictory — and thus those boys and men whose feminine or gay antics draw the greatest laughter get their masculinity and their heterosexuality validated. The joke is obvious: “Isn’t it wild to see Bubba in his miniskirt? What makes it funny is that he’s so strong, so big, so male, so straight.”
Many queer folks are, understandably, uncomfortable with these displays. At first glance, the behavior of these ‘alpha males’ seems deliciously subversive. A hopeful observer might want to believe that these thirty-something men grinding on the dance floor together, these college lads dressed up like Paris Hilton, are evidence of a wonderful new willingness to flout conventional attitudes towards gender roles. But spend five minutes around these guys, listen to the hooting and the hollering that always accompanies these displays, and you’ll get the message pretty quick: this isn’t subverting a homophobic and sexist culture, it’s subtly (and more often, not so subtly) reinforcing it. The men who engage in this behavior aren’t any more accepting of homosexuality than their peers who refrain from these displays; rather, these displays boost the “masculinity quotient” of the young men involved. If too much anxiety about being labeled “gay” or “feminine” is seen as evidence of weakness, what better way to show off one’s sturdy self-confidence than to assume the role of what one so obviously is not?
In my day, I’ll confess I often engaged in — and even initiated — this sort of behavior. In grad school, I had a buddy named Cale. Cale was a rarity: an enormous former football player for a division I-AA school who was getting a doctorate in medieval history at UCLA. Cale was beefy (6′4″, 270 or so) and remarkably quick for someone of his size. He and I bonded because we were the only two medievalists who cared really passionately about virtually all sports (Cale could talk knowledgeably about golf and fishing as well as football). And somehow someone started a joke that Cale and I were lovers. We were both married at the time (to our first wives, this was nearly twenty years ago), and seemingly, our heterosexual credentials were firmly in place. But without ever naming what we were doing, Cale and I responded to this teasing (which had begun because we had the same adviser and were working on very similar projects and spending oodles of time together) by putting on flamboyant, puerile, and risible displays of faux homosexuality. We shrieked at each other in high voices, pretended to have “lover’s quarrels” at parties, and always made a great show of dancing together. Our behavior was wildly over the top, and of course, only took place in front of an audience. Alone together, we were cordial but somewhat distant.
Cale and I were colleagues, and because of the way grant money was disposed, we were rivals. Though we were both married, we both were pursuing the brightest and most mysterious woman in the grad program, which made us all the more competitive. (Again, folks, this was a long time ago. I was a very messed-up twenty-four year-old, even if my skills in paleography and Anglo-Norman French were at the highest they’d ever be.) Cale and I continued to study together, talk sports together, compete for money and for women’s attention for the better part of a year — all while regularly mugging it up for our friends and classmates.
Cale and I only stopped this behavior when the one openly gay man in the program, Alastair, approached us both in fury one day. He pointed out that what we were doing was the equivalent of Al Jolson putting on blackface, and that though he liked us both, he was disgusted beyond words by the way in which (as he put it) our own “internalized homophobia manifested in these pathetic performances.” Cale and I were both chastened, and we toned it down. I apologized profusely to Alastair, but it took me a while to earn his trust again.
Over the years, I’ve found myself more than once playing this game of establishing my masculine bona fides through these sorts of shows, though never to the degree that I did so with Cale all those years ago. (Another parenthesis: Cale and I ended our friendship altogether in a fight over the first Gulf War, which he strongly supported and I just as strongly did not.) But I’ve worked very hard to avoid engaging in these “sexualized blackface” rituals, and I’ve begun to gently and firmly call more and more young men on this behavior when I see it.
But Saturday night at the wedding, with hundreds of people milling about, I wasn’t prepared to pull the groom and his well-lubricated friends aside. There’ll be time for that conversation.
This week folks came here with a variety of search terms and phrases. Here are some favorites of mine:
psychology of younger women who date older father figures Methinks you answer your own query
wasp kind Many WASPs are, contrary to perception.
should a man turn the check over to his wife If both signatures are required ;)
percentages of twice divorced man remarrying I’ve helped raise the stat
how do chinchillas defend their self If you’re asking, you don’t know yet. Stop pissin’ them off, and they’ll stop pissing on you.
is it morally acceptable to experiment on non-human animals to develop products and medicines that benefit human beings? No.
getting circumcised in england Just don’t let the dentists do it.
vegan animal rights feminism eating disorders Sing the Sesame Street song: “one of these terms is not like the others, one of these terms just doesn’t belong”
why did lauren first make the coffee maker? I knew I loved her!
recurring dream tidal wave I am not alone!
why is mary - jesus mum - a role model for peoples live’s? The wording made me happy. Short answer: she said yes.
movies with naked women having sex with naked men showing how to do sex without buying any Buying what? Movies? Naked men? Sex? Me confused.
husband considers his family more important than his wife Uh, if the latter isn’t a vital subset of the former, then we got problems.
mothers who kidnap aleinate and brainwash there children Left men’s rights advocates who can’t spell? Is aleinate a derivative of caseinate?
cristian ronaldo fan songs Are sung by lovesick Portuguese? By a calmer Wayne Rooney?
waxing pasadena very hairy I wax poetic in Pasadena, and some would say I’m pretty hairy.
dr. hugo schwyzer ph.d 2007 Uh, got it in 1999, thanks. It’s been mine all century.
wifes oil change vs mans oil change Please, please let this be about cars.
good blogging handles …are near the love handles, only slightly lower and farther ’round to the back.
I haven’t run many short races in recent years. On a whim, I did the Fiesta Days 10K in La Canada this morning; it’s quite a hilly course (with all the uphills in the second half, which is what I like). I had two goals — break 45 minutes for the race, and run the second (uphill) half faster than the first. I missed my first goal, finishing in an unofficial 45:06, but did (by my rough calculations) do the second half about fifteen seconds faster than the first.
When I was younger, I would run fast early and hang on at the end; now, far wiser (if far slower) my goal is not to get passed in the final third of any race I run. Today, I was more than six minutes slower than my personal best on a certified 10K course (38:49, back in the day when I was a skinny, nervy thing) but I had lots of fun. And no one passed me at the end.
Also, I just joined the Christian Vegetarian Association. Would have done it earlier, but somehow didn’t know about ‘em. Thanks to reader “Jay” for the link. The CVA reminds me that the literal reading of Genesis 1:29-30 would seem to support the notion of the vegan diet as “God’s best.”
Read through CVA’s faqs here, and check out the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians as well.
Happy Memorial Day.
I’m tired this Friday afternoon. I was supposed to do my Eaton Canyon to Mt. Wilson summit run this morning (a 19 miler, all hard trail, a mile’s worth of elevation climb) but ended up breaking off the ascent a little before the top. I still logged 16 miles, but it’s been a long time since I didn’t finish what I set out to do. Not how I wanted my first long run since turning 40 to turn out, but on the other hand, it’s evidence of wisdom that I didn’t push through my exhaustion and end up making myself sick.
I’m behind on a variety of projects, and I’m hoping to catch up this weekend. It’s my wife’s birthday tomorrow, however, and we have a variety of happy things planned. I won’t let my various other obligations stop me from honoring my most important commitment.
Speaking of my wife, someone sent me a link to this blog: Black Female Interracial Marriage. Evia hosts the blog, and describes herself and her project:
I’m an African-American woman. My blog explores my interracial marriage to a white American man and offers provocative commentary, discussions, articles, and media regarding intraracial and interracial relationships and marriage options for black women.
Evia is interested in discussing black female/white male relationships, and her blog provides an astonishing list of links to famous (and not-so-famous) marriages and relationships that fit that racial model. The discussion in her comments section gets rather heated from time to time, but her posts — and the comments — are worth the read.
My gorgeous soon-to-be-another-year-older wife is of mixed African, Colombian, and Croatian ancestry. She’s got as much claim to the title of “African-American” as, say, Barack Obama. No, folks, you don’t get a picture; I zealously and faithfully guard my wife’s privacy at her request. I briefly blogged about the racial dynamics of our marriage here.
Given that race has been a hot topic in feminist blogging circles lately, I thought linking to Evia’s blog was a good way to finish out the week.
See y’all Tuesday.
As I noted this week, I’ve become mildly obsessed with Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. I so rarely listen to contemporary pop music, and every once in a while, a song does it for me.
But this FRT is a real break from tradition. What happened to my feminist credentials? Eight of ten songs by men? The misleadingly misogynistic title of the great Neil Young track at #8? #2 is a fine cut off the new album from one of the fiercer young women in mainstream country, and #6 and #8 are off two of my favorite albums from my favorite musical decade. Most folks think Rod Stewart wrote #7, but it did indeed begin as a splendid song by the future Yusuf Islam. Gillian Welch’s debut album was perhaps her finest (not that her later work has been too shabby), and this is one of my favorite cuts off that recording.
1. “Abraham”, Sufjian Stevens
2. “Guilty in Here”, Miranda Lambert
3. “A Change is Gonna Come”, Sam Cooke
4. “Authority Song”, John Mellencamp
5. “Nothing is Ever Enough”, Derek Webb
6. “The Late Show”, Jackson Browne
7. “The First Cut is the Deepest”, Cat Stevens
8. “A Man Needs a Maid”, Neil Young
9. “Green Fields of France”, Dropkick Murphys
10. “One More Dollar”, Gillian Welch
Bonus Track: “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards”, Billy Bragg
So I’ve been thinking — hasn’t everybody this week? — about the intersection of race and sex and the broader feminist movement. As I mentioned on Monday, a debate over the merits of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism has metastasized into a painful and often bewildering discussion about the ways in which white feminists unintentionally marginalize the voices of women of color. I’ve linked to some of the posts on the subject; from more recent posts, here’s Brownfemipower’s, and here’s Sylvia’s.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the intersection of race, class, and gender in American history and contemporary society. Though it doesn’t always show, I’ve read a book or three on the subject and sat through, gosh, dozens of seminars and symposia. I’m old enough to have read the first edition of This Bridge Called my Back not long after it initially appeared.
But I’ll admit that for most of my life as a pro-feminist man, I’ve worried that too great a focus on the Great Crime of racial oppression in this country meant a marginalization of what I grew up believing was the Even Greater Crime of the exploitation of women. My mother was a huge Shirley Chisholm fan, and supported the first black congresswoman’s famous 1972 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Chisholm, who died in 2005, was often asked whether she considered her sex or her race to be the greater obstacle to her success. She was unequivocal in her response, quoted from the New York Times obit:
“I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being black,” she told The Associated Press in December 1982, shortly before she left Washington to teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. “When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”
Bold emphasis mine. I remember reading the original quote from Chisholm in the early 1980s; I think my mother may have brought it to my attention. I can’t tell you how formative Chisholm’s frank discussion of the race/sex dynamic was for me. Though I ought to have known better than to allow one remarkable black woman’s words to form my entire world view on which “ism” constituted the greater oppression, I have to say that for the last quarter century, whenever the discussion of the racism/sexism dynamic comes up, I immediately quote the lines above.
Anecdotally, I will say that most of my female students of color nod their heads vigorously when I share — as I almost always do — the Shirley Chisholm story. Most of my students today were born more than a decade after Shirley ran for president, and yet their experience of both racism and sexism has left many of them convinced that while both have tremendous power to hurt, the latter has served as the far greater impediment to their full acceptance as human beings. Those who think Shirley Chisholm is describing a different era than our own (an era where Stokely Carmichael could say that the “proper position for a woman in the movement is prone”) ought to come and listen to the stories told by the young women of color I have in my classes.
I recognize that to be doubly or even triply-oppressed is difficult. On campus, all of our student groups meet at the same time each week: Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon. An aspiring white feminist will have less trouble choosing how to spend that hour; since her sex is the only source of her marginalization, she’s fairly likely to choose a women’s group. A young woman of color may experience more conflict: what to do when the Black Students Association or MEChA meets at exactly the same time as a feminist forum? The sense I’ve gotten is that many of my young women of color feel at times that they are being forced to choose between two parts of themselves, and that hurts. Their “brown brothers” are oppressed for their brownness, not their maleness; their “white sisters” are held back for their sex, not their whiteness. When you’ve got one single hour per week to spend with one single group, when you’ve got just one dollar to give to your club of choice, choosing between brothers and sisters is hard.
And yes, I know that well-meaning white feminists can be unconsciously racist. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had a young white woman in my classes make disparaging remarks about Latino machismo, for example. My Latina students frequently squirm; they recognize much truth in what their white classmate is saying, but they feel protective and defensive about their brothers, their fathers, their heritage. Too often, white feminists overtly or obliquely ask women of color to turn their backs on what white feminists assume is a culture so steeped in misogyny that it cannot possibly be redeemed.
What I’ve realized from the whole kerfuffle over Jessica’s book is that I continue to let my views on the race/sex/class intersection be formed almost entirely by the “Shirley Chisholm analysis.” I think Chisholm was telling the truth about her own experience, and I think that her experience is still that of the majority of young women of color in contemporary American society. 1972 and 2007 are far less different than some folks would have you believe. But where I’ve gone off track is in my insistence that we keep the focus of our justice work more narrowly focused on gender oppression, assuming that in the end, all women regardless of race or class or sexual identity or physical ability are marginalized and mistreated in more or less the same way. After more than twenty years of reading (and teaching) Anzaldua and Lorde and hooks and Moraga, I ought to know better.
Note: Comments that are either overtly racist or overtly anti-feminist will be deleted.
I like this poem. I like reading it this week in conjunction with last week’s Donald Justice offering.
The Thread
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
For my birthday dinner last night, my wife took me out to a great little vegan place in Los Feliz. Before dinner, we went to get massages. And I was reminded, not for the first time, of how much work I have had to do in my life to get to the place where I allow myself to be massaged and touched.
Though I’ve been running and doing other fitness activities for years, I didn’t have my first massage until I was 36. For years and years, the idea of having a stranger — or even someone whom I knew well — rubbing me all over freaked me out. No matter how sore or achey I got, I preferred to treat my pain with massive doses of ibuprofen. (At one time, when I was more foolish in my training, I was doing 2400 milligrams of ibuprofen every darned day, before, during, and after workouts.) It wasn’t the expense of a massage; I felt the same way about allowing a girlfriend or buddy to rub my neck or back.
I’ve always been an affectionate person. I’m a hugger, an enthusiastic back-slapper, a comforting patter of knees and shoulders. And I was always quite willing to rub the aching shoulders or neck of a friend or loved one. I never had a problem initiating physical contact; as long as I was in control of how much contact happened and how long it lasted, I was happy. Receiving was, to put it mildly, a different story. I had zero ability to lie back and enjoy any kind of physically pleasurable experience, unless that pleasure was provided by an inanimate object. (I remember discovering a massage chair in an airport lounge many years ago. Though I still had some trouble enjoying the experience, I was at least willing to try it.)
What I came to realize, with the help of she who is now my wife, is that I had a very serious control issue when it came to my body. As someone who battled eating disorders for years, and still has to watch his exercise addiction, I’m unduly infatuated with my own physical autonomy, particularly when it came to pleasure. I was very good — during my various youthful hospitalizations — about putting up with various medical procedures. I used to joke that I had an easier time being catheterized or having my stomach pumped than being given a full-body massage. (The former two experiences happened entirely too often.) So it wasn’t just about losing control — I could accept losing control when it involved suffering in a way that I couldn’t when it involved pleasure. What I couldn’t accept was the overwhelming discomfort that came when someone else seemed single-mindedly focused on giving pleasure to me.
The strange mix of guilt and anxiety that I felt just at contemplating getting massaged (by loved one or hired stranger) wasn’t rooted in any early childhood trauma, nor — as far as I could tell — was it connected to a profound sense of guilt about my body. My massage phobia was alive and well during the most promiscuous times of my life, when I had no trouble being sexual with people I barely knew, as long as those sexual experiences didn’t involve me passively receiving anything pleasurable. I had no trouble undergoing medical exams either; I’ve never been one of those men who is reluctant to go to the doctor. It wasn’t about a loathing of the body, it was about a mistrust of other human beings rooted in something so deep that I couldn’t name or see the source.
My very patient girlfriend, now my wife, worked on me gently and lovingly. I finally broke down and gave into a massage on Valentine’s Day, 2003. We were out in Palm Springs together, and when we woke up on the morning of February 14, she hit me with a bombshell: she had ordered a “couples massage.” Two men would be coming to our room that afternoon with tables and oils and New Age music, and they would rub each of us. For an hour. And there was to be no arguing; I was to give it a try as part of my Valentine’s present for her. And I gulped, swallowed hard, and agreed. I spent half an hour in the shower before the masseurs showed up, scrubbing myself clean. Though at this point I had been off drugs and alcohol for five years, I found myself longing for a quick little drink, or better yet, a handful of benzodiazepines to cope with the anxiety. But I went through the experience stone cold sober.
The masseur was wonderful, gentle, strong. He found the sore spots in my lower back and my chronically tight hamstrings right away. About fifteen minutes into the massage, I began to cry. I kept on crying, softly, until the hour-long experience was over. It was an extraordinarily cathartic mix of profound emotional discomfort, intense pleasure, and psychological release. After the men left, I felt overwhelmed with nausea. All of the toxins stored in my muscles for so long were now flooding my system, having been released by the massage; I spent the rest of Valentine’s Day 2003 puking. It wasn’t very romantic, but my gal was thrilled, knowing that I had broken through this phobia about pleasure and control.
I still only get massaged a couple of times a year. It’s still often a difficult experience to endure, though I’m getting better and better at receiving pleasure and healing work while I lie passive. I know I’ve got a strong puritanical streak within me. Most of the time, I think that puritanism is fundamentally good — after all, it’s rooted in the conviction that I must not allow my own selfish desires to trump my ethical responsibilities to the earth and its creatures. But there’s a thin line between restriction for the sake of sharing with other living beings, and anhedonia, the aversion to pleasure in its own right. Learning to accept massage, learning to accept touch, learning to accept caress and care is an important, if incredibly difficult, part of this journey towards making that vital distinction.
Most semesters (but not all) I hold an “all-female day” and an “all-male day” in my Women in American Society class. My “all-female” day was last Tuesday, and my “all-male” day will be this Thursday.
I got the idea from a group of students who took the class in the spring of ‘01. That was a particularly strong group, and one day midway through the semester a small delegation approached me in my office. In a class that was 80% female, 20% male, they asked me to facilitate two separate days, one for students of each sex. Instead of a lecture, we’d have a structured discussion, sitting in a circle. The all-male and all-female days would happen late in the semester after students had had a chance to absorb and really think about a lot of the material. The single sex environment would, it was hoped, promote greater candor, greater frankness, and greater opportunity for same-sex bonding.
I checked out the legality of having a single-sex classroom for a day,and was assured by my division dean at the time that as long as I offered one day for each sex, I would not be violating college or state rules. And so, since the spring of 2001, I’ve held these all-male and all-female days in most of my sections of women’s history.
I’ll blog about the all-male day experience soon. I can say that the all-female experience is almost always an enormously positive one. Over and over again, I read in student journals and evaluations that that was their “favorite day” of the whole semester. Though I rarely issue sweeping pronouncements about what feminism is or isn’t, I am adamant that one can’t be much of a feminist if one is committed to the liberation of women as a class but one doesn’t generally like individual women. The whole “loving humankind, hating people” deal is thoroughly incompatible with every imaginable category of feminist praxis. And yet so many of my female students do struggle to bond and connect with other women. The “all my good friends are guys” contingent is invariably a substantial one.
A single day of sitting in a circle and sharing stories doesn’t create instant feminist community. But it sure as heck is a good start, and sadly, it’s often more sharing and listening in an all-female group than many of these young women have ever done before. I feel quite strongly that a feminist classroom has elements of the therapeutic as well as the intellectual; personal experience, while not a substitute for reason, is also a valuable source of information and knowledge. Tears are not uncommon on all-female day; tears of sadness, of exhaustion, of empathy.
Unlike at a major university, we have no “discussion sections” built into the course. I get 75 minutes twice a week to cover American women’s history (and contemporary feminism) from the pre-Columbian period to the present day. There is no other course on campus that surveys women’s history or offers an introduction to women’s studies. But as precious as the short amount of time I have is, it’s worth taking two days to reflect together, to retreat from the purely intellectual to the emotional. Laughter, tears, and authentic catharsis have their place in the feminist classroom.
It’s hard to be a Christian alone. It’s hard to be a feminist alone. Living out a commitment — whatever that commitment is based on — is more easily done with a community of the like-minded to encourage and nurture. Given that I teach at a community college that has an almost complete absence of feminist or pro-feminist institutional support for young men and women, I’ve got to try and create that institutional support in the classroom.
We had a great all-female day on May 15. I’ll have some more thoughts on working with young men in a feminist setting next week.
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