Archive for May, 2007

Remembering uncle Peter

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 13, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness, Family, Favorite posts 2007 and Memories
. 7 Comments

Ten days ago, I noted the passing of my uncle, Peter Roeding Butler. His obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle appears today, and it seems the right time to write a short tribute.

Uncle Peter was both my uncle and my cousin. He married his second cousin, my mother’s sister Marianna, after they met at a family reunion. As his obituary makes clear, he was born and raised in Hawaii, but spent most of his adult life in the Bay Area.

My parents divorced when I was six; though I stayed close to my father, after their separation, he rarely came to family gatherings at our Northern California ranch. My maternal grandfather had died in 1969, and this meant that Uncle Peter was perhaps the central male figure at the ranch in my childhood. At Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmas gatherings throughout the 1970s, Peter was one of the two senior men on the premises. (The other vitally important man in my growing up years was my great-uncle, Stanley Williams Moore, the late philosopher.) Uncle Peter was the first Santa Claus I can remember, and for years, he ran our small “safe and sane” ranch Independence Day fireworks show to the great delight of his children and nephews and nieces.

I don’t think I would have become an endurance athlete if it wasn’t for Peter Butler. He started running the first of his 81 marathons in the mid-1970s (I’ve run 13 to date, and have a long way to go to catch him). In the summer of 1978, he and my aunt came to visit us in Carmel; they decided to stay at a little inn out in the valley, about eleven miles from our home by the sea. One weekend morning Peter, always eager for a run, sent my aunt Marianna ahead to our house. He wanted to make the journey to our place on foot, but was worried about getting lost. My mother sent me, aged 11, out on a bike to meet him; I would accompany him the final miles to our place.

I knew the drive from our house out to Carmel Valley Village well. I remember bicycling about five miles up the valley to our agreed-upon meeting point, amazed that anyone could run as far as my uncle was running that day. I had heard of marathons, but I didn’t know how long they were; running eleven miles (when I had a hard time biking that far) seemed absurd. It seemed impossibly heroic. And on that summer day in 1978, I waited for my uncle at the top of a little hill in the valley. After a few minutes, I saw him. It was a warm day, and he ran in a sweat-soaked singlet and red shorts. He was a tall man — about 6′2″, well over 200 pounds, with a frame that was never ideal for running. (I’m an inch and a half shorter and of somewhat slimmer build — it makes endurance work much easier). To little eleven year-old me, Peter was a great big bear of a man, all power and muscle and will. I was awed as I watched him ascend towards me. I handed him the bottle of water I had brought, and slowing only slightly, he drank most of it down. “Hugo”, he said, “take me to the ocean!”

I brought him the rest of the way, riding far enough ahead not to bother him, constantly looking over my shoulder as I did so. His strength and his purpose amazed me; at that age, I was fascinated by mythology, and I remember thinking he looked like a drawing I had seen of Woden, the great father god of the Norse. I took him to Carmel Beach, and watched him plunge into the water, bellowing like a delighted moose. I was utterly transfixed. The next day we drove out to Carmel Valley to see Peter and Marianna, and I remember staring out the window in amazement as the miles rolled by, scarcely able to conceive what it would be like to run all that way.

It would be nearly two decades before I ran my first marathon, at Los Angeles in 1998. It would be 25 years before I would run my first ultra, here in our local mountains in 2003. As soon as I started training, however, I sought out advice from my uncle. He urged me to do as many miles as possible on dirt rather than asphalt; in his later years, he had both knees and a hip replaced as a result of having logged too many hard road miles in too short a time on too big a body. My own father, whom I loved with all my heart, did not share my growing fascination with endurance sports. Peter was a role model and a mentor for me; I bought my Trek 5000 bicycle because it was what he had. He and I had our last long talk about running last August. He couldn’t run in his later years, but still biked and swam. I heard the wistfulness in his voice as we talked of my latest workouts, and I remember his gentle admonition to continue to “take it easy” so that I would still have my knees in my old age.

My Uncle Peter took me to my first college football game (at Cal, of course); he was the first person to explain the rules of that sport to me. (And by God, he could spot a holding penalty faster than anyone!) My Austrian-born, English-raised father had no interest in American sports –Peter did, and it was with him that I watched countless hours of football, baseball, and other sports on television. With my mother and father separated (however amicably), I needed and craved grown men in my life: Peter Butler was one of a very small number who was there for me through what was, truth be told, a difficult and often unhappy childhood. I am grateful beyond words for that.

Peter became a family activist. There’s a park in Fresno, Roeding Park, named for my great-great grandparents. In 2004, our family fought an unsuccessful legal battle to keep an expanded zoo out of the park. My ancestors gave that land to Fresno for quiet contemplation and recreation, not the exploitation of animals. The voters of Fresno didn’t see it that way, alas, but my Uncle Peter was the leader of a large family coalition that fought to keep the park’s future use consistent with the intent of the original bequest.

He was justifiably proud of his nickname of “Ironman”, earned when he finished an early edition of the famed Hawaii Ironman Triathlon (at 50). Though I followed him into endurance sports, I never thought of him as “ironman.” The great ultramarathoners I train with don’t think of themselves as made of iron. We are, in the end, ordinary men and women who push our bodies to do extraordinary things. Iron rusts. Iron can’t bend, can’t expand, can’t grow any stronger than it already is. My uncle grew more tender and more loving with age. At times he could be hard and inflexible, like many of us. But his heart, his generosity, his genuine vulnerability, always seemed to trump that hardness, that iron aspect of his identity. He was my uncle and my cousin, a role model throughout my life. In his later years, he was also my friend, and I will miss him.

All true endurance athletes are happiest going uphill, I think. Whether on a bike or on foot, we love to climb and climb. Next to being in the arms of my wife, I am most at peace when I am alone, running up a mountain on switchback after switchback, the longed-for summit growing slowly closer. The downhill that follows is usually less relief than it is anti-climax. In a short documentary made for the family by his son Dean, my uncle Peter spoke last year about this longing to ascend endlessly, the sense that life itself is a long, often difficult but also joy-filled climb. Not much more than six months before his death my uncle remarked, “I’m not at the summit yet, but it’s in sight.” When I saw the DVD (produced for his 75th birthday last fall) and heard those words, I gasped aloud and began to weep. On a visceral level, I got what he meant instantly. His life was filled with joy, but also with an endless sense of struggle. And I have so much of that in me, more perhaps than most of the rest of his family.

I am no poet, though I love verse. Years ago, I wrote a haiku about running up, up, up. I’ve modified it a few times, but here’s the original:

Climbing the mountain
Blazing summit in my sight
There is no descent

There is no descent, Peter. You can stay on top of the mountain now.

I’m running the San Francisco Marathon on July 29; I’m dedicating that race — and the training season until then — to him.

Wilcox gets it wrong again

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2007
in Divorce, Marriage and Men and Masculinity
. 25 Comments

I’ll blog this next week, but I nearly fell over after reading this gem from W. Bradford Wilcox, the sociologist and allstar cheerleader for traditional marriage:

Marriage also binds children to their fathers, who usually find it very difficult to maintain consistent and positive relationships with their children without the support and encouragement of their children’s mother.

That’s world-class woman-blaming, that. Dad is distant, preoccupied, unavailable? Whose fault is it? Brad gives you one guess. Poor clueless men, we need a woman’s support and encouragement to connect with our own children — and if we aren’t connecting, then y’all know who’s to blame.

I’m off to the gym to work out some wrath, and then home to a spinach salad and some journal grading.

A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2007
in Books, Eating disorders, Feminism and The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls
. 9 Comments

It’s been a smoky week here in Southern California. Two places I know well have been burning: Griffith Park and Catalina Island. I know almost all the trails in the former; the latter hosts one of my favorite dirt marathons, which I last did in 2004. I’m thinking this morning about the people who’ve been displaced, the firefighters who have worked so hard, and about all the countless animals who’ve been terrified, hurt, or worse.

In comparison, all I’ve faced is a little tightness in my chest from running hard in this poor air we’ve got, with a little stinging around the eyes. Not much to worry about by comparison. Some friends and I did the 8.6 mile Mt. Wilson trail early this morning, and coming down we could see the brown haze of smoke and other pollutants sitting on top of the entire L.A. basin.

So, last night I finished Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating your Body It’s a powerful book, even as it revisits familiar ground. This is a long post, so the rest will be below the fold. Continue reading ‘A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”’

Friday Random Ten: slouching towards forty

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 4 Comments

#1 is the title track off the album I’ve been obsessed with for months. Other big favorites are 6,7,9; the last of these was originally burned for me by a student who said she thought it described me. And the bonus is from one of my favorite punk bands of my childhood; it didn’t come up on my party shuffle, but I’m dedicating it to the remarkable breakthroughs we have seen in Northern Ireland this week.

1. “Firecracker”, Wailin’ Jennys
2. “In my Hour of Darkness”, Gram Parsons
3. “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”, Uncle Tupelo
4. “Country Song”, The Men they Couldn’t Hang
5. “Alone and Forsaken”, Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler
6. “The Pearl”, Emmylou Harris
7. “Summer, Highland Falls”, Billy Joel
8. “The Story”, Brandi Carlile
9. “Lucky One”, Alison Krauss
10. “Walk Down this Mountain”, Bebo Norman

Bonus Track: “Alternative Ulster”, Stiff Little Fingers

Ten things

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2007
in Blogging and Vanity
. 11 Comments

Taken from Rudy Carrasco, here are ten things you may not know about me, despite an extraordinary amount of public navel-gazing.

1. Since I was a child, my nightmares are almost all the same: I’m on a beach, a tidal wave is coming, and I can’t move. I still have them a couple of times a year. I’ve never dreamed of any other natural disaster or accident.

2. Of all of my button-down shirts, more are pink than any other color.

3. Of my closest friends, over half are Republicans. Several support the war and eat meat.

4. The combined total attendance at all four of my weddings: just over 500.

5. Number of people, besides me, who attended all four: eleven.

6. I took wood shop in high school, and actually loved it. My mom still has many things I made.

7. My senior year in high school, I was president of my school’s Model UN club. We represented Zaire at the state convention.

8. The first time I got drunk, it was on Andre Cold Duck . It was twenty-five years ago this month, and I was in ninth grade.

9. Sometimes, after a particularly emotional day of teaching (or, like last night, an emotional time with some of my youth group kids) I get into my car in the parking lot and cry before I drive home.

10. Though I love other breeds better, when it comes to dogs, I instinctively identify with whippets.

Outsourcing justice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2007
in Feminism, Food, Having children, Veganism and Working
. 22 Comments

I can usually count on my blog-crush, Chris Clarke, to get me thinkin.’ And he does that today with a great post up at Pandagon: Quality of whose life, again? Citing naturist, philosopher, novelist and poet Wendell Berry’s fondness for having all of his work typed by his wife, Chris points out that too frequently, the burden of living “slow”, of living “off the grid”, of living a life of “environmental purity” often places a disproportionate burden on to women:

What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry.

Yikes.

Since my wife joined me in strict veganism (and she jumped in “cold tofu”, skipping from eating red meat one week to full-on vegan the next without any of the traditional stages in between) we eat out a lot less. The number of restaurants to which we can go has been cut, even in greater Los Angeles, by 90%. With one or two exceptions, the local fast food options are all off the table now. We spend much more money at the supermarket than we used to; we are using the pots and pans more; we are eating out less. All of this is great for the health of the household. But it does do exactly what Chris worries it will — put extra pressure on both my wife and me to avoid falling into traditional gender roles.

The nice thing about eating out all the time was that, well, my wife and I contributed exactly the same amount of labor to the process. Pulling out the Amex and signing the bill is not a labor-intensive activity. The people who made our food and cleaned up our dishes were invariably invisible to us, and we assuaged any small sense of guilt about being waited on by giving good tips. But we eat out less these days, and that means more work for both of us.

My wife made a wonderful stew on Tuesday night, loaded with sauerkraut and potatoes (among other goodies). I packed it into tupperware after we had eaten, and I had one portion for lunch yesterday, another today, and another tomorrow. Yes, I washed dishes and packed leftovers away. But my wife still ended up doing a bit more work than I did that particular evening.

I know well enough that “real feminism begins at home”. If my commitment to egalitarianism isn’t matched in what I do around the house, then all of my public pronouncements are built on a foundation of fraud and hypocrisy. And as Chris cheekily points out, men who think they’re “doing their share” by dealing only with the outside things (like washing the car, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash) often have no sense of just how much less time these traditionally male activities require than the “inside” chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry) that we think of as largely female.

I’m going through a particularly ascetic period these days. I’m drinking a lot of vegan shakes (which come prepacked), I’m eating a lot of raw spinach, lots of trail mix, lots of soy yogurt (with some nice live cultures), lots of vegan organic food bars. Only once in a while am I eating anything that takes much time to prepare. This limited diet has the benefit of being quick and easy, but I’m aware that it’s hardly to everyone’s taste. More importantly, as my wife and I consider having children, we have no intention of raising our kids on little baggies of almonds, pumpkin seeds, and spinach leaves. At some point, our environmentalist and animal-rights commitments will demand that we take even more time than many other parents do to meet our children’s needs for variety and pleasure as well as ethical nutrition. And I’m going to have to work doubly hard not to fall prey to the Wendell Berry phenomenon, where my commitment to the most humane lifestyle possible ends up creating much more work for other people!

So this summer, it’s vegan cooking classes for me. Maybe with my wife, maybe not. But I’ll be danged if I’m going to outsource my justice.

Thursday Short Poem: Wilbur’s “The Riddle”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 10, 2007
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

When I was in grad school at UCLA, I spent the 1992-93 academic year as the managing editor of a journal called Comitatus, published by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance studies. I got a crash course in old-fashioned copy editing, and for nearly nine months, wandered everywhere clutching my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. I can still remember — mostly — how to copy-edit, and I will never forget my frequent moments of indecision about one apparent grammatical infelicity or another. Frequently, I’d mark an error, change my mind, and just write “stet” — which as any copy-editor knows, is a way of saying “oh heck, let the original just stand as is. It’s fine just the way it was put down.”

The marvelous Richard Wilbur is grateful our God has “stet” in his inexhaustible copy-editor’s vocabulary.

The Riddle

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused His work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all His grammar,

I love Him that He did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please Him yet,
Crossed out ‘delete’ and wrote His patient ’stet’.

Demand, supply, and moralistic sermons: a reply to Garance Franke-Ruta

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 9, 2007
in Porn and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 13 Comments

Lots of discussion about porn and the “Girls Gone Wild” phenomenon this week. Last Friday, Garance Franke-Ruta made the case in the Wall Street Journal for raising the minimum age for performers in porn from 18 to 21. She makes a good point about the huge changes that take place for most folks in those vital three years, and argues that — especially for the drunken spring breakers who lift their shirts and scribble on a model release form handed them by Girls Gone Wild, Inc. — raising the age to 21 would provide much-needed protection against enduring regret and exploitation.

Franke-Ruta’s modest proposal has been much discussed in the feminist blogosphere; I am late to the party again indeed. Amanda at Pandagon leads the charge of those who weigh the idea sympathetically, and then discard it as ultimately unworkable and paternalistic. Ultimately, I’m not big on the idea either. Allowing young women to get blown up in Iraq at 18, but not allowing them to lift their shirts for the camera until they’re 21, seems silly to me.

My objection to Franke-Ruta lies in this middle section of her WSJ piece:

Curtailing the demand side of such a “market” is difficult, requiring moralistic sermons and abridgements of speech. But the supply side is more vulnerable to change. It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21–”consent,” in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.

I’m a big, big proponent of fighting most social vices by reducing demand first. I’m a historian and a recovering alcoholic who knows damned well Prohibition was largely a failure and Alcoholics Anonymous has been, by and large, a phenomenal global success. Pot is illegal, and I didn’t have trouble finding it in my youth and my students seem to have very little trouble finding it today. Using the power of the state to reduce the supply of an addictive commodity often ends up raising its price and making it more dangerous for those who work to produce it. Reducing demand, the seemingly more difficult task, is ultimately the more successful strategy.

Smoking has been greatly reduced in this country. Yes, higher prices for cigarettes and greater restrictions on where one can smoke have played a part, but the real source in the drop in cigarette consumption has been the growing awareness of just how bad tobacco is for living creatures. The slow but clear success of the anti-smoking movement has proceeded primarily by reducing demand; the tobacco industry until very recently received colossal subsidies from the government in order to continue producing supply.

Why not the same for pornography? When we show school children cigarette ads from the 1920s that promised tobacco could help cure sore throats, they giggle. Who could ever have believed that cigarettes were not only harmless, but positively therapeutic? Today, we have legions of folks who insist that pornography provides a healthy release for those who have no other sexual outlet; occasionally, we have a dimwit claim that the availability of porn reduces rape (rather than making it more likely). Many feminists, troubled by mainstream porn’s narrow and male-centered depiction of women’s sexuality, long for an alternative pornography, perhaps one in which women as well as men are encouraged to ogle, lust, and masturbate from the resulting excitement.

But in the internet age, there is growing evidence that online porn addiction is bringing devastation and heartache. There is growing evidence that as with cigarettes, there are few “casual” users. As with any drug, casual use quickly turns habitual, and what is habitual often turns compulsive. Of course, some folks can use porn once every five weeks and not think about it again. They remind me of my great aunt, who famously smoked a cigarette once a year with great ceremony. The porn industry makes its money on those who are willing to run up credit card bills, stay up late at night on the computer, and often compromise their social and romantic obligations in order to hunt down the next exciting image of a stranger (usually young, poor, and female) unclothed.

Franke-Ruta has no taste for “moralistic sermons.” Neither did Phillip Morris (whoops, Altria), who spent years waving the flag of “personal choice” to defend their staggering profits from the toxic leaf. Now, I like me the occasional moralistic sermon. A good sermon — delivered either in secular or openly theistic tones — challenges people to think about themselves and their behavior in a radically new way. A good sermon doesn’t have to be modeled on a William Wigglesworth or a Jonathan Edwards. It can be modeled on a Dr. King, who had a clear and compelling way of delivering uncomfortable truths to an overly comfortable audience. Moralistic sermons, delivered by ordained ministers and backed up by public action, changed this nation’s views on race. Is it okay to use religious language to inspire people to turn away from Jim Crow, but not okay to use that same language to inspire them to stop buying the Girls Gone Wild DVD set? Is it okay to use “moralistic sermons” to change white hearts and minds until they see blacks as their full equals, but not okay to use those same sermons to challenge men to see young women as deserving of love and respect rather than objectification?

Sermons alone didn’t change America’s attitudes on race. Sermons, backed up by direct action (often including civil disobedience) did. We live in an era that sees the male sex drive as overpowering; we live in an era where we have so little faith in our brothers we daren’t ask them to stop masturbating to porn because we doubt, in our hearts, they have either the desire or the will to change their lives. (Italicized parenthetical aside: If I had a dollar for every woman I’ve heard say “I don’t like that he looks at porn, but I won’t tell him to stop. If I say I’m okay with it, then at least he’s not lying to me and doing it behind my back.” Talk about the false dichotomy built on low expectations: men will either use porn with your consent or without it, so you might as well give it so you won’t get deceived. God, how depressing.) A good sermon — which can be given on the blog, in the classroom, in a casual conversation at work as well as from a pulpit — inspires people to believe that they can do what they had not previously believed was possible. A good sermon, given by preachers and fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters and lovers, can work wonders. A good sermon, filled with anecdotal and research-derived evidence about the effects of porn on families, about the effects of the industry on those who are its “stars”, can really begin the process of changing hearts, changing minds, and more to the point, changing behavior and spending habits.

Most folks agree Voltaire never said “I despise what you have to say, and will defend to my death your right to say it.” Still, it’s a fine sentiment, and one with which I generally agree. (I still have a soft spot for the ol’ ACLU.) I have no interest in using the power of the state to stop porn, just as I am not (at least yet) ready to endorse the use of the state to mandate veganism. The way to put an industry out of business that profits from exploitation and degradation is through taking away their customers, one at a time. And we do that by changing their hearts. And we change their hearts by holding them accountable, by refusing to accept or enable, by lovingly challenging them. I’ve seen it work in my life, and in the lives of friends of mine. And that’s how I intend to keep fighting against pornography.

Search term Tuesday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 8, 2007
in Blogging
. 3 Comments

Some selections from the search terms that led people to this blog this week, all below the fold: Continue reading ‘Search term Tuesday’

A long and confessional post about veganism, transformation, smugness and judgment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 8, 2007
in Animal Rights, Body, Christianity, Feminism, Food, Sexual ethics and transformation and Veganism
. 43 Comments

I’m still thinking a lot about the post immediately below this one, and the problematic relationship between veganism and feminism.

Let me reframe the dilemma, as I see it. Feminists are rightly concerned that too many women are too worried about their bodies, too anxious about fat. We are saddened by the huge amount of time and energy our sisters put into the pursuit of an unrealistic, cruel, unattainable ideal. (Let me say again how well Courtney Martin summarizes the problem). Part of the solution, of course, is helping women to see their appetite for food as fundamentally good. Feminism, at its core, rejects the notion that our longings to be full, to be satisfied, to have pleasure, are sinful and need to always be repressed.

But veganism demands intense scrutiny of labels. While it demands that scrutiny and mindfulness in the name of avoiding cruelty rather than in the pursuit of thinness, the end result is that the compulsive dieter and the vegan may both end up spending a great deal more time than the average person thinking about what they “should” or shouldn’t eat. Both the vegan and the compulsive dieter will have a hard time at restaurants, as they study the menus in hopes of finding something that in the first case has no animal product and in the second case contains the least amount of fat.

There’s another problem, one I’m fighting against in my own life right now. Mythago, who bluntly tells me where I’m right and where I’m not, periodically calls me on both my myopia and my condescension. Though it stings when she does it, I’m old enough to know that we learn more from honest critics than we do from our enthusiastic supporters. As someone who has set himself up to be a role model, who teaches and mentors, I am in regular need of having folks who point out the myriad ways in which I continue to fall short. And one big way in which I continue to fall short is around my continued tendency to quietly judge.

When I first became serious about being a male feminist, I quickly grasped that one of my chief “jobs” would be working to hold other men accountable. I understood I could no longer laugh along at the degrading humor, no longer (ever) darken the door of a strip club, no longer enable another man’s casual mistreatment of the women in his life. I lost more than a couple of guys from my life as a result. And today, one of the hardest things I have to work on is my tendency to judge those men in my peer group (I am easier on teen boys) who continue to lead lives that I view as secretive, irresponsible, chauvinistic. I often find myself quietly — and not so quietly — seething at these guys. Why haven’t they seen the light? How can they still do what they do?

Last Thursday, I stopped at a magazine stand to pick up the May issue of Track and Field News, my subscription having expired. I stood in line to buy my beloved collection of statistics and meet reports; two men (a bit older than me) were in front of me, one with a porn magazine. Perhaps to offset the “shame” of what they were doing, the pair were engaged in that boisterous bonhomie that so many guys use to cover guilt or insecurity, joking about the bodies of the models in the magazine. And while on some days I might have said something, last Thursday my stomach was upset and I was underslept. I just had no energy for an argument. So I stood there and I judged these two, feeling ever more smugly superior as I did so. And while it briefly felt good to judge, I walked away from the newsstand feeling even more nauseated than before, upset at my own temporary inability to love these men. I committed murder in my heart, if only for a moment, on Robertson Boulevard last week. And though it doesn’t happen often, it does occur often enough that I realize I need to be honest and open about this quiet, viciously judgmental streak.

It shows up around food these days too. It’s hard not to judge what other people put in their mouths. It’s not the “don’t they know that will make them fat” judgment, it’s the “don’t they know how that sausage was made” judgment. It’s the “don’t they understand how much pleasure they’re getting from another creature’s suffering” judgment. Sometimes, particularly when I myself am tempted by meat, I find myself flooded with a temporary but intense hostility to those who “don’t get it.” That hostility, alas, is accompanied by a feeling of superiority. Like most repentant libertines who turn to Puritanism of one form or another, I am unpleasantly prone to periodic bouts of holier-than-thou smugness!

But I know to my core that it is possible to live a life of radical justice without consistently condemning (in word or thought) those who fall short of that mark. I write this confession today because I see this tendency to judge, this periodic smugness, as another serious character defect to overcome. Living a spiritual life isn’t about achieving perfection, it’s about peeling another layer off the onion. A better image would be to say that our character defects are like layers of blankets thrown over a lamp. In order to reveal the maximum amount of light, we have to peel off one blanket after another. The light gets progressively brigher the more layers we lift, but there’s always still another one to remove. I’ve removed the blankets of reckless womanizing, drug and alcohol abuse, chronic disregard for my impact on those around me. The current layers that need to be lifted involve the bigger sins of pride and judgment and condescension. I’m making progress, but somedays, especially when I’m hungry or tired, it’s really hard.

So I want to apologize to those whom I have offended. I have worked so hard to create a very different kind of life for myself. I’ve worked hard to match my commitment to justice for women, justice for children, justice for animals, justice for the earth, with my own behavior. I’m by nature drawn to extremes, of course. To paraphrase Goldwater, extremism in the defense of the defenseless is no vice. But that extremism for me is about making a maximum effort to bring about change. It’s not about violence of any kind, and violence can be physical, it can be verbal, and yes, it can even be psychic. I don’t hit people and I don’t call them names, but sometimes in my head, I call down curses on my enemies that would have the psalmist gasping. (I do like the psalms so much, for just this reason.) And though King David himself called on God to break the teeth of his enemies, I’m convinced that God wants better than that from us.

Jesus calls us to live lives of love and justice. I’ve come so far in terms of working to embody that justice in my day-to-day life, in how I eat and make love and spend money. Now I need to redouble my effort to love, delight in, and enjoy the company of those who do not share my values or commitments. I need to work harder on overcoming my judgment of my brothers with their porn magazines or my sisters with their hamburgers (or vice versa). I have been where they are, and God’s grace was poured out on me. I am no better than they, and though I can try and model a different way to think about sex and food, in the end, all of this transformation is meaningless if I don’t genuinely love them.

Meat, Dairy, Porn: some preliminary thoughts on women, dieting, veganism, guilt, pleasure and exploitation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2007
in Animal Rights, Eating disorders, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Food, Veganism and Youth
. 36 Comments

I mentioned this morning that I am reading Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. I’ll try and say more about it once I’m finished, as I’m only through the first couple of chapters. It’s a grim go, early on — story after story of the bright, the beautiful, the dazzling consumed with self-loathing and tortured by body dysmorphia. It’s not a new story, but for those of us who have been dealing with this sort of thing for a while, it’s always a bit disheartening to realize that things aren’t getting any better. Still, a fuller review coming next week.

I was thinking about Courtney’s book a few minutes ago. Mondays are my long days here at the college; I teach four classes, and in order to fit those in as well as office hours, I get here around 8:00AM and won’t leave until close to 9:00PM tonight. Mondays, it goes without saying, are hard days to be a vegan. When I run in the mornings I rev up my appetite for the entire day, and though I try and pack a lot of food (nuts, fruits, veggies, tofu, juice) it only gets me so far sometimes. In the old days, I would go and grab a burrito or a chicken bowl at the “El Pollo Loco” franchise across the street. It filled me up if nothing else.

Half an hour ago, feeling peckish, I wandered into the little student cafe by my building. Tons of things to eat, but so few completely vegan choices. I settled for a little pre-packed bowl of melon and papaya (I’ll try and recycle the plastic container) and another banana. I thought about the slice of greasy, cheesy sausage pizza, and for a moment, I really wanted it.

There’s a trick to living a strictly vegan life. First off, as reading a book about eating disorders reminds me, I have to draw a bright and clear line between self-denial for the sake of self and self-denial for the sake of justice for my fellow creatures. I tell myself — and everyone else who will listen — I am NOT on a diet. This is not a temporary plan to lose weight, or something I’ll give up once marathon season comes to an end. This is a lifestyle choice — not to take into my body any animal products at all, to eat “raw” as much as possible, to avoid preservatives and high fructose corn syrup and all the rest of it. Whether it makes me thinner or fatter, makes me more pudgy or more defined, it can’t be about me anymore.

The funny thing is that being strictly vegan (off honey entirely) means that I am more attentive to what I eat than at any time in my life since I was crash dieting fifteen years ago. Back in 1992, I dropped from 175-145 the summer and fall after a divorce; on my 6′1″ frame, the 145 looked awful. I lived on small portions of junk food, and had no consciousness at all about whether or not animals were involved in producing what I was eating. I just wanted to have a body devoid of fat. Back then, I counted calories and fat grams obsessively. Today, I largely ignore fat and calorie information and read to make sure that what I’m eating is entirely plant-based and devoid of hidden dairy or egg traces. (Damn that sneaky caseinate!) I’m once again radically concerned with everything that goes into my mouth — but for a radically different reason.

But it’s hard not to focus on diet so much and not also think about how eating vegan (and doing a whole mess of runnin’) affects my physique and my overall appearance. The “is this about my ego, or is it really about the animals” question pops into my head almost every day, reminding me, as they told me in AA, to always “check my motives.” For anyone who has had an eating disorder, which I have certainly had, to move from casual vegetarianism to strict veganism is an experience that requires some regular self-examination.

It’s also hard to fight the urge to judge what other people put in their mouths. When I was exhibiting anorectic behavior, I got high as a kite on the bittersweet drug of self-denial. I did judge folks who ate a lot and didn’t work out. I spent years unlearning all that judgment, especially for my role as a feminist professor and youth mentor. I didn’t want the young people I worked with to torture themselves, to feel that overwhelming guilt over what they put in their mouths. I’ve wanted them to understand that they have a God-given right to joy, to delight in their own flesh. I’ve been adamant that feminism, food, and pleasure are all linked.

My feminism and my veganism, therefore, are in an uneasy alliance. On the one hand, they are natural allies. As many others have pointed out, there’s a link between patriarchal exploitation of women and human exploitation of animals. Men have used women to do unpaid work for millenia, and humans have used animals in the same fashion. The bodies of women are seen as “fair game” (a hunting reference) for predatory men, and pornography celebrates the idea that men are entitled to take delight (visual or otherwise) in the flesh of women who have little or no say in the matter. The meat industry teaches us that cows and pigs and fish exist solely to bring delight to our taste buds and satisfaction to our bellies. In patriarchal culture, the bodies of women and the bodies of animals exist to be consumed. Feminist veganism rejects the exploitation and abuse of living things; it counsels radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed.

But women, particularly first-world women, eat plenty of meat. They also feel guilty about it, as Courtney Martin reminds us. The feminist in me wants the young women in my life to enjoy food, to reject the destructive cult of thinness. The vegan in me wants to curb and redirect the appetites of these very same young women. I don’t want them to have the pizza, the burger, the Milky Way bar, the mahi-mahi — not because I don’t want them to have pleasure but because that pleasure comes at the expense of a confined and tortured dairy cow, or a fish who died a slow, gasping death.

While historically meat and fish consumption might have been essential for survival, few Americans today would drop dead if they were forced to go vegan. They’d find life rigorously hard, at least many of them would. Hard, perhaps, in a way not dissimilar from the way a compulsive dieter finds her life hard. But the difference would be in the purpose of the self-denial.

So many feminist voices want our daughters and our little sisters to be less obsessed with calories and fat grams. We want our daughters to love their bodies, to delight in their flesh. We want them to stop readiing labels, and just eat what they want to satiety. But for me — and for other vegan feminist voices — that delight in guilt-free eating is highly problematic when it involves the exploitation of the victims of factory farming. Pleasure is a good. Overcoming crushing, unnecessary guilt is a good. But living, eating, and buying cruelty-free is also a powerful good.

There’s a book to be written here, or at least a longer article. I’ll muse on it some more. But I’m thinking that the phrase radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed pretty much sums up my position on meat, dairy, and porn.

UPDATE: Stentor, who shares many of my concerns, has an interesting take here.

“Full Frontal Feminism”: a ringing endorsement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2007
in Books, Feminism and Teaching
. 12 Comments

I’ve been making my way through two excellent new books, Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating your Body and Jessica Valenti (of Feministing)’s Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Valenti’s book showed up three days before Martin’s, so I’ll review it first as well.

I’ll be honest. I was worried I wasn’t going to like Jessica’s book, which would be a pity, because I really dig Jessica. The title made me wince, and the cover (featuring a young woman’s bare torso, reminiscent of the cover of Brumberg’s Body Project) didn’t make me much happier. Jessica told New York Magazine, in defense of her cover, …let’s face it, no young woman is going to pick up a book with the woman’s symbol with a fist on it. She may be right, but “naked stomach” or “clenched fist” seems a bit of a false dichotomy. Never mind. You can’t judge a book and all that… (Note: Ilyka Damen has a strong reaction to the cover. Read it here).

As I’ve been mentioning ’round these parts, I’m hitting 40 this month. I am excited about it for any number of reasons, but I am very aware that my ageing means I need to adapt my teaching. I was 27 when I started teaching women’s history here at PCC, a full year younger than Valenti is now. My students were mostly about 21-24, so I was essentially a slightly older peer. Now, I teach classes where the average age has dropped about three years(fewer reentry students, more kids coming to community college straight out of high school), and I’m a baker’s dozen years older. I’m now at least two decades older than most of my students. I do have a couple of students now whose fathers are younger than I am, and that number will inexorably increase each year. The “young and hip” label is fading, and that’s not a bad thing.

But I came into my feminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I did all my coursework in the second Reagan and Bush 41 administrations. I’m a “second wave” feminist through and through. And though I do try and “stay current”, it’s a much harder thing to do with seven classes of teaching and a regular life than it was when I was an undergrad or a beginning grad student. If I’m not careful, I risk teaching in a way that seems dated and antiquated. While ideas like “equality” and “parity” and “justice” never go out of style, the ways in which we talk about those ideas change regularly. And I’ve been acutely aware that I need to incorporate the voices of younger feminists in to my syllabus.

Full Frontal Feminism fits the bill perfectly. It’s a quick, easy read. Jessica’s style is much the same as it is on her blog: deceptively breezy. She writes conversationally and confessionally, as most good bloggers do; she uses profanity liberally enough to make me squirm just a little bit. But underneath this very accessible style, there’s a lot of depth. What Jessica does is lay out a powerful, impassioned polemic. She makes the case that not only is feminism still relevant to those born post-Roe, post-Watergate, and even post-Cold War — it’s still essential. The greatest single threat to women’s freedom is the widely accepted lie that feminism is no longer needed, that all of the important battles were won one (or now, two) generations ago. Jessica’s youth, her background, and her keen awareness of what matters to teen and twenty-something women make her the perfect messenger to update a message that goes back to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This is the right book at the right time to play an important part in spreading the good news of an ongoing feminist revival.

I’ve decided to assign Full Frontal Feminism to my women’s studies class, starting this fall. I’ll still assign the aforementioned Body Project, and I’m not ready, yet, to accept that The Handmaid’s Tale is too dated to be relevant to students born years after its 1985 publication. And I love my main text, Through Women’s Eyes. But Jessica’s book fills an important niche, and I’m guessing my students will find it compelling, useful, and above all, helpful in moving them to a place where they too can “claim the name” of Feminist for themselves.

Strange doings at “the Beach”: CSULB, Kevin Macdonald, and Barry Dank

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 7, 2007
in Pasadena City College, Sexual ethics and transformation and Teaching
. 16 Comments

I didn’t get a chance to post about the interesting case of Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, whose work on Jews has been linked to hate groups. (Here’s Inside Higher Ed on the story; here’s the Times — both stories are from about two weeks ago.)

I’ve defended the rights of avowed (or at least apparent) Nazis to teach, so I certainly have no problem with MacDonald remaining in the classroom. He’s no Nazi, but his work is problematic. He told the Times:

In general, Judaism is considered a complex and successful survival mechanism, and at times they’ve been victimized for it. I do think there is a biological element at work here that’s existed throughout the centuries.

Jews, who have typically been in the minority in countries around the world, are compelled by an evolutionary strategy that makes them push for liberal policies, like immigration and diversity, with the intent of weakening the power of the majority that rules them.

I like the Long Beach State response. They aren’t taking Prof. MacDonald’s classes away from him, but they have issued a series of public statements separating themselves from his work. More importantly, at least some of his colleagues have apparently expressed a willingness to confront MacDonald (civilly, of course). Tenure ought to protect those who teach unpopular ideas from losing their jobs, but tenure is no shield from vigorous criticism. If MacDonald were in my department, I would have no trouble pushing him to clarify his views. Our jobs are sacrosanct, but with that ironclad security comes a duty to engage in some intense intellectual tussles.

But I’m reminded by the MacDonald case that I never posted about one of his colleagues at Long Beach State, the now-retired sociologist Barry Dank. While a great many folks are rightly troubled by the implicit anti-Semitism in MacDonald’s work, too few bothered to challenge Dank, who in the 1990s and into the first half of this decade was the leading proponent of faculty-student romantic relationships.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Dank (already a senior faculty member) became deeply troubled by the growing number of policies designed to protect students from lecherous professors. While he seemed to reluctantly support bans on outright, unwelcome harassment, Dank became academia’s most public and vociferous defender of the right of professors to date their current students, as long as the relationshiip was with a legal, consenting adult.

He founded the Foundation for Advancement of Sexual Equity (the website is now gone), and put up the still-extant Academic Sexual Correctness site, still hosted on a Cal State Long Beach server. The first article on the ASC site is Dank’s piece that ran in the Electonic Journal of Human Sexuality: Banning Sexual Asymmetry on Campus. It’s a hoot to read, as Dank goes so far as to compare bans on teacher-student dating to pre-Loving anti-miscegenation statutes:

The closest analogy we can draw is the traditional opposition to inter-racial relationships, particularly black-white relationships, with their stereotypes of innocent white females and predatory sexually obsessed black males. Bans on inter-racial relationships were, as we well know, designed to maintain rigid systems of racial stratification.

It gets better. Dank reveals the his true colors as a misogynist by suggesting that those who propose bans on faculty-student sex are mostly older women worried about being unable to compete with “hot coeds”:

Some other motives suggest themselves from the new Puritans loud insistence that their only interest is protecting innocent female students. We cannot help wonder if some of them might be really interested in protecting themselves from competition from younger women or affirming their power over younger women.

Dank’s article was co-authored with the late College of Charleston anthropologist Klaus de Albuquerque (a great name, btw).

Unlike his colleague MacDonald, who has — rightly or wrongly — been vilified for his stance, Dank was never the subject of angry editorials. It’s hard to see how his positions are any less offensive, or potentially threatening to students involved. Of course, Dank is retired now, though Long Beach still hosts his site, which hasn’t been updated for years. (If you read through the rest of the articles, you get more of the same stuff — and you get a link to the National Coalition of Free Men, suggesting, unsurprisingly, that Dank has strong MRA ties.)

By the time I discovered Dank’s work, I was already well into my own process of making amends for the brief period early in my career where I had had a series of consensual romantic relationships with my students. When I was chairing the academic senate’s ad hoc committee to write a policy banning consensual sexual relationships several years ago, I wrote to Dank but received no reply. I wrote to take particular issue with his suggestion that these policies were being pushed by aging (female) feminists eager to control their male colleagues and protect themselves from competition from younger women. I wrote to him as a man who had come to realize that he had crossed an ethical line. I wrote to him as a man who had never been held accountable by the college (or anyone else) for these inappropriate relationships, but who nonetheless had come to believe that faculty-student sex was always and in every instance a gross betrayal of professional and moral responsibility. By this point, I had already “outed” myself to the president of the college, the campus newspaper, the VP for human resources and my colleagues. I had, where possible, made sincere and heartfelt amends to the women who had been in my classes as well as in my bed. Chairing the committee to write this policy was President Kossler’s idea, as he (a former Catholic priest) thought it would be an excellent way to demonstrate contrition and take positive action.

I came across Dank’s work as I was researching policies that other campuses had devised. I was tempted to dismiss him as a crank, but knowing that at the time he was still an active faculty member, I wanted to push for some dialogue. He never replied to my overtures, and I dropped the issue. But if he were still teachin’ at Long Beach, I’d ask my friends at Inside Higher Ed to consider running a story on him and his views. If Kevin MacDonald’s bizarre take on Jewishness is fair game for public debate, which it rightly is, so too are the views of faculty like Dank who defend their right to bed their students.

A cake picture

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 6, 2007
in Age and Fun
. 4 Comments

My wife arranged a very special surprise birthday party for me yesterday. I’ll confess I had been hoping for a “surprise” party, but thought it would happen in a few weeks, closer to May 22nd. My wife had me totally convinced we were going to a regular 5 de Mayo backyard gathering, and I walked in to a garden filled with family and friends with my mouth agape. Lots of good conversation, a salsa band, and some amazing vegan Mexican food. Let me sing the praises of the caterer, and recommend Alex to any Los Angeles area folks looking for a pro who can deliver a wide variety of cuisines (he doesn’t limit himself to vegan.) The soy chorizo was pretty swell, and I managed to stumble through a cumbia with my wife without stepping on her feet or pulling any muscles in my ageing body.

And my amazing spouse capped it off with a huge (vegan) chocolate cake, complete with a picture of Matilde, our first chin, beautifully drawn in icing.

Here’s a picture at Flickr.

‘Twas a very happy day.

Sad for Sheridan, rooting for Segolene; a short politics roundup

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 4, 2007
in Politics
. 7 Comments

Following the various elections in Britain, I can’t say I’m terribly pleased. Sentiment aside, I’m not a huge fan of the nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland (though I gave money to Plaid Cymru once, a long time ago). I am disheartened by Tory gains in Wales (especially in my brother’s old home of Carmarthen, where the Labour member was ousted over her vegetarianism in a largely agricultural constituency). Though it was pretty bad for the left throughout England, I am relieved that the Conservatives remain irrelevant in Scotland.

I am especially saddened that Tommy Sheridan, a long-time hero of mine, won’t be in the Scottish Parliament. The self-destructive infighting among the far left is an old and depressing story, and the endless splits among British socialists have left them entirely out of Holyrood. Bad night for the Greens too, alas.

This weekend, I’ll be pulling for Segolene Royal in France, Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas, and the Cal Golden Bears rugby team as they go for another national title at Stanford.

UPDATE: I called the fight correctly, which wasn’t all that impressive since most folks predicted De La Hoya would be too slow and too old. We bought the PPV at the last minute, just as Mayweather entered the ring. It was worth the $54 tab to watch these two masters go at it. Oh, and Cal did win the rugby title. But the French have chosen Sarkozy, in their infinite wisdom. Thank goodness theirs is not a parliamentary democracy as is Britain’s. Sarkozy will find it hard to push his rightist agenda through the charmingly sclerotic system, but still, expect some whopping street demonstrations in Paris over the next year. Next year is the fortieth anniversary of soixante-huit; if Sarkozy gets too aggressive, look for a rerun.