Archive for the 'Body' Category

Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 09, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Feminism, Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness
. 64 Comments

A reader named Tracy sent me a link to this Meghan Pleitcha piece that originally ran on Nerve and was then reprinted at Alternet: What Happened When I Legally Exposed My Breasts in Public. This summer, Pleitcha took advantage of a New York state law that permits “gender equity” when it comes to baring chests in certain public settings; she sunbathed topless in Central Park, and wrote about the reactions she got from men, from women, and from her inner voice. It’s a thoughtful piece, and Tracy wanted to know my thoughts on female public toplessness and how that issue connects to the “myth of male weakness” about which I have written so often.

I’ve got a whole category of posts about modesty, and the ways in which our fears about uncontrollable male sexual desire result in our shifting the responsibility for self-control from men to women. I don’t want to keep rehashing points made over and over again, so let me offer just a few links:

In this post, we looked at the word kosmios (the koine Greek term, translated as modesty in the New Testament) and how it has nothing to do with showing skin, but instead refers to refraining from lavish displays of wealth.

In this post, the “argument from testosterone” is considered and rejected.

And I posted about breasts and the notion that men can’t help but stare here.

Though some might not regard the right to bear one’s breasts in public as the single most pressing issue on the feminist agenda, I do support the expansion of the already-extant New York law mandating gender equity when it comes to the exposure of the human chest. What “must be concealed” is a societal variable which has evolved over time. As we read in the news this week, Sudan canes women for wearing pants (something for which women were arrested in this country little more than a century ago.) In some societies, women’s hair has tremendous erotic value, perhaps as much as breasts themselves; in many cultures, concealing the top of the head is mandatory. And as anyone who has watched National Geographic specials or spent time on the beaches of Europe knows, the idea that female breasts are universally arousing to men is silly — what we find arousing is almost entirely culturally conditioned, and has far less to do with our hard-wiring than the peddlers of pop-evolutionary biology would have us believe. For reasons of fairness, as well as for the reason that the male lack of self-control is a construct rather than an immutable truth, it makes good sense to change our laws to permit women to go shirtless in public. Continue reading ‘Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation’

I Really Like Big Guys: “More to Love” and the desire to feel small

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 01, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Mass media
. 46 Comments

I wrote about More to Love, the Fox reality show, just over a month ago. One theme in more recent episodes (h/t Jenn Pozner) is that many of the plus-sized women on the show are attracted to large men who make them feel “small” and, presumably, more feminine. I wrote about that subject on November 29, 2006, and that post appears below.

I was talking to a female friend of mine yesterday; she’s just started dating a new fella, and the budding relationship appears promising. My friend is about 5′8″, and her new boyfriend is 6′5″. I knew her last boyfriend, who was her height — and so, as we chatted, I asked her if the height differential in this current relationship made a difference.

“Yes, I suppose it really does”, she said. “Being with a man so much taller and bigger makes me feel smaller, more feminine. Being in his arms feels wonderful because I feel the difference between us so much more than with Jack (her ex).”

My friend, who knows I teach feminism, asked “Do you think that makes me less of a feminist, wanting a man who can wrap me up and make me feel so feminine and protected?”

Almost from the start of 2006, the broad feminist blogosphere has been engaged in an intense period of self-criticism, culminating in October’s infamous “waxing wars.” I have no interest in reviving a lot of talk about feminist credentials. But my friend’s sense of delight in the size differential between her and her new guy — and her mild discomfort at what that delight might symbolize — is worth a post.

Of course, y’all know I’m going to share the inevitable personal anecdote. In college, I had a huge crush on a gal who lived in the same co-op as I did. She was my height (6′1″) and a broad-shouldered swimmer who had started her college career on an athletic scholarship but who had tired of the intensity of the competition. She was the consummate jock, and if I could be said to have a “type”, it was always the very athletic, tomboyish women. “Lisa” and I tried a romantic relationship, but it ended quickly; my interest in being more than friends exceeeded hers.

Lisa told me, even before we started dating, that she had doubts about our chances together: “I really like big guys”, she said; “I’m a tall strong girl and I like being with a man who makes me feel petite and feminine.” She liked dating tall linemen, and I was going through one of my “skinny stages”. I was already taking women’s studies classes at that point, and in order to make my case, I quite shamelessly used what I thought were sincere feminist tactics, saying something like:

“Lisa, you only want a stronger, bigger man, because you’ve been brainwashed by a sexist culture. You’ve been taught to be uncomfortable with yourself as a tall athletic woman, and so you want to be with an even bigger guy who can make you feel more traditional. You’re surrendering to the patriarchy!”

There might have been one or two grains of truth in what I was saying, but it was evident to both of us that my exhortation was colored less by a commitment to feminist principle and more by naked self-interest. And I had no reply when Lisa told me off, saying (and this I remember more vividly than my own words):

“Don’t be an asshole and assume that what I want stems from my oppression as a woman. If you were a real feminist man you would never try and channel my feelings and desires to serve your needs, and you’d never try and use feminism to guilt me into being with you.”

That was an uncomfortable “aha” moment, and it taught me an enduring lesson. Few things are more indefensible and pathetic than a self-proclaimed male feminist using the rhetoric of gender justice to try and “get” a woman to be attracted to him. Been there, did that, grew out of it. Continue reading ‘I Really Like Big Guys: “More to Love” and the desire to feel small’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Carter, personal autonomy, and defending progressive faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Christian feminism here and here.

Blood, birth, and eros: against the myth of the frail male

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 09, 2009
in Body, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness and Parenting
. 37 Comments

The latest entry in the “men today have it so hard” sweepstakes is this Jonathan Last piece that ran in the June 4 Wall Street Journal: Present at the Creation. Remarking on the excellent new Judith Leavitt book Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room, Last wonders if our contemporary cultural insistence that men be present when the mothers of their children give birth is such a good idea.

Explaining how the dinosaurs once rationalized keeping men in the Stork Club (the waiting room for expectant fathers), Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor’s argument from the mid-1960s: “As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby — a negligee will never hide this apparition.” Another doctor concluded: “On the whole, it is not a show to watch.”

We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: “No thanks, I’ll be in the waiting room with cigars.” Ms. Leavitt’s fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

One’s head hurts.

Last strains to connect the increased expectation that Dads will be present with an increasing divorce rate (never mind that the divorce rate has been in decline throughout the admittedly brief 21st century). If there’s a need for a case study for correlation without even a whiff of causation, this WSJ piece might be a good place to start. One is left to wonder if Last actually believes that men are more inclined to divorce their wives after witnessing birth; perhaps he imagines that the delicate masculine sensibility is so easily overwhelmed by the sight of the “bloody show” that future marital relations are inexorably damaged as a consequence.

This, in other words, is just another bit of popular sexual “wisdom” from the purity peddlers and the chastity crowd. Last implies that men’s sexual desire for their spouses (or the mothers of their children to whom they are not wed) is contingent upon denial about the bloody reality of how life comes into this world. Women, of course, can be expected to endure childbirth — despite the pain and turmoil inherent in the process — and then turn around and long to do again with their men the very act that ended up putting them through the whole traumatic (albeit, presumably, rewarding) experience in the first place. Women’s libidinousness, in other words, isn’t allowed to be contingent upon some carefully enforced ignorance about bodily functions. Instead of marveling that so many modern women are willing to give birth more than once, to make love with their husbands with the memory of what lovemaking can lead to still embedded in the consciousness, Last worries about the poor lads whose fragile sensibilities might be permanently scarred at the sight, sounds, and smells of a delivery room. This is the myth of male weakness writ large indeed. Continue reading ‘Blood, birth, and eros: against the myth of the frail male’

More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 07, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Youth
. 108 Comments

Two posts responding to Monday’s post about men and feeling desired: Feeling Hot or Not by Lynn Gazis-Sax and Wanted Bodies, by David Schraub. (UPDATE: Here’s Sungold’s post as well.) I’m grateful for all the comments here, which I think have been helpful.

Second Update: A response from Figleaf.

I can’t stress enough that nothing I wrote was intended to suggest that it ought to be women’s job to praise men more frequently for their physical desirability. As several of the commenters pointed out, women have good reason to fear significant negative repercussions for vocalizing desire. I don’t think casually subjecting strangers to a lusful gaze is ever a good idea, of course, but it’s important to remind ourselves that the consequences of doing so are generally much more perilous for women. Our narratives about rape, for example, make it clear that the only women who are “true victims” are those who have no sexual agency, who expressed no desire. A woman who makes clear that she’s turned on, or at least drawn to, some aspect of men’s bodies (rather than, say, men’s wit or wealth or charm or kindness) risks being “slut-shamed” — and worse, she risks the suggestion that she’s “asking” to be assaulted. Bottom line: we have a perverse cultural sense that “a horny woman can’t be raped”.

Both men and women are raised around male narratives of desire. Most of us grow up hearing that all men are turned on by similar things. Where we do allow for variation, we break men down (I remember learning this when I was about eleven) into “boob men”, “butt men” and “leg men.” The depressing implication is that the desire is for body parts, not whole people. A “boob man”, or so I was told by older boys in junior high school, “needed” to be with a woman who had large breasts — and it was rational for such a man to make sexual and relationship decisions accordingly. The discourse taught me that not only was male desire intensely strong, it was also unchangeable; a boob man couldn’t overcome his obsession even with the most heroic efforts. Dating an otherwise perfect woman with an A cup was useless, almost unfair.

When I was still in junior high school, older boys taught me to rank girls on various attributes (”face” = 8, “body” = 5, that sort of sad thing.) Homosociality is powerful; as so many generations of boys discover, the real pleasure of these “ranking” conversations lies in two things: the false sense of power over women that the process seems to give, and the sense of male cameraderie that the shared discussion engenders. Part of my journey to justice as an adult man has been unlearning that training to “rank” women; part of my men’s work has been learning how to create bonds with other men without relying on either sports or the objectification of women as homosocial glue. And of course, a big part of the work is doing what I can to call other men out on the “ranking” when I hear it happening. Continue reading ‘More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts’

Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 04, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Favorite Posts 2009, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality
. 63 Comments

I’ve been thinking this week about the experience — or lack thereof — of being the object of other’s desire. Two different posts got the wheels turning: Girls, Both Real and Otherwise by Daisy B., and Figleaf’s Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen. Both Daisy and Fig, in different ways, talk about alienation from their own bodies, at least as they appear to others (and, in a sense, to themselves). I recommend both posts.

In feminist circles, it’s common to talk about the tremendous damage that objectification does to women of all ages and adolescent girls in particular. Many young women remember a moment (painful, terrifying, or, perhaps less often, full of wonder) when they realized that they were the object of another’s sexual desire. Even more women have memories of being sent the mixed message of how both to entice desire (lessons on how to apply make-up, how to dress “sexy” taught at a young age) and how to avoid appearing either “slutty” or “ugly.” (the distinction, of course, is a shifting and elusive one.) For better or for worse, most young women grow up with a cultural awareness that their generally speaking, women’s bodies (though perhaps not their own) are intensely desirable to boys and men; strategies for managing that desire are much-discussed facets of women’s magazines, the advertising industry, and conversation.

But we don’t have a culture in which many young men grow up with the experience of being seen and wanted, in which young men grow up with the sense that their bodies are desirable and beautiful as well as functional. Our cultural discourse about young men teaches that managing their own (presumably insatiable) sexual desire is the defining task of their adolescence. A “jock discourse” that encourages young men to “score” with as many women as possible and an “abstinence discourse” which encourages young men to restrain themselves heroically have essentially the same perspective: your job as a man is to channel your libido, either into sexual conquests or radical restriction. Both discourses center male desire, just as most discourses aimed at young women teach teenage girls how to gain, manage, and direct that same titanic force. The missing element, of course, is the idea that female desire can be directed towards men in general, and towards their bodies in particular.

There’s some explicitness below the fold. Use your own judgment about proceeding. Continue reading ‘Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men’

“Boob Wars”: reflections of a new father on breastfeeding, class, and feminism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2009
in Body, Class, Money and Parenting
. 46 Comments

In the thirty years or so since I entered puberty during the Carter Administration, I’ve spent quite a bit of time contemplating women’s breasts — and my own (not to mention other men’s) fascination with them. But in the last few months, as a first-time father and partner to a breast-feeding mother, that fascination has morphed into a new kind of reverence. And I’ve become aware of what might, for lack of a better term, be called the “boob war” — a sub-conflict within the larger “Mommy War” that continues to rage, exasperating and frightening and dividing women. And into this fight comes a bombshell article in the new Atlantic Monthly: Hanna Rosin’s The Case Against Breastfeeding. More on the article later. (Cap taps, belatedly and with apologies, to Rod Dreher and to Scott.)

The term “Mommy Wars” generally refers to the public and private debates, common among the middle and upper-middle classes of the developed world, about what makes a “good” mother. For years, the chief front in these wars has been the battle over daycare and work outside the home, though other conflicts rage in areas like nutrition and natural childbirth. As a women’s studies professor, I of course had a professional acquaintance with these battles — but as a first-time father these past few months, I’ve gotten an entirely different perspective. As a man, my cultural and physiological privilege immunizes me from attack; yet as a devoted partner and father and feminist, I cannot help but be involved.

When we first announced to people that we were expecting a child, we got (along with the hugs of congratulation) many queries and unsolicited nuggets of advice. In particular, my wife was regularly asked about her plans for nourishing the baby; whether she intended to breastfeed, and if so, for how long. The merits of “pumping” versus “not pumping” were presented with bewildering detail; and, at least in our social circle, the evils of infant formula were repeatedly stressed.

We chose a midwifery team and a pediatrician based on recommendations from friends and a series of interviews (trust me, we were thorough in the latter). The pediatrician we ended up choosing is a delightful man, a fellow vegan with a prominent reputation as an opponent of a slavish adherence to the vaccine schedule and a proponent of both breastfeeding and attachment parenting. He charmed us with his attention and his devotion and his irreverance, as well as his conviction that child health and animal rights can be entirely compatible commitments. When we first met with Dr. G. weeks before our daughter was born, we also met with his professional lactation consultant, who promised to come in the hours after the delivery to help my wife breastfeed. It was clear that in this practice, formula at any time in the first six months — even the first year — was considered tantamount to child abuse. Continue reading ‘“Boob Wars”: reflections of a new father on breastfeeding, class, and feminism’

A little ER visit

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 04, 2009
in Body and Memories
. 10 Comments

First off, I’m feeling fine this morning.

But I didn’t feel so fine yesterday afternoon, when I fainted — twice, in rapid succession — in our bedroom at home. I was standing at my dresser, pulling out my running gear, when I felt woozy; the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, listening to my wife’s worried voice call my name. Not wanting to make her overly anxious, I bounced back up too quickly, and tumbled down again.

My mother-in-law drove me to Huntington Hospital, where I spent six hours in the Emergency Room, awaiting and then receiving treatment. I was dehydrated with low blood sugar, and though my pulse was where a runner’s should be (hovering around 40), my pressure was much higher than normal. The doctor considered me to be afflicted with stress, lack of sleep, and too much caffeine (and not enough water). I was pumped full of a litre of fluid, patted on the head, and sent home.

With a newborn and other obligations, getting uninterrrupted sleep is not realistic now. With my teaching duties, caffeine is essential. But I can follow the general rule of drinking more water than I drink caffeine –for each ounce of the latter, two ounces of the former. I’ve got a roomy bladder, thank goodness. And I’ll try and eat more regularly. To be honest, my anxiety about gaining weight (as a result of not being able to work out nearly as much thanks to the coming of the blessed baby girl) has left me cutting my calories.

Lots of lessons in here, chief among them the paramount importance of self-care. In so many areas, I’m good at matching my language and my life. But that addictive personality, tinged even now with the neurotic desire to always be in motion, always connected, means that I can run myself ragged to the detriment not only of myself but also of my growing little family. For someone who wants to see an awakening of healthy masculinity in this country, my own penchant for workaholism is hardly an encouraging character trait.

So, more water, more rest, less multi-tasking. Continue reading ‘A little ER visit’

Of boys and hand-washing

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 15, 2008
in Body, Hygiene, Men and Masculinity and Youth
. 13 Comments

One of my many early morning rituals is to log on to BBC News. And this was the first story I saw today: Millions Mark UN Hand-Washing Day. 2008 is, I learned, the International Year of Sanitation. I’m delighted to see this simple education campaign underway, and eager to see more governments and donor agencies get involved in improving sanitary conditions in poor countries. Since I no longer support Heifer Project and other aid programs that involve the mistreatment of animals, I’ve gotten very interested in Oxfam’s Build a Bog program. (I’m a fan of clean toilets; if anyone is wondering what to give me for Christmas or my birthday, trust that I already have more than I need. But buying someone a nice place to poop in my name would make me deliriously happy.)

Reading about “world hand-washing day” made me think about men, cleanliness, and self-care. I’ve become, in my old age, a very good and loyal hand-washer. It was not always so, and I confess it was a former girlfriend, Ali, who turned things around for me many years ago. We had just moved in together, and on one lazy afternoon, I got up to use the bathroom while my gal stayed on the couch. When I returned, Ali looked at me suspiciously: “I didn’t hear the sink”, she said. I must have flushed red, saying nothing. “Did you wash your hands?” I sheepishly admitted that I had not. This woman had a drug and alcohol addiction at least as well advanced as my own, but when sober, she had a tremendous commitment to good hygiene. “Well, Hugo, if you ever want to touch me again, you damn well better wash your hands with soap and hot water every time you ‘go’.” Indeed, even when we were both under the influence, headed for bed, Ali would drunkenly push me towards the bathroom, insisting that whatever else I did, I had to make sure my hands were scrubbed clean. The relationship came to a messy hand, but my post-toilet ablutions have remained relatively devoted ever since.

I use the faculty men’s restroom located right across the hall from my little office. My colleagues and I are often in there together. I’ve worked with most of these lads for many years, and I know well who the “good handwashers” are. Some use soap and hot water and rub their hands thoroughly. Others practice what I often did in my younger days, the “wetting the fingertips with cold water for a period of not more than five seconds” strategy. And some — I will name no names, no matter how hard I am pushed on the matter — emerge from stalls or step back from urinals and do not even glance at the sink before heading out to meet and mingle with their students. I never say anything. I already have a reputation for “policing” the sexist language of some of my male colleagues, and I’m not sure I’m ready to start parenting men in many cases considerably older than myself. (Sometimes, I do confess, I use a paper towel to open the restroom door on my way out.)

The larger problem, of course, is the cultural feminization of cleanliness. It’s axiomatic that we raise boys in our culture with expectations of dirt; it is equally axiomatic that most parents are much better at communicating lessons about cleanliness to their daughters. It’s not that many parents tell their sons not to wash their hands, of course — it’s that we have diminished expectations for what boys can remember. Popular theories, generally unanchored in anything approaching scientific research, suggest that girls “have a keener sense of smell, and thus are better about remembering to be clean” or that “boys are just naturally dirtier, and can’t be expected to wash all the time.” And of course, the old nursery rhyme about “sugar and spice” for girls and “snips and snails” for boys is rooted, not in immutable physiological truth, but in socially-constructed myths about childhood. Above all, we live in a culture that sees dirt on boys as evidence of healthy masculinity, and in which male fastidiousness is associated with queerness and effeminacy. Continue reading ‘Of boys and hand-washing’

Parental pride, parental anxiety: on ever-earlier adolescence and the ever-present double standard

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 13, 2008
in Body, Feminism, Veganism and Youth
. 54 Comments

Comments should be open.

As I’ve written before, each semester in my women’s history course we spend some time looking at Joan Brumberg’s wonderful Body Project. Brumberg talks about the four to five year drop in the onset of puberty between the late nineteenth century and the present. The best medical evidence we have from 1900 put the average age of menarche at 16; today, it is just over 11. And of course, with earlier menarche comes earlier development of other secondary sex characteristics. The same is true with boys, though males lack the single defining demarcation line of the onset of menstruation to mark an entry into adolescence.

It’s a women’s studies class, so we spend much more time focusing on the impact of earlier puberty on girls than on boys. We refute some of the common myths (like the long-standing notion that the Virgin Mary was fourteen, and thus menarche must have happened for her before she was to be wed). We talk about the role of changing diet, particularly meat consumption, in driving adolescent growth. I quote from PCRM’s summary of a Harvard study:

Some studies suggest that the growth of vegetarian children is more gradual than that of non-vegetarians—in other words, vegetarian children grow a bit more slowly at first, but they catch up later on. Final heights and weights for vegetarian children are comparable to those of meat-eating children. Interestingly, breast-fed babies also grow more slowly than bottle-fed babies. Somewhat less rapid growth during the early years is thought to decrease disease risk later in life.

On the other hand, diets rich in animal protein, found in meat, eggs, and dairy products, appear to reduce the age of puberty, as shown in a 2000 study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier. Nature may well have designed the human body to grow up more gradually, to reach puberty later, and to last longer than most people raised on omnivorous diets experience.

Bold mine. The full study is here. I never hide the fact that I’m a vegan, and so I’m quite clear about my bias: if future parents want to make sure that their children “don’t grow up too fast”, raising them with a minimum meat intake (or as vegans) is the best way to go. Take Harvard’s word for it — there’s a lot to be said for delaying physical puberty by 24-36 months, to give the mind time to keep pace with the body developmentally. MTV can’t make your daughter menstruate earlier than you did; McDonalds can.

But please believe that I don’t just use the palpable anxiety my students feel about the “vanishing of physical childhood” to push my vegan agenda. Yeah, I do that - but there’s more as well. We also spend a great deal of time exploring the historical, psychological, and cultural implications of a much earlier adolescence. Those students who are comfortable doing so are invited to open up dialogue with older female relatives (this is not required); many in my classes, filled as they are with first-generation Americans, have grandmothers who are a foot shorter than they are — and who report “starting” substantially later.

In journal assignments, many of my students write about their own worries about their younger sisters or daughters. (I have many single parents, mostly moms, in my courses). A great many talk about rethinking the diets that they will offer their future children. But interestingly, none of them express any anxiety about early puberty in boys. When the subject comes up — which it has — in my men and masculinity courses, I never hear a student say “Gosh, I want to make sure I raise my son vegetarian so he can stay in a boy’s body longer.” In my women’s history courses, I constantly hear “I want to do everything I can to delay my daughter’s development”. Continue reading ‘Parental pride, parental anxiety: on ever-earlier adolescence and the ever-present double standard’

“Bowflex Boy” and Kristy McNichol: desire, celebrity, and the sexiness of earthy reality: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 27, 2008
in Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mass media, Memories, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 5 Comments

There’s been an interesting discussion going on beneath this post at Feministe. As part of a riposte to some rather silly criticism of Third Wave, sex-positive feminism, Jill last week put up a number of pictures of hot shirtless men. (It’s reasonably work-safe to visit.)

Some commenters (both men and women) criticized the decision to put up the photos. They asked the usual questions: isn’t it reflective of a double standard if we denounce men for objectifying a narrow range of beautiful women, while celebrating when a feminist woman posts pictures of handsome, ripped, relatively young men? Isn’t it problematic to celebrate a narrow ideal when we live in a culture in which body dysmorphia and self-loathing is rising dramatically in the male population?

Jill responds to the criticism in this comment. When the question of poor male self-image is raised, some commenters leap in to make the perfectly legitimate case that all things considered, women today suffer far more from a culture that fetishizes a very narrow notion of perfection. That’s true enough, but the damage done to young men by our contemporary ideal of the “cut, be-sixpacked” physique is very real.

But this post is not an attempt to revive some sort of suffering Olympics discussion about male v. female body image issues. Rather, I’ve been thinking about something I learned twenty years ago about desire, the ideal, and insecurity. In college, I lived for a while in a co-op on the northside of the Berkeley campus. There were 37 of us in the house, nearly as many women as men. One of my best female friends in the house lived in a “single”, and I often visited with her in her room. (I had a triple for most of my time in the co-op). Debbie had a huge poster on her wall — an ad for the “Bowflex Man.” If you remember the ’80s, you remember the ad. I’ve done a Google image search, and can’t find it, but the picture is indelibly carved on my brain. A young, dark-haired man is pulling off his shirt, lifting his arms over his shoulders. His body beneath is tanned and spectacularly toned. A Bowflex machine is in the background. Half the dorm rooms on campus seemed to have this picture up; it was more popular than that college staple, Robert Doisneau’s kissing Parisian street couple. Here’s the picture: Bowflex Boy

Anyhow, Debbie had this picture in her room, over her bed. At one point, Debbie and I made a brief attempt at a romantic relationship. It lasted only a few weeks before we realized we were better off as friends. But I remember that when I was naked in her bed the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of masculine perfection just inches away. I was not terribly out of shape in college, but in both color and texture was a bit doughy around my middle. I certainly wasn’t “Bow-flex boy”. And after we had finished fooling around, as we lay in her very narrow single bed, I made a rather joking, obviously insecure remark. It’s been more than twenty years, so I don’t remember exactly how I put it, but it was something like “I can’t believe you want to be with me when you’ve got this guy to look at.” Continue reading ‘“Bowflex Boy” and Kristy McNichol: desire, celebrity, and the sexiness of earthy reality: UPDATED’

The political, the personal and regulating the minimum BMI for supermodels: another response to John Spragge

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 22, 2008
in Body, Feminism and Politics
. 3 Comments

In my post last Friday celebrating the 160th anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments, I quoted this line from that most worthy of feminist documents:

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

I noted that our feminist foremothers at Seneca Falls were not just concerned with the issue of poltical rights and public justice, but with the world of private emotion. These foremothers knew, and knew very well, that a movement that concerns itself only with winning political rights, but not with the emotional well-being of an oppressed class, ends up fighting only half the battle. Hence I wrote, riffing off the lines from the Declaration above:

The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.

John Spragge makes a pair of criticisms below that orignal post, taking issue with my reading of the Declaration and my suggestion that the Seneca Falls conventioneers were willing to make personal concerns a central aspect of their agenda. John writes:

Politics exists to manage the public square, the shared spaces where we meet. But if the same politician promises to make me happy or make me good, we have a problem. Politics stops at my skin.

I certainly am not suggesting we form an Orwellian federal Department of Happiness that ensures that each citizen has a strong sense of well-being. But the fact is that unhappiness of the kind the declaration describes –an abject dependence, a lack of self-respect, a dearth of self-confidence — doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Though some unhappiness may be a result of poor personal decisions, or a result of some sort of familial abuse, or due to organic factors in the brain, a great deal of the kind of unhappiness that the Declaration laments is a direct result of public policies and social mores that treat women very differently from men. Continue reading ‘The political, the personal and regulating the minimum BMI for supermodels: another response to John Spragge’

Boys, fathers, teasing, and disordered eating: spite more often wears a man’s face

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 05, 2008
in Body, Eating disorders and Youth
. 4 Comments

I’ve been meaning to blog about the new study, reported in the Washington Post, about the clear gender differences that appear in adolescent disordered eating behavior. The study appears in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, and is entitled Family, Peer, and Media Predictors of Becoming Eating Disordered.

This was fascinating:

Frequent dieting and trying to look like persons in the media were independent predictors of binge eating in females of all ages. In males, negative comments about weight by fathers was predictive of starting to binge at least weekly.

The study makes clear that for younger teen girls, a mother’s negative attitude towards her own body can impact a daughter’s self-image and put her at risk for developing disordered eating; in older teen girls, the media had a much greater influence. For boys, however, critical comments by dads about their sons’ weight turns out to be the most highly reported cause of disordered eating behavior. Boys are less influenced by the media, in other words, while both sexes are impacted by the words and views of their same-sex parent. Indeed, while young teen girls are as influenced by their mothers as boys are by their fathers, by later adolescence males are much more likely to be negatively impacted by Dad’s criticism than their sisters will be by criticism or self-loathing from Mom.

Older girls were, according to the study, much more likely to be negatively impacted by critical comments about their bodies from male peers than by similar remarks from parents of either gender, or by female peers. From the study:

Among the females, teasing by mothers, fathers, and other females was unrelated to the risk of starting to binge or purge weekly, but teasing about weight by males was associated with an increase in the risk of starting to purge weekly.

Among males, a high level of concern with weight and negative comments about weight by fathers were both significant predictors of starting to binge eat at least weekly.

What to make of this? Clearly, one of the most common assumptions we make about adolescent girls is false: popular wisdom often suggests that girls are harder on other girls than are boys. The idea that disordered eating in girls is driven by competition with other women is a popular one, yet this study suggests that teasing by male peers is a more important predictive factor than any other, including same-sex peers, parents of either sex, or even the media. As a society, it seems we often over-estimate the degree to which teen girls exhibit cruelty towards each other, and we may woefully underestimate the damage done by boys and men.

In the case of teen boys, the power of fathers to impact their sons’s self-image is striking. Let’s hope this study is widely publicized among Dads across the nation, as fathers need to learn that their sons are just as sensitive as their daughters to ridicule, while teen boys need to be reminded that teasing girls about their bodies is never, ever okay.

The most important takeaway from this study is that men — both fathers and teen boys — have a greater impact on disordered eating behavior in teenagers of both sexes than was previously thought. In a culture that too often assumes that spite wears a woman’s face, this study appears as a sobering and important corrective.

On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 08, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Sports, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 13 Comments

The New York Times has a preview up today of a long article coming out on Sunday in their magazine: The Uneven Playing Field. It’s by Michael Sokolove, and based on his forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (I’ve pre-ordered the book, and will review it this summer when it comes out.)

In this lengthy adaptation on the Times website, Sokolove writes about what he sees as the extraordinary number of knee (ACL) injuries that are being sustained by female athletes, soccer players in particular. His thesis:

(the epidemic is) part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

The rate (of ACL injury) for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

At this point, my heart was sinking. Was this going to be anti-feminist ideology dressed up as professed concern for the health of young women? Was Sokolove trying to scare parents into pulling their daughters out of competitive sports? I even wondered if Sokolove was some sort of shill for the anti-Title IX crowd, trying a new tactic in their never-ending crusade to roll back a policy of equal funding for women’s sports. As a passionate sports fan, married to a former club soccer star, I have a deep and abiding commitment to women’s athletics — particularly the “beautiful game” of what the rest of the world calls football.

Happily, reading the article to the end (it is ten pages long) makes it at least fairly apparent that Sokolove is committed to women’s sports. Rather than imploring parents to pull their daughters off soccer teams, he writes sensibly and knowledgeably about the causes of what is undeniably a common problem: catastrophic ACL injuries among young female soccer players. The chief culprits have nothing to do with inherent feminine weakness. Rather, they are two-fold: poor bio-mechanics and the exhausting “club” system in high school and college that leaves many talented girls playing a demanding sport literally year-round. Continue reading ‘On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article’