Archive for July, 2009

Thursday Short Poem: Amichai’s “If I Forget Thee”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 30, 2009
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Today is Tisha b’Av, the Ninth day of Av (Leo), and one of the most solemn days in the Jewish calendar. This is the day on which tradition (if not all historical accounts) suggest both the First and Second temples were destroyed; Kabbalists say that this is the day, however, on which the Messiah will be born. It is a day, certainly, to reflect — and for many, it is a day to fast. And it is a day to reflect on that original shining city on a hill, that real and transcendent Jerusalem. Yehuda Amichai was perhaps the greatest modern poet writing in Hebrew, this is one of his most famous pieces.

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Then let my right be forgotten.
Let my right be forgotten, and my left remember.
Let my left remember, and your right close
And your mouth open near the gate.

I shall remember Jerusalem
And forget the forest — my love will remember,
Will open her hair, will close my window,
will forget my right,
Will forget my left.

If the west wind does not come
I’ll never forgive the walls,
Or the sea, or myself.
Should my right forget
My left shall forgive,
I shall forget all water,
I shall forget my mother.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Let my blood be forgotten.
I shall touch your forehead,
Forget my own,
My voice change
For the second and last time
To the most terrible of voices –
Or silence.

“Mommy, was that your friend?” More on Dr. Tiller, two months on.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 29, 2009
in Abortion and Male feminists
. 2 Comments

It’s been nearly two months since George Tiller was murdered, and I still feel the shock of that assassination keenly. The most emotion-driven (albeit also — I’d like to think — reason-and-theology-informed) post I’ve written in 2009 was in response to the killing.

There’s a great piece in the new summer issue of Ms.Magazine about Dr. Tiller, and an extended excerpt is online. Here’s how it finishes:

“The last time I talked to him,” says (Tiller’s friend) Susan Hill, “I said, ‘Why are you still doing this, George? You certainly don’t need to. Why don’t you just retire, enjoy life?’

“He said, ‘I can’t, I can’t leave these women. There’s no one else for them.’”

“When I found out about the murder,” says Miriam Kleiman, “I just kept hugging and kissing my boys and telling them I loved them.” Her 8-year-old asked, “Mommy, why do you keep crying?”

“And I said, ‘There was a man who helped us about Junior’”—the family’s name for the son whose life was unsustainable. “Someone killed that man, and I’m sad.” Later, her son saw a headline and a photo of Tiller in the newspaper and asked, “Mommy, was that your friend?”

“At whatever level,” says Kleiman, emotion welling up again, “my son got it.”

I liked that bit about Kleiman embracing her sons, born after a previous, hopeless pregnancy was ended in Dr. Tiller’s office. I wanted to hug my daughter a lot (even more than normal) on the day Dr. Tiller died. In 2009, for the first time in my life, I watched a woman I love give birth to our child; in 2009, my feminism has become even more personal as the consequence of now having a daughter (as well as a wife, sisters, a mother, and many other wonderful women in my life.) Dr. Tiller wasn’t just a physician who provided a full range of reproductive care, he was a feminist who, as is now well-known, abided by a simple motto: “Trust Women.”

One reason I’m a feminist is that I do trust women. And one reason I admire Dr. Tiller, and continue to be so moved by his life and so troubled by his murder is because in his life and in his ministry (there is no other word as adequate) he embodied what it meant to be a man who believed in women. Going back to John Stuart Mill and Frederick Douglass, there have been men who believed in women’s rights and were willing to fight to see those rights acquired. But very few male feminists have been martyred; very few male feminists took the risks, the calumny, the hatred of so many in order to continue to do what so few would do and what in so many tragic instances desperately needed doing.

I said it on May 31, the day of his murder: I am Dr. Tiller, and treat me as you would him. And while I certainly have no desire to be shot, I continue to find myself inspired this summer — my first as a father — to live out my feminism more fully and more boldly as a consequence of this gentle, good, Christian, feminist man’s legacy.

“More to Love” and the tentative broadening of male heterosexual desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 29, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Mass media
. 56 Comments

I hadn’t heard about the new Fox reality show, More to Love, until the beginning of the week, when a couple of students in my women’s history class asked me if I had any thoughts about it. I looked up the previews online, and read Samhita’s pre-show analysis at Feministing yesterday. Reluctantly, but in the vague hope that I might be pleasantly surprised, I watched the show last night.

Designed, as Fox claims, to be an “inspirational new series”, More to Love follows a 26 year-old former offensive lineman named Luke (whom we are reminded at every opportunity weighs over 300 pounds) as he chooses a mate from a group of heavy young women (ranging in age from early twenties to early thirties). It was painful to watch. The set-ups were of the sort familiar to anyone who has watched reality television, but the insecurity of so many of the young women involved was all too real. And that’s what was so monstrously infuriating to me; rather than being inspirational, More to Love simply disguised its cruelty behind a guise of compassion; exploitation masqueraded as empathy. The very real low self-esteem of at least some of the women involved was carefully emphasized, reinforcing the idea that a woman whose body mass exceeds the ideal has no real right to either happiness or self-confidence save that that might be bestowed through great good fortune and the magic of Fox television.

But not everyone judged the show as harshly. Kate Harding, a noted activist for fat acceptance, remarks that the show “does little to dispel the myth that fat people’s lives are built around dessert and desperation.” On the other hand, she’s encouraged that the show is willing to present heavy women as desirable:

For all the show’s flaws — and they are legion — and for all the obvious issues every show like this raises about the objectification of women, I couldn’t help being a little flabbergasted by seeing a real, live heterosexual man on television repeatedly extolling the hotness of these particular women, one of whom was wearing a dress I’m pretty sure I’ve tried on at Lane Bryant. Even if a portion of the audience is tuning in to point and laugh at the fatties — and let’s be real, they will be — the bachelor in question won’t be laughing with them. “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type,” Luke drools.

There’s plenty of excellent feminist criticism of the show appearing in the blogosphere this week, but what Kate says here resonated with me and helped me to rethink some (by no means all) of my initial response to More to Love. As awful as the format of the program was, Luke wasn’t presented as particularly odd for his stated interest in larger women. His interest was not framed as a fetish to be analyzed or mocked (there was enough mocking of the female contestants to take up much of the program). The show did imply that Luke’s taste was rare, which reinforced the notion that most men don’t find heavier-than-culturally-mandated-ideal women to be particularly desirable. But as Kate writes, the fact that Luke was there at all, unshamed for his stated preference, represents at least a tiny degree of progress.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which young heterosexual men’s desires are shaped by culture and by their peers. The homosocial principle makes it clear that young males measure their manhood in comparison to other men, whose approval matters more than that of women. In the homosocial equation, dating a thin/pretty/young woman is a way of signaling masculine cachet to other men; dating an older, plainer, or heavier woman will be read by other men as weakness. At its ugliest and most destructive, the culture of what Michael Kimmel calls “Guyland” is a culture in which women’s bodies are trophies to be displayed. If a fellow is genuinely attracted to women who are heavier than what his buddies or his culture declare is most desirable, he faces ridicule as a “chubby chaser” and for lacking the masculine chops to attract someone “hotter” (read = thinner.) If Luke is in any way rare, it is not in his preferences, which I think are quite common — it’s in the confidence that he has to make those desires known. To the extent that he represents the possibility that heterosexual male desire is broader than previously allowed, this is a good thing.

On the other hand, Luke himself is heavy, and I think that largely undercuts the potentially revolutionary aspect of the show. Of course, some heavy men are attracted to heavy women. But how much more radical might it have been to have a leaner man saying, as Luke did, “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type?” There’s an analogy to race here. Films and television programs showed people of the same race kissing years before they showed interracial romances. The “hot slender guy who is attracted to thicker women” barrier is yet uncrossed; a taboo remains in place. While men as well as women suffer from fat-phobia, we already have an extended cultural history of depicting overweight men as desirable. (Think how often, for example, folks tend to say publicly that Bill Clinton looked better when he had more meat on his bones.) What we don’t yet cop to — and what we all would benefit from seeing on television — is that one’s own weight is not in any particular way an indicator of one’s own desires.

In my own life, I’ve never had a particular physical type, having dated (and married) women across the spectrum of weight and height. My wife’s body, like the bodies of so many women, has been transformed by childbearing in the predictable way, a change that hasn’t had the slightest impact on my desire for her. (I ought to note that my own weight has crept up a bit, as the happy obligations of fatherhood have meant less time for working out.) But I’ve certainly sensed undeserved approbation come my way from other men when I’ve been with women who met the cultural ideal for beauty and thinness, and when I’ve been with women who deviated from that absurd standard, I’ve been on the receiving end of homosocial ridicule. I’m not alone in that.

In April 2006, I wrote a post on a similar subject: Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. An excerpt:

For many American men raised to see women as a yardstick with which to measure their own masculinity quotient, a partner’s weight gain is going to be perceived as a very real threat to their own standing. We all know men who get turned on when they realize that their wives or girlfriends are objects of desire for other men. One key question we need to challenge men with: is your partner’s weight gain really turning you off, or are you worried about how other men are reacting to her as a result? Do you miss being able to use other men’s sexual desire as a crutch to stimulate your own libido?

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

If Kate is right, there may well be one small redemptive aspect of More to Love. But though I’m heartened to see the potential for a new discussion about the ways in which culture shapes male desire, I’m not sure it’s worth the heartache and the humiliation we witnessed last night.

A new book on the evangelical left

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 28, 2009
in Books and Christianity
. 1 Comment

Brian Auten, who blogs at Withered Grass and with whom I share a number of Fuller Seminary connections (his wife is a Fuller grad; my last ex-wife was as well) has a wonderful and very interesting two-part interview with David R. Swartz, a Notre Dame PhD who is preparing a book about the history of the modern evangelical left. Here’s part one of the interview and here’s part two.

I’ve focused much more on my feminist blogging in recent years, but I still consider myself a member of the evangelical left, heavily influenced by Anabaptist critiques of both Reformed and Catholic Christianity. Many of my students and colleagues are floored when I come out to them, often in casual conversation, as an evangelical, born-again Christian. And my faith still informs my politics more than the other way around.

Can a feminist read Cosmo?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 28, 2009
in Clothing and Fashion, Feminist Pedagogy, Mass media and Youth
. 26 Comments

I’ve been asked the question that titles this post more than once.

Last week I posted this bit about women and the importance of saving money “just for themselves”. It’s one of those tips that I think young women in particular need to hear. Another tip I often give to my women’s studies students regards their consumption of media: if it’s too hard to subtract, add.

To state the obvious, there’s a lot of sexist, misogynistic media out there. Some of it is in the form of crude advertising aimed at men; much of it in the form of “women’s magazines” which focus on beauty and fashion. Television shows like “The Bachelorette” or “America’s Next Top Model”, magazines like “Vogue” or “Cosmopolitan”, movies like “The Ugly Truth” — all send a troubling message about gender, about appearance, and about the capacity of any of us to find enduring happiness outside of narrowly defined roles. It’s not worth reiterating all that’s upsetting and demoralizing about mainstream media’s portrayal of women. But though many of my students find these magazines and television programs and films to be troubling and damaging to their own sense of self-worth, many also find them hard to give up. Over and over again, I’ve heard my women’s studies students describe reading fashion magazines or watching sexist shows (or, increasingly, looking at mainstream pornography) as “guilty pleasures.” And as a feminist, I’m wary of that phrase.

Obviously, we want to work collectively to reshape the ways in which the media portrays women — and men. It’s a given, too, that every dollar we spend is a vote; buying magazines which promote a narrow definition of beauty, for example, rewards and encourages the publishers and the advertisers. To the extent that we exercise choices within our consumer-driven capitalist system, we are at least partly responsible for those choices. The magazines and movie tickets we buy and the websites we visit matter; our behavior is tracked by curious advertisers and marketers eager to know “what works.” They are already rewarded enough for their contempt for women; why give them more of our precious dollars?

On the other hand, the reality is a bit more nuanced. Many women’s magazines which reinforce a narrow and destructive beauty ideal also feature first-rate writing by women on a wide variety of feminist subjects; magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan have run serious pieces in recent years on reproductive rights and pay equity; Seventeen and Teen Vogue have addressed eating disorders and sexual harassment. Those articles get more readers than comparable pieces in the feminist media; indeed, it’s entirely plausible that many women first encounter serious feminist analysis (whether they realize that’s what it is or not) within the pages of magazines like these. Continue reading ‘Can a feminist read Cosmo?’

Jimmy Carter, personal autonomy, and defending progressive faith

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 27, 2009
in Body, Christianity and Global Feminism
. 4 Comments

In the current media age, articles and videos go “viral” almost instantly. I got a good glimpse of that phenomenon a week or so ago, when friends and students emailed me or “Facebooked” me with links to Jimmy Carter’s brief op-ed, Losing my Religion for Equality. No other modern president has talked about faith more, or made it clear that his Christianity is central to his worldview, than has Carter. A lifelong member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, Carter has watched with sadness as the church he has known all of his adult life has moved further and further to the right. (It’s a long story, but the conservative coup d’etat within the SBC began right around the time of Carter’s own presidency; moderates were forced out of seminary positions and the denomination’s traditional tolerance for divergent views –a tolerance for which the Baptists were once rightly famed and praised — began to disappear.)

In any case, the article, which ran first in Australia’s The Age newspaper, is a powerful and simple indictment of the way in which traditional religion is so often used to oppress women. This is, Carter suggests, not only tragic, but it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the teachings of the great religions. The former president writes:

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths.

Those of us who hold deep spiritual convictions and strong egalitarian values are often accused of cherry-picking quotes from our holy books in order to construct an argument that God really intended radical equality between men and women. But as Carter suggests, it’s the conservatives who are perhaps even guiltier of this, particularly around issues of gender justice. (My favorite example, of course, is the steadfast refusal of many evangelicals to acknowledge the overwhelming textual evidence that Ephesians 5:21 is the controlling purpose for Ephesians 5:22; Paul’s intent is clearly mutual rather than unilateral wifely submission.) It is not we progressives who have let the values of a secular world distort our faith.

But here’s my favorite part of the 39th president’s brief missive. Carter writes:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Too often, “autonomy” and “control over the body” are seen as ideals of the secular Enlightenment, in opposition to the so-called spiritual virtue of allowing one’s body to be a vessel for others to fill. Christian women are offered the example of Mary, mother of Jesus, who is traditionally depicted as willingly — even blindly — submitting to God. Mary does submit to God, as all Christians are called to do. But what she doesn’t do is submit to any man. According to Luke, when Gabriel, God’s angel, comes to tell her that she is to carry a child, Mary is already engaged to Joseph. When the young virgin learns she will carry Jesus, the Son of the Most High, she doesn’t say, “Um, let me check with my fiance first to make sure this is okay with him.” She doesn’t ask for Joseph’s permission because she doesn’t need it. Her body is hers, and she offers it freely to God. That’s autonomy in action.

My life is defined by my faith, as Jimmy Carter’s is by his. As his example shows, faith and feminism do not need to exist in uneasy tension; it does not require cognitive dissonance or Jesuitical gymnastics to reconcile principles of individual liberty and women’s body integrity with a devout commitment to the Creator. We progressive believers need to do as Jimmy Carter has done, and speak more forcefully about the ways in which our faith informs our politics, particularly the politics of the body, of sexuality, and of personal autonomy.

More on Christian feminism here and here.

Harry Patch, 1898-2009

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 25, 2009
in Poetry and War
. 5 Comments

Harry Patch died today at 111, the last British World War One combat veteran and the last man to see action on the Western Front. Last year, the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, offered “The Five Acts of Harry Patch” as a tribute; it is reprinted below the fold.

Three known veterans of the Great War still live: an American, a Canadian, and a Briton who has lived in Australia for years. None were in trench combat; Patch, who fought at Passchendaele in 1917, was the last one to “go over the top.” It scarcely seems possible that any are alive, or lived so long to have seen so much. And none of the last survivors had a name quite like Harry Patch. Continue reading ‘Harry Patch, 1898-2009′

Reprint: a post on white privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 24, 2009
in Reprints
. 0 Comments

I’ve been following the Henry Louis Gates arrest case closely; count me firmly in the camp of those who, like President Obama in his initial remarks on Wednesday night, think that this case was handled “stupidly” by the local police. Count me also among those who believe racial profiling is very much alive and well in this country, and that the election of an African-American president has had little impact on the way in which policing is conducted in this nation.

Not much time to say more, but let me reprint (since I do reprints in the summer) a piece from April 2006 about white privilege, a post in which I refer to my own myriad (and invariably courteous) experiences with law enforcement.

Last Friday, I posted this rather flippant (but partly sincere) ode to my WASP upbringing. In the comments section, Aldahlia reposted some provocative questions (written originally by Lauren from Feministe) for those of us who acknowledge our whiteness:

1. what does it mean to be white? what does it mean to be White?
2. how has whiteness affected your worldview?
3. how has whiteness affected your educational experience?
4. how has whiteness affected your experience with authority?
5. how has whiteness affected your experiences with people of other races and ethnicities?

Asking the first question with and without "white" in capital letters is a good and provocative start. I’ve understood the lower case "white" to refer to external perceptions about my race and heritage.  Folks look at me, and they see a man who is, unquestionably, white.  They may not be able to tell I have a mix of English, German, Jewish, Scots-Irish, and Welsh ancestry, but my facial features instantly identify me as looking like the same sort of folks who traditionally have power in this country.

I wrote about some of the specifics of my WASPiness last week.  Yes, class and geographic location played a role in my upbringing.  I have cousins in South Carolina and Virginia who share my ethnic background, but grew up with slightly different cultural signifiers than I did.  (For one thing, in my California family, the first alcoholic drink any of us ever have is white wine; for my southern relatives, it’s bourbon or Irish whiskey.)  But when folks look at me on the street, they can’t tell whether I was raised in Carmel or in a trailer park; whether my parents were professors or plumbers.  What they can tell is that I’m a white man, and that gives me certain privileges.

When I was in college, all of my advisors looked like me.   With the exception of the Chicano Studies courses I took with Norma Alarcon and Cherrie Moraga, every single professor I had as an undergrad or a grad student was European or European-American.   In grad school, I could easily have passed as the son of most of my faculty advisors, all of whom were white men (with the exception of the wonderful Marilyn McCord Adams, about whom I must post soon).  Thus it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself becoming just like these men and women someday — and it wasn’t hard for them to see me as a younger version of themselves.  Did that have an effect on my confidence?  Hell yeah.

When I walked around the Berkeley campus (or the UCLA campus, or anywhere else), no one ever looked at me with a querying "what are you doing here?"  People who shared my sex and my skin color founded these universities and run them to this day. I felt an absolute and unerring sense of entitlement whenever I walked through the quads or under Sather Gate. It wasn’t arrogance, but rather a kind of confidence that came from always being seen as someone who "belonged".  My friends of color could not report the same set of experiences!

In countless ways, my white skin (as well as my sex and my class background) have opened doors for me.  In my life, I’ve been insecure about many things (my neurosis about working out and staying trim gets well-documented ’round here).  But I’ve never, ever, doubted that I belonged anywhere that I went.  I’ve had many "encounters" with law enforcement over the years, ranging from speeding tickets to getting 5150ed a few times in my late adolescence and twenties.  Even when my own behavior was self-destructive and bizarre, even when I needed handcuffs, I was always, always, always, called "sir."  (The last time I drank, many years ago, I remember being briefly handcuffed by a young deputy.  I slurred something along the lines of "I’m not gonna hurt you, buddy"; he laughed and said with remarkable and memorable gentleness, "Sir, we just don’t want you to hurt yourself any more.")  I’ve had black and Latino friends whose self-destructive behavior approximated my own — and they report very different stories of often violent (or at the least, rude) treatment at the hands of the police.

When I walk into a store in a nice neighborhood, even if I’m in jeans and a t-shirt, clerks ask "May I help you, sir?"  I don’t have security guards following me around, wondering if I’m going to shoplift.  When I walk down the street at night, women don’t cross over to the other side to avoid me.  Is all of this because I’m such a swell guy?  Of course not.  I’m a reasonably clean-cut white man, and my skin color opens doors and puts people at ease without my having to say a word.  That’s unearned privilege.

I’m not ashamed of being white.  I would not renounce either my skin color or my background, even if I could.  (Though I wish I wasn’t as prone to skin cancer as I am!)  As I wrote last Friday, I love my family and my heritage very much.  I love the particular traditions and rituals that I associate with growing up the way I did.  I have no patience with those who say that in order to be effective allies to people of color, whites have to entirely renounce their whiteness.  But while I won’t apologize for my upbringing, I can take positive action to renounce my privilege.  There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of one’s family or skin color (which I’m not) and working actively to end one’s own unmerited advantages.

The most effective thing white folks can do, I think, is admit that privilege actually exists.  I have no idea how many doors opened for me because of what I look like, and because of my family background.  When I was first hired at PCC, several people actually said to me "You’re lucky to have gotten that job, Hugo!  I’m surprised they didn’t hire someone of color using affirmative action.  At least you know you got this on your own merits!"  On my own merits?  Puhleeze!  I looked like two-thirds of my hiring committee!  I looked like the professors who had mentored me and looked out for me.  I went to the same university that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandfathers did.  Any unearned advantage conferred by affirmative action pales in comparison to those unmerited privileges bestowed upon me by my appearance and my background!  Of course, I was also hired for my teaching skills and my academic preparation.  My color and class would not, in and of themselves, have canceled out actual incompetence.  But they may well have tipped the scales in my favor when I was given this job I love a dozen years or so ago.

I’ll say it again: I’m not ashamed of my ancestors, my family, or my skin color.  But I don’t deny that these things gave me advantages I didn’t earn.  What whites need to do is stop perpetuating the myth that our personal successes are entirely unaffected by these privileges.  Whenever possible, we need to cop to the reality of these unearned benefits.  We need to embrace programs that seek to level the playing field (such as affirmative action) without complaint or bitterness.  And we need to stop insisting that all of our achievements were based solely on the content of our character, and not also in part on the color of our skin.

The fathers were wrong: a response to Kathleen Parker about Walter Cronkite

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 23, 2009
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism and Mass media
. 7 Comments

I have little love for Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males and the latest in a long line of conservative female pundits to sell books by suggesting that feminism has gone too far. But it would seem that there would be little to which to object in her piece yesterday paying tribute to the late Walter Cronkite. Clearly, what ended up in the Post was over or under-edited, as the piece jumps from a meditation on Cronkite’s comforting image to a discussion of whether or not his reporting on Vietnam ushered in an era of overt media bias. It’s a bit incoherent as printed, and was probably better as written.

But I don’t write much about the media. (As for Cronkite, I liked him, but ours was an ABC household; the favorite anchor of my childhood was Peter Reynolds, and I was always a big David Brinkley fan.) What I’m interested in is Parker’s reflection on Cronkite as a particular kind of male icon:

Our nostalgia for his passing isn’t only for the death of a familiar and mostly admired individual, but also for a certain kind of man — an iconic reminder of a time when fathers knew best and the media were on the home team.

He had the looks and voice of the sort of man one could trust for good directions. Nonthreatening and, it seemed, untempted by vanity, his prevailing affect was of seriousness and humility.

It is doubtless difficult in these post-metrosexual, celebrity-driven times to grasp the preference that Americans once held for people who weren’t “all that.” Male figures, also known nearly ubiquitously as “fathers,” were especially admired in those days for substance over style.

What’s so exasperating about Parker’s analysis is that she correlates Cronkite’s absence of vanity and consummate gravitas with his status as an icon of an era in which women were seen as frivolous and incapable of similar seriousness. Cronkite’s greatness lay in his professionalism, a quality entirely unrelated to his sex or to his absence of an intense curiosity about fashion. (Taking a wild guess, I’d say Kathleen Parker probably has an unhealthy and bizarre animus towards dear Anderson Cooper.) Cronkite, who mentored his successor Katie Couric (and was apparently far better disposed towards her than to Dan Rather) was by all accounts committed to greater inclusion for women in broadcast journalism; some have suggested that Cronkite’s behind-the-scenes influence led to Rather’s hasty departure and to the elevation of Couric to be the network’s first female anchor.

Cronkite’s bravest reporting, as Parker herself notes, came in his courageous willingness to expose our policy in Vietnam as disastrous; he had the guts to question the decisions that the “fathers” — presidents like Eisenhower and LBJ — had made in Southeast Asia. Rather than reinforcing the worshipful acquiescence to patriarchal authority that characterized so much of 1950s culture, Cronkite played a vital role in undermining that blind and unthinking trust that far too many Americans put in their national “father figures.” Vietnam showed Americans that fathers didn’t know best; Cronkite showed millions of Americans the truth about Vietnam, and in doing so, helped us to adopt a healthier skepticism towards paternal authority. For that, he deserves our gratitude.

Parker seems to suggest that substance and style are mutually exclusive, as if flair and grace are evidence of a reduced IQ. Of course, she casts “substance” as masculine, with the unwritten but unavoidable implication that “style” is feminine, lightweight, and unserious. Shorter Parker: “I miss my Daddy and my Mommy spent too much time shopping, so I wish I could find more men like my Papa, except that they’re now all shopping too. I feel unsafe.” But there was nothing particularly safe or virtuous about the rigid straitjacket of 1950s gender roles. Men were robbed of the chance not only to wear color, but of the chance to be vulnerable and open, complex and complete. Women were robbed of the chance to be ambitious, intellectually curious, and economically independent. We were half-people

What Parker and her ilk celebrate as a world of certainty, comfort, predictability and roles in harmony with “nature” was, for far more people than we realize, a world of spirit-crushing conformity and cruel repression. The end of the so-called “happy days” is to be celebrated rather than lamented, and to the extent that avuncular Walter Cronkite played a part in bringing those days to an end, he is to be honored as well.

Thursday Short Poem: Rich’s “Burning Oneself Out”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 23, 2009
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

This is the right poem for a summer where I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked before. There are many ways to be burned out and consumed; some far better than others. Adrienne Rich, as she usually does, gets them right.

Burning Oneself Out

We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that rock,
the sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire

Reprint: Against Powerpoint, and in defense of Luddite tendencies

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 22, 2009
in Reprints
. 16 Comments

An old rant of mine from March 2006. My teaching style has not changed, nor have my views.

Warning:  this post may be less restrained than some (and I might even swear).  I’m not unhappy, just in a kind of ornery mood.  (It might be because I’m sitting here in my sweat.  I went running at the Rose Bowl tonight for over an hour, came home and found that a water main had broken up the street.  No shower for me.  If it isn’t fixed soon, I’ll have to make a late night trip to the gym in order to bathe.)

Today, we had our monthly noon Social Sciences Division faculty meeting.  As usual, I stayed quiet, though I perked up a bit during a brief discussion of the new Internet filters.  (All of my colleagues are adamantly opposed.)

But then we launched into another discussion about creating "smart classrooms."  This has nothing to do with real teaching, mind you.  A "smart classroom" is one filled with all sorts of technological gizmos:  DVD players, wireless Internet access, various modern projectors, and lots of something called Power Point.  I am now convinced I am the only tenured professor in America under 40 who has no idea what Power Point is.  To me, it sounds like a basketball term (wasn’t Magic Johnson kind of a "power point" guard at 6′9"?).  Anyhow, my colleagues all seem to be busy showing videos (or DVDs) and creating fancy Power Point projects for their classes.  It all sounds dreadfully dull, and I’m just not interested.

I show — maybe — one video a year.  When I first started teaching, I showed a lot of them — largely because I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough to say.  Now, God help me and my students, I have plenty to say.  I know damn well that my students spend enough time interacting with technology outside school; the last thing they need is to sit mutely in front of a TV screen.  I’m not saying that videos don’t have their place — in an art history class, I would imagine that they would be essential, but too often I think they (and all the other fancy-shmancy stuff) are just cover-ups for mediocre teaching.

I am sick and tired of having folks with doctorates in education (Lord help us) tell me that "lecturing is an outdated teaching style."  Well, it’s still a damned effective teaching style if it’s done well.  I put a lot of time and energy into crafting articulate, interesting, lectures, largely because I believe that for most students, it remains the most effective and memorable way to learn.   I do invite discussion and debate in some of my classes, and I welcome questions — but I cling tenaciously to the old-school notion that my job is to be an interesting, compelling, and provocative deliverer of information.   (And along the way, raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.)

Continue reading ‘Reprint: Against Powerpoint, and in defense of Luddite tendencies’

“First, Last, Security Deposit”: Women’s savings, feminism, and the steps to getting a room of one’s own

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 21, 2009
in Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Money
. 5 Comments

This summer session in my women’s history course, I’ve been more conscientious than usual about suggesting proactive solutions for young feminists to use as they navigate their way through a difficult and misogynistic world. I’ve got a compendium of tips, all of which ought to be collected into a single blog post at some point. But one suggestion I’ve made repeatedly, and which I’ve seen proven useful again and again, is that young people of both sexes (but especially young women) set aside money for themselves.

It comes from something I heard years ago from a feminist colleague of mine. She remarked, apropos of nothing that I can remember, “You know what freedom is? Freedom is having first, last, and a security deposit.” (Most landlords require a first month’s payment and a last month’s payment in advance before renting an apartment; most require a security deposit, often equal to another month’s rent.) For young people living in unhappy home situations with repressive parents, or for women in abusive relationships, the ability to leave and begin a different life is tied to access to money. Feminists rightly celebrate the importance of “choice” and “autonomy”, but we must always acknowledge that it is far easier to exercise these two fundamental goods when one has resources over which one has direct control.

This is not a new point, of course; Virginia Woolf said as much in her indispensable “A Room of One’s Own.” Some years, I’ve given my students excerpts from Woolf to read; many identify all too well with the famous point about Shakespeare’s sister. But whether they read it in Woolf or hear it from a professor or pick it up from their friends, it’s vital — particularly for those from families with few resources — that women start putting aside money that will be theirs and theirs alone. Perhaps, yes, money with which to rent a room of one’s own; perhaps money with which to buy a car. Perhaps money with which to take a life-changing trip abroad. The freedom to become who one was called to be is considerably easier with money of one’s own.

This all sounds obvious, of course. But for many of my students, setting aside even small bits of money is very difficult. The “pleasing woman discourse” is pervasive, and it makes it all too easy for whatever amounts of spare cash are accumulated to be offered to the invariably needy and demanding multitudes that surround far too many young women. In some families, young women are expected to contribute to their parents’ rent and to the grocery money; for many of my working-class students, particularly in the current Great Recession, living at home is as much about helping their family survive as it is about remaining under the control of overly-watchful parents. Continue reading ‘“First, Last, Security Deposit”: Women’s savings, feminism, and the steps to getting a room of one’s own’

Reprint: Feminism, Food, Sex, and Pleasure

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 20, 2009
in Reprints
. 9 Comments

Another reprint, this one from November 2006.

In recent years, as I continue to fiddle with my women’s studies syllabus, I’ve moved away from emphasizing certain themes and towards others.  One theme that has become more and more important to me: tracing the cultural history of women’s shame in America, particularly in regards to sexual pleasure, food, and other "selfish" desires.

I’ve emphasized this many times before, but my students are, overwhelmingly, non-white.  They are, overwhelmingly, first-generation college students.  And in my women’s studies class, overwhelmingly female.  But whether they are black, Latina, Asian, Armenian, they’ve almost all been raised with one enormously important — and colossally destructive — discourse: pleasure comes with penalties.

I tend to focus on the close relationship between attitudes towards eating and attitudes towards sex, largely because they seem so often to be inextricably linked.  The pleasure of food is our first pleasure; when we were tiny infants, it was what we screamed for and it was gave us comfort and delight.  Long after many of our other appetites may have faded, we will still take pleasure in what we eat.  (I’ve spent a lot of time with the elderly; my experience has been that in nursing homes, the subject of lunch tends to dominate conversations.)  Throughout our lives, in groups or alone, eating has the potential to be one of our greatest physical delights.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: Feminism, Food, Sex, and Pleasure’

Declaration of Sentiments day

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 20, 2009
in Feminist Pedagogy and Holidays
. 2 Comments

It is July 20, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (which my two-year-old self watched on television, according to my mama, but which I do not recall), and the 161st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments (and its accompanying Resolutions) at Seneca Falls, New York.

I’ve been teaching women’s history at Pasadena City College for a decade and a half or so, but oddly enough, today will be the first time I’m teaching my History 25B course on July 20 itself. It was only a couple of years ago that I added women’s history to my summer course repertoire; the last two July 20ths fell on non-teaching days. So today, on what promises to be the hottest day of 2009 so far, we’ll be gathering in my classroom at noonish to celebrate the day on which the feminist movement in the United States began.

It’s always tough to date the moment a revolutionary movement got underway. We mark our nation’s independence with the signing of that famous declaration in July 1776, but the revolution itself had begun more than a year earlier. The French date their revolution from July 14, though the key Oath of the Tennis Court fell nearly a month before. The civil rights movement tends to be commemorated each year around the birth of Dr. King, and not on the anniversaries of the March on Washington or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The same ambiguity is present in American feminist history; we could look at the founding of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, or the beginnings of labor organizing in the textile mills, or to the birth of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, or any of a dozen other key figures in the fight to win equal rights for women.

Yet there had never been anything quite like the Seneca Falls Convention, this first great gathering of women (and a handful of male allies) committed to gender justice. And in its sweeping and brave condemnation of existing power structures, in its clever homage to Jefferson’s 1776 document, and in its firm insistence that men and women are radically equal in their worth and ought also be equal participants in every station of life, the Declaration of Sentiments stands alone in its significance. The rights that American women have today — the right to vote, to be educated, to own property, to exercise sovereignty over their own flesh — trace themselves back to July 20, 1848. The status of American women, like the status of African slaves in this country, was little changed by what happened in the rebellion against Great Britain; it would take other documents and other wars to expand the electoral franchise and the right of self-determination to all.

When we gather today, we’ll read some excerpts from the Declaration of Sentiments. Some students will share about what feminism means to them, and about all that we still have left to accomplish. We’ll eat and drink and raise a glass of something legal to our foremothers who gathered in that small town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State 161 years ago.

And by God, all who come into my classes will remember the date July 20 for a very long time.

Friday Random Ten: once in a summer season edition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 17, 2009
in Friday Random Ten
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These are getting rarer and rarer, but I thought I’d offer an FRT for the hot months. These were the ten tracks that came up when I hit random shuffle on my iTunes this morning.

1. “Banks of Marble”, Leo Kottke and Iris DeMent
2. “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her”, Mary Chapin Carpenter
3. “Angel from Montgomery”, John Prine
4. “Living of Love”, Avett Brothers
5. “Hardest Time”, Los Lobos
6. “Follow the Lights”, Ryan Adams
7. “Lucky”, Radiohead
8. “Foolish Games”, Jewel
9. “Hard, Ain’t It Hard”, Weavers
10. “The Last Snowfall”, Vienna Teng

Bonus Track: “Quite Early Morning”, The Mammals