Archive for February, 2008

“Lucky in her enemies”: why I can’t stop pulling for Hillary

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 12, 2008
in Feminism and Politics
. 25 Comments

As we head through another primary day, and the sense grows that Barack Obama is picking up unstoppable momentum, Melissa at Shakespeare’s Sister offers us a fine compendium of anti-Hillary articles. Melissa figured she’d be able to find twenty or so recent instances of misogynistic attacks on Senator Clinton; instead, she came up with 62.

I’m not the only person who’s gone back and forth between rooting for Hillary and rooting for Barack. Sure, as a registered Republican, I voted for McCain (as part of the quixotic effort to drag the GOP back to its centrist, moderate roots). And last year, I backed John Edwards. And literally daily, I vacillate between pulling for the junior senator from Illinois and the junior senator from New York. And one thing that keeps me leaning — ever so slightly — towards Hillary Clinton is my outrage at the venomous misogyny that is so regularly directed her way. Continue reading ‘“Lucky in her enemies”: why I can’t stop pulling for Hillary’

Year of the rodent

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 12, 2008
in Chinchillas
. 4 Comments

My friend Zoran sends me this link: Hamster prices triple in China.

According to the Chinese media, prices have tripled to about 30 yuan ($4.20, £2.10) per hamster across the country.

In the Year of the Rat, this tiny creature has become the most acceptable rodent, a type of animal that is not everyone’s first-choice pet.

“Rats and mice have a bad image, but hamsters are gentle. You can hold them in your hand a play with them,” Xinhua News Agency reported.

Pet stores are also reporting an increased interest in other, similar-looking creatures, such as chinchillas and squirrels.

Yikes. I shudder to think what will happen next February, when the year of the rat comes to an end. We all know the horrors of Easter, when cute bunnies are given — and rapidly neglected. This seems to be the same phenomenon, potentially on a massive scale.

In other chinchilla news, our charity, the Matilde Mission, now has a UK partner: R&J Chinchilla Rescue. The Matilde Mission has given a grant for the year to support R&J’s work; you can read more at their site.

And the Matilde Mission continues to welcome your donations; you can read about our latest work here.

Grade inflation works both ways: on professor evaluations

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 11, 2008
in Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors and Teaching
. 13 Comments

Much to my surprise, when I came onto campus this morning I found my student evaluations from last fall waiting in my mailbox. As I wrote back in November when the evaluations were distributed, in the past professors don’t get the evals until May. Things have been sped up — perhaps because unlike in the past, no one bothered to type up the written comments. I was simply given all of the evaluations in a manila envelope.
Continue reading ‘Grade inflation works both ways: on professor evaluations’

Returning to an old course on the body

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 11, 2008
in Body and Teaching
. 0 Comments

I’m back on campus, busy reacquainting myself with my office. Spring semester classes start February 19, and I’ve got syllabi to write (or, at least, update).

In addition to my “bread and butter” Western Civilization courses, I’m teaching my Women in American Society class and a Humanities special course entitled “Beauty, the Body, and the Western Tradition”. Here’s part of my introductory spiel:

This course provides an interdisciplinary look at historical and contemporary attitudes towards male and female bodies. We live in a culture obsessed with beauty and sexuality and power; we also live in a culture in which millions of our fellow citizens are profoundly uncomfortable with their own flesh. This course will ask tough questions about the relationship between the body and the mind, the body and the culture, the body and the state. We will look at how attitudes towards beauty, the body, and weight have changed over the last several centuries in European and American society. Students will be asked to think and write about their own experiences as embodied people, and will be asked to analyze words and (especially) the images they see around them.

Though I’ll be supplementing this reading list, the core four texts for the class are:

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (Courtney Martin)

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Susan Bordo)

The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (Susan Bordo)

Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Joan Brumberg)

It’s only the second time I’ve taught the course; it debuted in Spring 2004, and for various reasons, I haven’t taught it since. It’s an emotionally challenging course for both me and my students. I have struggled with body issues, disordered eating, and exercise addiction since I was in my teens. My students (who, judging from the class roster, will be largely female) surely will have their own complex and often unhappy stories to tell. And though the academic and the therapeutic are not always mutually exclusive, the class will not be an extended opportunity for each student to process through his or her own issues with the body. Rather, the course offers an introduction to how the body has been represented by medicine, religion, high and popular culture in the Western world since the Middle Ages.

It was a tough course to teach the first time around, and I don’t suspect it will be easier this year. But I am excited about doing this work with my students, collaborating with them to fashion a better understanding of how we got here, to this place where so many of us are filled with anxiety or distaste or shame about our own flesh.

I’ll report, particularly about how my students respond to Courtney Martin’s book, the one new text I’ll be employing.

Against sociopathic vandalism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 10, 2008
in Environmentalism
. 2 Comments

Chris Clarke writes about the threat to the Desert Cahuilla Prehistoric Area. He links to this piece posted by the Desert Protective Council.

Check out the links for more explanation, but bottom line, the threat comes from recreational off-road vehicle use. Chris says:

I regard off-road vehicle driving as a socially sanctioned form of sociopathic vandalism, especially in the fragile desert. In southern California especially, the ranks of OHV enthusiasts contain a disturbing proportion of actual thugs. Expanding their access to irreplaceable and fragile desert lands would be an atrocity.

Chris, as usual, is absolutely right, both about the connection between off-roading and vandalism and about the very real threat these folks and their awful machines pose to the wild. (The only people who infuriate me more than off-highway vehicle enthusiasts are those in the fur industry. A repeated willingness to waste fossil fuels while tearing up nature in your ATV is grounds for the termination of friendship in my book.)

In any event, go here and take action.

On “settling” and the indispensability of passion: a reply to Lori Gottlieb

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 9, 2008
in Divorce, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage, Memories, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 33 Comments

The March 2008 issue of The Atlantic has one of those sure-to-start-a-heated-discussion pieces: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. The author, Lori Gottlieb, is exactly my age: forty, on the nose. She’s a single parent, having conceived her young son with donor sperm. Lori begins:

About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

Gottlieb anticipates that this last sentence will arouse howls of indignation, but she pushes blithely ahead. She’s writing, it seems for younger women, and she’s offering what is only a slightly different spin on the by-now ubiquitous bromide that “feminism hurts women by suggesting that happiness is possible without a man.” I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t dozens of books and articles out there aimed at headstrong young women warning that if they don’t get hitched and start breeding early, they’ll miss their chance at the deepest and most satisfying source of happiness that the be-ovaried can ever know. It’s an old trope: the wiser older sister figure presenting her own story of woe as a cautionary tale. (And yeah, I know I sometimes do a similar thing here on this blog.) What’s interesting — and particularly galling — is Gottlieb’s hook: she urges smart young women to marry “Mr. Good Enough”. Continue reading ‘On “settling” and the indispensability of passion: a reply to Lori Gottlieb’

Empathy and exasperation: on men, ageing, and the “Peter Pan” syndrome.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 8, 2008
in Age, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 44 Comments

I’m reading through the comments left below old posts while we were away. Below my post on the older man/younger woman dynamic in “Juno“, my old friend Bill asks for more compassion for men — like the fellow played by Jason Bateman in the film — who struggle to accept their ageing:

I wish you wrote about men who have had trouble growing up with a little more empathy, particularly those, like Mark, who had dreams with expiration dates and who did not see them come true and now must figure out where to go from there. I think you actually feel such empathy but it doesn’t come through here.

It might be helpful to read the original post for context. In Juno, the character of Mark is apparently in his late thirties. He and his wife are unable to conceive naturally, and are eager (or his wife is eager) to adopt. But as the audience discovers, Mark still has dreams of success as a musician. He bonds inappropriately with Juno, and it becomes clear as the picture progresses that that bond is less sexual than emotionally chronological. Her interests (comic books, music, horror movies) are his; his wife’s interests (domesticity, children, middle-class stability) are not.

(This doesn’t mean that an interest in comic books is inappropriate for older people. I know many fine folks over 40 who have seemingly adolescent hobbies. There’s nothing wrong with still going to punk shows or comic book conventions when you’re old enough to remember the Nixon Administration. Maturity is not about one’s interests; maturity is about the understanding that like it or not, ageing means the acceptance of certain responsibilities: financial, emotional, professional, and so forth. And, of course, as in the oft-quoted Donald Justice poem, it means “closing softly the doors to rooms (you) won’t be coming back to.”)

But to get to Bill’s point: I’m sympathetic, but not terribly empathetic, with men whose dreams turned out to have “expiration dates.” Part of that is that I am fortunate to be doing at 40 more or less what, at 20, I expected to be doing at this age. I was studying to be a history professor when I was a teenager, and by the time I was 26, I had a tenure-track job. I’ll admit, I was lucky. Getting the job I wanted wasn’t solely due to luck (I’d like to think talent had something to do with it). Continue reading ‘Empathy and exasperation: on men, ageing, and the “Peter Pan” syndrome.’

In praise of progressive Republicanism: celebrating the triumph of McCain

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 7, 2008
in Politics
. 19 Comments

I spent a lot of time yesterday reading commentary about the Super Tuesday results, and admit that I spent most of that time focused on the Republican race, about which more in a moment.

On the Democratic side, I started supporting John Edwards last year and continued to support him until he dropped out of the race. His was the most consistently progressive voice of the three major candidates; I am pleased to see that the two candidates who remain have been influenced by his rhetoric, particularly on poverty issues. I wrote last month that all things being equal, I was slightly more inclined to Hillary Clinton than to Barack Obama. That’s more out of admiration for Hillary than dislike of Barack. I don’t accept the “suffering Olympics” model that posits either sexism or racism as worse than the other; the election of either a woman or a black man to the most powerful office on the globe would be equally revolutionary. What matters to me is simple: I want each candidate’s voters to pledge unequivocal support to the party’s nominee. If Clinton does end up with the nomination — and I give her about a 60% chance of doing so — Obama will need to urge his supporters, particularly the young ones, not to be disheartened. If he doesn’t get the nomination in 2008, the chances are excellent he will someday.

But of course, I changed my registration to Republican last year. It’s not that I am ideologically comfortable with today’s GOP. On virtually every major issue, the Democratic party is a better fit for me. But that’s less because I am particularly left-wing and more because the GOP has, since my childhood, moved farther and farther right. The GOP of my childhood included not just moderates, but genuine progressives, especially on environmental issues. The GOP was never just the party of the right; it was also the party of Pete McCloskey and Millicent Fenwick. Continue reading ‘In praise of progressive Republicanism: celebrating the triumph of McCain’

A short trip report

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 7, 2008
in Traveling
. 5 Comments

The Thursday Short Poem will return in one more week.

We had a wonderful time on our South America/Antarctica trip.

Our first stop was Chile. The Antarctic tour group was to gather in Santiago, but we flew in a few days early to explore on our own. Though we enjoyed the Chilean capital immensely (some of my German ancestors worked in Santiago and Valparaiso in the 1840s), our real purpose in coming early was to visit the Chinchilla National Reserve a few hundred kilometers north of the capital. We’re devoted to chinchillas, of course, and most of the remaining wild chinchillas live in one of two Chilean reserves. (Chinchillas were once found throughout the Andes, from Chile all the way up into Colombia, but they were always most numerous in the south-central Andean region.) Continue reading ‘A short trip report’

Back from the Southern Cone: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 6, 2008
in Photos and Traveling
. 4 Comments

We’re home again. LAN Flight 602 from Santiago, Chile, to LAX touched down at 6:45 this morning, and my wife and I were just about the first two off the plane, so eager were we to be back on familiar ground.

We were gone for three weeks, spending six days in Chile, four in Argentina, and the rest on an adventure cruise down to Antarctica. More about the trip later, but for now, I’m working on editing photos and reading about Super Tuesday. I hope to have pictures up on Flickr in the next few hours.

UPDATE #1: Photos from the Chilean portion of our trip are up, including many from our visit to the Chinchilla National Reserve.

UPDATE #2: Photos from Ushuaia, Argentina, and from Carcass and New Islands in the Falklands are here.

UPDATE #3: And almost 100 photos from the Antarctic cruise are now up in this album.

UPDATE #4: And a fourth and final batch of a few photos from Buenos Aires.