Author Archive for Hugo Schwyzer

Reprint: Love, Free Will, and What Is — and Isn’t — Written in the Genes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 02, 2010
in Reprints
. 3 Comments

This post originally appeared in April 2007.

A couple of folks have emailed me this New York Times piece: Pas de Deux of Sexuality is Written in the Genes.

It begins:

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

I don’t have a personal animus towards evolutionary biologists. I’m no scientist, after all. I honor the work these men and women do. But I always shudder nonetheless when I get one of these articles e-mailed to me. And I shudder because I know that the laypeople who read these articles frequently come to the conclusion that these “latest findings” prove that heredity trumps socialization, and that genetics trump free will.

The field of evolutionary biology is intensely politicized, less so by the scientists themselves and more by those of us who interpret the findings to fit our own agendas. The right-wing often contradicts itself. Many conservatives I know believe that homosexuality is a matter of personal sin, not the hard-wiring of the brain; they believe that gay-ness can be cured. And just as they proclaim that gays and lesbians can become “completely heterosexual” (Ted Haggard just set a world speed record in that regard), they often rely on science to make the case that men and women are so enormously different that rigid gender roles actually make good sense. Where homosexuality is concerned, they think free will trumps biology; where gender roles are concerned, they think the reverse. Continue reading ‘Reprint: Love, Free Will, and What Is — and Isn’t — Written in the Genes’

Voice of the Week

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 01, 2010
in Blogging
. 0 Comments

I’m very pleased to be named BlogHer “voice of the week” for this post from Monday last.

The advertisements running on the right side of the page are coordinated through BlogHer, and are producing a tiny but welcome income stream.

Check out the “Voice of the Week” archive too!

Discourses of desire and the problem of rejection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 01, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Rape, aggression and violence and Sexuality
. 8 Comments

Last week, Rachel Hills guest-posted an explosive piece at Feministe: But Women Don’t Rape. Rachel began by reflecting on this post at the Feministing Community which dealt with a woman’s sudden awareness that one of her female friends had coerced her boyfriend into having sex. The comment threads at both Feministing and Feministe are substantial and well worth a read.

Rachel and her commenters note the constellation of factors that make us believe that women cannot force men into unwanted sex: our misconceptions about male physiology (the “guys can’t have erections or ejaculate against their will” myth); our belief that men are more resistant to psychological pressure and invariably less eager to people-please: our notion that, as the Feministing post put it, “nice girls” (especially feminists) simply are incapable of forcing their boyfriends to do anything against their will.

Please join the great discussion at either site. I have posted a bit on the issue of men-as-victims, as well as on the notion that pleasure is not evidence of consent. In a 2005 post about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau I wrote:

For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with (being a victim of) sexual violation. But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.

I’d amend that to say that the statement holds fairly well even if we remove the “adolescent” from it.

But there’s another issue that Rachel raised at Feministe that I’d like to tackle: the way in which we socialize women to believe that they ought never be the higher-desire partner in a heterosexual relationship. She writes:

…one of the interesting threads that has come through in my interviews is how very poorly many women take it when their male partners don’t want to have sex with them. They don’t like it at all. For these women, being turned down for sex – even if only occasionally, even if only once – is read as communicating a whole lot of nasty things about them and their relationship. That their partner doesn’t find them attractive anymore, that he’s cheating, that their relationship lacks passion, that they’re bad in bed, that he’s not into women at all.

(For more on Rachel’s research and to take her survey, visit here.

I think that Rachel’s right. The male sexual desire discourse tells us that men are always in the mood, invariably hornier than women. Indeed, our whole notion about the myth of male weakness is linked to assumptions about the overwhelming power of men’s libidos. But as countless women have discovered in relationships with heterosexual men, this discourse founders on the rocks of reality. As Rachel says, many women are confused when boyfriends or husbands evince less interest in sex than they themselves do. Rather than question the discourse, many choose to blame themselves, assuming that they are insufficiently attractive. Sometimes, they externalize that self-doubt, accusing their male partners of being gay or of having an affair.

As several of the commenters have pointed out, there’s an old axiom in marital therapy: the lower-desire partner has more power than the higher-desire partner. The one who has the power to please or disappoint by saying “yes” or “no” gains the upper hand. (I’ve posted about that a couple of times. Sorry to always link to myself, but here’s a post on that subject too.). And of course, one of our most traditional (and loathsome) discourses with which we raise young women is the one that teaches that a woman’s power comes from her ability to control men sexually. Sex is a bargaining chip, and its value is created by men’s impetuous libidos.

Though most younger women today, particularly young feminists, intellectually reject the “sex as leverage” trope, the idea continues to exert an uncomfortable hold on many. Many women don’t realize the degree to which they had “bought in” to the discourse until they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own. And while it’s never easy to be rejected, and never easy to deal with sexual frustration and self-doubt, men are more insulated than women from the effects of that rejection. That doesn’t mean men are less sensitive, or less vulnerable to hurt. But a man whose sex drive is higher than his female partner’s can comfort himself that theirs is “a normal relationship.” His frustration is par for the proverbial course; his masculinity is not called into question when his girlfriend is not in the mood.

We have many inanities that pass for common wisdom about men and women and their different attitudes towards sex. We say things like “Women need a reason; men just need a place” or, when describing the speed of arousal, that “Men are lightbulbs, women are ovens”. My readers can probably think of more. And while like all cliches, they prove true in some instances, the exceptions are sufficiently numerous as to disprove the rule altogether. The problem is, of course, the effect on the many for whom the opposite of these “truisms” is true. A woman who does “feel like a lightbulb” when it comes to arousal is made to feel abnormal, as is a man who is more “like an oven.” And while these bits of common nonsense comfort “higher desire men”, reassuring them that they are normal, they suggest that all sorts of things are wrong with a woman if she finds herself more easily and frequently turned on than her boyfriend.

It is axiomatic that the fewer freedoms women have, the more their beauty is valued. Some of the most repressive societies on earth value that beauty by concealing it from all but her husband, who is entitled to possess it as he pleases: others encourage young women to display their bodies (whether they want to or not) for men’s consumption. This isn’t about burqas and bikinis again. It’s about the idea that we raise our daughters to see their beauty as a particular source of power. And while most of us would like to be found attractive, our craving to be wanted sexually is often in inverse proportion to the amount of leverage we can achieve using our other talents.

A decade into the 21st century, and many of us still believe that a woman’s desirability is among her most valuable assets. And many women who don’t think that they believe that nasty old sexist notion discover that it still has a strange hold upon them –and they discover it at the moment that they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own.

Yves Magloe, 1967-2010

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2010
in Pasadena City College
. 8 Comments

I returned to campus this week and to the very sad news of the death of Yves Magloe, my colleague in the English department. Yves was a local cause celebré in 2006, when he was briefly fired by the Pasadena City College administration after a nervous breakdown. I blogged about it here and here, and was privileged to play a small part in the campaign for his reinstatement. That campaign received national coverage in the mental health and higher education communities.

Yves and I hadn’t met before his dismissal, battle with the board, and eventual rehiring. We did have a few nice chats after his return, and spoke of what it was like to serve as a faculty member while battling mental illness. Yves and I were, to the best of my knowledge, the only two full-time faculty members at the college to have spoken publicly about our struggles. And now Yves is gone, due to causes that I am told were related to his battle against his illness. I know few other details. There is a simple memorial to him here.

I note that both Yves and I were born in May of 1967, two days apart and on opposite sides of the world. Our paths led both of us to Pasadena City College; our battles against our inner demons both became known to our campus community. And Yves didn’t make it.

I grieve his loss.

“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Relationships and Youth
. 22 Comments

I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named May, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading ‘“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence’

Thursday Short Poem: Wilbur’s “Lying”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2010
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

Time perhaps for a more famous — and long poem. This Richard Wilbur piece is on its way to being much anthologized and much-praised. Wilbur, my second-favorite-living American poet, dazzles and moves and amuses all at once here. It’s longer, so it’s below the fold. It ought to be read aloud rather than scanned. And how I love this Audenesque line:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light…

Yup. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem: Wilbur’s “Lying”’

HPV and boys: new concerns

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 24, 2010
in Health Care, Science, Sex Education and Youth
. 14 Comments

My sources tell me that today, the immunization committee at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is debating whether to recommend the use of Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, for use with male patients. HPV, or the human papillomavirus, is the most common of sexually-transmitted infections; the CDC estimates that 50% of sexually active adults will acquire HPV at one point over the course of their lives. Some suggest that the percentage is higher still.

HPV has been conclusively linked to cervical cancer. Since 2006, Gardasil has been approved by the FDA for use in inoculating women against HPV. Because the best form of protection is prevention, many health experts recommend vaccinating girls before they become sexually active. Given the grim reality that HPV can be easily transmitted through non-consensual sex, and given the ease with which the virus is spread through oral sex, vaccinating girls before the onset of puberty is encouraged. (This has led, of course, to predictable howls from the religious right, who are less concerned with protecting young women’s health and more concerned that a vaccine against HPV might encourage pre-marital sexual exploration.)

But as an article in the brand-new issue of Ms. Magazine makes clear, HPV poses a greater threat to men and boys than was previously known. The Adina Nack piece is not available online, but here’s a quote from what’s available on your newsstand:

While it is fears of cervical cancer that
have motivated young women to get HPV vaccines,
that’s not the only cancer caused by this virus: It can lead
to oral, anal and penile cancers as well. In fact, the combined
U.S. death rates for these cancers are at least twice
that of cervical cancers… Some researchers, in fact, believe that
HPV may soon cause more oral cancers in the U.S. than
alcohol or tobacco combined.

As a result of this research, the CDC may well soon recommend that boys and young men also be inoculated with Gardasil, as the connection between HPV and oral/anal cancer becomes as apparent as it already is with cervical cancer.

Nack emphasizes that men’s health is a feminist issue:

Women’s health—especially reproductive health—is usually
the focus of sexual-health discussions but men’s health
also deserves women’s attention—and not just because
women care about their sons, male partners and male
friends. It almost goes without saying that women can also
be infected by their intimate partners, and since the great
majority of women primarily have heterosexual relations,
that usually means by men.

In fact, men’s health is an even larger feminist issue.
“Feminists have a vested interest in advocating for policies
and circumstances around the world that shape men’s ability
to develop healthy sex lives, which, by definition, has
to include respect for the rights of those with whom they
partner, regardless of gender,” says Patricia Rieker, Ph.D.,
a sociologist at Boston University and Harvard Medical
School and coauthor of Gender and Health (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).

The truth is, if women don’t prioritize men’s health,
we’re not just losing a chance to foster the overall health
of our communities, we’re actually putting ourselves and
future generations at risk

It is axiomatic that women of all ages are more willing to seek medical treatment than are men. The “sturdy oak” myth of robust masculinity makes it difficult for boys and men to acknowledge vulnerability. Our cultural narrative about heterosexuality tends to suggest that women are emotionally and physiologically more fragile — and more likely to “suffer” from sex. That “expectation of female suffering” (associated with everything from first penetration to pregnancy to increased vulnerability to STIs to the guarantee of heartbreak after a break-up or abortion) is matched with a narrative of male imperviousness to harm. We like to pretend that boys are dense, violent, and comparatively shallow. But boys do cry, and boys do get hurt, and as the latest research shows, boys do get HPV-related cancers too.

Feminists have done much to dispatch the myth of female frailty. They have also been on the frontlines of fighting against this myth of the invulnerable male. It is no surprise then that we find this important clarion call for male sexual health in the pages of Ms. Magazine.

In the script, sincerity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 23, 2010
in Addiction and mental illness
. 2 Comments

Count me among those who watched and was moved by Tiger Woods’ statement last Friday.

I didn’t see it live, but watched the replay twice. I watched with the eyes of someone who has spent years in and around Twelve Step programs, someone who has been graced with double-digit years of recovery from a disease that nearly killed me. I watched as someone who experienced a wide variety of addictions ranging from alcohol to drugs to sex to food to exercise. I watched, and was struck by how far Woods was from other celebrities caught in similar scandals — his contrition was absolute rather than conditional, his willingness to recognize his own grandiosity spot on and welcome.

It was scripted, of course. But we make a huge mistake when we imagine that a rigid dichotomy exists between the “scripted” and the “heartfelt”. Indeed, in my experience, reading a statement of amends aloud was invariably more sincere. For those of us who have struggled with what might be called sex addiction, we are accustomed to seductive behavior. I learned early on that I can write from the heart more easily than I can speak from it. As someone who is very comfortable — perhaps too comfortable — speaking extemporaneously, I know that if I start making it up as I go along, I will tend to shape my words and my cadence and my rhythm in ways that I hope will get a specific reaction. Years of acting and improvisational work and years in the classroom have made me an stute reader of audiences — if I can deviate from a script, I usually will. That is particularly true when I’m conveying something difficult and painful.

My Twelve Step sponsors not only made me write things down, they made me write out the amends I was to make. The late Jack Kissell insisted that I not deviate from a written script when I made amends. He was a stage actor, and saw in his sponsee that same performer’s need to pander to an audience. He asked me to write out my amends statements, and read them to him first — and then, if the time was right, read them verbatim and without embellishment to the persons who needed to hear ‘em. For me — and I suspect for most of us accustomed to getting what we want through the application of talk and charm — there is much to be said for the honest virtue of a simple script from which no deviation is possible! And when I saw and heard Tiger reading his statement last week, I thought I saw a fellow addict doing exactly the right thing at this stage of what will be a long recovery.

Sex addiction is real. I’ve been addicted to many things: drugs (prescribed and illicit); alcohol; pornography; sex; sugar; dieting and compulsive exercise. For me, addiction has both a physical and a mental component; as the AA Big Book puts it, it is always both “an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.” I’ve experienced the cravings as pressing physical imperatives, and I’ve experienced them also as psychological obsessions that will not release their grip. What was true of opiates was true of affairs with women; what was true of vodka became true of the need to run and run and run and run. Addictions move laterally as we grow. Letting go of all of them is a very, very long process. And sex certainly deserves to be considered an addiction in the same category as addiction to alcohol or opiods - the compulsion is similar in its inexorable demand, and the damage the addiction wreaks is no less great.

So, two cheers for Tiger. When you’ve been proved a fraud and a liar, when you realize that you’ve become so tangled in a self-spun web of deceit that even those who love you most can no longer trust you, you’re near your bottom. And when you get to that bottom and you ask for help, when you let others who know better guide every facet of your recovery process, when each day becomes simply about doing the next right thing — then, then, then you are available for the miracle. It’s no guarantor of forgiveness; I’ve lost more than one marriage to my compulsiveness. Sometimes folks forgive you but still can’t love you; sometimes they still love you but can’t live with you. Your recovery must progress regardless. I learned all that, and by some strange grace, I still remember that lesson.

In his discomfort as he stood before many of his loved ones, reading haltingly from a prepared script, Tiger looked and sounded genuine to me. We who spent years having only a passing relationship with the truth will never convince everyone we have at last found sincerity. But when we do as he did last Friday, and read from a text in which we accept full responsibility for actions that have no excuse, we’re taking one giant step forward. Here’s hoping that the fierce urgency of the newly sober remains for Tiger in the months and years to come. And here’s giving thanks that after so many wrong things, he’s done the next right one — and done so in a way that is congruent with the most effective and life-transforming recovery strategies known.

Of burqas, mini-skirts, and whopping presumption

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2010
in Clothing and Fashion and Faith and Feminism
. 16 Comments

A couple of folks have asked me about the French attempt to ban the wearing of the burqa or the niqab in public. (Google about for various discussions about the not-always-clear distinctions between the two.) What is important to note is that the burqa and the niqab, terms sometimes used interchangeably and in slightly different ways in various parts of the Islamic world, both involve concealing much if not all of the face. This is distinct from the notion of hijab, which normally refers only to the covering of the hair, and perhaps the concealing of arms and legs.

Before I go any further, let me recommend this short and sensible response from Jill at Feministe. Another good post is here, at Muslimah Media Watch.

The French initiative (which has not been finalized) is motivated by concern for the rights of women. Though only a tiny fraction of Muslim women in France actually wear the burqa in public, they are highly visible symbols of a particular kind of conservative Islam, one that severely circumscribes women’s public role. It is no doubt true that women who wear the burqa do so on a spectrum of volition. Some are presumably forced to wear it; others — and the evidence for this is considerable — do so in opposition to their family’s expectations rather than in acquiescence. One person’s oppression, after all, is another’s vigorous assertion of independence and identity.

Reading coverage of the burqa story in the mainstream and feminist media, I’m struck by what a number of other feminists have also noted: the degree to which those who claim to be acting on behalf of women seem to be certain that they know what women are actually thinking. Concealment of the body that goes beyond a cultural norm is automatically read by some as oppressive, something no woman in her right mind could want for herself. It reminds me of the same damn argument I hear from some of my students about classmates who dress in more revealing clothing.

We’ve all seen it happen in the classroom on a hot day (of which we have a surfeit here in inland Southern California). A young woman walks into class a few minutes late. Perhaps she’s wearing a mini-skirt or very short shorts; perhaps she also has a low cut shirt or a tube top on. From at least some of her fellow students, she will be on the receiving end of both hostility and lust. Listening carefully, one can hear the sotto voce whispers, “Who does she think she is?” and “This is school, not a night club”, or even the simple, devastating, “What a slut.” In nearly twenty years of college teaching , I’ve witnessed this umpteen times. (More so at two-year schools, for reasons discussed in this post on clothing, class, and community colleges.)

When I ask young men and women why they think a female student might wear revealing clothing, most discount the possibility that she’s doing so for comfort or for her own pleasure. “She’s insecure”, they’ll insist. “She just wants attention.” Some get into advanced pop psychology: “She probably doesn’t have a good relationship with her Dad, so she needs male validation.” The notion that a girl could be expressing agency, courage, and genuine self-confidence is almost always dismissed. As those of us who teach gender and sexuality know, young people are all too often strangely puritanical in their insistence that a strong sense of self-worth can’t be congruent with sexual display. And they are certainly nearly universally presumptuous in their certainty about what their be-miniskirted classmate is “really thinking.”

The argument in favor of banning the burqa has never struck me as feminist. I’ve never for a moment bought the notion, advanced by some media-savvy social conservatives in all the Abrahamic religious traditions, that concealing a woman is a kind of feminist act. The notion that men can only respect as an equal a woman whose flesh is concealed is absurd; it sells men short and it does something even more decidedly unfeminist, which is make women entirely responsible for how men conduct themselves. The idea of mandating headscarves, or banning short skirts, troubles me. But the banning of the burqa bothers me equally.

One of the hallmarks of an illiberal, anti-feminist society is that it sees women’s bodies as threats. A society horrified by a display of self-confident sexuality is no better and no worse than one scandalized by the equally public display of deep piety. Religious feeling, like sexual feeling, is in some sense private — but it also is so much a part of us that it is unreasonable and bigoted to ask us to conceal it entirely when we come into the public square.

The French Enlightenment tradition is a fine if not untroubled one. (Rousseau makes me shudder, but Voltaire offers some comfort.) Certainly, the French grasped the rights of the individual before many of their neighbors, and they shed blood to guarantee those rights. And if there is one Enlightenment principle that I cling to, it is the notion that the right of the individual to trouble the conscience of the many ought to be damned near sacrosanct. On a public street, the right of a woman to walk unmolested and unchallenged in a burqa or a bikini is worth protecting. And when we see that woman, we do well not to rush to judgment about what particular constellation of religious and psychological influences led to her sartorial choices.

Reprint: Giving Thanks for the CC

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2010
in Pasadena City College
. 5 Comments

This post originally appeared in August 2005. As we start yet another semester today, I thought it appropriate to reprint.

Jonathan Dresner sends me this link to a Jay Mathews piece in the Washington Post in praise of community colleges:  The Workhorse of Higher Education.

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been over eleven years since I was hired for a full-time position here at Pasadena City College.   I still remember the date of my first-level interview, April 8, 1994.  It was a Friday afternoon, and it was the day that Kurt Cobain’s death was announced; I was listening to KROQ (LA’s alternative-rock station) and heard the news just as I was pulling into the parking lot here at the school.  I was a moderate Nirvana fan, but couldn’t help but consider this tragic news to be a "bad omen".  I have no idea what I ended up saying during the interview, but within days I was called back for a "second-level" meeting with the committee, and on April 20, was offered the job.

I’ll never forget the reaction of my dissertation chair when I told him I was accepting a tenure-track post here at PCC.  "You’re a fool if you take it, Hugo", he said.  By ‘94, I was about half-way through my dissertation.  I was giving papers at medieval history conferences, and was enjoying the feeling of being "groomed" by my distinguished adviser.   In that same spring of 1994, my adviser told me I was "one or two years away" from successfully competing on the academic job market for a position at a four-year research institution.  He was very upset that I wasn’t willing to wait for a chance at a university job.  Frankly, our relationship was never quite the same after I came to teach at the community college.  He was very helpful as I finished my dissertation (with my teaching load at PCC, it took me until early 1999), and gave me a warm handshake at my doctoral hooding ceremony.  But he was clearly disappointed that I wasn’t willing to put research first.

Unlike many of my colleagues, I’ve never taken a class at a community college.  I knew plenty about community colleges growing up; my mother taught for three decades at Monterey Peninsula College (MPC). But even as I saw how much she loved her work there, I also had a bit of prejudice against the system.  My high school teachers made it clear that the best and the brightest did not go to community colleges, and there was no question that there was (and I think still is) an unfortunate stigma in some circles related to "JCs."  I’m afraid I internalized that stigma even as I was proud of my mother’s work.   The summer after my junior year, I’m sorry to admit I even paid the much higher fees to take summer classes at UC rather than enroll in a community college. 

In graduate school, however, my goals shifted.  Though I liked research well enough, I loved my time as a teaching assistant.  (I still remember my first section, in the spring quarter of 1991; I was not quite 24, and so terrified I threw up before meeting my first class.)  I quickly realized that it was teaching that turned me on, not research.  I didn’t like musty old archives, and I sure as hell didn’t like working on long papers.  I enjoyed discussing ideas in seminars, but nothing was as "fun" as interacting with students in the classroom.  I began to think more and more about what my mother did for a living, and began to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off teaching somewhere where I could "just teach".

Continue reading ‘Reprint: Giving Thanks for the CC’

When a “can” ought to mean a “should”: on men and empathy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2010
in Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 24 Comments

I got an interesting email from one of my regular commenters who uses the handle “Randomizer”. He sends me a link to this post at Overcoming Bias which references an intriguing study that appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin back in 2001: Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand . The abstract:

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Bold is mine.

For the second week in a row, someone sends me a link to promising research.

In plain English, the studies suggest that the notion that men lack the capacity for empathy — equivalent in degree to that more commonly displayed by women — is simply false. When motivated to put a dormant skill to use, the study suggests men can be every bit as intuitive as women. For a psych journal, the phrase “wiped out any difference” is very strong stuff indeed — it leaves no room for those who insist on men’s diminished capacity to love, to connect, and to care on which to stand.

So this raises the question that gets discussed at the Overcoming Bias site: if men can empathize every bit as well as women, why don’t they? Randomizer points to one of the commenters at OB, a fellow calling himself BD. BD writes:

(In the masculine) value system, empathy is not connected to caring for someone. It’s connected to believing that the person can’t care for themselves Or believing that the person is a threat. “Don’t ask me to treat you like a child. And don’t ask me to treat you like a boss whose volatile ego I have to tip-toe around.”

And there can be a “Golden Rule” thing going here as well. ” He may not want to treat her “like a child” because he doesn’t want to be treated “like a child” either.

With his peers, he can just relax and be himself. Male friendship and peerage is often a rough and tumble thing. It’s not to say that male friendship doesn’t have its own rules. Its just that significant empathy is not part of that. When he is dealing with people he cares about, he tends to default to his most comfortable and peer-like relationship model, which happens to feature minimal empathy…

I think BD is right in one sense, in that I think we do indeed teach men to associate empathy with the burden of managing someone else’s fragile emotions — a boss who needs placating, or a child who can’t yet self-regulate. But if he’s implying that men and women have different but equally valid interpretations of the purpose of empathy, I think that’s much more problematic. In BD’s formulation, men are taught to see empathy as a tool to be used in a certain select set of scenarios, two in particular: first, when a reward is available, such as from a boss (or, in the case of the study we’re citing, cash-for-empathic display); two, when dealing with someone needier and more vulnerable than themselves, such as a child or the victim of a particular tragedy. It is not, in other words, a relationship tool — indeed, in “guyland”, a relationship in which empathy is not required is far more egalitarian than one in which it is needed.

Here’s how culturally constructed masculinity warps us all: for far too many men, empathy gets associated with manipulation and dependency rather than intimacy. The message seems to be: You can have my empathy, or you can have my respect as my equal. But you can’t have both. I don’t think that marks a “healthy difference” between men and women. It’s absurd to imagine that we can sustain healthy relationships when one sex believes empathy is a necessary component of all our interactions and another sex believes it to be an unpleasant tactic, a tool to be employed in a few instances, most of which involve a hierarchy of power and respect.

So the good news: one more bit of evidence that the full spectrum of human emotion is available to every member of the species, regardless of biology. The study reinforces the truth that the reason so many members of each sex utilize less than that full spectrum is attributable to socialization and choice, not to physiology. But we need to do more than say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting”. We need to recognize that this is one of those instances where ability translates to obligation; if men can empathize, than I think it’s fairly clear that they should do so far more often than they do.

Why? Merely to make wives and girlfriends and sisters happier? No, though making relationships better is nothing at which to sneeze. It’s that in the end, all great cruelty is, as Timothy Findley so famously said, a failure of the imagination. And the kind of imagination at which men so often fail is not the ability to imagine alternate universes or other fantastical things — it is the simpler failure to imagine what another person feels. When men regard that kind of imagination as a tool or a burden rather than as a gift and a responsibility, they become the chief architects of human suffering. To refuse to empathize is to be complicit, in a way either large or small, in the ongoing great crime.

I’ve often said that one of my two or three favorite novels ever written is Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I’m hardly alone in my deep love of the book and its world view. And I’m hardly alone in trying to remember, always remember, the simple epigraph of the text: “Only connect.” That is true of prose and passion, it is true of Americans and Haitians, and it is true of husbands and wives.

We can do this. And if there was ever an instant when ability leads inexorably to obligation, I think this is it.

Thursday Short Poem: Clifton’s “A Dream of Foxes”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2010
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Lucille Clifton has died; she received a fine and welcome obituary in yesterday’s New York Times. A poet who wrote the body and black women’s experience beautifully, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I knew a little of her work, but my friend Fallon sent me this one I didn’t know, and it seemed like just the right one for this week’s TSP.

A Dream of Foxes

fox

who
can blame her for hunkering
into the doorwells at night,
the only blaze in the dark
the brush of her hopeful tail,
the only starlight
her little bared teeth?

and when she is not satisfied
who can blame her for refusing to leave,
Master Of The Hunt, why am i
not feeding, not being fed?

the coming of fox

one evening i return
to a red fox
haunched by my door.

i am afraid
although she knows
no enemy comes here.

next night again
then next then next
she sits in her safe shadow

silent as my skin bleeds
into long bright flags
of fur.

dear fox

it is not my habit
to squat in the hungry desert
fingering stones, begging them
to heal, not me but the dry morninngs
and bitter nights.
it is not your habit
to watch, none of this
is ourrs, sister fox.
tell yourself that anytime now
we will rise and walk away
from somebody else’s life.
any time.

leaving fox

so many fuckless days and nights
only the solitary fox
watching my window light
barks her compassion.
i move away from her eyes.
from the pitying brush
of her tail
to a new place and check
for signs. so far
i am the only animal.
i will keep the door unlocked
until something human comes.

one year later

what if,
then,
entering my room,
brushing against the shadows,
lapping them into rust,
her soft paw extended,
she had called me out?
what if,
then,
i had reared up baying,
and followed her off
into vixen country?
what then of the moon,
the room, the bed, the poetry
of regret?

a dream of foxes

in the dream of foxes
there is a field
and a procession of women
clean as good children
no hollow in the world
surrounded by dogs
no fur clumped bloody
on the ground
only a lovely time
of honest women stepping
without fear or guilt or shame
safe through the generous fields.

Reprint: Kosmios, Skin, and the Real Meaning of Modesty

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 17, 2010
in Modesty and Reprints
. 1 Comment

An Ash Wednesday reprint of a post that originally went up in July 2006.

Looks like another hot and humid day in Southern California.  I have the same classroom for all three of my summer courses, and it is exceedingly well air-conditioned.  Many of my poor students who dress for the heat end up shivering in the freon blast.  I’ve always suggested that they layer a down jacket over swimwear — the only way to be truly prepared for the unpredictable nature of our college’s ancient heating and cooling system.

I’m thinking more about modesty this morning.  I wrote about the topic last Thursday, primarily in response to the pastoral letter from the Catholic Bishop of Amarillo on women, dress, and attending mass.

I never finished the koine Greek classes I started, but I do know enough to know that the word the New Testament uses  that is usually translated as "modesty" is kosmios.  Kosmios generally means "orderly" or "proper", neither of which are helpful words in clarifying skirt length!  Given the subjectivity of what it is that different cultures and different individuals regard as "proper", it’s hard to find evidence anywhere in the New Testament that suggests a clear standard for how much skin women were to reveal.

But one aspect of modesty is well-covered (pun intended) in the New Testament: the importance of avoiding displays of wealth. In fact, the New Testament only explicitly defines immodesty not in terms of revealing flesh but in terms of ostentatious displays of property.

1 Timothy 2:9: I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes…

Gold, pearls, and expensive clothes are set up as the opposite of kosmios; the decency and propriety here is economic rather than sexual. 

1 Peter 3:3-4:  Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.

These are the two most explicit references to how women ought to dress in the entire New Testament.  In neither instance is there any evidence of concern with dress as a symbol of sexual impropriety.  In both cases, the emphasis is on avoiding crass displays of wealth — particularly gold and expensive outfits.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: Kosmios, Skin, and the Real Meaning of Modesty’

Fatherhood and feminism: not a zero-sum game.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 17, 2010
in Men and Masculinity, Parenting and Sports
. 8 Comments

Kathryn Lopez posts a column this week about the immediate aftermath of Super Bowl XLIV: Brees after Super Bowl win was a poster boy for family. K-Lo notes that the winning quarterback for the Saints scooped up his young son in the aftermath of victory, holding him with both love and glee.

It’s an image America needed.

“Given that about one-in-four American boys are living apart from their dads at any one point in time, it is great to see a Super Bowl champion with his wife and son, and to see that this win is all the bigger for him for being shared with his son,” Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project said.

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, isn’t a football follower, but she liked what she saw: “It bespoke an intimacy of real time spent together. Even in a football stadium of screaming fans the toddler boy didn’t look anxious. He knew he was safe. He was with dad.”

I couldn’t agree more that it was a touching moment. I too like the image of a father embracing his son; I like seeing unguarded affection between parents and children. We all agree it’s a lovely thing.

So what’s the problem? The folks K-Lo cites in her piece (and the organizations with which they are affiliated, like the Institute for American Values) are relentless in their insistence that fatherhood has been damaged by feminism. For the cultural right to which folks like Wilcox and Lopez belong, the empowerment of women has led to the inevitable marginalization of men. In the strange math of social conservatives, it’s all a zero-sum game: the greater the freedom of women to divorce, exercise reproductive sovereignty, and earn money outside the home, the less self-worth their male partners will invariably feel.

It’s subtle in this piece, but explicit elsewhere in the writings of the anti-feminist traditional marriage movement: the great lie that male responsibility is contingent on female vulnerability. Only when women defer to men, submit to men, allow men to take the proverbial reins — only then will men “feel” valued, feel needed. According to this tired bit of wisdom, men get confused and alienated when they are denied the opportunity to shoehorn themselves into a traditional masculine role. The notion that gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, the notion that men and women can possess different plumbing but the same skill set — all this is too much for the be-penised to grasp. Fathers have abandoned their families, the lie goes, because they no longer feel needed or valued as men.

I adore my daughter. My worth as her father is not compromised by the fact that my wife earns a good living outside the home. My wife relies on me as I do on her — we rely on each other to be there, to do what we say we’re going to do, to pick up the dry cleaning and the baby food when we say we will, to be faithful. The fact that my wife could be a successful single mother without me doesn’t vitiate my value as a Dad. The fact that the world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket were I to disappear doesn’t mean I don’t feel loved and important. My daughter needs me, and I believe her life is better with me in it. My wife and I love each other and are building a life together. But my manhood — and my status as a father — is not under attack in our culture, unless you buy the myth that insists that a husband’s dignity requires a certain amouht of frailty on the part of his wife.

So here’s to encouraging fathers to be present in the lives of their children. And here’s to recognizing that the greatest obstacle to making that happen on a wider scale is not feminism, or the culture, or the legal system — it’s our outdated notion of masculinity itself.

Good Girls Marry Doctors: a new project about daughters, feminism and the diaspora

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 16, 2010
in Books, Ethnicity, Family and Feminism
. 2 Comments

This past weekend I got an email from Josephine Tsui, a Mills and University College London alumna. Josephine and Piyali Bhattacharya have started a web project called Good Girls Marry Doctors, a site for diasporic women from East Asian, South Asian, and other non-Western backgrounds who are working to reconcile their feminism with their family traditions. Josephine and Piyali are putting together an anthology: Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles: South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents, and are looking for submissions. Here’s their call:

Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.” Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?

We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.

We do not seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experiences such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing these issues.

More details at their website, and make sure to check out the blog Josephine and Piyali have started.

Josephine kindly notes that she found this post of mine from early 2009 to be particularly helpful: Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out. It was a post of which I was proud at the time, and am happy to say that I’ve had some good success putting young women from that particular culture together to share strategies for negotiating a path to both freedom and cultural preservation. I got some very nasty emails after that post appeared, mostly from young Armenian men (and a few parents) who were incensed at what they saw as a crude assimilationist agenda. (One of the only times I’ve ever received a physical threat serious enough to consider reporting it to campus police came in one of those emails.) I emphasized to them what I emphasized in my post: it’s not cultural betrayal to insist that women’s individual happiness matters. It’s not cultural betrayal to offer support to young women from traditional backgrounds assistance in discerning what of modern feminism they want for their lives — and what they don’t. It’s not ethnocentric to encourage slightly older women who have had some success in mapping a route “out” to mentor younger women who are unsure of the way. If I can quote myself from one of the posts below:

… if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.

Some related posts of mine:

Some lengthy thoughts on feminism, traditional families, contingent happiness and daring to disappoint

Dating to Disappoint: the Bulworth Solution

Dare to Disappoint: Cheering on Sandra Tsing Loh

“Kindly Remembrance”: of faith, ancestors, and debts to the past; a long post in response to Daisy B.