There is no sense on my part that having an extra day this month means more time for anything. It’s a very busy Friday, and I’m exhausted from the week, so this is all the posting I can manage. I finally sent off a submission for the Yes Means Yes anthology, and have some new writing ideas floating around in my head. And what I really want to do is lie on the couch and see if I can find the Cal-Washington State women’s basketball game on TV.
Archive for February, 2008
We’re heavy on the traditional music this week, with a little bit of Contemporary Christian goodness for seasoning. The bonus track is one of the first folk songs I remember listening to as a small boy. And lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Hole and a lot of Don Gibson, who have nothing much in common except their capacity to comfort me this week. Mac Powell and Iris Dement have voices that make me shiver. Axl Rose haunts my dreams every once in a while, and the Robert Cray track strikes very, very close to home.
And even my worst enemies think better of me because I am so hopelessly devoted to Emmylou Harris.
1. “(Right Next Door) Because of Me”, Robert Cray
2. “Tangled and Wild”, Oh Susanna
3. “Touch the Morning”, Don Gibson
4. “Wasteland of the Free”, Iris Dement
5. “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind”, Keith Whitley
6. “Violet”, Hole
7. “Jamaica, Say You Will” Jackson Browne
8. “Civil War”, Guns n’ Roses
9. “Wish We Were Back in Missouri”, Emmylou Harris
10. “Restore to Me”, Candi Pearson-Shelton and Mac Powell
Bonus Track: “Sailing on the Lonesome Sea”, June Carter Cash
I’m sitting on a couple of hiring committes at the college. (We’re hiring some English profs, and a new Africanist for our history program). Today, we met with the dean of Human Resources to get the usual talk about confidentiality, and the now-customary reminder about how our committee must comply with the mandates of California Proposition 209 (which banned most forms of affirmative action) while still ensuring a “diverse” applicant pool. Our HR head, Jorge, is a very agreeable sort, and he and I have had many good chats in recent years.
During a break, he came up to me. “Hugo, I meant to tell you. Last fall I got a couple of complaints about your blog. Someone wrote me a long letter demanding you be fired. I checked out your blog, but I can’t remember what it was that got them so upset. I told them about academic freedom and so forth, but I thought you should know.”
Jorge and I rolled our eyes together at the silliness of the world. I wasn’t troubled by fear for my job, because I do know that tenure is darn-near inviolate, and unless I lapse into manifest incompetence or rob a bank, I’m untouchable. But jeez, if I didn’t have the seniority I do, I would have felt very uncomfortable today. And honestly, I’m a little bit sad. I know I have annoyed a variety of people, but until today, had no idea that anyone would go to the lengths of writing a letter (backed up with more than one phone call to the vice-president) in order to get me terminated.
I blog under my own name for a reason. Look me up on the campus website, and you’ll find my office number and my office hours. Maybe it’s a mixture of naivete and arrogance, but I don’t think I have a damn thing to fear from anyone. It’s not as if I’m running for Senate. But gosh almighty, it peeves me that someone would go this far.
And you know, when the Lord blesses us with children, I may be a bit more careful about how open I am. If I can make someone angry enough to try and get me fired, I wonder if I could make an already unstable someone angry enough to go to the point of physical violence. And while the childless man can say “bring it on!”, the prospective father has to be more careful.
In response to my post on Tuesday, I got an e-mail from a reader who wrote that while she had come to the point where she no longer believed in banning abortion, she still considered herself pro-life. Reflecting on how she had been raised (in a conservative Christian household), she noted that she had always been taught that women who undergo abortion will invariably experience regret and depression. Faced with the reality that that is not always the case, my reader writes that she finds it harder not to judge women who don’t experience regret.
One of the hallmarks of traditional sexism is its insistence that “good women” feel certain feelings and not others. “Good girls” are expected to be interested in romance, but not in sex — especially not the latter when it is disconnected from the former. Good girls are allowed, even encouraged, to daydream about marrying their handsome boyfriends; they are discouraged (via shame) from lusting after the hot water polo players in their Speedos. These messages about what the right emotions are for women (compassion, tenderness, romantic longing) and what the wrong emotions are (ambition, horniness, anger) are taught early, usually long before puberty. And the grip of this dichotomy of good and bad feelings can be intense, lingering for a lifetime, passed on to the next generation.
I know a lot of folks who feel as my reader does. In this world view, shaped both by sexism and popular Christian teaching, remorse and regret are prerequisites for forgiveness and understanding. A young woman who has had an abortion will have no trouble finding sympathy in even the most conservative circles if she says the right words. For example, this will do nicely:
“Oh, I was so confused and scared! I had no idea what to do. I I just wanted it all to be over with, and I had nowhere else to go, so I called up the clinic and I went and ‘took care of it.’ I cried afterwards for hours; it hurt so much. At first I felt numb, and then I felt relief, and then I felt this awful sense that I had done something terrible. Every day I ask God to forgive me. I regret it so much, and I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling so horrible.”
Say that in private — or better yet, tearfully in front of the congregation — and you can expect the outpouring of warmth and forgiveness given to a Prodigal Daughter. The pastor will use you as an example, mingling admonition with a reminder about God’s grace and a wildly inappropriate but inevitable reference to Rachel the Matriarch weeping for her children. Folks will hug you and pat you and say soothing words. “We’re praying for you, sweetheart.” “Jesus loves you.” “You are forgiven.” “Thank you for speaking out; you may have saved another girl’s baby today.” And on and on it goes. Continue reading ‘Grief, Remorse, and Judgment: the myth of a “right response’ to abortion’
I have a large reservoir of affection for Joseph Bottum, a poet, essayist, and editor of First Things. I can think of only a handful of writers whose prose and verse dazzles me more; despite his reactionary politics, Bottum scribbles with such tender and generous power that he often moves me to tears. I have read just about everything he’s written that’s in print. I have mused before on my blog-crushes; my feelings for J. Bottum extend well beyond that threshold into the realm of heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed devotion. His wife and children need not fear; no stalker I.
He has some published poetry; formal and elegant, this is my favorite of his.
The Undivided Heart
(Lines Written on My Daughter Faith’s
Second Birthday)
Why should the aspens shrink from death?
In the clearing after fire,
they sift the sunlight through their leaves:
a ripple shield, a spray of shade
for tender shoots of tower pine
in whose grown shadow aspen dies.
Yesterday I caught my daughter
pushing gently at the mirror,
reaching for her self and other,
learning now that at the heart
of things there is divide. Christ,
it was from this I’d hoped to save her,
shelter her until I died
content beneath her tower shade.
In Faith’s green age I climbed the hill
behind the cabin, through the pines,
to sit alone in the fire glade.
The aspens flashed like mirrored panes,
and in the breeze the rippled leaves
whispered there of light and dark,
death and love and sacrifice,
the undivided heart that springs
to fill the broken heart of things.
…than not being able to be in two places at once.
From March 27-30, I’ll be in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Women, Action, and Media Conference, meeting heroes and friends.
That same bloody weekend, I’ll be missing the Gender and Justice Conference at Vanguard University, just down the road in Costa Mesa. Vanguard, a Christian university associated with the Assemblies of God, has one of the best women’s studies departments of any Pentecostal institution in the world. Christians for Biblical Equality (for whom I have written an article or two) and Jackson Katz will be there.
Is it too much to ask, dear hearts, that y’all coordinate these things in the future? What’s a Christian feminist lad to do?
Jeez Louise, I’m bummed.
This week I’ve had a couple of conversations about teaching which have dovetailed nicely together. A junior colleague asked me what I’d learned since I first started here fourteen years ago; later that same day, a student whom I mentor asked a not dissimilar question.
I teach very differently than I did when I first arrived at Pasadena City College in 1993. I have considerably more confidence, and — possibly — a deeper knowledge of the material. When I first started teaching Western Civ, I often had only the barest, thumbnail grasp of what it was I was covering in my lectures. Like so many other novice professors, I was frequently just one step ahead of my students. Experience and background reading have gradually filled in most of the lacunae, but every once in a while I still find myself lecturing on a topic about which I don’t know nearly as much as I would like. (For example, the Napoleonic Wars.)
But on a psychological level, the real change is measured by the diminishing degree to which I pander to my students in order to be liked and admired. I don’t know if those of us who are predisposed to narcissism are naturally drawn to the teaching profession, but in my case, my need for validation and my career aspirations meshed together nicely from the beginning. Hugo Schwyzer at 26 (the age at which I began my career here at the college) was an insecure bundle of nerves and desires. I was already a fairly polished speaker, but that polish was the result of the assiduous cultivation of qualities that I knew could get me the attention I craved so much. Continue reading ‘Some will love you, some will loathe you, and the mass will be indifferent: some thoughts on teaching and student reactions’
I’m quoted in the Montreal Gazette. Or, more accurately, this post is. See, googling yourself does pay off.
Certain sectors of the pro-life blogosphere are spreading this sad story from Cornwall: Artist hanged herself after aborting her twins.
Carol Platt Liebau, a card-carrying member of the “the exposure of thong underwear by teenage girls is a sign of the Apocalypse” wing of the American right, writes:
When pro-choices (sic) discuss how many women die with “back alley abortions,” somehow deaths like these never seem to be counted.
Gosh, possibly because they fall into two separate categories?
With one or two exceptions, virtually every thoughtful voice for reproductive options understands that in some cases, abortion can have a significant emotional impact on the women who choose it. I am well aware from my own experience that the men who helped conceive that which was aborted can, on occasion, feel very real grief. (It is February; had my high-school girlfriend and I not chosen an abortion, I would have a twenty-two year-old celebrating his or her birthday this month. I think of that often). It simply isn’t true that the majority of what Liebau calls “pro-choices” don’t acknowledge that pain, sadness, and depression can follow an abortion. (We also point out that pain, sadness, and depression can follow the birth of a child, too. Post-partum depression in mothers is very real, and the religious right would likely not wish to employ it as an argument against human reproduction.)
We can experience real grief over a choice we’ve made while being immensely grateful to have had that choice in the first place. Divorce is, in this instance, similar to abortion. No one has sex saying “Gosh, I hope I get pregnant so I can find out what an abortion is like!” No one gets married saying, “Oooh, I can’t wait to go through the heartbreak of dividing up the Christmas ornaments and deciding who keeps the dog!” In my all-too-abundant experience, divorce proved to be the least-worst option in my first three marriages. It was not an option exercised with joy, but with a strange mix of deep sadness and immense relief. Continue reading ‘Grieving the best choice’
This story popped up on my radar screen today: Professor, ex-student tie the knot.
Muata Kamdibe and Crystal Domingues aren’t looking for anyone’s stamp of approval - not from their resistant families, curious colleagues, or a gossip-prone public.
For two months, the couple managed to keep their romance a secret from everyone, knowing the kinds of whispers and judgments their 18-year age difference would spawn - as well as the fact that Kamdibe, 36, a Rio Hondo College professor, first met Domingues, 18, when she was a student in his class last fall.
But it all publicly tumbled out two weeks ago, when Domingues was reported missing by her family, then tracked down by a private detective Feb. 7 to Kamdibe’s home in Irvine.
Well, that’s one way to start off with the in-laws. Continue reading ‘“The rights of desire”: a professor-student romance makes the local news’
Originally published August 30, 2005. It’s appropriate again this week.
If there’s one thing I don’t like about the first week of classes, it’s the task of saying "no" over and over again.
Like many community colleges, we have far more students than we have slots available in most of our classes. It’s a very rare course where I am able to accept everyone who shows up the first day trying to "crash" a class. More often, as with the three classes I met today, I have wait lists of one or two dozen students. I generally do lotteries for available seats, and ask all those not selected to leave.
I’d like to enroll everyone, of course, and be the "nice guy." But if I did that, I’d be left with a classroom too tightly packed for anyone to move, and in serious violation of city and state fire and safety codes. I’d also be overwhelmed with papers and tests and journals, and my grading load — with seven courses and no teaching assistants — is already immense. So for reasons of both safety and sanity, I have had to get very good over the years at saying no.
Saturday night, my wife and I drove out to Cal State Northridge to see a production of the “Vagina Monologues”. Eve Ensler’s play has become a campus standard, traditionally performed near Valentine’s Day (or “V” day, in which the V can stand for Valentine, Vagina, Vision, Victory and an end to Violence against women.) This was the third time I’d seen the play performed. I saw a professional production in Los Angeles in 1999 or 2000, done as a dramatic reading, and saw a very amateur (and technically, unpermitted) performance by some students here at PCC in 2002.
My sister-in-law, Devereau, is a senior theater major at CSUN. To our delight, Dev had what I remember as the most entertaining and powerful of the many monologues: The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy. That particular piece features an explanation of how women from a variety of different backgrounds moan in pleasure, and my wife was very brave as she listened to her baby sister offer a magnificent litany of orgasmic cries, groans, and bellows. Continue reading ‘On seeing the Vagina Monologues again’
I’ll admit I haven’t seen all the films that have been highly recommended this past season, but if you want to know what my favorites were of those I did see, the list is below the fold. Continue reading ‘Top Ten Films of 2007′
I’m grateful to Daniella Maestretti of Utne Reader who e-mailed me this afternoon to let me know that this site was mentioned in her column on feminist blogs.
Maestretti names four “starter sites” (four cornerstones?) of the feminist blogosphere: Feministing, Pandagon, Shakesville, and Feministe. But Maestretti also notes the breadth and diversity of the ’sphere, linking to Sydette and Brownfemipower and Donna among others.
It’s a good summary, and I liked this bit:
Do these bloggers know each other? Hate each other? Love each other? To some degree, I imagine, all of the above. They certainly seem to read each other, which keeps things lively, and there’s more interaction between them than I expected to find.
Well, I’m hoping to meet many of these bloggers (and all the others who ought also to have been mentioned) next month at WAM 2008. And whether or not my unabashed admiration for all is reciprocated, I’m fond of each and every one of my “colleagues”, and eager to connect with ‘em in “real” life.
Though it is not available online, my post about Andrew Gomez, my student who became the first female-to-male transgendered Homecoming King in the USA, is in the new issue of XY Magazine. XY in America is not to be confused with XY Online, the Australian pro-feminist site run by Michael Flood ( a site, coincidentally, where I have an article or two available). It’s nice to see Andrew’s remarkable story continue to attract attention.
It’s a busy day, and I’m trying to finish a couple of writing projects that have March 1 deadlines, so not much time to blog.
What I did want to touch on is a lighter subject: picking.
I’ve been married four times and lived with a couple of other women for extended periods. (I never did single well, evidently, from the time I was seventeen). And just about every one of the women with whom I have lived in or out of wedlock has developed a fascination with grooming me. Whether it was searching my back for acne or patrolling my beard line looking for ingrown hairs, virtually everyone with whom I’ve been in a long-term relationship has had a strong desire to explore, poke, pluck, and pop various parts of my body. I have never once felt even the remotest desire to reciprocate.
Mind you, I like my wife’s grooming. Though it’s periodically painful to have tiny hairs torn out, zits punctured and so forth, I take it as evidence of affection. It’s obviously a behavior we humans share with a wide variety of our fellow animals; everyone from primates to penguins seems to delight in removing impurities from a loved one’s skin, fur, or feathers. Despite more than twenty years studying or teaching gender and sexuality, I’ve never given much thought to the cultural or psychological implications of this behavior in humans. In my experience, at least, this sort of grooming in heterosexual relationships is rarely reciprocal — it seems to be initiated mostly by the female partner, and is submitted to with varying degrees of willingness by the male. (In the animal kingdom, it does appear to be a gender-neutral behavior, and enthusiastically mutual.) Continue reading ‘Poking, plucking, popping: a note on the compulsive grooming of one’s beloved’
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