Lots of upcoming travel hither and yon over the next ten days, and not much time for blogging. I’ve already got some posts in mind for the week I come back, and I’ll do my best to deliver a good October of blogging. But for now, no posts until Monday, October 6.
I will be monitoring and participating in existing discussion threads.
Lauren, of Feministe and Faux Real Tho, is compiling “voting stories” as we head towards the November 4 general election. Many of those stories have already appeared at Feministe. Here’s the announcement:
FEMINISTE is soliciting stories about your voting experiences to help encourage registered and unregistered voters to vote.
Do you have a story about working a registration drive? About working the polls? Do you live in a split-ticket household? What kinds of traditions or stories does your family have when it comes to voting in an election? Do you have additional ideas on how to participate in the election during the final weeks? How is the subtext of race and gender this election season going to affect how you, your friends, and family members, are going to vote — or is it?
Send your stories to fauxrealtho at gmail dot com with “VOTE” in the title, including your name and a link to your website, and we will publish your stories as they come in along with additional information about voting registration, disenfranchisement, and election news. Send us what you’ve got.
Meanwhile, you still have at least through September and early October to get registered to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Some states allow voters to register through the end of October. You can find out your state’s deadline here
Below the fold, a bit about my love affair with voting. Continue reading ‘Voting Memories’
This splendid Wendell Berry poem is the perfect riposte to those among the most privileged who would seize for themselves the undeserved mantle of victimhood. I’m half-Anglo-Saxon, reasonably heterosexual, and gently Protestant by theology (if not by either birth or baptism). And I’m a man who is not going to stoop to asking for a cookie. Here’s to picking up after ourselves, my brothers.
Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men
Come, dear brothers
let us cheerfully acknowledge
that we are the last hope of the world,
for we have no excuses,
nobody to blame but ourselves.
Who is going to sit at our feet
and listen while we bewail
our historical sufferings? Who
will ever believe that we also
have wept in the night
with repressed longing to become
our real selves? Who will
stand forth and proclaim
that we have virtues and talents
peculiar to our category? Nobody,
and that is good. For here we are
at last with our real selves
in the real world. Therefore,
let us quiet our hearts, my brothers,
and settle down for a change
to picking up after ourselves
and a few centuries of honest work.
If you ask most folks who have been blogging for a while, they’ll remember the one “break-out” post that got them noticed, or first attracted a significant number of comments and hits. For me, it was this post about pornography back in April 2004. I wrote in response to news that several major stars of the adult film industry were infected with HIV.
I wrote that post, and many subsequent posts on pornography from two over-lapping perspectives. I wrote as a pro-feminist steeped in the anti-pornography tradition of one branch of feminism; I wrote as someone who was moved by the desperately sad story of Linda Lovelace, moved by the razor-sharp incisiveness of Andrea Dworkin, challenged by the dazzling legal theory of Catherine MacKinnon. But my intellectual response to porn was mixed with my own experience of “addiction” to pornography, and a long struggle to overcome the compulsive use of sexually explicit material. Porn addiction, particularly in my youth (long before cyber-erotica became available) had done tremendous harm to me — and as a consequence, it had damaging repercussions in many of my relationships. So my feminism, my faith, and my own intense desire never ever to go back into that addiction combined to form a very strong anti-pornography stance.
It has been a long time since I’ve “used” pornography of any kind. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the possibility of relapse. Heterosexual married men in my position — teachers, pastors, mentors — are famous for living sexual double lives. (The examples, sadly, are too many to list.) While some fall from grace in spectacular ways –Ted Haggard — others commit “adultery” only with their computers. I know my own tendency towards workaholism and Calvinist striving; I know that that Puritanical streak can, left unchecked, feed a dark side. It’s so easy, after all, to feel heroic doing what I do: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, advising, chairing committees and giving lectures. It’s easy, too, to buy into the lie that I’ve “been so good” and I “deserve” a little “me time.” For a lot of men, including myself for many years, that “me time” involved the compulsive consumption of pornography.
I learned early that a fulfilling sex life with a partner or a spouse is not a prophylaxis against porn addiction. I’m very clear these days that it isn’t my wife’s job to keep me sufficiently sexually sated that I don’t stray, even in my mind. It’s my job. And staying faithful in body and mind involves many things, of which willpower is actually the least important. Staying faithful to my commitments is made much easier by honoring the needs of my body as they arise. I was much more prone to use porn when I was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired; I have become much better (thank God) at recognizing my triggers. I listen to the needs of my body, and I don’t suppress them. That doesn’t mean I indulge every imperious demand! It means I do take the naps I need; it means I do get the (very non-sexual) professional massages that release the tension and the ache in my flesh. It’s when I bottle everything up, I know, that I am at risk of “acting out.”
But writing about pornography from the perspective of a recovering addict is problematic. Most saliently, it leads me — as it obviously did in that 2004 post — to be dismissive of those whose experience with pornography was radically different from my own. I’m not talking about the Larry Flynts of the world, mind you; I have little time for them. I’m talking about feminist voices, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, voices of women who work or have worked in the sex industry. Like so many folks, I’ve been more willing to hear the stories that match up with my pre-existing world view. I confess I’ve given more credence to those who spoke of the sex industry in negative terms (exploitation and abuse and addiction) than to those who talked about genuinely enjoying the work they were doing.
What I am most guilty of is pathologizing those whose experiences do not match my world view. I am not alone in this; many of my fellow anti-porn feminists do the same. We of all people, who ought to know better, still regularly suggest that women who work in the sex industry (or merely those who enjoy watching porn) are — take your pick — “deceiving themselves”, “working through childhood abuse issues”, “filled with a self-loathing they cannot acknowledge.” Sometimes, we infantilize female sex workers, suggesting that they are in desperate need of “rescue” by we the enlightened, the middle-class, and the sexually vanilla. Continue reading ‘Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side’
In a comment on the post immediately below this one, my friend Carlos writes:
It just feels to me that you’re sending a high-pitched, almost indiscernible signal that you do condone violence. I think Gonz accused you a long time of “praising with faint damns” those who use violence to liberate animals… on Facebook you list yourself as a supporter of Animal Liberation Front; on your sidebar you link to the Animal Liberation Press Office. Is this a oblique way of signalling your real views, which may be too radical to put out in the open?
What has happened to your pacifism, a subject about which you used to blog for years?
Here’s my archive on pacifism. It’s true I haven’t written on the subject in more than a year and a half. I came to pacifism after 9/11; seven years ago, following the horror of that famous day and its aftermath, I left the Episcopal parish in which I worshipped to join a local Mennonite church. I had started reading the great Mennonite philosopher John Howard Yoder within days of the September 11 attacks, and his Politics of Jesus seemed like the perfect radical alternative to all the warmongering that was in vogue seven autumns ago.
I’ve thought a lot about pacifism and violence over the years since, though I don’t know if those thoughts are particularly insightful. And though I was attracted to the Anabaptist radicalism of the Mennonites, with their peace witness and their call to simplicity, I ended up feeling a bit like an alien in their midst. (There’s still a strong ethnic element in many Mennonite churches — lots of Yoders and Swartleys and Brennemanns, folks descended from the original Swiss-German founders of the faith.) When I left the Mennonites, I dropped the most doctrinal commitment to pacifism, but remained — and remain — enchanted by the notion that in the struggle for justice, ends and means must be radically congruent. In other words, war is made possible by war, peace by peace. And as a Christian, I must still trust that God is in charge of the final ends — but it is my job to live a life aligned with the means which Jesus modeled when He walked the earth. Continue reading ‘Pacifism and the Animal Liberation Front: against the heresy of endowing property with rights’
The initial polling looks good for Proposition 2 here in California, the Humane Farms Initiative. Backed by a coalition of animal welfare, veterinary, and family farming groups, the proposition is modeled on initiatives already successfully passed in New Jersey, Florida, Colorado, and Arizona. It’s just about the simplest initiative in town, requiring that every farm animal in California be allowed the freedom to stand up, turn around, and spread its wings (or other limbs.) Implementation will not be required for nearly seven years, until 2015. The proposition is endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States, most of the leading veterinary groups in the state, and a variety of small family farms that struggle to compete with the heavily mechanized agricultural behemoths (the ones, of course, who use the harshest confinement practices.)
The proposition has attracted bi-partisan support. No one would call congressmen Elton Gallegly (R-Ventura) and John Campbell (R-Orange County) liberals; both have written to their colleagues asking for congressional backing for Proposition 2. (See PDF here). Gallegly in particular represents a district with a heavy agricultural presence, making his support all the more noteworthy. The primary public opposition comes, of course, from the biggest of the agricultural producers, along with a loud minority of veterinarians who insist that current confinement practices (in which veal calves cannot stand up, and chickens in battery cages cannot spread their wings) are humane. But there are others, normally on the opposite side of the issue from Big Ag, who are also strongly against Prop 2. Continue reading ‘The Best and the Good Enough: Abolitionists, Welfarists and the agonizing quarrel over the Humane Farms Initiative’
If you are, like most people, in desperate need of an intelligent primer on how we ended up in this current global financial meltdown, read this post. I’m not an economist, but my colleague who is just sent it to me with rave reviews.
My old debating buddy and men’s right activist Glenn Sacks sent me a note about this post of his: Girl Commits Suicide After Being Expelled from School for Having an Abortion. Here’s an excerpt or two:
Last night my wife and I attended the 15-year-reunion for a Catholic School where I once taught. I taught most of the attendees World History as sophomores.
It was quite a way-back machine. I remembered some names and I recognized some faces, but didn’t do too well at connecting them. Still, many of the students remembered me (fondly, believe it or not), and I enjoyed seeing them again.
One student I wanted to see was Elena, who had been one of my favorites. She and her boyfriend Darian, who was also in my class, were expelled from the school in mid-year because Elena had gotten pregnant and had an abortion at Planned Parenthood.
The day they were expelled from school I had been out sick, and I was later told that they had come to my room after being expelled to see if I could defend them and get the expulsion reversed. I always felt a little guilty about having been out that day, though of course there was nothing I could’ve done about the expulsion anyway. It was quite a surprise–I had no idea she was even pregnant…
I was looking for her at the party last night and when I couldn’t find her I asked Cathy, who organized the event, if she knew whether Elena was coming. She got an odd look on her face, and told my wife and I:
Elena was very depressed after being expelled. She was cut off from her friends and the life she had. She got depressed and her life spiraled down.
A few years later she hanged herself. I was dating a guy whose brother was a friend of hers and he was the one who found her and cut her down.
My jaw dropped. It’s still on the floor. I guess we’ll never know to what degree her expulsion led to her suicide, but it certainly seems that it was a major factor. And however one feels about abortion, I’ve always opposed making pariahs out of scared girls who find themselves in a bad situation.
Glenn, more than most who beat the drum for the cottage industry known as the “men are victims too, and it’s mostly feminism’s fault” lobby, takes a liberal line on certain issues. He’s caught flak from some of his normal allies, who lean well to the political right, for standing up time and again for gays and lesbians. And I welcome the concern he expresses in this piece.
It’s a good time to talk again about teens and abortion. The initiative that won’t die is back on the California ballot this fall: Proposition 4, which requires parental notification for minors seeking an abortion. We beat two earlier incarnations of this proposition (73 and 85) in 2005 and 2006, but its wealthy conservative backers are nothing if not relentless. Given the stakes that they perceive to be at play, I admire their tenacity even as I reject their basic premise. (For more on parental notification, read this old post of mine opposing the identical proposition 85 a few years ago. And check out Mermade’s piece from just this past weekend.)
The story of what happened to Glenn’s old student is desperately sad. My initial inclination is to hold the school which expelled her accountable — at least in significant part — for her suicide. My more right-wing friends would reject that notion, and might even argue that guilt over the abortion was a prime instigator for Elena to take her life. But if guilt was a motivating factor in the suicide, that guilt was something externally imposed on to Elena rather than her own organic response to terminating a pregnancy. Of course, in the absence of a very detailed suicide note, folks on both sides of the abortion divide could argue about this until the proverbial cows wander back into the barn. It’s axiomatic that we come to these painful anecdotes, all of us, with our own prejudices. We interpret a tragedy in a way that fits not only our worldview but our deepest instincts about sexuality and ethics. Continue reading ‘Shame, suicide, sex education and the unwitting incentivizing of abortion’
A wonderful post at RH Reality Check by Lauren Bruce, web designer (of this blog and many others), founder of Feministe, and former teen mother: A Wish List for Young Parents. It’s full of win, as the kids say these days, especially:
Young parents need safe, affordable housing in which to raise their children. Moreover, their housing should not be yanked out from under them based on their marital or partnered status. Marriage isn’t magic. Marriage doesn’t protect you from finding out your partner is a lying, cheating, alcoholic loser. People don’t become single parents because they stupid, they became single parents because they can’t predict the future, one of the reasons that the “you should have known better” approach to single mothers is so infuriating. Nobody enters a marriage planning to divorce, nobody enters a relationship optimistically anticipating a nasty break up, and endless nights of arguments and crying jags are not elements of a good relationship or stable household or happy childhood.
Read the whole thing.
Actually, I don’t know if that’s a fair title. I’ve been a fan of traditional folk and country music and its offshoots, like Americana and “alt. country” for years. And here’s what I’ve noticed: fans of bluegrass and Americana tend, for whatever reason, to be farther to the left than fans of more mainstream country music. For example, the Tim McGraw/Faith Hill/Kenny Chesney demographic tends to lean right, and the Del McCoury/Ricky Skaggs/Alison Krauss demographic leans left. That’s based on the bumperstickers I see in the parking lots at these sorts of concerts, as well as on entirely informal observation. I’ve seen all of these in concert a time or nine, and the differences between the two audiences are marked. If mandolins and dobros are involved, you’re gonna have more “blue” voters. If large cowboy hats are in evidence, or if the male artist in question wears a vest without anything else on his torso, you’re gonna have a majority of Palin fans.
I’ve got two recent discoveries on this FRT: the Avett Brothers and Alecia Nugent. Good modern bluegrassy-goodness. #8 has been in my head all week.
1. “God Knows What”, Alecia Nugent
2. “Gold”, Emmylou Harris
3. “With Arms Outstretched”, Rilo Kiley
4. “Oh My Sweet Carolina”, Ryan Adams
5. “Coast”, Eliza Gilkyson
6. “Out of the Rain”, Duhks
7. “From Silver Lake”, Jackson Browne
8. “Ootishenia”, Be Good Tanyas
9. “Pretty Girl from Cedar Lane”, The Avett Brothers
10. “That Don’t Worry Me Now”, Shawn Colvin
Bonus Track: “Must I Paint You a Picture”, Billy Bragg
Strong language in this post below the fold, at least a smidgen.
In a long comment below this post, SamSeaborn writes and asks:
You can be a great MALE while being a virgin. But can you be a great MAN?
These are three distinct layers of identiy - PERSON - MALE - MAN
So what is it that makes a MALE PERSON a MAN? Of course, sexual success with women is just one arbitrary measure. But what other criterion could be used?
He gets some sharp responses from other commenters, and those responses are excellent.
In one sense, though not perhaps in the sense he intended, Sam is right. We live in a culture in which manhood has been made distinct from biological maleness. “Boys are born, men are made” is the sort of thing repeated over and over again by those who imagine themselves wise about such matters. And there’s no shortage of institutions in our culture which promise to “make boys into men”; the military has done nicely for quite some time by recruiting on that promise very explicitly. Plenty of boys try out for football, or learn to hunt, or join a fraternity, or allow themselves to be jumped into a gang, all because of some desperate hope that through membership in a select company of the be-penised (the team, the gang, the Marines) the boy will be magically transformed into someone recognizable to his peers and to himself as a Man.
Heterosexual initiation is, as Sam makes clear, the sine qua non of real American manhood. That it ought to be otherwise seems wise and reasonable, that American males are generally made to feel it to be essential to their acquisition of manhood is indisputable. There are some wonderful works out there, by the way, about how young Catholic males view their presumably celibate and virginal priests — priests are often granted a special dispensation into ‘manhood’ by virtue of what seems a heroic sacrifice. And after all, priests and monks make a conscious choice to remain virgins (though some, of course, have sexual experience before their vows). And for many men in our culture, having enough “game” to have been able to have sex if one wanted to, but choosing otherwise because of a higher commitment, is sufficient to establish at least a partial manhood. It’s the males who are homosexual and have no interest in intercourse with women, or the males who (for all their desire) lack the “pull”, the “game”, the magnetism to get women into bed who receive the full measure of scorn from their fellows. Continue reading ‘Manhood, Boyhood, Adulthood: a response to SamSeaborn’
Easily one of my favorite poems by, in the end, my favorite male twentieth-century poet. Yeats and Auden were better, but I love Jeffers more. This will be one of two poems I want read at my funeral (many years from now, deo volente; the other is here). My mother has already asked for it at hers.
The Shears
A great dawn-color rose widening the
Petals around her gold eye
Peers day and night in the window.
She watches us
Breakfasting, lighting lamps, reading,
and the children playing, and the dogs by the fire,
She watches earnestly, uncomprehending,
As we stare into the world of trees and roses uncomprehending,
There is a great gulf fixed.
But even while I gaze, and the rose at me,
my little flower-greedy daughter-in-law
Walks with shears, very blonde and housewifely
Through the small garden, and suddenly the rose finds herself
rootless in-doors.
Now she is part of the life she watched.
So we: death comes and plucks us: we become part of the living earth
And wind and water whom we so loved.
We are they.
This is the third installment of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Part one is here, and part two is here.
In the first two parts, I looked at Kimmel’s concerns about young men in America, noting his insights into the “Guy Code”, homosociality, and the recurrent theme of escape in boys’ lives. Kimmel is as good as any in identifying the problem, and making a compelling case that there are some immensely troublesome aspects to the way in which our culture helps (or doesn’t) boys transition into adulthood. But it’s axiomatic that diagnosis is always easier to write than remedy; most of us see the wrong more clearly than we see the right. And in the end, the most valuable contribution that any of us in the gender studies field can make is to prescribe workable solutions to the problems we are usually so good at identifying.
Many writers of similar books spend the first four-fifths of the text laying out the case that something needs to change, usually with copious anecdotes designed to illustrate just how bad things have gotten. The suggestions for change and transformation, if they have any, usually only appear in the conclusion. Too often in recent years, I’ve read books about “youth in crisis” in which practical solutions appear almost as a rushed afterthought. It’s as if the author never meant to include them at all, and only did so, grudgingly, at the firm insistence of an editor. I am happy to say that Michael Kimmel weaves his vision for an alternative “guyhood” into every chapter of his book. Though the bulk of his strategy for change appears towards the end of Guyland, the whole text is shot through with thoughtful and compelling suggestions for how things can be different.
First off, we need to acknowledge that there is much that is good in our young men. One of the classic slurs that anti-feminist men’s rights activists (MRAs) throw at the likes of Michael Kimmel (or Jackson Katz, Robert Jensen, Michael Flood, and — if I may be so bold –myself) is that we are filled with masculine self-loathing. We then apparently project our own self-hatred onto other men, longing (apparently) to change “real men” into women. This charge has as much credence as the suggestion that Barack Obama runs an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, but like those whispers, the spurious charge of misandry has proven surprisingly resilient. Kimmel does what all of us do, though we get too little attention for it: he honors the worth and dignity of the young men about whom he writes, and he honors them as men. Continue reading ‘Looking for “the inoculation against cruelty”: how to help boys through the trials of Guyland’
It’s always a shock when one discovers a familiar name on the list of those killed in a notorious tragedy. My wife learned only this morning that among the 26 killed in last Friday’s terrible Metrolink train crash was Ron Grace, her junior-high counselor and P.E. teacher. His obituary is here.
Mr. Grace, as she knew him, was a key figure in my wife’s early adolescent years. It was Mr. Grace, she told me today, who encouraged her to compete in the eighth-grade spelling bee; she won that bee. She has often remarked that that victory (which stunned her, but not Mr. Grace), gave her a shot of intellectual confidence that made a huge difference in the years that followed. Ron Grace was at the very beginning of his career as a mentor when he coached my wife on the athletic field and pushed her into the spelling contest. He died on Friday afternoon, on his way home, just 55 years old.
If you’ve got mentors, father figures, mother figures, old school counselors or beloved teachers who made a difference, let this be your encouragement to drop them a line. Now. No one, after all, knows the time or the hour when we are to be summoned home.
The third installment of my three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s Guyland will appear tomorrow, the 17th. I keep getting distracted from writing it, alas, but it will be here by noon PDT on Wednesday.
This is a less thoughtful post.
I write this morning in praise of, well, morning. According to my parents, from the time that I was very small I was an early riser. “Sun’s up, Hugo’s up” was a near-certain formula in my infancy, and it’s still true today.
My “circadian rhythm” has clear demands. It responds very well to daylight, and not so well to darkness. Mind you, I don’t have seasonal affective disorder. I’m quite happy with cloud and overcast; growing up in the Bay Area, I was spoiled by foggy summers where the temperature never got over 85 degrees. I don’t crave the sun itself — just enough daylight in which to move around easily.
As my wife (as well as a legion of former spouses, girlfriends, and family members) will tell you, I’m not a night owl. Going out in the evening fills even this extrovert with a sense of despair; I’ve been known to nod off in nightclubs and in the stands at evening football matches. 10:00PM rolls around, and there are precious few things in the world worth staying awake for. I can think of one previous marriage in which my habit of falling asleep at the most inopportune times was a factor in the decision to get a divorce; I was married to a “night-oriented person” who thought that the Argentine fashion of dining at eleven in the evening was the height of sophistication. Given that she was also at her peak of amorousness around 12:30AM, our union was maimed from the start. I carry from the womb, she discovered, a light-loving heart…
And to stay in bed past dawn? Nearly impossible, unless I’m ill. It’s not that it seems lazily indulgent (though to my pseudo-Calvinist eyes, it sometimes does). It’s that from the time I was very small, I always felt that I was missing something wonderful and interesting by not being “up and at ‘em” as soon as daylight appeared. That was true when I was six, and it’s true at forty-one.
One of my exes jokingly called me the “youngest old man in the world.” I like my dinner at half past five in the late afternoon, and dislike eating after 8:00PM. Breakfast is excellent at 6:00AM, and even better when it comes on a stomach made hungry by a pre-dawn run. I’d do well in most retirement communities! Heck, even in my drinking and using days, my wildest partying tended to take place in daylight hours. In college, the only Greek parties to which I always worked hard to wangle an invite were the annual “tequila sunrise” events put on by one notorious fraternity . (Drinking started at 6:00AM, and folks were often passed out by 10:00. I always had a wonderful time.) A few times in the late nineties, I went to some very late after-parties — the sort that start around 3:30AM; I simply went to bed at 9:00 in the evening, got up at 3:00, and enjoyed myself immensely. It was the parties that got started just before midnight that did me in.
And today, it’s 8:00AM, I’ve been up for well over three hours. I’ve had my morning seven-miler, my peanut butter and toast, and my indispensable two cups of coffee. I’ll go through my day like a whippet on crack until, oh, about 8:30 this evening, when I will begin a two-hour unwinding that will culminate in a complete collapse before 11.
Most of my dissertation pages were written between 9:00AM and noon. These days, most of my best blog posts are written between dawn and 10:00AM. My lectures in my morning classes are, in my estimation, always better delivered than the ones in my dreaded night courses.
So, folks, when during the day are you most productive? How do you handle intimate relationships with folks whose body clocks are very different?
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