Archive for April, 2008

If it’s “stealing”, you’d better prove it: on Amanda Marcotte, BFP, and RH Reality Check

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 9, 2008
in Blogging, Immigration and WAM 2008
. 219 Comments

The part of me that likes to avoid conflict wants to stay quiet. That part of me is not on display this morning.

Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing Amanda Marcotte of “stealing” her ideas for this RH Reality Check piece: Can a Person Be Illegal, from this speech by Brownfemipower at WAM. The speech was given March 29 in Cambridge; the Reality Check article was published on Wednesday, April 2 (and republished by Alternet five days later). Here is Brownfemipower’s post, and Sudy’s,and Sylvia’s, and Rebecca’s.

Amanda has explained, in comments on various blogs, that she had already outlined the Reality Check article in an editorial meeting well before she, Brownfemipower, and all the rest of us were gathered for WAM. Brownfemipower has not acknowledged that claim, and has chosen not to name Amanda, changing her name to an “X” in her comments section.

Radical women of color have rightly suggested that “mainstream”, predominantly white feminist bloggers need to do more to cover broader issues of social concern. Amanda, who has been writing about a wide spectrum of justice issues for years, chose to tackle the immigration/language issue in her Alternet piece because, as she says, immigration is a vital contemporary issue, much in the “zeitgeist.” And inevitably, when people who share the same progressive concerns start focusing on an issue, the chance that they will independently come to similar conclusions is pretty high.

Perhaps the Reality Check article ought to have had more links within it; I don’t know what Alternet’s particular policy is to citations. But the accusation of “stealing” — a charge now being repeated on multiple blogs today in regards to Amanda — is very serious indeed. It’s also a charge that requires far more proof than has been offered, and if that proof cannot be found, it’s a charge that ought to be withdrawn. It’s one thing to be frustrated, as many women of color bloggers are, that radical ideas are not getting published. It’s another thing altogether to accuse a fellow feminist of theft when she does take on, in eloquent and thoughtful terms, the very issue you’ve been demanding that mainstream white feminists address.

Certain words are matters of perspective and opinion. You can call me elitist and pompous; you can call me a clueless, self-serving asshole; you can call me a self-loathing fuckwit. (I’ve had all of these thrown my way in the past year.) It’s not a crime to be pompous; I can’t be sued for being a fuckwit. But to accuse someone who makes their living with words of stealing is a very, very serious charge — one that is normally subject to civil litigation or severe academic discipline. To make that charge without compelling evidence is to damage a writer’s reputation in perhaps the most serious way possible. No amount of frustration or anger justifies it.

There are larger issues here that may be driving some of the anger towards Amanda. Her new book (which I reviewed here) has just been published by Seal Press. Representatives of Seal Press got into a nasty exchange with some women of color bloggers at WAM. The community of “radical women of color bloggers” has suggested that Seal needs to do more to publish serious works by non-white feminists; Amanda’s article in RH, repeated on Alternet, coming so soon after both the publication of her book and the conflict with Seal, is understandably exasperating. Why some folks get book deals and others don’t, why some folks get articles published and others don’t — these are issues worth discussing.

Here’s what’s not okay: assuming that if Amanda Marcotte writes an intelligent and interesting piece about immigration right at the same time that Brownfemipower makes similar points at a conference, then somehow the former has “stolen” from the latter. The struggle for justice for undocumented migrants is an important one. Those who come late to the issue ought indeed inform themselves by listening to those who have been publicizing the struggle for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that the right to publish on the subject is limited to those who were writing about it first.

The charge of theft against Amanda has spread fairly widely, despite her clear statement that she had designed the article well in advance of the WAM conference. BFP’s powerful speech, read side-by-side with Amanda’s article, in no way constitutes a “smoking gun”, proving that Marcotte’s piece was plagiarized. Amanda seems caught between a rock and a hard place: if she doesn’t write about issues like immigration, she’s ignoring an issue of vital concern to women of color. When she does produce an intelligent, provocative piece on the subject, she’s accused of having stolen the idea.

There are some charges for which there are no proofs or disproofs: “clueless”, “racist”, “elitist.” But theft can be proven, and if you’re going to use the language of theft, you need a hell of a lot more evidence than you have so far produced.

UPDATE: The links to Brownfemipower are defunct, at least from my blog. If you don’t go through me but through one of the other links listed above, you can apparently still access the post. I don’t want to link where I’ve been explicitly asked not to do so any longer (Chris Clarke’s Faultline), but since this post is already up for discussion and receiving many hits, I did want to explain the difficulty folks might have in obtaining access.

“I have so much love to give”: young women and self-flattery

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 9, 2008
in Relationships, Teaching and Youth
. 18 Comments

In my women’s history class yesterday, we were making our way through Lynn Phillips’ Flirting With Danger, a text about which I have written before and which I have used in class for the last several years.

Phillips talks a great deal about discourses that impact the lives of contemporary young American women. Among these is what she calls the “Love Conquers All” discourse:

The love conquers all discourse does not limit itself to the notion that long-term heterosexual relationships are necessary for women’s fulfillment in love. Indeed, it suggests that finding the right man will somehow solve all of life’s problems.

Fed by Disney movies and pop songs, magazines and movies, most girls run into the notion that love conquers all early on. Some fiercely resist it, of course. The discourse suggests, however, that those who most fiercely resist making romantic love a priority are fooling themselves; from Jane Austen’s time to our own, we have countless fictional heroines who are initially dismissive of love, but in the end, succumb to its all-consuming power.

My students know all this, of course. It’s not news to any group of college students that they live in a culture that tries to impose a vision of happy heterosexual fulfillment on each and every one of them. But I’ve found another aspect of the “love conquers all” discourse that Phillips largely ignores: a great many young women (usually younger than typical college-age) go through adolescence with a vast over-estimate of just how much love they have to give to the “right person”.

When I first started working with youth group kids, particularly ninth and tenth-graders, I was struck by how often I would hear the same thing from so many of the girls with whom I worked. In group discussions or in writing, many would say something more or less like this:

I have so much love to give. I’ve never been in love, not really, but I just feel like I have this huge amount of passion inside of me. If I could just find someone whom I could really trust, then I could give him (usually, it’s a him) everything I have inside of me. I know it sounds corny, but I really believe love can heal all our problems. I feel like I have enough love inside of me to change the world, if I could just find a way to let it out. Continue reading ‘“I have so much love to give”: young women and self-flattery’

The art of losing, not always a disaster: on the language of virginity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 8, 2008
in Virginity, Youth and Youth ministry
. 21 Comments

Apologies to Elizabeth Bishop.

My student Hilary blogs, and on Sunday she linked to this interesting Jessica Zaylia piece on The Hymenization of Virginity. Treading on somewhat familiar ground, Zaylia offers all the right critiques of the language of “losing”. What is being lost, anyway?

What Zaylia doesn’t do is propose a counter-language. What else should we encourage folks to say? Those of us who are rightly eager to make the case that penis-in-vagina intercourse is only one form of sexual expression among many may want to downplay what our culture tells us ought to be the earth-shattering significance of a single act. As awkward as it may sound, asking someone how old they were when they first had intercourse — assuming that it’s an appropriate question in the particular context — is vastly preferable to “when did you lose it” or worse, “To whom did you lose it?”

Zaylia’s meditation on “loss” is incomplete. She rights:

Pairing the two word “losing” with “virginity” accomplishes two goals. First, we only lose what we consider valuable (e.g. “I lost the race,” “I lost my notebook,” or “I am lost.”). We also lose things we presume we ought to have kept (e.g. “I lost my temper,” or “I lost your phone number.”) Coupling “losing” with “virginity” implies that virginity is something of value that we ought to have kept.

True enough. But there’s a third sense of “losing” Zaylia misses. People on diets speak of “losing weight”, after all — and they almost never express regret about the “pounds they gave up.” When we talk of “losing fat” or “losing inches”, we talk about it with hope and optimism beforehand and pride afterwards. And of course, for many of us, “losing virgniity” was a loss eagerly anticipated!
Continue reading ‘The art of losing, not always a disaster: on the language of virginity’

Monday Reprint: dating, self-worth, and challenge

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2008
in Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 6 Comments

I wrote this back in November 2005. It seemed appropriate to put back up today. The original post with comment section is here.

It struck me that no one has ever come up with a “dating tips for pro-feminist men.” I toyed with the idea for a moment, but then rejected it. After all, all such “tip lists” which offer ten or twenty suggestions for “scoring” with the opposite sex, or “picking up”, or even “meeting” partners have one fundamental problem. By their very nature, they turn sex/dating/romance into a project. They posit a problem and offer a solution.

But I’ve come to believe we make a terrible mistake when we see dating and sexuality as problems to be solved. The dating advice that Jill quotes at Feministe — and most other such advice I’ve seen elsewhere – is based on the assumption that women are a challenge to be mastered, rather than human beings to be engaged. There’s the suggestion that when it comes to love and sex, there are a finite set of absolute truths out there about men and women that a few lucky folks have understood and of which the rest of us are ignorant. But if we pay close attention (and pay money) to these “masters”, they’ll teach us their techniques and we can begin to practice them with greater success and confidence.

Yes, I do get asked for dating advice. (Few folks ask me — yet — for marriage advice.) I work with lots and lots of young people, and my life experience and field of interest suggests to them that I might be a good person to ask. Younger boys often ask for specific tips: “How can I tell a girl that I like her?” “How do I know if she’s into me, or if she just likes me as a friend?” “How do I know when it’s okay to kiss her?” There are lots of stock answers having to do with summoning up courage and the like, but I don’t dispense little bon mots of wisdom. I’m not sure I’m qualified, first of all, but more importantly, I think there are more important questions to ask. Continue reading ‘Monday Reprint: dating, self-worth, and challenge’

Paying for pleasure: some preliminary thoughts — with links — on sex work, pleasure, and touch

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2008
in Sex work and WAM 2008
. 42 Comments

The struggle over sex workers and their rights has been much on my mind since the WAM conference ended just over a week ago. As I wrote in this post, I went to Audacia Ray’s presentation on representations of sex work and sex workers in the media. As a Christian feminist deeply troubled by sex work, I came largely to find a way to alter my vocabulary: I wanted a way to speak about sex work and sex workers that was less paternalistic and stigmatizing. But I found many of my assumptions being challenged by Audacia and others in the workshop, including my fellow blogger Amber Rhea.

The model to which I am still attached is one that sees the act of paying for sex to be fundamentally at odds with feminist ideals. This is more grounded in intuition about the unique nature of sex itself than it is in an actual consistency. After all, my wife and I employ women to clean our home. We make sure we pay them above the prevailing wage, we make sure that they have comfortable conditions, we avoid agencies and deal with contractors directly. But we have no trouble renting, if you will, a woman’s hands to scrub our toilets. We also are fortunate enough to be able to afford visits to the spa once in a while. I have no trouble these days paying a woman to massage my shoulders and back, though it took me a while to get accustomed to being touched by a stranger.

The line between sex work and massage is a clear one, except it isn’t: in both cases, a consumer pays for physical pleasure that is delivered via the body of a working person. I don’t have a problem renting the hands, muscles, and elbows of a skilled masseuse: the idea of renting the vagina of a woman seems an utterly different thing. I’m troubled by surrogacy, as I don’t like “renting wombs”, but I’m willing to hire women to clean chinchilla cages and rub out my knots. Feel-good slogans like “Women’s bodies are not for rent” run into a whole host of problems and exceptions.

Even when I lack the power to describe it, I think sex is qualitatively different from all other activities. My acculturation leads me to maintain that there is something unique about the power of sex, particularly intercourse, to bind two people together emotionally. But is that really true? Or is just my heterosexist cultural programming that has taught me this? When I think about it, I’ve had intercourse that was lousy and distant. On the other hand, I had a massage a couple of years ago where the masseur who was rubbing me seemed to be pouring love into me. I felt hot light coming in wherever his hands were, and I wanted him to keep close to me forever. I didn’t know his last name, but, for sixty minutes, I loved him because I felt that for that precious hour, he loved me. I’ve had sex that was a hell of a lot less intimate! He was $150 an hour, this fellow, and worth every penny. Bottom line: learning to be massaged has taught me that radical physical intimacy is not always sexual, just as my colorful past taught me that sex is not always intimate. And radical physical intimacy that you pay for can be really, really good.

There’s an implication for sex work in all this.

I recommend this post that Amber linked to: Reaching the Media, Sex Workers Against Rape posted by Jill Brennemann at the work-safe “Bound, Not Gagged.” It’s got me thinking.

Girlfriends, boyfriends, feminism: a long response to “Gwynn”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2008
in Feminism, Links, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 32 Comments

A reader named Gwynn writes:

I’ve been thinking about you recently as my boyfriend and I have been talking about feminism.

He’s 25, I’m 34, but this is not about our age difference per se. A bit before we started dating, I told him I was a feminist, and he took the kind of not-uncommon position something like “well as long as you’re not mad at me personally…” But when we spoke further, I found him very receptive to feminist ideas. He was simply clueless, which isn’t uncommon in either sex, I suppose.

I gave him a bunch of links to read (from this blog and elsewhere).

So everything was great and I’ve been calling him a feminist. But lately he’s admitted he’s not comfortable calling himself a feminist because of his lack of actual education about it, and because he’s afraid someone like his sister or mom will argue with him if he uses that title. And also, feminist stuff is starting to seriously stress him out and sometimes when it comes up, it makes him really miserable, partly from a generic perspective (”the world is really fucked up!”) and partly selfishly.

The way I can approach sympathy for his position is as a white person. Racism is an issue where I’m in the oppressive majority, so I can understand the discomfort that comes with that position. Otherwise I’d probably get truly irritated when he says things like “I just don’t like having so much anger directed at me that I don’t deserve,” etc. I talk him through this stuff as best I’m able.

He’s also freaked out around ideas like “what can I personally do about misogyny?” and “seriously, I can never use the word ‘bitch’ again?” and “do men really have a vested interest in keeping women down?” and “but how does patriarchy benefit me personally?”

I’m not a gatekeeper of feminism. I’m a student of it, like most people. I don’t want to be his feminist authority.

I’m pretty good at answering the questions and challenging him. We had, for instance, a whole discussion in which I convinced him that the position that all heterosexual sex is rape is, while (IMO) wrong, not actually ridiculous. He’s open to everything that I say. He agrees that gender stuff is fucked up. (Of course, he’s especially receptive to arguments about how patriarchy hurts men, but I’m fine with that. I hate how patriarchy hurts men too, and as long as you’re not using that as a way of saying “so shut up, bitches, at least you don’t have to do dangerous jobs”, I’m totally cool with discussing it.)

I wish he had a male feminist mentor of some kind, but I don’t see that happening. I wish he was more well read about it, but he’s been reading “The Republic” for about the past year, which indicates how much time he spends with books and how slow he is at it.

I guess my sort of general question is, without doing all of his work for him, or letting him off the hook, how does a girlfriend help a boyfriend with feminism?

One of the problems in any age-disparate relationship — particularly when the older partner is committed to a spiritual or political ideal about which the younger knows little — is that a kind of complicated mentoring relationship can develop. The younger partner, so often infatuated with the older, can easily associate their new love’s beliefs with the new love himself or herself. In other words, the interest in feminism could (and in Gwynn’s boyfriend’s case, I don’t know for sure) become inextricably linked with Gwynn, and his receptivity to feminism thus rises and falls with the status of the relationhip. That’s always problematic.

But there are two basic issues here: how to get young men to understand — and embrace — feminism, and how can a romantic partner help in that process, if at all? Continue reading ‘Girlfriends, boyfriends, feminism: a long response to “Gwynn”’

Irony-free in SB

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 6, 2008
in Faith and Music
. 7 Comments

We spent the day back up in Santa Barbara; it was the first time my brother, sisters, and I had all been together since before our father died nearly two years ago.

This morning, my ten-month old nephew Matthew Hubert was honored in a “naming” ceremony at the Santa Barbara Unitarian Society. I’m fairly accustomed to being around earnest, sweet, doctrinally vague, and unfailingly left-leaning Unitarians. But my wife and I couldn’t hold it together, when, after a service filled with virtually every cliche in the Book of Progressive Religion, the minister asked us to — yes, you know it — join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” My beloved and I did quarter-turns away from each other as we clutched hands, knowing that if our eyes met we would both lose it completely.

How often does the phrase “we’re not going to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’” make its way into our discourse? And yet, in all my church-going experience, I’d never actually been asked to do it. Oh, I’ve held hands with my fellow worshippers; I’ve sung Kumbaya a time or two. But I’ve never had these two activities combined into the great archetypal experience of well-meaning liberalism.

The Santa Barbara Unitarian Society, bless ‘em all, is an irony-free zone.

Hands, groomsmen, soccer walls

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 5, 2008
in Posture
. 15 Comments

My wife and I went to a lovely wedding this afternoon; Melissa, our personal assistant and “chinchilla nanny”, married her long-time sweetheart. We had a wonderful time at both the service and reception, but watching the wedding itself, I was reminded of something I’ve meant to blog about for a while.

It’s a strange aspect of the acculturation of the American male that most men end up with no idea what to do with their hands when they are standing still. I’ve been to dozens and dozens of weddings in my life; in most of them — particularly those with large numbers of groomsmen — the lads all end up standing with their hands firmly clasped together in the pelvic region They look like soccer defenders preparing to guard against a free kick; they look, every time, ridiculous. Most of them have enough sense not to put their hands in their pockets, though I do sometimes see that as well. The bridesmaids didn’t have to worry, as is customary in American weddings, they all had bouquets to hold and keep their hands occupied.

Here’s something I learned in theater classes when I was ten years old: as awkward as it feels, it’s perfectly okay to stand still with your hands resting gently by your sides. It “feels” strange, but it looks much better than the “soccer wall” look. No hands in pockets, no hands clasped, no fingers pinching the outside trouser seam. No “gunslinger” look either, with the arms at the sides but the hands a couple of inches away from the hips. (President Bush is guilty of this.) Stand up straight, don’t hunch your shoulders, take a stance just a little bit less wide than your shoulders, and keep those hands still, apart, and just slightly open. No one’s gonna fire a ball into your testicles, boys, relax.

Friday Random Ten: midterm writing edition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 4, 2008
in Friday Random Ten
. 2 Comments

The only new artist here is Vienna Teng, another “Pandora discovery.” Posting resumes on Monday.

1. “One More Dollar”, Gillian Welch
2. “Back of Your Hand”, Dwight Yoakam
3. “Cry For Me”, Catherine Feeny
4. “Two Pink Lines”, Eric Church
5. “Forever”, Third Day
6. “City Hall”, Vienna Teng
7. “Bittersweet”, Big Head Todd and the Monsters
8. “Holiday Inn”, Elton John
9. “Gillian”, The Waifs
10. “In Spite of All the Damage”, Be Good Tanyas

Bonus Track One: “Clear as a Bell”, Rosie Thomas
Bonus Track Two: “Billy 4″, Bob Dylan

Waxing poetic at the Sandpiper Lodge

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 3, 2008
in Age and Father
. 2 Comments

I’m blogging from the Sandpiper Lodge in Santa Barbara, a place I’ve stayed quite a few times on previous visits to this, the town of my birth. This afternoon, I rented a large Ford E350 van from the Avis franchise in Pasadena, drove to LAX, and picked up my brother, sister-in-law, and their three children who had just flown in from England. We loaded all their gear into the gas-guzzling monstrosity that is the E350, and drove up here to Santa Barbara. My brother’s family is staying at my stepmother’s. I considered driving back down to Pasadena tonight (it’s 92 miles, door to door), but I’m beat from a hard week of traveling and teaching. The Sandpiper has free wireless and decent coffee in the morning, so this works for me. I’ll drive back down to the ‘Dena tomorrow morning, and my wife and I will be back up on Sunday for a more extended family visit.

I have a lot of serious things I want to blog about, mostly in the usual categories. (And you may notice, I’m rapidly adding more categories on the sidebar, trying for greater precision). Tonight, I’m too tired for anything serious. Tonight, I’m by myself in a cheerful two-star motel in the city where I was born, and where I watched my father die, and I’m feeling both deeply exhausted and deeply content. I’m wearing polka-dot boxers, a half-buttoned dress shirt, a wedding ring and not a damn thing more; I’ve been here less than an hour and somehow have already managed to make a mess. (I’ll leave the room tidy in the morning — I am very good about not making more work for the maids.)

A moment ago, I stood in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, struck by how old my face looks — and how much like my Dad I am becoming. Both in my ageing and in my growing resemblance to my father, I feel blessed. A month shy of 41, I am living out what Donald Justice wrote in the second part of his most perfect and famous poem:

…And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Something is filling me, deep and enormous and ancient and good. And there is still so much more to come.

Love trumps aesthetics: of books, music, desire, and deal-breakers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 3, 2008
in Books, Music and Relationships
. 23 Comments

Jill and Amanda both had posts up on Monday about the “Pushkin Problem”: the issue of love, disparate literary taste, and “deal-breakers”. Their posts were inspired by this Sunday Times piece: It’s Not You, It’s Your Books. It begins:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

As of this morning, there are 114 comments below Jill’s excellent reflection, and twice that many below Amanda’s. And all of this has me thinking about deal-breakers, both past and present, when it came to dating or marriage.

I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until I was 17 and a senior in high school. Before that, I spent a great deal of time talking with my friends — and fantasizing to myself — about what the “ideal girl” for me would be like. I’m not talking about physical attributes, though that sort of fantasizing was not absent from my reveries. I’m talking about taste. Like so many teenagers, I cared a great deal about books and music. It was the early-to-mid-1980s, after all, and I was in perhaps the only stage of my life where music (this meant records and tapes) was hugely important. I went back and forth between listening to Sixties folk-rock and early ’80s pop-punk; Joan Baez and The Clash were indispensable components of my adolescent soundtrack. And sometime in 1983, before I had even been properly kissed, I declared, with puerile self-righteousness, that “I would never date a girl who likes Duran Duran.” As best I can remember, this was the first of many “statements of exclusion.” Continue reading ‘Love trumps aesthetics: of books, music, desire, and deal-breakers’

Thursday Short Poem: Rich’s “From a Survivor”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 3, 2008
in Poetry
. 3 Comments

I’m approaching, in a few months, my tenth “birthday” in recovery. Of course, I’ve been around 12-Step Programs since 1987, but have been clean from drugs and alcohol since July 1, 1998. And as I approach this milestone, I find myself thinking about those whom I knew and loved who didn’t make it. I don’t dwell a lot on former lovers, for so many reasons (chiefly the desire to focus so strongly on she who is my now-and-future). But there are some people whose skin I knew intimately and with whom I shared a private world who aren’t here anymore. It’s too painful to write about, but this poem captures some of what I feel when I think about them.

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

Meme

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 2, 2008
in Blogging
. 0 Comments

My student Sarah tagged me with an interesting meme.

The Rules
1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It’s hard to beat the obvious: “once was lost, now am found”, but I’ll just steal from Wallace Stevens, cutting him down just a bit:

After the final no, yes comes.

Six more words:

All who want tagging, are tagged.

“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 2, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Teaching, WAM 2008 and Youth
. 28 Comments

Another issue that came up in Saturday’s WAM session on “breaking the hold of the Old Boys Club” was that of mentoring. Ann Friedman brought up the often-problematic, often-rewarding experience of being mentored by older men. In her field, journalism, the majority of senior writers and editors are male; it simply wouldn’t be possible for her to seek out only women as mentors, as there aren’t enough of them around yet. Though the topic came up only briefly, several of the women on the panel talked about being hit on by “creepy” older men, but also about having had very kind, safe, nurturing older fellows play a welcome and vital role in their professional growth.

One of the things Ann said, before we moved on to other subjects, was something like “It’s difficult for a man, as a mentor, to send the right signal about his willingness to mentor a younger woman. Should he come right out and say ‘I’m not hitting on you, but I am interested in working with you’, or should he leave it alone? That’s a hard one.” Everyone else agreed, and since the topic of the workshop was not “how can older men safely mentor younger women”, we moved on to other things. After all, I was the only man over 25 in the whole auditorium.

I divide my mentoring work into multiple categories. In various church settings, I’ve worked with teens and young adults as a volunteer youth pastor. Here at the college, I’ve mentored students and, increasingly, junior colleagues. The mentoring with students is both academic and personal. Because I teach gender studies, and offer courses on emotionally charged, sensitive subjects like sexuality, GLBTQ history, and “the body”, I have an obligation to be present for students as they work through the various issues that these classes can bring up inside of them. Any given semester, I would guess that I’m actively mentoring around a dozen current students, as well as current and former youth group kids. Some come to my office hours, I meet others — when I can — for coffee and lunch.

Off the top of my head, I’d say two-thirds of the people I mentor are women. Pasadena City College is already 56% female, and my gender studies courses — from whose ranks most of my mentees come — are 70-90% female. Add in the cultural forces that make it more likely for women to ask for help when they need it, and it makes good sense that the majority of my mentees would be female. Most of my mentees are, these days, young enough to be my children. The students I am working closest with this year were born between 1986-89, the years in which I was a college student. Continue reading ‘“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED’

Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 1, 2008
in Favorite Posts 2008, Male feminists, WAM 2008 and Working
. 64 Comments

The first session I went to at the WAM conference on Saturday afternoon was a panel discussion, chaired by the sublime Ann Friedman of Feministing, on women journalists confronting the “old boy’s network.” There weren’t many men in the session, but during the Q&A portion of the workshop, one young man asked an excellent question of the panelists: “What can male feminists do, especially those in the media, to confront the Old Boy’s Network?” It was a variation on the classic question that all well-intentioned men in the feminist movement ought to ask: “What is the most helpful thing I — as a man — can do?” The panelists gave some excellent answers about supporting female colleagues and introducing feminist themes into one’s own writing, but they left out, understandably, what I see as the single most important thing that any feminist man in a male-dominated field can do.

After the session, I went up to the young man and introduced myself. He’s Derek Warwick, an undergraduate women’s studies major from the University of Alberta in Edmonton (where my father taught, many years ago). Derek blogs at DoingFeminism. (I’ve been saying his name in my head, trying not to confuse him with the poet Derek Walcott.) I told Derek how delighted I was he asked the question, and told him that I hoped he would forgive the presumptuousness, but as an older male feminist, I thought there was one thing he really needed to hear in answer to his excellent query.

Male feminists must support women, of course. In the journalism world (which was the arena up for discussion on Saturday), that means standing in solidarity with women colleagues and fighting for the inclusion of feminist perspectives in all aspects of reporting. But I’m convinced that the single most important thing that feminist men can do to dismantle the Old Boys’ Network is both far more simple and far more difficult: refuse to join it.

Particularly for young white men working for older white men, the pressure to join the the Network can be both immense and subtle. All of us, as we age and climb whatever ladder it is we are climbing, look to mentor younger folks. The desire for a protege is a common one, and the classic model in the Network is for an older man to look for a younger version of himself — which in journalism, or academia, or law, may mean a middle or upper-middle class white guy in his twenties. Even those male supervisors who are ideologically sympathetic to feminism may find themselves more likely to support and nurture a young man with whom they feel that emotional affinity, that sense of themselves at a younger age. Resisting the “unearned privilege of the protege” is a very difficult thing to do. Continue reading ‘Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do’