Archive for June, 2007

Photo Pride on Flickr

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 20, 2007
in GLBTQ and Photos
. 1 Comment

I got this email from someone named Ceceilia, asking me to pass along the word, and I’m happy to do so here.

I’m a student activist and frequent reader, wondering if you would be willing to spread the word about a really, really important (really easy!) fundraiser on Flickr for The Point Foundation, which provides scholarships to marginalized LGBT student leaders. I’m a Point Scholar myself, and you can read my bio on the website at www.thepointfoundation.com. This foundation has been a true lifesaver for me, and though their financial help is really easy to quantify, the emotional support and mentoring relationships they have given me are valuable beyond words.

In an effort to support scholarships–there are 94 of us now!–The Point Foundation has partnered with Yahoo’s Worldwide Pride 2007 on Flickr, and for every photo that is uploaded to the group’s photo pool, Yahoo will donate $1 and up to $25,000. Thus, I’m asking you to help spread the word!!!! Every dollar counts! And god only knows how many pride photos are on Flickr!!!

Photos don’t necessarily need to be of pride (especially if participants aren’t queer or didn’t go to pride), but they just need to be representative of people who are proud to be LGBT or are proud of LGBT people. Further instructions are posted below.

1. Go to The Point Foundation website
2. Click on the Worldwide Pride 2007 (Yahoo) link
3. Create a Yahoo ID if you do not have one
4. Join the Worldwide Pride 2007 photo pool
5. Upload your photos
6. Create multiple Yahoo IDs
7. Go back to step one, wash, rinse and repeat!
8. Celebrate Pride!

Up early

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 20, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness and Body
. 0 Comments

This summer, my Wednesday mornings are going to start around 4:15AM. My poor showing in my last two marathons was due to too little mileage; one thing I’ve learned over the years is the value of a mid-week middle distance run. If I do a long run (16-22 miles) on Sunday, and I do a middling run on Wednesdays (10-12 miles, perhaps picking up the pace a bit during it), then I’m going to be much better off come marathon time.

Of course, with the temperatures starting to climb, and an 8:00AM class, that means I have to run very, very early. Getting up early isn’t hard for me; going to bed at a reasonable hour often is. Since I was a small child, I’ve liked getting up early; I hate being in bed when it’s light outside. I’ve never been much of a night owl either; much to my wife’s dismay, if I really had my way in all things, I’d go to bed at ten every night and get up at 4:30 every morning. When I’m eating right and light, I can do fine on 6 hours of sleep. If I start eating a lot of sugar or other heavy things, then I find I need another hour or two to feel rested.

I hit the pavement this morning just before 5:00, running a loop that takes me over into Glendale (for the locals, I ran from my house to the Rose Bowl, up Lida, past Art Center and into Chevy Chase Estates before swinging down through LCF and home). In the hills, I saw lots and lots of rabbits; the best time to see the bunnies is always right at dawn. I worry about them — the hills are so dry this summer, and they, like all the other critters, have to get closer and closer to people’s lawns and pools and bird baths in order to find water. That means a whole new set of dangers. I worried a lot about a lot of animals this morning as I ran, but I comforted myself with the certainty that the God who watches over me watches over them as well.

It’s a long day of teaching ahead — I do about six hours of teaching a day during summer school, all lecture or discussion moderation; it’s hard to be “on” for that long day in and day out. Caffeine helps, and the sublime endorphin high of a solid 12-miler will see me through the morning.

No Magic Grading Machine

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 19, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 6 Comments

I’m done with the grading. Jeepers, I hate grading. We can’t give plus/minus modifications to final grades, so everyone ends up with a straight A,B,C,D, or F. (I give very few Ds, lots of Cs, a fair number of Bs, a few As and a few Fs.) Ranked in order of commonality, it’s C,B,A,F,D.

Particularly with the Bs and Cs, there are huge gaps. One student who gets a B just missed an A; another who gets a B barely avoided a C. If you wre to read their final papers, you would be bewildered as to how they could end up with the same grade. But with no plus/minus option, there you have it — a huge variation amongst folks with similar grades. That’s less true of the As, but for Bs and Cs, it’s a constant.

I had 322 finals or final papers to grade. No time for thoughtful comments, just a quick read-through, a grade, and then a brief period of wrestling over what final mark to give for the class. A few very kind students manage to earn the same grade on everything, and that makes the ultimate decision simple; there are not nearly enough of these consistent types to make my job easier.

I dream of a magic grading machine, operated by industrious chinchillas.

Another in the student crushes series: the “daddy crush” and the need for a mentor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 19, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Student crushes, Teaching and Youth
. 20 Comments

I’ve written a few times about student crushes and their meaning, starting with this post that still gets loads and loads of hits from search engines. My basic thesis:

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places!

One thing I’ve really started to notice in the last two or three years is an interesting, satisfying shift in the way that some of these crushes seem to play out. Something shifted in my relationships with my students right around the time I became old enough to be their father. The crushes that students got on me — and the way they made those crushes known — were qualitatively different when I was 30 than they are today at 40.

Leaving me out of it, I know that some student crushes on their teachers are explicitly sexual. But most really aren’t, even if they appear externally to be motivated by physical desire. Young people, you see, have a good vocabulary for sex. Romantic longing and sexual fantasy are part of the discourse of most college students. But we don’t have the same vocabulary for wanting a mentor, or even a father-figure. When a 20 year-old college student says of her professor, “I think he’s hot”, her friends may or may not agree — but they understand her frame of reference. They’ll likely take what she says at face value.

But what if that same gal told her friends “I really want him as a mentor”? It’s likely she’d be teased; “Yeah right, you want him as a mentor! Puhleeze! Can’t you be honest about it?” We live in a culture that insists on eroticizing our desire to be guided and cared for to such a degree that it is assumed that anyone who insists that his or her longing to be nurtured isn’t sexual at its core is, well, lying. As a result, we don’t have a way to let young people ask to be mentored, guided, even loved in a safe, non-sexual and yet intimate way.

Talking about sexual desire also sounds so much more adult than talking about a desire for a father figure. We live in a culture where many young people see lust as evidence of maturity. Saying about your teacher: “I want to do him” makes you sound grown up, aggressive, sophisticated, a “together woman.” Saying about that same person, “I want to spend time with him, he’s kind of like a Dad to me” may seem — to peers if not to the young woman saying it — like evidence of immaturity. “What, you’re still not over your father issues?” Too often, I think the vocabulary of erotic desire masks something else, something more tender and raw.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that some female students will flirt with me early on in visits to my office hours. It’s not particularly flattering, and it’s not evidence of my desirability. What I’m convinced it is is simple: so many of these young women, particularly first-generation college students, have been taught by their parents (or by bitter experience) that “men just want one thing.” If they want guidance and mentoring, if they want to be noticed for their ideas, they figure they have to get a male professor’s attention first by using their sexuality. They sometimes don’t trust their own inner worth enough to assume that they could get that attention without being flirtatious, and often they don’t believe that men — even older men in positions of authority — will really give them as much validation if they don’t wear certain kinds of clothing and behave in a certain way. Once a relationship is established that feels safe and entirely non-threatening, I notice the tendency to flirt usually goes away.

I’m opening myself up to several charges here: narcissism, for one, for assuming that so many folks do get crushes on me (regardless of the meaning of those crushes). Two, I’m being presumptuous about what young people, particularly young women, “really” want from me. I make no secret of my longing to be a father (seven chinchillas, an active avocation for youth ministry); maybe I’m just projecting my own need to be a Daddy onto my students. I’ve got a colleague who just assumes that all of his female students “want” him sexually; he preens like a rooster (though he’s old enough to retire with full benefits) and talks graphically and embarrassingly about his students’ dress. His ego needs tell him that legions of women thirty-five years his junior long to go to bed with him; is it not possible that my ego needs lie to me as well, telling me that a great many of these young people think of me as, if not a father figure exactly, at least a mentor? Perhaps I flatter myself as badly as my lecherous colleague.

But even if I do exaggerate the case, I think the “daddy crush” is more real than we know.

Some thoughts on marriage, socialization, libido and the vocabulary for one’s own inner terrain

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 30 Comments

It’s not uncommon to have a “gender divide” in discussions of feminism, sexuality, or marriage. Rarely, however, has the divide been as stark in my comments section as it is beneath my post last Thursday about men and “emotion work” in marriage.

One thing that tends to happen in these discussions is a revisiting of the nature/nurture argument. In particular, many men make the claim that women are simply hardwired to “do emotion work better.” They insinuate that it’s unreasonable for women (or their pro-feminist allies) to demand that men “behave like women” and learn to talk openly and freely about their feelings.

Of course, many of these same men express frustration with their girlfriends and wives about sex. When, say, a wife or girlfriend shows less interest in sex than her guy, or perhaps seems to have some reticence about acting out one of his fantasies, the same guy who insists that he is “naturally” less verbal than his female partner insists that she “work through her sexual issues”. It is a pop culture stereotype that men have higher sex drives than women and that women have a greater need for emotional connection, and like most stereotypes, it’s perhaps partly grounded in truth. But what I see happen a lot in the relationships and marriages I know is a kind of profound inconsistency on the part of the husband/boyfriend — when it comes to excusing his own unwillingness to do “emotional relationship maintenance”, he explains it away with biology; when it comes to his female partner’s “sexual inhibitions” (which may simply be an unwillingness to fulfill his needs whenever he feels them), he insists that this is something she “needs to work through.”

I am convinced to my core that both men and women have enormously powerful libidos. Sex drives may vary in intensity from person to person, but that variation has less to do with gender and far more to do with individual preference. Almost all of us have a capacity to delight in sexuality. Similarly, almost all of us have the ability to express ourselves verbally; we all have the capacity to accurately describe our inner emotional terrain. The problem is obvious: in our culture, we shame and shut down young women’s sexuality to the point that many have a hard time acknowledging that they have the capacity for eros. At the same time, we shame and shut down young men who are too freely expressive with their emotions.

“Slut” and “fag” are words that whip the two genders into line; the fear of being “dirty” leaves many young (and not so young) women profoundly disconnected from their own authentic sexuality. These young women may have a sense of themselves as objects of desire, but they all too often have been shamed out of their own sexual subjectivity. In almost exactly the same way, their boyfriends and brothers have been brutalized by the cult of contemporary American masculinity. The “fear of faggotry” not only causes young men to hide their tears, it eventually leads to a kind of emotional frigidity that leaves them profoundly disconnected.

All over America, there are heterosexual couples having sex. Far too often, a key issue in the sexual relationship is that the woman “doesn’t feel anything.” She wants to enjoy sex, she’s attracted to her guy, but somehow, things just don’t end up as exciting for her as they do for him. Sometimes, she fakes it, or she’s passive. She feels guilty, perhaps, or resentful. Often, she just feels frustrated and a little bit cheated.

And all over America, there are men and women trying to have a conversation. And the guy is trying (maybe) to connect emotionally with his wife or girlfriend. He wonders why the words seem to come so easily for her, why her tears flow more quickly than his. He loves her, but when he looks inside of himself, he isn’t sure what he sees. He wonders if he’s just shallow, or numb, or some sort of sociopath. Maybe he feels guilty. And maybe he feels a little frustrated at his own lack of emotional vocabulary; maybe he feels resentful at the woman in his life for “wanting so much emotional connection” all the time.

Look, I’m doing some whopping stereotyping. Relationship advice manuals do this all the time, of course. But the point I want to make is that we make a dreadful mistake in our culture when we assume that women will never be as randy as men, and that men will never be as emotionally intuitive as women. From early childhood, we shut down women’s sexuality and men’s emotional sensitivity; in school, peers use terms like “whore” and “queer” to reinforce the point that certain things (female sexuality, male sensitivity) are taboo. And we then launch a generation of young women who don’t know how to have an orgasm and a generation of young men who don’t know how to connect to their deepest, most authentic feelings. Worse, we assume that this is “just the way it is”, and we begin to believe in the lie of complementarianism, in which each spouse becomes chiefly responsible for one specific compartment of a shared life, a compartment in which the other is neither expected nor allowed.

I’m being a bit crass here, but I want to make this point clear. We need to do more to raise our young women to be comfortable with their sexuality, with their anger, with their appetites for food. We need to do more to raise our young men to express their pain, their hurt, their anxiety. We don’t need any more “people-pleasers” or “sturdy oaks.” I’ve been the sturdy oak married to a people-pleaser, and it’s nothing short of sheer hell — alienation, distance, misunderstanding, resentment. My job as a human being is to become as emotionally complete and multi-faceted as possible. It’s my wife’s job to do the same, and to a very great extent, we can each play the role of the other’s cheerleader in that process. But in the end, we are each fully responsible for our own completion.

Sexual harassment training

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 18, 2007
in Sexual harassment
. 6 Comments

Several times over the last few years, I’ve presented lectures and led workshops on sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. I began doing them as a member of a group called Peer Sexuality Outreach when I was a student at Berkeley in 1986, and have continued to offer them to various organizations. Many times I’ve thought about creating a more serious side business out of these trainings, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I’ve done trainings in a variety of settings — with Greeks on college campuses and with Presbyterian seminarians at Fuller. I always try and adapt what I’m doing to the specific needs of the organization I’m working with; seminarians get a slightly different message than secular high schoolers. And last Thursday, I did a training at my once and future boxing gym here in Pasadena. (I’m taking a break from boxing to concentrate on marathon training; I’ll go back to lifting and hitting things in August.)

I’d never done a sexual harassment/misconduct training in a gym setting before. I spend a lot of time in gyms, and indeed have flirted with the idea of going through trainer certification at some point in the future. Personal trainers have been a huge part of my life. I’ve worked with running coaches and boxing coaches and weight-lifting coaches; my wife and I are absolutely devoted to Stephanie, our Pilates instructor. I’ve got enormous respect for the folks who have not only made fitness the source of their livelidhood, but who are committed to helping others reach their physical goals.

But gyms, like restaurants, are notoriously hostile work environments for women. While sexual harassment can happen anywhere, I hear an unusually high number of (often appalling) anecdotes from folks who have worked in the fitness world. And even though boxing and kickboxing have become much more popular in the past decade, gyms that focus primarily on these activities have a particularly bad reputation. Folks who have never worked out in a boxing gym make some unfair (and some warranted) assumptions about what might go on there; many women in particular are nervous about walking in the door to sign up for classes or personal training. The fear of being harassd, of being hit on, of being placed in an ugly situation — these fears are real, and they hurt the business potential of those who own and operate these clubs.

My sexual harassment seminar on Thursday was light-hearted. There’s a trick to doing these workshops: on the one hand, you need a certain amount of engaging humor in order to put folks at ease. On the other hand, you want to make it absolutely clear that you take this subject very seriously — too much humor can make it seem as if sexual harassment training is like one of those Comedy Traffic Schools, where the unstated message is that the whole experience is a frustrating waste of time. Getting people to understand what sexual harassment is, and what it isn’t; getting people (especially men) to make a commitment to work to create a safe environment for all employees and clients — this is vital, serious stuff.

The most sensitive area of my whole presentation dealt with “consensual relationships” between trainers and clients. I reminded the various coaches and trainers at the gym that every national certifying body in the American fitness world considers sexual relations between a trainer and a current client to be profoundly unethical. This gym, like most gyms I’ve been around (and I’ve been around a great many) has a certain percentage of trainers who honor this rule more in the breach than in the observance. I noted the rules barring these sorts of relationships between professors and students, between lawyers and clients, between doctors and patients. “If you want to be seen as the professionals you are”, I said, “then you need to be willing to live up to a professional code of behavior. And you’ve got to do more than just follow the rules yourself — you’ve got to be willing to hold your fellow trainers accountable. Their misbehavior reinforces a stereotype that ends up reflecting badly on you and everyone else in the business.”

In an ideal world, people would go through sexual harassment workshops because they want to create a safe space for everyone. Realistically, the fear of litigation is the reason why I get paid to come in and do these trainings (and some larger, corporate entitites get paid huge sums to come in and present slick, packaged, day-long workshops.) But my concern is less with the motive than with the outcome. Whether I’ve been brought in to prevent lawsuits or because there’s a genuine desire to create a safe, fun, healthy atmosphere for everyone doesn’t matter. If people end up doing the right things for the wrong reasons, it’s still a damned sight better than not doing the right things at all.

This was my first workshop that got videotaped; at some point, I’ll see if I can’t get excerpts on to Youtube.

A note on a father’s day run

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 17, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness and Father
. 2 Comments

It’s just after 12 noon on Father’s Day, my first Father’s Day since my Dad died nearly a year ago.

Last Father’s Day was the last time my father and I were able to speak. He was in the very late stages of dying of cancer, and we knew he had only a few days left. He was still coherent most of the time, and — blessedly — in virtually no pain. My wife and I spent the day with him, my stepmom, and my two sisters in Santa Barbara. He dozed most of the day in his easy chair, periodically waking up to chat with us or smile at us while we held his hand. He died four days later.

I woke up this morning very early, even before my alarm went off at 5:00. I went downstairs, meditated for a bit, and thought about the fact that this would be the first Father’s Day of my life without my Dad. I remembered the little gifts and cards I made him in elementary school; I remembered the lunches I took him out to in more recent years. I thought about last Father’s Day when, in the evening, we put Dad into bed and I heard him say — for the last time — the same words he had been saying to me for nearly four decades: “Good night, Huggle.”

I’m in the heart of my marathon training now; today’s run was a hard twenty-miler from the Aquatic Center parking lot south of the Rose Bowl to the top of Brown Mountain in the Angeles Forest. I was looking forward to the run today of all days because it would be something joyous, liberating, peaceful, exhilarating.

I ran with two of my buddies, Caz and Mark; both are fathers. Both knew my Dad. I didn’t talk much about missing my father, but I was soothed by the presence of these old companions of mine; their gentle maleness is reminiscent of my papa’s, and I needed some gentle masculinity today.

The last stage of the run was grueling. We had added in an extra section that gave us another mile, so I was doing a solid 21 this morning. I ran the last four miles alone, in the blazing sun, down through Devil’s Gate dam and along the east side of the Bowl. I felt my father with me as I ran; it was he, after all, who taught me to run thirty years ago, back when he was briefly caught up in the “jogging craze” of the mid-to-late 1970s. And when I came to a stop near my car, soaked in sweat, my skin coated in dust and salt, I felt the tears well up. Running, for me, isn’t really an escape from emotional pain; it is in my running that I draw closer to my own woundedness, my own grief — it is in endurance athletics that I find a kind of catharsis and healing that I find nowhere else, not even on my knees at the communion rail.

And doing 21 miles of long, slow, painful distance on this Father’s Day brought me very close to the pain of losing my father a year ago. But it also brought home for me the Great Hope that I hold in my heart, that I will be with him again in another country. Perhaps when I join him there, they will have hills and fire roads, and we will run a very long time together.

That’s not just my hope, that’s my certainty this Father’s Day.

The chinchillas got their dad a dozen yellow roses and a gift certificate to the movies. Their papa is grateful.

Matthew Hubert pictures

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2007
in Photos
. 1 Comment

Pictures of my new nephew here.

Friday Random Ten: “there is no magic grading machine” edition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 15, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 4 Comments

A lot of “retreads” on this FRT. My fondness for punk is not what it was a generation ago, but #5 and #10 are both fine examples of the genre. #3 and #6 both take me back to high school — reminding me of very different aspects of my adolescence, of course. I’ve mentioned before that Nebraska is my favorite Springsteen album, and this is my second-favorite track off that marvelous acoustic recording. And I like #4 as a cover of the James Taylor classic, but I know some other people find it appalling.

1. “Heavenly Day”, Patty Griffin
2. “Awful”, Hole
3. “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love”, Van Halen
4. “Fire and Rain”, Sammy Kershaw
5. “Mr. Integrity”, L7
6. “To Turn You On”, Roxy Music
7. “Lonesome Valley”, Joan Baez
8. “Atlantic City”, Bruce Springsteen
9. “Love Song for a Savior”, Jars of Clay
10. “Take ‘em All”, Ultima Thule

Bonus Track Two: “The Beautiful Ones”, Prince
Bonus Track Two: “Romeo and Juliet”, Indigo Girls

Rocky Shimon’s first pictures

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 14, 2007
in Chinchillas, Family and Photos
. 4 Comments

Here, here, here. He’s our second son, and he’s doing amazingly well given that his early life was characterized by consistent mistreatment.

My brother and his wife just had a son (of the human kind) born tonight in England: Matthew Hubert Schwyzer-Howell. I am a very proud uncle (and chinnie papa).

“A son, not a husband”: some very long thoughts about marriage in a roundabout response to Jill

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 14, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 89 Comments

Jill has a post up this week: I’m Never Getting Married. It opens

I actually don’t know if that’s true (her claim in the title of the post), but the closer I get to standard marrying age, the less I think it’ll ever happen — first because I think marriage is kind of a crock, and second because I’m becoming fairly certain that there just isn’t anyone out there who I want to be forever bound in marriage with.

It’s an interesting and lengthy post, though Jill doesn’t spend as much time on the second part of her reasoning (the near-certainty that there is no one out there whom she wants to marry) as she does on her first. Part of Jill’s criticism of marriage is directed at engagement and wedding ritual; she specifically calls out diamonds and bachelor parties. She makes some excellent criticisms of both (particularly the anti-feminist implications in the former and the horrifying behavior of many men at the latter).

Back in 2004, when I was engaged but not yet wed, I posted about diamond rings here. I noted that while I bought my wife an engagement ring, she bought me one as well. Here’s an excerpt:

…it’s important to remember that the origins of our traditions do not dictate their contemporary meaning. There is little doubt that the practice of having a father walk his daughter down the aisle to her groom (rather than having both parents escort her) is rooted in notions of the marriage as property transfer. But in the modern world, we are free to take older traditions and remake them, transforming their meaning as we please. What was once oppressive need no longer be so. I’ve known some strong women who walked down the aisle on Dad’s arm dressed in white — and they weren’t property (and they sure as hell weren’t virgins). At some point, oppression is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and these women didn’t feel oppressed by the ritual itself.

It is absolutely true that folks will make judgments about a man’s wealth and status based upon the size and perceived expense of his fiancee’s engagement ring. But again, their perceptions do not determine the exclusive meaning! For me, the engagement ring does not symbolize wealth or ownership; rather, it symbolizes sacrifice and enduring commitment. In many traditions, it is customary for a man to say to his bride “with all my worldly goods I thee endow”. In the modern world, that means he is surrendering his financial (as well as his sexual) autonomy in order to build a blended life with his partner. That’s no small sacrifice for either party when it is genuinely meant! The engagement ring symbolizes his commitment to share all that he has with her. (I suppose she could wear his 401K plan as a doily, but that wouldn’t be nearly as appealing.)

As for bachelor parties that involve strip clubs or other forms of sexualized entertainment, I’m obviously appalled by them. (I’ve had small bachelor parties before each of my weddings, though a number of them have consisted of just hanging out with a group of friends of both sexes. None involved strippers.) I’ve posted many times about the sex industry in all of its forms, and won’t repeat those posts here. I do want to offer a ringing endorsement of what Jill writes on the subject:

Bachelor parties where the boys get together and go fishing or out to a nice dinner are one thing. But the “take the groom-to-be out to watch naked women dance around” is problematic not only because of the feminist issues with paying women to strip, but because it strikes me as a direct statement of power over his to-be wife — the message is that marriage is such a burden and a bore that he has to get all of his youthful energy out before he enters into it, even at his fiancee’s expense.

There’s no question that going back for more than a century, pop culture has set men up to believe that marriage means the end of “fun”. The jokes about “the old ball and chain” go back to the furthest extent of living memory. And of course, there’s a small grain of truth in all of this ugly humor. If your definition of happiness is the pursuit of everlasting novelty, then yeah, marriage will be dull by comparison. If your definition of freedom is the freedom to sleep with as many women as you can, then yes, marriage will seem confining.

But I’ve already written my paeans to monogamy; I’ve already said (to the exasperation of many of my readers) that I consider monogamous marriage to be the best vehicle I know for personal growth. (See my marriage archive if you want more of that.) I’m not going to repeat myself here, though I will say again that I know plenty of very evolved, interesting, compassionate people who have chosen alternatives to monogamy. To paraphrase Symmachus, there are many roads…

I respect Jill’s reasons for — at this stage of her life — rejecting marriage. But in her post, I don’t read the reason I hear from many young women (and not-so-young women) for their wariness. Whenever I launch into my glowing defense of marriage as a vehicle for personal transformation, someone (invariably a woman) remarks that in most marriages she’s seen (or been in) one partner is shouldering considerably more of the burden of creating that change. Almost always, that partner is a woman.

A good friend of mine, several years older than Jill, is recently divorced. She pledges never to remarry, saying: “In the end, most men expect women to take care of them once they’re married. I don’t mean financially, I mean enotionally. I’m just tired of thinking about someone else’s needs all the time, particularly an adult’s. I’m prepared to take care of a baby. But I don’t want my first-born to be my second child!”

My friend isn’t describing every American man. But she’s describing all too many. And it’s not just a reference to housework she makes. All of the research shows, of course, that even when both parties in a marriage work an equal number of hours outside the home, the woman tends to spend more time on domestic work. But the problem my friend is really focused on is less about doing the dishes and more about emotional intelligence (what’s often called “EQ”). Far too many men fail to do adequate self-care when they are in relationship with women. Far too many men becoming enormously reliant on their girlfriends or wives to urge them to see a doctor, to be the sole source of professional encouragement, to monitor their alcohol intake or the content of their diets. Far too many men unintentionally turn their girlfriends or wives into mother figures; in a sense, they outsource their emotional maintenance.

Every romantic partnership ought to be just that, a partnership. And while the partners are rarely going to be equally adept at every physical and spiritual and emotional task, it is important that the overall psychic workload of their union be shared fairly. Too often, women like my friend feel that when they marry, they end up focusing all of their time and energy on meeting the needs of their husbands. And while there is an element of need in even the healthiest of marriages, too often many women begin to feel that they are doing for their husbands what they damned well ought to be doing for themselves. Men can wash dishes (with hot water and detergent). Men can talk about their feelings with their friends just as so many women do, and thus alleviate some of the emotional burden many wives feel to be their husband’s sole source of psychological support. Men can stay faithful in body (and in fantasy), even when their wives don’t feel like having sex every night of the week.

Of course women have a huge part in this as well. Far too many women have traditionally derived their sense of self-esteem from their skill at providing pleasure and happiness to others. Some women deliberately seek out men who will be emotionally needy; part of the “bad boy” syndrome is sometimes less an attraction to the “bad” than it is to the “boy” who, beneath his truculence and his self-destructiveness, just “needs a little special TLC”. Both women and men can be architects of their own adversity in this regard. I am not absolving women of all responsibility here.

But in the end, I’m convinced that a great many women (not necessarily Jill) are reluctant to marry (or marry again) because they believe that their are relatively few men worth marrying. Many women look at the colossal sacrifices other women make in marriage, they look at the legions of husbands and fathers who are emotionally distant or desperately dependent, and they say to themselves “no thanks.” They are legitimately concerned that when they marry, a part of themselves will disappear; they fear — sadly, often rightly — that they will be forced to neglect their own growth to focus on enabling the growth of their husbands and their children.

I am not a perfect husband. One of my most important jobs as a husband, however, is to strike a balance between genuine intimacy and interdependence on the one hand, and emotional self-sufficiency on the other. Even now, at 40, after four marriages and a decade of therapy (including two years of formal analysis), after a dramatic and enduring spiritual conversion, after years and years of serving as a mentor and a counselor and a gender studies professor, I still have work to do. I still have to be vigilant not to slip into a pattern in which my wife ends up doing for me what I ought to do for myself. It’s not my wife’s job to make sure I eat right and get enough sleep, it’s not my wife’s job to tell me that I need to cut back on the exercise. If I am to be the man God calls me to be, I cannot outsource my self-care to my spouse.

My wife and I are trying to save chinchillas, trying to bring about social change, trying to plan for our own futures, trying to be agents of justice and love in the world. And we’re trying to have fun while we’re doing it. We rely on each other for encouragement, for comfort, for friendship. We focus our romantic and sexual lives on each other, knowing that if we put all our intimate energy into our relationship, we will emerge from our private moments recharged and more ready than ever to do the important work we are called to do.

So what’s the bottom line? There are many reasons not to want to marry. But one big whoppin’ reason for many women is that they’ve seen the available men. And while these lads may be cute, sexy, witty, kind, and bright, far too many of them strike the women around them as poor long-term investments. Far too many seem as if they’d end up being sons rather than husbands. And if we who believe in marriage want to see the institution thrive, we need to work on getting our brothers to grow up.

Note: This is an-MRA free zone, folks. No anti-feminist bromides permitted.

Thursday Short Poem: Szymborska’s “On Death”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 14, 2007
in Poetry
. 3 Comments

Emily shares with me a fondness for poetry and in particular, the 1996 Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska. I’ve had a few of Szymborska’s poems up before, but not this fine one, which Emily sent me last week.

On Death, without Exaggeration

It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can’t even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn’t strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won’t help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies’ skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it’s not.

There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you’ve come
can’t be undone.

Many indeed are the caterpillars that have outcrawled it. I love that line.

Exposing a myth about “leaving”: some notes on Evan Stark’s new book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 13, 2007
in Aggression and violence, Books, Family and Relationships
. 10 Comments

I’ve been asked to comment on this remarkable excerpt from Evan Stark’s new book Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life.

Stark laments that so much of the writing on domestic violence over the past thirty years has remained focused on the psychological weaknesses that lead women (who are the overwhelming victims of spousal or partner abuse) to stay in these relationships. Stark:

Because women have such ready access to rights and resources in liberal democratic societies, it is widely assumed that if abusive relationships endure, it is because women choose to stay, a decision that seems counterintuitive for a reasonable person. The logical explanation is that women who make this choice are deficient psychologically or in some other respect. Yet researchers have failed to discover any psychological or background traits that predispose any substantial group of women to enter or remain in abusive relationships. Battered women do suffer disproportionately from a range of psychological and behavioral problems, including some, like substance abuse and depression, that increase their dependence and vulnerability to abuse and control. As we will see momentarily, however, these problems only become disproportionate in the context of ongoing abuse and so cannot be its cause…

My emphasis. So if it’s not “women’s fault” for remaining with their abusers, and their decision to stay isn’t the result of a pre-existing psychological handicap, then why — why, why — do so many women find it so difficult to exit these relationships permanently? Stark points out that most of our talk about domestic violence is based around what seems like a logical assumption: that by leaving an abuser, women reduce their chances of being victimized. That may make intuitive sense, but Stark makes the case that the reverse is true:

In fact, around 80% of battered women in intact couples leave the abusive man at least once. These separations appear to decrease the frequency of abuse, but not the probability that it will recur. Indeed, the risk of severe or fatal injury increases with separation. Almost half the males on death row for domestic homicide killed in retaliation for a wife or lover leaving them. As we’ve also seen, a majority of partner assaults occur while partners are separated. So common is what legal scholar Martha Mahoney calls “separation assault” that women who are separated are 3 times more likely to be victimized than divorced women and 25 times more likely to be hurt than married women.

Bold emphasis is mine.

I’d heard this anecdotally, but confess I hadn’t really considered the implications of this.

Most of us who counsel women or girls who are in abusive relationships encourage these women to report the abuse and leave the relationship. We assume (at least, most of the folks I’ve talked to do) that getting “professional help” and “involving the police” and “moving out” are the best ways for a woman to keep herself safe. Many of us have heard women say things like “I’m afraid of what he’ll do to me if I leave him”, and we respond by making soothing noises that reassure her that the police or the courts or a shelter will provide her with all the protection she needs. Though logic would seem to make that self-evident, the sobering crime statistics Stark cites suggest otherwise.

I haven’t read the book yet, though it’s now on order. But I’m sobered by what I’ve read in this brief excerpt, and I’m all the more determined to expose our fundamental myth about partner violence. That fundamental myth says that we end partner violence primarily by empowering women to leave abuse relationships. The truth is that the available legal, social, and economic resources to protect women (and their children) once they’ve left are woefully inadequate.

Note: This thread is not to be used to launch attacks on feminism, or to question domestic violence statistics, or to advance the absurd MRA lie that men are the primary victims of partner abuse. All comments made in that vein will be deleted without warning.

Introducing Rocky Shimon Schwyzer

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 13, 2007
in Chinchillas
. 2 Comments

First off, we’re keeping our newest rescue chinchilla. He came with the very generic name of “Chili” (which is almost as bad as “Fluffy”), and last night, we formally bestowed upon him his new monicker: Rocky Shimon. Rocky joins his brother Dudley Mr. Doodles and his sisters, Gabriella Princessa; Ninotchka Miss Mouse; Chihiro Pango Massionfruit; Joonko Evangelista Crawford Turlington and Racheli Scrappy Doo.

Plans are afoot for their own website, complete with webcam (and possibly live chat.)

Updated pictures of all of our babies to come this weekend.

Various charity-related items: chinchillas, mangosteen, and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 12, 2007
in Chinchillas, Family and Father
. 3 Comments

1. We are fostering a seventh chinchilla, a sweet little boy who comes with the name “Chili.” (Just about the most popular name ever for chinchillas. If we keep him, we’re changing his name.) We rescued him from a very bad home situation where he was being abused; pictures to follow soon.

2. You can read more about the latest adventures of our chinchilla charity, the Matilde Mission, here. Check out a bunch of cute little ones who were saved from pelting by the kind donations of folks just like you. You can donate here. Continue reading ‘Various charity-related items: chinchillas, mangosteen, and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet’