Archive for September, 2009

Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 30, 2009
in Birth control and contraception, Desire and objectification, Global Feminism, Health Care, Parenting and Science
. 53 Comments

Back to school with much work to be done.

After Friday’s post (immediately below) about male sexuality and its perceived dangers, I got an interesting email from blogger Erin Solaro. She wrote:

The reason male sexuality has been viewed as dangerous and yet at the same time men are supposed to push women has a great deal to do with biology, and no, I don’t mean that men have a higher sex drive than women…

…I mean that 1940 was the first time in America that the mythical average woman’s chance of dying in childbirth dipped below 1 in 100. (For black women, it was higher, about 3 times as high.) In modern Afghanistan, it’s about 1 in 7, which may be pretty close to the historic norm.

Until we understand that, we aren’t really going to understand why we think about men, women and sexuality the way we do.

It’s an interesting point. Any women’s history class must take into account the history of birth-related maternal and infant mortality. While it’s difficult to get accurate historic statistics, the 1 in 7 figure that Solaro cites for contemporary Afghanistan is probably lower than it was in many other time periods. It is generally assumed that until the 20th century, childbirth was the leading cause of death for all women of childbearing years; in some societies that maternal mortality rate may have reached 40%, while other medical historians prefer a lower figure of 1 in 4 or 1 in 5. Given that many women in the developing world still have half a dozen children or more, as they did in previous centuries, the overall risk is compounded by the sheer number of pregnancies carried to term.

Our cultural memory of this devastating toll is limited. We have a Mother’s Day, of course, but we have no public rituals to honor our countless female ancestors who died — quite literally — so that we could live. There is no Tomb of the Unknown Mother in Arlington, though more American women died from childbirth than male soldiers did in war for the first century and a half of our republic’s history. This legacy lives on best in fairy tales, replete with stories of single fathers (Beauty and the Beast) or wicked step-mothers (take your pick). When I ask my students what happened to Cinderella’s birth mother, it drives the point about maternal mortality home.

Whatever the exact figures, childbirth has probably killed more women than any other single cause in human history. Until very recently (a miracle two millenia ago in Palestine notwithstanding), the only possible cause for pregnancy was heterosexual intercourse. So if childbirth kills women, and sex causes pregnancy, then by the logical transitive property, heterosexual intercourse has been, not so indirectly, the most lethal of all human activities for one-half of the population. To put it even more bluntly, men have killed far more women by ejaculating inside of them than they have by any other method. Semen has killed more people than any other body fluid (and yet it is menstrual blood that is considered far more “unclean” in many Western traditions.) (This, by the way, is a good moment to note how absurd the argument is about AIDS being “God’s punishment for homosexuality.” Even if we were to assume that AIDS was primarily transmitted through same-sex sexual activity, the number of deaths globally from AIDS has not yet risen to the historic levels of those from childbirth. If God punishes by death those who engage in forbidden sexual activity, how then to explain that the leading cause of death for women for centuries was having intercourse with their own husbands?)

Very few, if any, men ever presumably sought to kill their wives or lovers through intercourse. But men did devise patriarchal power structures that forbade women from using contraception or from refusing sex to their husbands. From both a moral and a statistical standpoint, cultures that don’t allow women access to contraception — as well as the right to say “no” after marriage as well as before — are complicit in the death of countless millions of women. Of course, many women surely enjoyed sex despite the risks; many women surely longed for children even in the face of the grave dangers that attended pregnancy, labor, and delivery. All the more reason to honor the bravery and the sacrifice of those who fought for life against death on a battlefield far more lethal than those on which their husbands, fathers, and brothers struggled. Continue reading ‘Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation’

Lust and humanity, desire and dignity: some thoughts on an all-male Consent Day workshop

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 25, 2009
in Consent trainings, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Rape, aggression and violence, Sexual ethics and transformation and Youth
. 72 Comments

I’m heading back to New York City after a couple of days in Providence. The weather, so humid yesterday, has turned wonderfully brisk and autumnal. I think of my native state, sweltering and drought-ridden and smoke-filled, and feel — almost — guilty that I’m not there with the millions of other suffering Californians. Home on Tuesday.

Brown University’s first annual “Consent Day” was a great success, not least because of the immensely popular t-shirts (a photo here) designed by Catherine McCarthy, the student who led the organizing team for the event and who first contacted me about coming to speak. The front of the shirt is visible in the photo, the reverse includes the reminder “Consent is active, enthusiastic, and freely given.”

I gave a workshop entitled “Sex, Consent, Enthusiasm, and Stoplights: Rethinking the Language of Yes and No”. The basic thesis is familiar from this post, but I also touched on the “all men are dogs” (myth of male weakness) ethos which undergirds so much of the way we socialize modern males (and socialize women to think about them). I also brought in what my women’s studies students know as the “upside-down triangle”, which I wrote about in this post.

There was some good give and take, and some very thoughtful questions from a mixed audience of Brown students.

In the second part of the workshop, we held a male-only discussion group. It is, of course, important to do anti-rape work with both men and women. When doing survivors workshops, it’s obviously beneficial to have women-only spaces. (And yes, men can also be survivors of sexual assault, though usually at the hands of other men rather than women — which may make all-male space more problematic, but that’s another topic for ‘nother post.) But in dealing with issues around sexual consent, the topic on yesterday’s table, single-sex space can also offer an opportunity for a higher degree of safety. And I was eager to meet with at least a few of the young men who had been through the workshop to hear their thoughts and feelings.

As our hour together Thursday evening bore out, many young men (certainly all of those who, gay and straight alike, participated in our closed discussion) are frustrated by the absence of a discourse of healthy male sexuality. This was a self-selecting group; these were guys who had volunteered to participate in Consent Day activities and who identified themselves as sympathetic to feminist goals. Several were already involved in peer counseling or in campus progressive politics. They were energized and excited by the discussion about enthusiasm and consent; there were no rape apologists to be found. But the real hunger that many of them articulated very well (not surprising for Brown University students) was a hunger for some kind of validation of their sexuality as good, healthy, okay.

“I know all the things not to do”, one guy said; “I work really hard at being a good ally. But I sometimes feel that in order to be a good ally, I have to pretend that I’m asexual; my fear is that women won’t trust me as a friend if I show any sign of sexual desire.” This lad hastened to add that he wasn’t sexually interested in most of his female friends; what he’d like to be able to do is talk about his sexual feelings (as some of those friends talk with him about theirs) without losing their trust. Several of the other men in the room nodded in agreement. We talked at length about the familiar but still-powerful compartmentalization phenomenon, one in which “good guys”, those who strive to do justice with their lives and with their bodies, live a separate, secretive sexual life (usually involving pornography) that seems, at least to the guys themselves, to be something profoundly shameful.

Timothy Beneke’s Men on Rape is now out of print, but one of the many memorable lines within that invaluable text is this: “I’m not aware of any common English phrases that allow one to express sexual desire in a way that acknowledges both lust and humanity.” Beneke captured a truth about our idiom, but he also captured a truth about the way in which we see male sexuality in our culture. For a host of excellent reasons, rooted in countless painful anecdotes and our own collective witness, many of us — perhaps most of us — have a difficult time believing that heterosexual desire doesn’t invariably compromise a man’s capacity for empathy. We men can’t want sex, our culture tells us, and while still seeing the people we want to have sex with as they really are. “A hard dick has no conscience”, we say with resignation or cynical bravado. But as is so often the case, our language in this instance doesn’t so much reflect an immutable reality as it creates and maintains a distorted understanding of our nature and our potential. Continue reading ‘Lust and humanity, desire and dignity: some thoughts on an all-male Consent Day workshop’

On the now-notorious happiness gap

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 23, 2009
in Happiness and Men and Masculinity
. 20 Comments

I’m in New York, getting ready to take the train up to Providence later today; giving my presentation on consent and male weakness at Brown University tomorrow evening.

There’s a very worthy discussion at Feministe about this Maureen Dowd piece in Saturday’s Times on the question of why, since the early 1970s, women’s happiness seems to have declined while men’s seems to have increased. Gracie and Jillian offer some good responses and analysis.

Assuming the data on happiness (from the General Social Survey) is correct, social conservatives might make hay with this by suggesting that women are suffering the consequences of too much liberation. That conclusion is dampened somewhat by the interesting tidbit that having children increased rather than decreased the likelihood that a woman would report being unhappy. To believe the anti-feminist pop media, it is childlessness that leads aging women to despair; the data suggests exactly the opposite. But as Dowd and her commenters are all aware, it’s difficult to attribute the “joy gap” to any one cause.

Let me suggest two things: first, more than a few men underreport their own unhappiness. Most American males are raised with the “big boys don’t cry” ethos. For a great many adult men, admitting to despair or angst is a form of “crying”; to complain (particularly to a stranger, like a researcher) is a display of weakness. Time and progress have not entirely eradicated the “self-made man” myth from the American psyche; the self-made man is, almost by definition, relentlessly optimistic. Despair and depression are much more likely to be interpreted by men as evidence of personal failure, as proof that one “can’t hack it” in the tough but opportunity-filled real world. The rise in reported male happiness may be evidence that that myth is — blessedly — losing its hold on some men. But it also is equally likely that men are still less likely than women to report unhappiness; one need only look at video games and action movies to see that heroic stoicism is still very much a masculine virtue. Thus when boys and men say “It’s all good”, we do well to probe a bit deeper.

Secondly, women’s unhappiness is surely tied at least in part to the “second shift” phenomenon. The feminist movement has succeeded in opening up new professional opportunities for women, particularly middle and upper-middle class women. Though we have not yet hit the longed-for full parity, women’s wages are much closer to those of their male counterparts than they were thirty or forty years ago. Far more women are working full-time for wages. Many of these women are wives and mothers, and all of the evidence suggests that men’s willingness to work inside the home hasn’t kept pace with women’s willingness and opportunity to work outside the home. In many dual-career families in which both partners put in equal hours in the workplace, the wife still does the lion’s share of the housework as well. Men’s willingness to take on traditionally female roles has, not surprisingly, lagged behind women’s willingness to take on traditional male roles. And as a result, far too many women are utterly exhausted from working what Arlie Hochschild famously called the Second Shift.

Happiness isn’t rocket science, but it is, for so many, elusive. “The noblest and pleasantest of things”, according to Aristotle, happiness comes from a sense of purpose, a set of meaningful relationships, a sense of being valued, an opportunity to have and to share pleasure. But happiness is neither easy nor obligatory, and this study gives us much with which to wrestle and upon which to reflect.

Reprint: of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 22, 2009
in Reprints
. 6 Comments

I’m still in New York, but thought to repost this, apropos of some of our recent discussion. Reprinted from May 2008.

Amber Rhea gets the hat tip for this article in New York Magazine: The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage. That’s the title in the magazine, anyway, but when you click on the link, the title that comes up is What Makes Married Men Want to Have Affairs?, which is a very different sort of question. Asking why men want what they want is never, ever, the same question as why men do what they do.

The author, Phillip Weiss, gets us off to a depressing start:

When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine; it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’d only talked about my issue with any honesty over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and a therapist, they are all men.

So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. When people at dinner parties cried out, “What was Spitzer thinking?” I whispered to a friend that I knew damn well what he was thinking: He wanted some “strange,” to quote the old Kris Kristofferson line. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes. Straying, wandering eye, a blowup. If you have a pulse.”

What situation is that, I wonder? The situation of the middle-aged married male, caught between his promises and his urges? Apparently. Here’s Weiss’ stunner:

An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. “I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t,” says a forward-thinking friend. “There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity.” But like other of my male sources, he didn’t want me to use his name. “Don’t get me divorced!” was the refrain. All of these guys nursed a fantasy, as quaintly surreal as an old tinted postcard, of a perfectible world in which we might have sex outside our primary relationships and say that it doesn’t mean anything.

Yikes. Let’s just say, the piece goes down hill from there. The bold emphasis above is mine; it illustrates the classic fallacy of what I call the “myth of male weakness”. Continue reading ‘Reprint: of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue’

Heading east

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 17, 2009
in Traveling
. 1 Comment

I’m getting ready to leave town, flying out to New York on a red-eye tonight. I’ll be on the east coast all next week for a variety of reasons both spiritual and academic; a week hence, I’m the guest speaker at Brown University’s “Consent Day”. The event is open only to the Brown community, and I’ll be speaking on “Negotiating Consent and Myths of Male Weakness”. I’m also planning to do a workshop with a male-only group after my talk.

It should be noted that I am available to give this presentation elsewhere; it’s gone very well in the past and I have high hopes for next week in Providence. If you’re a college or university looking for a guest speaker to talk about men and feminism or issues around consent, I’d love to chat about the possibilities. Email me at hbschwyzer@gmail.com

In any case, this means that posting will be light to non-existent over the next ten days or so, though some reflections on the Brown event will certainly be forthcoming.

Thursday Short Poem: Auden’s “The Common Life” (again)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 17, 2009
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

I post more poems by Auden than by any other poet, and a few of his are worth posting over and over again. Since this hasn’t appeared on the TSP since November 2004, it’s worth a re-run. It’s the last long sentence, and that immortal and right line about truth and love, that I never forget. It’s as good a piece of marriage advice as I know.

The Common Life


A living-room, the catholic area you
(Thou, rather) and I may enter
without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
each visitor with a style,

a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
with his, and decides whether
he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms
where nothing’s left lying about

chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
of bills being promptly settled

with cheques that don’t bounce.) There’s no We at an instant,
only Thou and I, two regions
of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
a room is too small, therefore,

if its occupants cannot forget at will
that they are not alone, too big
if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
for raising their voices. What,

quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
ours is a sitting culture
in a generation which prefers comfort
(or is forced to prefer it)

to command, would rather incline its buttocks
on a well-upholstered chair
than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance
at book-titles would tell him

that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
on our food. But could he read
what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures
frighten us most, or what names

head our roll-call of persons we would least like
to go to bed with? What draws
singular lives together in the first place,
loneliness, lust, ambition,

or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another
clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
between them, like Bombelli’s

impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained. Still, they do
manage to forgive impossible behavior,
to endure by some miracle

conversational tics and larval habits
without wincing (were you to die,
I should miss yours). It’s a wonder that neither
has been butchered by accident,

or, as lots have, silently vanished into
History’s criminal noise
unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years,
we should sit here in Austria

as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
of a Naples Bambino,
the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky,
doing British cross-word puzzles,

is very odd indeed. I’m glad the builder gave
our common-room small windows
through which no observed outsider can observe us:
every home should be a fortress,

equipped with all the very latest engines
for keeping Nature at bay,
versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling
the Dark Lord and his hungry

animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute
can buy a machine in a shop,
but the sacred spells are secret to the kind,
and if power is what we wish

they won’t work.) The ogre will come in any case:
so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
the Spirit we die, but life

without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.

Reprinting an oldie about Wendy Wasserstein, fertility, feminism, and hope

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 16, 2009
in Parenting, Reprints and Science
. 10 Comments

This post first appeared here on January 31, 2006, and not all the links within it may still work. But the point about motherhood and feminism is one I’d like to reiterate, as well as to remind folks of a great feminist voice now silenced. If you want to read the original 2006 comment thread, it’s here.

Coretta Scott King and Wendy Wasserstein have left us, much too young in both cases.  Readers can easily find many obits and tributes on the ‘net.

I’ve long been a fan of Wasserstein, and remember the birth of her now seven year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, as the occasion of a bitter fight with a dear friend.  As is well-known, Wasserstein spent many years in her forties in fertility treatments, anxious to have a child.  In his obituary in today’s Times (rather annoyingly titled "Witty Voice of Feminist Self-Doubt"), Mike Boehm writes of her as a woman whose need to nurture led her on an eight-year journey through fertility treatments that culminated in motherhood at the age of 48.   Somehow, that description bothers me a bit, and I can’t figure out why.  Is it vaguely condescending?  Would I mind it as much if the obit was written by a woman?  I’ll mull it over.  Is it the verb "need?"

Anyhow, when Wasserstein’s account of her journey to motherhood appeared in the New Yorker back in the summer of 1998, I got into a huge fight with a buddy about the ethics of becoming a single mom at Wasserstein’s age.  I enthusiastically supported Wasserstein, while my friend accused her — and other older women like her, who conceive children artificially and while single — of profound selfishness.  It was strange how heated the argument quickly became, and my friend and I realized that the story of how Lucy Jane came to be exposed a basic fault line in our worldviews.  At the time, I was in the midst of my conversion process; my friend was a much more conservative Christian than I.   While I was genuinely moved by Wasserstein’s steadfast refusal to let either aging or singleness deter her from her dream of motherhood, my buddy saw her actions as evidence of narcissism and upper-middle class privilege.  My friend — at the time a recently divorced father — said bitterly: "Women like Wasserstein think men are expendable.  We’re more than sperm donors, you know."

I’m not a bio-ethicist.  My recollection of the fertility techniques Wasserstein actually used is vague.  I thought I had her book "Shiksa Goddess" somewhere (it has the original New Yorker essay about Lucy in it), but apparently it got misplaced in my last move, or lent to a student, or it walked off into the ephemera.  But even now, as an evangelical Christian, I am untroubled by the notion of a woman in her late forties conceiving, bearing, and raising a child without the help of the child’s biological father.   Yes, certain fertility techniques that involve the destruction of embryos bother me a bit, but I can hold that discomfort in tension with my very firm belief that the role of science in allowing women to bear children at an older age is a good and positive one.

Continue reading ‘Reprinting an oldie about Wendy Wasserstein, fertility, feminism, and hope’

“Why is everyone hugging here?” More on hugs, teaching, and boundaries

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 16, 2009
in Affection, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Pasadena City College, Physical affection and Teaching
. 9 Comments

We’ve recently hired a number of wonderful new faculty members in my department, and we’re excited to have them. (All the more so because with the state budget cuts, it may be eons before we make any additional hires.) One new professor, who has had some teaching experience elsewhere, asked me yesterday: “I’ve noticed that quite a few students here want to hug me. Is that normal at PCC? It hasn’t been at the other places where I’ve taught.” I smiled and told her that yes, it was something I’d noticed early on in my own career here: students at community colleges (or at least this one) tend to have much greater expectations of being “nurtured”, which can include hugs, than do students at four-year institutions. It’s more common for students to hug their female professors, and most of those seeking hugs are women. And while it’s far from being a universal practice, my new colleague is not the first professor to point out that students here are, as a group, more affectionate than at many other other academic institutions.

My new colleague, who is untenured, wanted some tips on how to handle the “hugging thing.” I assured her that there were no rules against hugging students, though common sense and a respect for boundaries suggests that it is best to wait for the student to initiate a friendly embrace. I reminded her of what I know she already knows, that — particularly for the untenured — perception matters as well as intent, and that it is helpful to remain aware of how one’s physical actions might be perceived by witnesses. Students are, as we all know, very attentive to the mannerisms, quirks, and personas of their professors. While fear of arousing suspicion shouldn’t cause us to be defensive or distant, we need to balance the responsibility to connect with our students with an awareness of how that connection (particularly when it includes a physical gesture like a hug) might be perceived.

This is all the more true in gender studies, the field in which I (and my new colleague) work. We’re not just teaching a subject, we’re leading classes that touch (sorry) on issues of sexuality, boundaries, power. We stir up strong emotions; we invite our students to consider their private lives and how their attitudes towards some fairly intimate subjects are shaped by history and culture. As I’ve written before in my student crushes archive, some students are prone to confusing excitement about the subject with excitement towards the professor who’s teaching the class.

None of this means we shouldn’t hug our students. Though I never foist hugs on the unwilling, and I am attentive to good boundaries, I am resolute in my commitment to practice physical affection as part of my mentoring and teaching. I do it because we live in a world where far too many men in positions of authority are fundamentally unsafe. Far too many adult men, including professors, are sexually predatory. Touch from them is unsafe and violating. Other men live in a not entirely unreasonable fear of having their actions misinterpreted. Anxious not to be labelled as harassers, they maintain scrupulous boundaries with their students and subordinates. That’s obviously preferable to groping lechery, but it sends the message that men are cold, remote, distant, and unavailable. It reinforces the message that touch can’t be safe.

I certainly don’t hug all my students. I don’t just hug women, or just men. I recognize that personality and cultural expectations about affection differ; foisting unwanted affection on someone for whom I am responsible would be profoundly unethical and violating. At the same time, if I didn’t embrace with exuberant non-sexual enthusiasm those students who would like to be hugged, I fall short of another mark. Touch can violate, but touch can heal. Touch can be unsafe, touch can be more affirming than a thousand verbal reassurances. We cannot allow our fears about touching blind us to the good, as well as the harm, that it can do. Just as gender studies, as an academic discipline, has broken down the convention that said that sexuality was not suitable for intellectual analysis, so too some of us may be called to dismantle the convention that says that touch has no place in teaching.

Five years ago, in another post, I wrote:

I have come to believe that the key thing that those of us who work with young people need to do is commit ourselves to being deliberately counter-cultural when it comes to touch. This doesn’t mean ignoring the power of sexuality. It means not allowing our fear of sexuality to hold us back from reaching out to those who need it. We have to find non-exploitative ways to hold each other — and hold each other across lines of sex, age, and status.

I repeated something like that to my colleague in our conversation yesterday. And, with the reminder that discernment and intuition are vital here, I stand by that advice publicly. I don’t expect hugs from everyone: I don’t hug everyone. But with the commitment to be “safe” foremost in my mind, and with deep reverence for tremendous variety in other people’s personal boundaries and comfort levels, I’m as committed as ever to an affectionate hug, a reassuring squeeze of the hand, or other good and right forms of affirming touch.

Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 15, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Teaching
. 43 Comments

For the first time in three years, I’m teaching my humanities course on “The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition.” (More about that course here.) We use the work of John Bradshaw as a tool with which to interpret four great masterpieces: the book of Genesis; Euripides’ “Medea”, Ibsen’s “Doll’s House”, and Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I’ve been teaching the course periodically for over a decade, and it’s one of my favorite classes to offer.

Yesterday, we talked about Genesis 19; the famous story of the destruction of Sodom — and of Lot and his daughters. Since the last time I taught the course, I’ve read Robert Polhemus’ dazzling (if occasionally exasperating) Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority. Polhemus’ book covers not only the story of how the incestuous relationship between these young women and their father has been interpreted within the Abrahamic traditions for millenia, but he touches on some of the ways in which non-incestuous older men/younger women relationships in popular lore mirror the Lot story. (The book is already dated, focusing as it does near the end heavily on the Hillary-Bill-Monica triangle that was so fascinating in the late ’90s; the biblical parallels are there, but to my students who were barely into elementary school at the time, the story doesn’t resonate.) In any case, I recommend Lot’s Daughters with enthusiasm.

The outline of the story ought to be familiar: Lot, Abraham’s relative, offers hospitality to two angels who come to his hometown of Sodom. A crowd of locals besieges Lot’s house, demanding the opportunity to rape the (male) angels. Lot tries to calm the crowd by offering his two virgin daughters instead, but the crowd isn’t interested; Lot ends up being pulled back inside the house. The city is soon destroyed by God, with only Lot and his family permitted to escape; Lot’s wife (the women, of course, are unnamed) makes the fatal mistake of looking back at her burning hometown — and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up taking refuge in a cave, where the girls decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him so that he can father their children. The eldest daughter conceives a son who will be the first of the Moabites, the people from whom the great figure Ruth comes. Since Ruth is an ancestor of David, and David an ancestor of Jesus, Christ himself is (if we accept Matthew’s lineage) a descendent of a line begun in father-daughter incest.

We all have a question, reading this story: why do the daughters do it? From a feminist standpoint, it’s a perverse twisting of the reality of incestuous abuse; the literature on the subject reveals that parent-child incest is, in reality, always initiated by the former. The victims are turned into the victimizers, and the male authority figure is absolved (through his drunkenness) of responsibility. Read literally, it’s infuriating in its familiarity; heck, it even fits in as an early example of the “myth of male weakness” against which we’ve so often railed on this blog. Lot gets to pass on his line, and he gets to do so with young, nubile women rather than with his barren wife. (Salt, strewn in fields, destroys fertility — you don’t need to be a graduate student in English to figure out that turning a pillar of salt is a metaphor for the undesirability and absent fecundity of ageing women.) Lot gets to start this blessed line –one that will include Ruth, David, and Jesus — through a sexual act for which he was not responsible. In Genesis 9, Noah curses his son Ham for catching his father drunk and naked and exposing the secret; ten chapters later, Lot remains silent when his daughters get him drunk and naked. (Polhemus has a fascinating section in which he details the ways in which centuries of Christian and Jewish theologians devised ways to absolve Lot of what ought to have been a profound sin).

But here’s the angle Polhemus doesn’t touch on, and one we did explore yesterday in class. The first we learn of Lot’s daughters is when their father offers them up to be raped by a mob. Lot wants to use the sexuality of his own children as a bargaining chip in order to protect the men who are his guests. Read in modern terms, Lot is doing what older men (sometimes fathers, often not) continue to do to adolescent girls: reduce their worth down to one thing. Their value lies solely in their desirability, in their imagined purity, in their youthful fuckability. Scripture doesn’t tell us what the girls thought when they heard their father offer them up to the crowd, but it’s not hard to see the impact on their lives. From a feminist and a family systems standpoint, we can’t understand why the girls seduce their father until we understand the impact of his earlier betrayal upon them.. Continue reading ‘Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency’

“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 14, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Myth of Male Weakness and Science
. 43 Comments

Below last week’s post on toplessness, Brian takes issue with my suggestion that men are capable of empathizing with women’s nearly-universal experience of being objectified. He writes:

Dialogue between the starving and the force-fed ain’t easy; even establishing a common frame is hard; nevermind agreeing on whether something looks tasty.

It should be easy enough to see terms aren’t used the same way. It comes up often enough that men can’t readily distinguish between objectifying and finding aesthetically appealling. (I know I can’t). Lack of a frame of reference.

The “force-fed and the starving” image refers to the experience of most men (who never feel themselves as objects of desire) and many women (who are objectified and ogled for much of their lives.) It’s an offensive analogy, because it suggests comparable injury between never being wanted and being harassed on a daily basis; the subtext is that women should even feel grateful for the attention they receive, and think sympathetically of men who never know what it is like to be whistled at. Given that we live in a world where a large number of men sexually assault women and use their own desire (inflamed by a woman’s choice of clothing, or behavior, or something similar) as an excuse, it’s silly to suggest any equivalence whatsoever. (Note that I am not unsympathetic to men’s lack of experience of feeling desired; see this post.)

Besides the problem of false equivalence in Brian’s remark, there’s a corollary to the “myth of male weakness” in what he writes. The myth of male weakness suggests that all men are cavemen; brutish and hyper-sexual, our civility is a thin veneer that can drop at any time. Driven by the irresistible forces of the Y chromosome and testosterone, we are to be applauded (so say the peddlers of the myth) for even the most half-hearted efforts at self-restraint. Because of our inherent vulnerability to temptation and our concomitant single-mindedness, the myth suggests it is women’s job to protect us from ourselves. Women need to cover up so as not to distract us; women need to flatter and cajole us rather than ask us directly for what they want; women, in other words, need to treat men like potentially dangerous but nonetheless loveable overgrown infants rather than as full and complete equals. And of course, while this sounds demeaning to men, the real pain of the myth is born by women — who are held responsible for men’s inability to exercise self-control. (This is a good place to recommend, again, Martha McCaughey’s magisterial corrective to all the bad evolutionary biology in the popular media, The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science.)

Brian’s corollary is a familiar one: men are too simple-minded to understand women, who are infinitely more complex. The “men are simple, women are complicated” myth works to serve the interests of a sexist status quo. The myth excuses men for being uninterested in women’s inner lives and inattentive to women’s concerns; it suggests that a man trying to understand a woman is like having a toddler try to grasp advanced mathematics — taught in Finnish. It is not flattery to tell women that their inner lives are infinitely more rich and nuanced than those of men. It’s part of a very clear agenda to tell women that asking men to “get” them is an unreasonable and bootless request. It may be the soft bigotry of low expectations in a new form, but the real victims are women, who are urged not to expect too much. And the beneficiaries, whether they realize it or not, are most men, who are excused the challenging but certainly not impossible task of listening to women, developing empathy, and remembering what it is that they have heard. Continue reading ‘“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness’

Jaclyn Friedman on changing the cyber culture

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 12, 2009
in Blogging
. 1 Comment

Jaclyn Friedman has a terrific piece in the online edition of Bitch Magazine on cyberharassers and anti-feminist trolls. The problem she outlines is a serious and familiar one, and the solutions are excellent. A must-read in the feminist blogosphere.

Reposting a rethink about Naomi Wolf, monogamy, myths of male weakness, and the oversold erotics of concealment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 11, 2009
in Myth of Male Weakness and Reprints
. 16 Comments

This post first ran in the spring of ‘07, but the celebrated Naomi Wolf article to which it refers has now found a new life on Facebook, with many people reading it for the first time. Since it deals with the issues of modesty, monogamy, and myths of male weakness that have come back up again this week, I’m reposting it now:

Vanessa at Feministing takes issue with Naomi Wolf’s cover piece this past weekend in New York Magazine: The Porn Myth. It’s not a new article, it just seems to keep getting recycled. I commented on it back in May 2004.

One of the things about blogging for several years: one’s opinions and views evolve, and one is then left with the interesting archival evidence of that evolution. While consistency is surely a virtue, so too is a willingness to rethink one’s stance on key issues, especially in light of new information or further reflection. So, since Wolf’s piece reappeared online this week, I’m going to revisit what I said in 2004. More to the point, I’m going to reject much of what I had to say three five years ago.

I am as thoroughly anti-porn as it gets, as any visitor to my pornography archive will quickly read. (That sounds more titillating than it us.) I agree with Wolf’s view that pornography tends to destroy authentic sexual appetite. She writes:

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Wolf talks of chats with college-aged women who relate their anxieties about competing with pornography, and what she writes rings true with me. Where Wolf falls down — and where Vanessa was right to challenge her, and I was wrong not to do so in 2004 — is that Wolf urges women to adopt modesty and concealment as a strategy for reenergizing the male libido. Wolf is enchanted by the story of an observant Jewish friend of hers, a woman who allows only her husband to see her hair, and the rest of the time, keeps it concealed under a wig or a scarf. Wolf writes:

I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.”

The red flag for me in 2007 (which wasn’t there in 2004) is the verb in bold. The implication is that in and of themselves, men lack the incentive and the ability to maintain a strong and vibrant sexual focus solely on their wives. It’s a great passage from Scripture she quotes, mind you, and one I love. Married men are called to direct all of their sexual energy towards their wives, even as both they and their wives age. But it’s not women’s job to “create mystery” in order to keep men excited! While marriage is surely a partnership, it is deeply misguided (if very traditional) to suggest that wives must strategize to keep their husbands from straying in act or thought, with flesh-and-blood mistresses or with cybersex. Continue reading ‘Reposting a rethink about Naomi Wolf, monogamy, myths of male weakness, and the oversold erotics of concealment’

Best place to be sick and rich? Here. Best place to be sick and not rich? Not here.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 10, 2009
in Health Care
. 18 Comments

I have precious little that is original or interesting to share about the health care debate. Let me say that I strongly favor a “public option”, and honor the work done by the representative in whose district I now reside, Congressman Henry Waxman. I was inspired by President Obama’s speech last night, and look forward to an aggressive push by the White House for the most progressive bill possible.

I will note, too, that I’ve been infuriated (as have many members of my family) by the misleading and absurd attacks this summer on the British National Health Service from conservatives in this country. As a dual citizen, I’ve used the NHS on my visits to Britain; my nephew was born “on the NHS”; the service paid for a home birth, midwives, and doulas. My brother and his wife paid nothing out of pocket. I’ve seen the kind of pediatric care my nephews and niece get. I’ve been in emergency rooms in London, and I’ve been in emergency rooms in Los Angeles, and I know where I’ve been seen faster. And it ain’t here.

My wife and I are fortunate. We have excellent health care provided through my employer, the college. We also, out of our own pockets, use what’s called “concierge medicine” for our daughter; it’s a worthy but pretty penny. I’ve got my pediatrician’s cell phone number, and he actually answers when I call, which I’ve done more than once (nervous first-time father that I am.) But you know, I’d trade that concierge service and the “Cadillac Plan” I get from the college for a single-payer plan that embraced everyone. Failing that, I want the most comprehensive plan possible, one that leaves the fewest people behind.

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a great deal, and live abroad from time to time. I’ve been unfortunate enough to be accident-prone and inclined to very serious cases of food poisoning. (I’ve puked on all seven continents, if you count a cruise ship just off the Antarctic coast!) I’ve experienced medical care in many places. My bottom line conclusion: with unlimited funds, America is the best country in which to be sick. But if you’re without money or first-rate insurance, America ranks well behind many other countries whose publicly-funded facilities I’ve had the privilege — and, in a sense, bad luck — to use.

Lust is not the problem; misappropriation is: a reply to Lady J

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 10, 2009
in Christianity, Desire and objectification, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Masturbation and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 11 Comments

Below last Saturday’s reprint of an old post on sexuality and the distinction between self-honoring and selfishness, Lady J asks:

I still have questions about lust and masturbation and am curious about your thoughts on the matter.

In your post “Some Very Long Thoughts On Fantasy and Masturbation” you state that “Jesus continues the theme in Matthew 5:28: But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. It’s difficult to look at Scripture and continue to insist that masturbatory fantasy is harmless!”

So, what kind of fantasy is NOT harmless? Is there any? And if there is not then would that suggest that masturbation is not appropriate?

I will disclose that my fantasies consist of scenarios that are very loving and respectful. I need that even in my fantasy life. But isn’t that still lust?

Good questions, and I’ll try and answer below the fold. Continue reading ‘Lust is not the problem; misappropriation is: a reply to Lady J’

Thursday Short Poem: Olds’ “Know-Nothing”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 10, 2009
in Poetry
. 4 Comments

Readers tend to have strong feelings about Berkeley’s own Sharon Olds. Some love her work, others loathe it. She writes the body and sexuality better than any of her contemporaries, and this piece — from her fine 1999 collection, Blood, Tin, Straw — proves just how wrong the title is.

Know-Nothing

Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.
All that I thought I was going to know,
that I did not know, I still do not know.
I think about this out of town,
on hotel elevators crowded with men.
That body of knowledge which lay somewhere
ahead of me, now I do not know where it
lies, or in the beds of strangers.
I know of sexual love, with my beloved,
but of men—I think there are women who know
men, I can’t see what it is
they know, but I feel in myself that I
could know it, or could I have been a woman
who would dare that. I don’t mean what she does
with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,
but she knows something true that I don’t know,
she knows fucking with a stranger. I feel
in awe of that, why is she not
afraid, what if she did not like
his touch, or what he said, how
would she bear it? Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much
anything a stranger would say or do,
or maybe it is not mercy, but sex,
when she sees what he is like, she enflames for that,
and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch
stone desire, and know it, she is like
a god, who could have sex with stranger
after stranger—she could know men.
But what of her womb, tender core
of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,
and her dense eggs, what if she falls
in love? Maybe to know sex fully
one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Maybe only ruin could take
its full measure,as death stands
in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.