Archive for August, 2009

The importance of “talking the talk”: male feminists and visibility

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2009
in Male feminists
. 31 Comments

Reader Vir Modestus sent me a link to this Melissa McEwan post that appeared while I was out of the country. It’s a powerful piece by one of the best-known and most widely respected of feminist bloggers, calling out men — some of us in one sense, all of us in another — in a searing indictment of the way in which our sex is acculturated to treat women. An extended excerpt:

No, I don’t hate men.

It would, however, be fair to say that I don’t easily trust them.

My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man—the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eyerolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language (”humankind”).


There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. They tell them and I can laugh, and they can thus feel superior, or I can not laugh, and they can thus feel superior. Heads they win, tails I lose. I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, “I love you.” I love you, my daughter. I love you, my niece. I love you, my friend. I am meant to trust these words.

There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.

Nearly 300 comments follow beneath Melissa’s post.

Melissa followed up with this post last week: Crank it up to 11, in which she noted how many men had written or spoken to her in the aftermath of her first piece, assuring her that “not all men were like that” and that yes, they felt the same way that she did about those who were. While appreciative of the support, Melissa calls out feminist men to do more:

I can certainly understand why men don’t want to get involved in the rage-making timesucks that are threads about feminist women’s lived experiences. Aside from the crushing feeling of futility such participation inspires, men who engage on the side of feminist women inevitably face a barrage of intense vitriol. In return for allowing me merely to publish his response to the piece, Iain (Melissa’s partner) has been resoundingly pitied by misogynists across the blogosphere for his lamentable fate to be married to such a gruesome harridan.

Now here’s the other thing about leaving the rectification of gender-based inequalities to the ladies: Misogynist men don’t respect women. They don’t listen to women; they won’t acknowledge a woman’s authority on her own lived experiences; they’re not going to learn anything from women, and certainly not feminist women.

Men who think women are less than need to hear that they’re terribly, infuriatingly, and demonstrably wrong from other men. Publicly. Passionately. As loud as the loud, so very loud, voices on the other side. One of the ways their self-reassuring bullshit works is via the effective void of male dissension, which supports their erroneous belief that they are the “objective” arbiters of womanhood. Well, if we’re so wrong, where are the other people [men] to say so? they wonder smugly.

They count on feminist men never showing up en masse for the main event.

As we say in Christian circles, that’s a “come to Jesus” message I needed to hear this week. I learned early a basic truth that I repeat to my students and my mentees every chance I get: the acid test of a man who claims the mantle of feminism (whether he calls himself a feminist or a “feminist ally” isn’t particularly relevant) is not how only how he treats women, but how he deals with the men in his life. Feminist men need to be able to be vocal allies of women even when there are no women around; in all-male and mixed settings, male feminists have a special obligation to stand against misogyny. If that’s too scary to do in “real life”, it surely isn’t too much to ask in the world of the blogosphere, where nasty language doesn’t carry with it the threat of imminent physical violence. Continue reading ‘The importance of “talking the talk”: male feminists and visibility’

Smoke-filled first day of school

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2009
in Local news and Pasadena City College
. 0 Comments

Today, I begin my 17th year as a faculty member at Pasadena City College. When I arrived on campus at 8:15 this morning, the temperature was already well into the 80s and the smoke from the nearby Station Fire was so heavy that my eyes burned and my lungs ached as I walked from the parking lot to my office. My air-conditioned office reeks of smoke, as do the hallways and the classrooms. Perhaps we ought to have cancelled classes today, but perhaps this is the safest place for many San Gabriel Valley and foothill folks to be. On the other hand, with the air nearby officially labelled hazardous, a mass evacuation to the beach might be even more appropriate.

But it is not my job to prescribe remedies, it is my job to teach and comfort. I have found that in times of crisis, some students don’t want — or can’t — come to campus. They need to be accomodated with make-ups and excused absences. But many find reassurance in the routines of school; young people often see educational institutions as safe havens. Come what come may, the familar rhythms of syllabi being distributed, roll being taken, introductory lectures given and so on offers comfort and a sense of normalcy when things seem anything but. I was here for my students on 9/11, keeping my office open and meeting with my classes to talk. In this far more local crisis, where there is no escaping the discomfort, the best I can do is carry on, providing calm.

But perhaps an air filter mask would be helpful.

Station Fire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 30, 2009
in Local news and Pasadena City College
. 0 Comments

A quick Sunday night note:

As most readers will know, a major fire is burning in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. The beloved terrain where I became a trail runner is in flames; two heroic firefighters have been killed tonight; and the famous Mt. Wilson observatory (and Southern California’s main communications network) is under threat. As of now, Pasadena City College is planning to hold its first day of fall semester classes tomorrow as scheduled, though we’ve been advised that many students will not be in class. Several nearby schools have cancelled classes. The air quality will surely be abysmal tomorrow.

Many of my friends have been evacuated from their homes in Altadena and La Canada Flintridge, though their homes still stand.

The Pasadena Humane Society is swamped with rescue animals, and is in need of donations of cash, cages, blankets, and food. You may donate here.

Follow news of the fire on Twitter using #stationfire, #station and latimesfires; more breaking news here.

Friday Random Ten: the seventeenth year begins

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 28, 2009
in Friday Random Ten
. 2 Comments

On Monday, as improbable as it seems to me, I’ll begin my 17th year of college teaching. This week’s FRT celebrates my enthusiasm at returning to the classroom once more.

I make no apologies for adoring Lily Allen, whom I discovered listening to Radio 1 in the UK last year. Buddy and Julie Miller have one of the great alt.country marriage collaborations, and the track here is one of my favorites of theirs. And the bonus is perhaps the best song ever written about the trip to an abortion clinic.

1. “Wallflower”, Buddy and Julie Miller
2. “22″, Lily Allen
3. “Coast”, Eliza Gilkyson
4. “Happy Hour”, The Housemartins
5. “The Devil in Miss Jones”, Mike Ness
6. “Rose of Sharon”, Joan Baez
7. “One Step Up”, Bruce Springsteen
8. “Cry Lonely”, Cross Canadian Ragweed
9. “Levon”, Elton John
10. “Ghost Repeater”, Jeffrey Foucault

Bonus Track: Shasta (Carrie’s Song), Vienna Teng

Feminist Harpies Deny that Babies are Fun, a response to Katie Roiphe

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 27, 2009
in Feminism and Parenting
. 6 Comments

Amanda Marcotte has her customarily devastating take-down of this Katie Roiphe piece that appeared on DoubleEX on Tuesday: Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants?

First off, it’s a confusing title. I read it and thought, for a second, that Roiphe — a first-time mom to a baby boy — worried that advocates for women’s equality go around denying that little babies experience pleasure. Of course, she means something else:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Amanda has done an excellent job unpacking the absurdities in Roiphe’s argument, and Amy Bloom points out all the feminist authors who did write about adoring their offspring, writers whom Roiphe either hasn’t read or ignored. There’s no question, of course, that Roiphe is not alone in experiencing this extraordinary sense of joy in being with a baby. My wife and I have had our lives turned upside down in the most delightful way by Heloise’s arrival. My wife seems to crave the baby physically; when she’s been away from Miss Mouse for more than a few hours, she goes through what she describes as “withdrawals”. For me, who did not carry this baby inside of me, the addiction is less physiologically intense, but it is powerful nonetheless. Roiphe’s feelings about her child ring true to us, as I imagine they would to many other parents.

Others have made the case that Roiphe is wrong about feminists, and plenty of folks agree that she’s absolutely right about the joy that babies can bring. But that pleasure isn’t felt universally; not every woman bonds with every baby she gives birth to in the ecstatic manner that Roiphe describes. And the problem, of course, is that she writes from a position of the very sort of privilege that feminists have fought for. She writes:

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

Newsflash, Katie; many mothers — many people, period — never get to spend much time in that “great world where people talk and think and write”. I get to be in that world, Katie Roiphe is in that world, but far more mothers have jobs outside the home that are dull and not particularly intellectually stimulating. And when you’re on kid #3, and the first two are still young and clamoring for your attention, there’s no time to stay in the “opium den”, no chance to close the shades and retreat into a world of oxytocin-infused bliss. And just to be clear, who is fighting for paid maternity leave so that more mothers have the time to close the shades? Those very same feminists Roiphe despises.

In the end, one excellent reason why feminists don’t over-exert themselves in paeans to motherhood is because so many other forces in our culture already do do just that and do it well. Feminists know well that for women, opportunity quickly becomes obligation — telling women that having a baby will be the peak experience of their lives marginalizes those women who genuinely have no interest in being mothers, repeating the old and ugly lie that a woman who doesn’t grow life in her tummy has somehow failed to fulfill her most important destiny. Feminists know that some women — many women — don’t respond as Roiphe does; the greater our rhapsodizing about the joys of having babies, the more we shame those who don’t find the process as ecstatic as they were led to believe.

As individual parents, feminist writers (Amy Bloom named several) have written a great deal about having children. Roiphe seems to have only heard of the books in which feminists expressed ambivalence about motherhood, or emphasized the toil that comes with reproducing and raising the result. In the blogosphere, plenty of feminists write about their love for their children and their joy in being mothers or fathers (I think of Lauren Bruce, one of my blogging heroes and designer of this blog.) There is no feminist consensus that demeans motherhood, unless you consider making the case that having babies isn’t the sine qua non of a woman’s existence to be demeaning.

To be fair, Roiphe’s condemnation in DoubleEXisn’t as full-throated as in her far more destructive The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism , a now-dated tract that functions as little more than a defense of rape. But the piece does end up titled “Why won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?”, and given that tack, it is not surprising that a great many feminists (including those who happen to be parents) roll their eyes.

Thursday Short Poem: Williams’ “Rhetorical Questions”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 27, 2009
in Poetry
. 5 Comments

Folks I meet in California often ask me how I ended up with an “Hispanic name”; in this part of the world, most Hugos are of Latin American descent. But it’s common enough a name in the German-speaking world, and in Britain to boot: think of Hugo Young, Hugo Rifkind, or the Welsh poet, Hugo Williams, whose work I’ve featured before.

This short Williams poem features the single finest description of orgasm I’ve read in the English language. (When I first put it up, I sleepily gave it the title of the book in which it appears, “Billy’s Rain.”)

Rhetorical Questions


How do you think I feel
when you make me talk to you
and won’t let me stop
till the words turn into a moan?
Do you think I mind
when you put your hand over my mouth
and tell me not to move
so you can “hear” it happening?

And how do you think I like it
when you tell me what to do
and your mouth opens
and you look straight through me?
Do you think I mind
when the blank expression comes
and you set off alone
down the hall of collapsing columns?

Teddy Kennedy, 1932-2009

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 26, 2009
in Christianity and Politics
. 4 Comments

I was always fond of Ted Kennedy, who died last night at age 77 after a long and brave struggle with brain cancer. When I was 13, I had a “Kennedy ‘80″ bumpersticker on my Schwinn bicycle, and walked precincts for him before the Democratic primary. I was hopeful he would run again in 1984 or ‘88, and saddened that he chose not to. I followed his senate career with interest, noting in particular his brave and proud commitment to liberal political values during that lamentable era when “liberal” became a curse word. (Teddy never eschewed that word, never insisted on being called a “New Democrat” or a “progressive”; he was a liberal and proud of it.)

Kennedy fought to create a more inclusive America, a greener America, a fundamentally more equitable America. I looked up his lifetime voting ratings from organizations who share the values I embrace: NARAL, the League of Conservation Voters, the Human Rights Campaign. No other senator has had such a consistently progressive voting record over the course of many decades. And certainly, no other senator fought as hard for health care reform as did he. It is to be hoped that the senate he loved will pass a health care reform bill of which Teddy would be proud.

Much has been made of his personal life, which was beset by turmoil (much of it of his own making.) The best comment I’ve read on that comes from Kennedy’s fellow Catholic, arch-conservative blogger Elizabeth Scalia. While some voices on the right have been venomous in their condemnation of the late senator, Scalia is more balanced:

God knows more, and sees more, than the rest of us, because eventually we’ll all need to count on his mercy, as we face his justice. For all that we know of Kennedy, there is much we do not know. A family member who works with the very poor once told me that when he was in a real fix and unable to find help for, for instance, a sick child in need of surgery, a phone call to Kennedy’s office would set the “Irish Mafia” of professional people -doctors, lawyers, pilots and such- into brisk motion. I think an examination of the life of every “great” person (and I mean “great” in terms of power and influence) will expose deep flaws and surprising episodes of generosity.

As I wrote here, “the quiet altruism of a public man is always overshadowed by the noise of his sins,” and, “Is it arrogance and entitlement that keeps a public man of public failings turning, and turning again, to the Mass, the sacraments, and the tribe, or is it a kind of humility, a declaration of need that supersedes riches and power and all the consolations of the world?”

Kennedy went to Mass as often as he could, and was frequently a daily communicant. His Christianity was not merely cultural, or political — it was his sustenance and his strength. Indeed, it would not be wrong to call Ted Kennedy among the most deeply faithful of senators. Scalia finds his generosity “surprising”, perhaps because her politics are so diametrically opposed to Kennedy’s, or perhaps because in her understanding of moral anthropology, sin is our default mode. There is a tendency on the right to see the faith of those on the left as superficial; the cognitive dissonance that would arise from acknowledging that someone can be both deeply faithful to Christ and deeply committed to progressive politics and sexual freedom seems too much for many conservatives to bear.

Ted Kennedy was many things, among them a man of profound faith in God and His Church and a man profoundly committed to “building the Kingdom” here on earth. He has earned the famous benedictory verse from Matthew 25:21, so often recited at funerals and inscribed on memorials, “well done, good and faithful servant.”

“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 25, 2009
in Father, Favorite Posts 2009, Male feminists, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Parenting and Youth
. 23 Comments

Little Heloise Cerys Raquel is indeed an enchanting baby, at least in the eyes of her doting parents. Now seven months old, her delightful personality emerges more and more each day — or so it seems. One of my favorite things about being on vacation this summer was the chance to be with her virtually every second; as I type this in my office, I note the hours (about five) until I will be home to her.

When we’re in public and Heloise is in my arms, we invariably get the same remarks: “She’s got you wrapped around her finger already, doesn’t she?” Or, “Watch out, when she gets older, you’ll have to watch the boys like a hawk!” My wife frequently gets told how much our daughter takes after her, but never receives anything like these comments. (When we were in Britain over the past few weeks, we got almost the same comments as we do here in the States.) And as a male feminist and father to a daughter, I find the subtext of remarks like these troubling, even as I honor the innocuousness of the intent behind them.

The bit about a daughter having her daddy “wrapped around her finger” repeats the old myth of male weakness. The myth of male weakness suggests that men are inherently vulnerable to temptation and manipulation. Men, the myth insists, have a much harder time practicing fidelity than do women, as men are biologically less capable of resisting sexual temptation. Heterosexual men are easily seduced by women, or so the trope goes, and thus women can use this weakness to flirt their way out of, say, traffic tickets or into jobs and marriages. The parental corollary, I’ve been realizing, is that daddies are far easier for daughters to manipulate than mommies. Fathers, the myth suggests, are powerless to say no to the pleas of their infant (or adolescent, or grown) female children.

Fathers, like other men, are supposed to be at least somewhat aware that they are being manipulated. I’ve gathered already that if I say “Yes, she’s already got me right where she wants me”, I’ll get indulgent smiles and teasing warnings about what she’s going to be like as a teen. And if I say — as I have said in one way or another several times — “I adore my girl, but she’s not going to get away with murder on my watch”, folks tend to shake their heads in real or mock pity at my stubborn refusal to acknowledge my own obvious frailty in the face of my daughter’s feminine wiles. A great deal of homosocial cameraderie is built and sustained on the theme of genuine or feigned exasperation at the supposed male inability to resist the charms of “hot chicks and pleading little girls.” Continue reading ‘“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness’

Both saint and sinner: against teaching only half the story

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 24, 2009
in Feminist Pedagogy, Historiography, Race and Teaching
. 1 Comment

Last week, Renee (of Womanist Musings) put up a guest post at Feministe that has elicited a huge response: Thomas Jefferson, the Face of a Rapist. Below an image of our third president, she writes:

Americans look at Thomas Jefferson and see the one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, a statesman, a former president and one of the founding fathers,’ however; when I look at him, I see the face of a rapist.

Renee makes the compelling case that Jefferson’s well-documented sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a black slave who was perhaps fifteen when their “affair” began , constituted rape because of Hemings’ age and her complete inability to provide meaningful consent. Consent, Renee argues, can only be given when the right to say “no” exists equally alongside the right to say “yes”. That makes good sense, but it also makes it difficult to argue that any woman — slave or free, white or black — in eighteenth-century America could consent. A husband’s right of access to his wife’s body was as inviolate as a slaveowner’s right to the labor of his slaves. That doesn’t mean that wealthy white women suffered to the same degree that black slave women did, of course, but it does render our modern notion of enthusiastic consent radically anachronistic. And reminding ourselves of this historical truth gives us all the more reason to celebrate the achievements of the feminist movement, which has fought for more than a century and a half to give women of all races sovereignty over their bodies and the right to say “no” as well as “yes.”

As a feminist historian, however, I want to deal with another aspect of Renee’s post. Renee rejects the defense, offered regularly during discussions of the transgressions of the late and great, that they were men (or women) “of their time” and that we “shouldn’t judge” past behavior by modern standards. There’s a lot to be said for that forgiving attitude towards the past. After all, who among us wouldn’t be enraged by the sexism of our great-grandparents? Forget Jefferson; think of one’s own elderly relatives. Few among us don’t have older folks in the family who hold abhorrent views on a variety of topics, and in many instances, those relatives have matched their actions to their views. To judge everyone by a contemporary standard of what is ethical would make inter-generational community far more difficult.

On the other hand, refusing to condemn the injustices of the past is to minimise, or at least erase, the suffering of very real victims. We can’t know Sally Hemings’ mind — but we make a huge mistake when we adopt the dominant narrative of her life, assuming that in the absence of obvious evidence of abuse that she was Jefferson’s happily consenting paramour. When the story is told, her lack of agency ought to be a focus, and it is not beyond the bounds of thoughtful history to ask what light this grossly disparate relationship sheds on our understanding of the third president. Feminist narrative ought to center women’s lives, and feminist historians rightly insist that Jefferson’s relationships with women form part of the story of his remarkable life. That doesn’t mean devaluing his achievements; it doesn’t mean feminists should picket the Jefferson Memorial or stage protests at Monticello. But it does mean asking hard questions about race and sex and power, it does mean exposing the notion of a “consensual affair” between a wealthy white man and his adolescent female slave as problematic if not risible.

Above all, we ought to chart a course between hagiography and demonization. It’s too simple-minded — albeit immensely tempting — to turn the figures of the past into saints or devils. Jefferson was a great man — and yes, he was a rapist. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the pivotal figure in the civil rights movement and a man who inspired hundreds of millions; he was also a chronic womanizer. Margaret Sanger fought her entire life so that women could have that precious right to birth control, but she repeatedly flirted with racist eugenics. Depending on one’s politics, the temptation is to center one’s focus solely on a partial aspect of a historical figure. When we do this, we make the critical mistake of seeing history as a story of “either/or” rather than “both/and.”

Like everyone reading this post, I have inflicted hurt. The story of my life, like the story of your life, surely contains within it episodes of great kindnesses and incidents of genuine wickedness. (For many of us, the greatest wickednesses we do are rooted in obtuse indifference rather than malice.) A skillful historian could, using only the facts, make virtually any one of us paragons of virtue — or exemplars of cruelty. When it comes to the dead, we cannot allow a respect for their accomplishments to blind us to their shortcomings; by the same token, we cannot allow the magnitude of those shortcomings to erase the legacy of the good that they did. As Thomas Merton’s old axion puts it, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” There is straight and crooked in each of us, and good history tells the story of both.

Home again, and giving thanks for Britain

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 22, 2009
in Family, Father and Traveling
. 14 Comments

We’re home from a fortnight in the UK. My wife and I took Heloise and my wife’s mother with us on the trip; for the latter two, it was their first visit to Britain. (Our daughter was in my wife’s tummy when we were in Europe last summer, but no passport was required at that point.) The ratio of three adults to one infant is a good one for travel, and we’re blessed with a daughter who is an easy flyer. (I’m proud to say that the Cabin Service Director on our BA flight to Heathrow called her “the little angel” as we got ready to deplane.)

I took everyone to visit Kingston Lisle, the tiny Oxfordshire village in the Vail of the White Horse where my father grew up. We knelt at the graves of my paternal grandparents (noting that we need to hire someone to redo the headstones), stayed at a glorious hotel in nearby Great Milton, and enjoyed the Cotswolds before heading on to Carmarthenshire, Devon, and Cumbria. We took my English nephew to see his hometown side, Exeter City, play their first home match of the season. And we finished the trip in the glorious Lake District, which was the only place where we dealt with rain.

My father, born in Vienna and, from the age of three, raised as a war refugee in England, had four children. My younger brother decided years ago that he felt more at home in Britain than in America; he and his family make their home in Exeter, where my brother is now associate professor of English. My two nephews and my niece are growing up with Devonian accents; they are culturally English. My sister Elizabeth lived and worked in Britain for nearly a decade before returning home two years ago; my youngest sister and I have never lived for any great length of time in the UK, but visit regularly. All four of us have two passports; each of us feels a different degree of connection to that “green and pleasant land.”

My love for Britain isn’t rooted in ethnic heritage; on my mother’s side, I’ve got some ancestors from that sceptered isle, but far more from the continent. The love I have is rooted in many things, but perhaps most plainly in my family’s history. My paternal grandmother, Elisabeth von Schuh, was born in Vienna to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father; her husband, Georg Schwitzer (the spelling would later be changed) was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism when he married. My father was uncircumcised and baptized, but was ethnically 3/4ths Jewish; that latter fact would have meant a death sentence for him and the rest of the family following Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938. My grandfather, a gentle physician, wasn’t eager to leave; like many, he thought things wouldn’t “get that bad” for Viennese Jews (who were used to anti-Semitism as a political prop.) My late grandmother knew better, and she explored every avenue she could to get the family out.

It was Great Britain that welcomed in my father’s family. Not the USA (my grandmother tried that option). Not France (lucky, too, given what would happen to French Jews during the war.) The only door that opened was for Britain, which was willing to take certain Jewish professionals, especially doctors. The family escaped just before the outbreak of World War Two, and after a brief period in London, settled in what was then Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire, in a place called Fawler Manor just outside of Kingston Lisle. Though my grandfather was briefly interned as an enemy alien, he was eventually released and allowed to practice medicine. While my grandmother and her children stayed in the south, he went to work as the staff doctor at the refinery in Ellesmere Port, Lancashire — where he would die in a car accident in 1947.

It was the English who cared for my family before, during, and after the Second World War. My father left England at 24 to go to graduate school at Berkeley, but England never left him. The fundamental decency of that culture stayed with him all his life. He lived 47 years in the USA, but never got an American passport — he only wanted one citizenship, that of the one country that had opened its door and saved his family from the worst mass murder in human history. His California-born children all got their UK passports as soon as they could, and we all use them with varying frequency; we honor our father and we honor the land that became his home.

It was the British (the Scots are as British as any) who gave the Lockerbie bomber his compassionate release this week. Whether it was deserved in this case is debatable, but it is worth noting that compassionate release for the terminally ill is far more common in the United Kingdom than in the States (or anywhere else I know of). While the American attitude tends to be “let the man rot”, or more commonly, “fry his ass”, the attitude of at least a plurality of Britons is far more humane. And I see a direct link between the compassionate release of Abdelbaset al Mograhi this week and the compassionate welcome my father’s family received nearly seven decades ago. My family were escapees from mass murder rather than agents thereof, but the decency that undergirds the very existence of the concept of compassionate release was the same impulse that saved my father’s life.

Could I live in Britain? Perhaps. Not in London, which I find delightful but exhausting. To quote Cerys Matthews, the sublime and lovely Welsh pop star for whom my daughter is only partly named, “I come alive/outside the M25″ (the ring road around the capital.) I love the northeast, particularly Durham and Northumbria, but my brother’s location in the southwest makes a good case for a second home there. But perhaps, like my Dad, I am destined to spend the majority of my life in the once Golden State, making regular visits to somewhere greener, somewhere wetter, somewhere somehow just a bit kinder.

In any case, it’s good to be back. More blogging to come soon.

The August hiatus arrives

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 04, 2009
in Blogging
. 5 Comments

Like psychiatrists, the Schwyzers vacation in August. This blog will be dark until the week of August 24. When I have the internet connection and the time, I will moderate comments and jump into discussion threads if needed.

Sixteen hours per week: boys, girls, video games, and expectations

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 03, 2009
in The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 23 Comments

Amanda at Pandagon linked last week to this summary of a study from the journal Sex Roles, reporting that college-aged women spent considerably less time playing video games than their male counterparts. No surprise there, but the key explanation for the discrepancy is chilling:

“Our findings suggest that one reason women play fewer games than men is because they are required to fulfill more obligatory activities, leaving them less available leisure time,” said Jillian Winn of MSU’s Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, and one of the co-authors of the study.

To be precise, the study found that college-aged women did sixteen hours “more work” per week (chores, jobs, and so forth). As Amanda pointed out, that finding dwarfs the discussion of video games; it points to further evidence of what Courtney Martin talks about in her marvelous Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and what on this blog is called “The Martha Complex”. Young women today are increasingly likely to be over-worked, anxious, and beset by fears of failure; a growing percentage of their brothers are hooked on pot, porn, and Playstation, prioritizing “chilling out” over virtually any other waking activity. And an extraordinary number of these lads have women in their lives — mothers, sisters, girlfriends — cleaning up after them (a traditional sex role) and providing for them financially (something of an innovation.)

This time discrepancy is rooted in many things, it seems. Of course, some of it is rooted in the contemporary cultural ideal that, as Courtney Martin says, tells girls that they “can be anything” but implies that in order to do so, that they must somehow “do everything.” Over-caffeinated, over-achieving, and over-scheduled, a great many women are beset by anxiety. But it would be wrong to suggest that the problem is primarily in women’s heads. The time gap that forces so many college-aged, childless women to work a “second shift” is indeed frequently a result of direct pressure from parents and the community.

The lower the expectations for male behavior, the higher the expectations for female success and self-control. This is not only obvious and axiomatic, it has real-life repercussions in the lives of a great many young women. Many of my students come from immigrant families in which there are strict household divisions of labor; women cook and clean, men take out trash and fix cars. Given that cooking, cleaning, and laundry are daily and time-consuming activities compared to mowing lawns or emptying garbage cans, many of my female students take the same academic loads as their brothers while doing twice as much work at home. In many families, a young man is encouraged to do his homework so that he can then go out with his friends and play video games; his sister is told to help with the chores, and when everything else is done, she can then turn to her own homework. Continue reading ‘Sixteen hours per week: boys, girls, video games, and expectations’

Reprint: A very long post about Los Angeles, an Eagles song, nationalism, history, self-reinvention and the “club versus country” debate

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 02, 2009
in Reprints
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This post originally appeared in January 2007.

A week ago Sunday, my buddy Leo and I ran up the El Prieto trail and the Brown Mountain fire road. Though we’re usually part of a larger group, we were alone that day. Leo was recovering from a marathon, and I was feeling well-rested, so I was actually able to keep up with him for a change. (In his late 50s, Leo still regularly runs marathons just above the three hour mark and has finished his share of 50 and 100-mile races).

We talked about books, history, ideas. When I run with some friends, we talk about love and marriage and family; when I run with others, I argue politics or theology. A few friends, like Leo, are interested in all of these topics and more. In an early morning chill, we began by reflecting together on the burden of the past.

Leo was born just after the Second World War into a Polish refugee family. He was raised in West Germany. Much like my late father, a dozen years his senior, Leo has that sense that many war refugees have — a sense of never quite belonging, a sense that perhaps at any moment, he might have to pack his bags and leave again. My father, born in Vienna, raised in rural Berkshire, spent nearly fifty years of his life in California without ever truly feeling at home here. He didn’t feel fully at home in Austria or England either. Leo and my Dad knew each other, and were fond of each other. When I got married a year and a half ago, they spoke German together at our wedding.

But we didn’t just talk about my Dad or about Leo’s similar sense of not quite belonging. We talked about the San Gabriel Mountains we both love so much. As we neared the Brown Mountain summit, I said to Leo “Isn’t it interesting to think we are the only members of our family ever to be here? None of our ancestors ever stood where we are standing right now.”

“Yes”, Leo replied, “it’s liberating.”

And I’ve been thinking about that for nine days now. I’m a historian by trade, of course; I have devoted my scholarly and professional life to the study of the past. I’m a dual national, holding a UK passport, and am a regular visitor to the land that gave my father’s family shelter and the land my brother calls home. I love to visit what some folks call “old places”, filled with a rich sense of history. When I tramp through the hills of Devon, or run through the streets of Vienna, I feel as if I am surrounded by ghosts. Not evil spirits, mind — just an extraordinary cloud of witnesses of all who have lived and died in these places. And when I am in those places where my ancestors lived, I feel the weight of their fears and their hopes and their expectations all around me. It’s not always unpleasant, but it’s always there.

Even when I go home to Northern California, I feel surrounded by a sense of family history. On my mother’s side, my family came to the Bay Area for the Gold Rush more than a century and a half ago. We’ve had a country place in the hills northeast of San Jose since Rutherford Hayes was president; by the standards of this state, that’s some ancient history. My maternal great-grandfathers both went to Berkeley, and when I was a student at Cal nine decades later, I felt them all around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is a wonderful feeling to feel so connected to a place. But at other times, it is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe.

What makes me a Los Angeleno in my mindset is my fascination with self-reinvention. I love that I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who call somewhere else their truest home — but have nonetheless come here, to this basin with its beaches and valleys and hills — in order to start something new. They’ve come here to escape the burdens and obligations of the past, the sort that linger in the old places even after the old people have gone. They’ve come here to escape the “things are the way they are” mindset. They’ve come here to replace the fatalism and superstition of the old places with a relentless optimism about their own potential and the possibility of global transformation. They’ve come here to get away from the ghosts of Holocausts and World Wars and rigid class distinctions. They’ve come here to run on mountain trails upon which their ancestors never set foot.

(I’m listening to the Eagles “The Last Resort” right now on Itunes. Appropriate.)

As I’ve said, I love to visit the old places. My doctorate is in medieval history, for heaven’s sake; I spent many happy hours doing research in the shadow of my favorite building in the western world, Durham Cathedral. But it’s not just the damp and gloom of old Europe that makes me glad I live in this sprawling, metastasizing megalopolis. It’s the sense that I always get in the old places that humans and animals are limited and constrained by the story of the past. (As the Eagles sing in the song to which I’m listening: “where the Old World shadows hang heavy in the air.”) Their sense of themselves is related not only to place, but to the past story of the place. And just below the surface, there often bubbles a raw xenophobic nationalism that I find fascinating but repugnant.

Leo and I talked a lot about nationalism and place and history. We both love soccer, and we both are World Cup fans who go pretty nuts every four years. But especially after this last World Cup, I’ve begun to have some misgivings about “country” based sporting events. In professional football of the world kind, one great conflict that always comes up is the “club” versus “country” debate. When English players are playing for Premiership teams and training for a major international event, it’s hardly feasible for them to be 100% present for both sets of obligations. (Think of how angry folks in Newcastle are over the injury that an overworked and exhausted Michael Owen sustained last summer while playing for England in Germany.) The traditional wisdom is that athletes should put country over club, national pride over transitory professional obligations. I disagree completely.

I watched the England-Portugal World Cup quarterfinal match last summer in a state of grief and rage. My father, whose family had been rescued from Hitler by English generosity, had died days earlier. And England played a piss-poor match that they deserved to lose. But I, a dual national in SoCal, found myself working myself up into a nationalistic frenzy while watching the game. Under my breath, I said several embarrassing things about the entire Portuguese nation; my rage at a certain Cristian Ronaldo turned quickly into a temporary fury at all things Lusitanian. I calmed down within minutes, but from reading the BBC’s message boards after the game, I know that others were not so restrained. The racist bile that flowed last summer was appalling.

I’ve decided I prefer “club” soccer now. Though I am no fan of Manchester United, I love that Wayne Rooney and his nemesis, Ronaldo, play together. I love seeing a Premiership side take the pitch with eleven players with nearly as many passports. In the mercenary act of playing for pay rather than for national pride, these men do more to advance the cause of peace and understanding than they do when they wear their country’s jerseys on a global stage. Even when nation-based matches are played with mutual respect between the players, the fans themselves are often whipped into emotional frenzies in which ancient bigotries suddenly and shockingly reemerge.

I have my allegiances in sports. I “hate” the Dallas Cowboys. I “hate” Arsenal (of the London clubs, I support Spurs). But those aren’t ethnic hatreds. To put it bluntly, there’s a world of difference between cursing “those f-ing Gunners” after another loss in the North London derby, and cursing “those f-ing wogs” after England loses to a nation whose players (for the most part) have much darker skin than those who wear three Lions on their chests. Club rivalries have notoriously led to violence, but not to wars. In a club rivalry, you shout insults at another fan because of what he wears; in national rivalries, you shout insults because of who he is. There’s no question that the latter is more dangerous. (Now, OKOP don’t shout insults. Our disappointment is subdued, masked, drowned behind thin smiles and private tears. NOKOP rage is public, ours is sublimated.)

(Parenthetical aside: One of the things I love about Los Angeles: we don’t have an NFL team. Here’s an American football fan hoping we never get one! How delicious to live in a city where everyone’s allegiances are elsewhere! I get a smug satisfaction from living in a place that doesn’t need a team to call its own, but can rely on quirky whims to select which club to root for. My youth group kids are holding a Super Bowl party; some will root for the Colts and others for the Bears, but their allegiances are based on uniform colors or affection for a particular player rather than a loyalty to place. I like that.)

But even as I write this this morning, I know better than to claim that I live beyond history. My fascination with “personal growth” and transformation, my longing for new beginnings, my personal narrative of starting over — this is part of my own family’s legacy. What prosperity and success we have had comes from good luck (we got here first and stole more), but also from something that may be coded into our DNA: a longing to go further and further west. Pioneers and survivors are in my blood; I am descended from those who were willing to leave rather than stay. (This brings to mind a snippet from a Caedmon’s Call song: “I come from a long line of leavers.”) I am descended from those whose fascination with the new trumped their loyalty to the old. It would be hubris to suggest that I am the first in a long line to want to start over somewhere new, to liberate myself from old rules and old obligations and old animosities.

Leo and I had a good run that Sunday. And yes, we talked about all of this and more.

Reprint: Teaching, Teen Moms, and False Intimations of Tragedy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 01, 2009
in Reprints
. 12 Comments

Our niece, aged 21, just had her second baby, a beautiful little girl, last week. She had her first baby at 17. She is not married. And as I think about becoming a great-uncle (again), I wanted to reprint this post from November 2007.

This short Will Okun piece in the New York Times on teen pregnancy has gotten some strong reactions, here and here and here for starters. Okun teaches English in inner-city Chicago:

It happens too often. A female student approaches my desk, says “Mr. Okun?”, and and whispers the two words no adult wants to hear from a teenager: “I’m pregnant.” I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to shake her with anger. What have you done? Life is not hard enough already? Is it over, have you given up? What about finishing high school? What about college? What about your own dreams? What about enjoying the last of your own childhood? How can you parent a child when you are just a child yourself? How will you support your baby, how will you support yourself? Where is the man, will he be here next year? Will I see you and your baby coldly waiting alone for a city bus that will not come? Please look me in the eye and tell me you know what you have done.

Although her news disappoints me, I try to react without emotion or judgment. “What are you going to do?” I ask. But if she has already told me she is pregnant, we both already know. “I am going to have it,” she replies. I used to argue for abortion, which only enraged us both. At this point, what is done is done. All I can do now is offer her my unconditional support. I will give her a referral to counseling and pre-natal care and keep my personal frustrations and opinions to myself.

Inevitably, a few months later I will be invited to take photographs at the baby shower. I go because I like the student and I want to show that I support her and her family on this joyous occasion. But, in some cases, are we celebrating tragedy?

Well, Will, you get points for no longer “arguing for abortion.” (Just FYI, bud, there’s a rather nasty history of well-meaning whites encouraging poor women of color to have abortions. Glad you’re no longer one of them. Eugenicists are often well-meaning do-gooders.) But man, Will, you really don’t get it.

Let me be clear I don’t think teen pregnancy is a “good idea”. That said, I’ve spent more time than you might imagine with teenage mothers and their extended family. My wife and I have two nieces, both of whom became moms before they were eighteen years old. My wife and I will meet our newest great-nephew this coming weekend. Neither of our nieces are married to the fathers of their children. Both young moms are now living with relatives, both are working. And when it comes to parenting, my nieces are pretty damn good mothers. They are surrounded by a multi-generational community of experienced care-givers. Their children are not being raised in isolation, but with a surprising amount of community support.

I’ve been to baby showers for many a teenage mom in my day. I’ve also quietly helped pay for an abortion for a teenage girl who wanted one and who confided in me. Though I do everything I can as a mentor and a youth leader and a teacher to encourage a culture of informed decision-making (especially around sex), I understand that a very large number of teenagers are going to have unprotected intercourse for a very wide variety of reasons. And when some of them get pregnant, as they invariably will, there are no perfect options. Abortion is one choice (it was the one my girlfriend and I chose when we were teens with college plans). Adoption is another. And having the baby and keeping it is the third. Continue reading ‘Reprint: Teaching, Teen Moms, and False Intimations of Tragedy’