… I got my tongue pierced. (I had had the nipples pierced the year earlier.) The barbell was enlarged a few times over the next six months, but after I cracked two teeth with it in the fall of 1998, I took the darn thing out for good, less than eleven months after I first put it in. It was fun while it lasted.
How long ago it seems.
Zuzu has a fine post up this morning: Rejecting the Frames. It’s a follow-up to this piece at Feministing which sparked a heated — and at times — ugly comment thread.
The topic of the two posts (and this third brief, powerful one from Jill) is fat, the so-called “obesity crisis”, and the feminist response. Zuzu:
One of the things that bothers me… (as well as the whole “Diets Don’t Work!” mantra, which also usually puts in an appearance) is that it puts the focus on the individual fat person rather than on the treatment that the fat person is having to deal with. Indeed, this is a good example of the “personal is political” phenomenon as it was originally put forth: our weights may be within our individual control, but the way society treats us because of our weight demands a collective solution. Being turned down for insurance because of your BMI isn’t truly a personal problem, it’s a political one — why should insurance companies get to draw arbitrary lines to deny coverage, and by the way, why is it we still don’t have universal health care, again?
And your doctor’s berating you about your weight may seem like an individual problem, but the fact that fat hatred kills demands a collective solution. But if shame keeps us off-balance and justifying why we weigh what we weigh, or why we should (or shouldn’t) do something about that, then we never really think of the problem as being bigger than ourselves.
The self-justification also sets up a certain group (those who engage in healthy behaviors) as more worthy of being left alone by the Obesity Crisis™ Watchdog than those who don’t. But why should healthy lifestyle be the ticket to being treated as a human being? I shouldn’t have to do a damn thing to claim my right to being treated equally other than exist. Who the fuck has the right to deny me that just because I like to have a piece of cake every now and again, or because sometimes I eat too much or don’t exercise?
Amen, zuzu.
I was at my boxing gym early this morning for my regular Monday meeting with Pepe, my trainer. I know lots of other folks who work out there, and as I was packing my bag, getting ready to leave, a casual acquaintance of mine and I started talking about our Thanksgiving plans. As we said goodbye, she said laughingly, “Don’t eat too much this week. Oh, wait, go ahead — overeat! You’ve earned it!”
I was fairly groggy this morning, and didn’t think about what my friend said until I read Zuzu’s post. The language of “earning” is used a lot in fitness circles; it’s an economic and a moral term. And it’s got some fairly troubling implications. Continue reading ‘Fat is not a moral crisis’
The summer issue of Ms Magazine is on the shelves this week. I was raised on Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, and though it has gone through many transformations in the years since, it remains one of the indispensable serious reads for feminists and their allies.
One particularly noteworthy article is Extreme Makeover, Feminist Edition: How the pitch for cosmetic surgery co-opts feminism. Written by Jennifer Cognard-Black, it’s a superb and timely response to the increasingly common strategy of marketing plastic surgery to women under the guise of “empowerment”.
… the cosmetic surgery industry is doing exactly what the beauty
industry has done for years: It’s co-opting, repackaging and reselling the feminist call to empower women into what may be dubbed “consumer feminism.”
Under the dual slogans of possibility and choice, producers, promoters and providers are
selling elective surgery as self-determination.
Those who are eager to make a fortune out of women’s fear of growing older use the language of the pro-choice movement over and over again: “it’s your body, shouldn’t you be in charge of how it looks?” The precious right to be sovereign over one’s flesh becomes, in the hands of the beauty industry, the duty to battle against the onset of ageing. Feminists who critique cosmetic surgery are accused of inconsistency, of refusing to allow women the full range of “choices” to which they are entitled. Cognard-Black:
The word “choice” obviously plays on reproductive-rights
connotations, so that consumers will trust that they are
maintaining autonomy over their bodies. Yet one choice
goes completely unmentioned: The choice not to consider
cosmetic surgery at all.
One of my first posts to attract a lot of attention appeared in April 2004: Surgery, Sex, and Shame. I compared liposuction to nineteenth-century clitoridectomies (which were done far more often in the USA than many realize). Excerpt from my post (not Cognard-Black’s article):
…clitoridectomies were regularly performed on young girls in America and England to cure them of what one doctor called “the moral leprosy” of female masturbation. My students are always stunned to hear that; they falsely assume that female genital mutilation was never a Western practice. Young women were shamed for the inevitable (menarche) and the normal (masturbation) to a far greater degree than they are today.
But what occurs in the 20th century is a shift from morality to aesthetics, with shame being the constant. Though public discussions of menstruation and masturbation (even in an academic setting) are still sometimes awkward, most of my students seem to consider themselves far more educated and enlightened on those subjects than their Victorian sisters. But all too frequently, my students loathe their bodies with the same puritanical intensity as their forebears. They may not be as ashamed of their sexuality as their great-grandmothers were (though some are still understandably shy), but they are still ruthlessly critical of their own flesh. The negative judgments however, are now rooted in aesthetics. Fat has replaced desire as the primary enemy to be contained and controlled. If self-control and exercise fail, there is always the surgical removal of the offender (fat) through liposuction and body sculpting.
I try — with limited success — to make the case that Victorian clitoridectomies and contemporary plastic surgery are remarkably similar procedures from a feminist analysis. Yes, the former were performed on the young and the vulnerable, often against their will. But I’m not sure that the young students of mine who save and scrimp and go into debt for liposuction and breast enlargements (and I can think of quite a few who have done just that) really have much more agency and autonomy than their forebears. Slicing up the body to conform to a societal ideal is inherently a woman-hating act, whether the offending body part is the clitoris or thigh fat. There is no progress in moving from a culture that shames sexuality to a culture that shames any divergence from an unrealistic aesthetic ideal.
Yes, I have heard from my students who say they feel better about themselves after their surgeries. But the number of women in Somalia or Mali who support female infibulation are high as well. The fact that some women feel personally empowered by cutting up their bodies (or allowing their bodies to be cut) does not vitiate the essential horror of the practice. Some feminists are so in love with the notion of “choice” that they will defend any action a woman takes to alter her body. But choices are only exercised within a cultural context that decrees that certain choices are better than others. In this culture where even slight physical imperfections are seen as barriers to happiness, most young women who choose plastic surgery are not making a genuinely free choice…
Feminists must be careful to walk a thin line — judging and condemning those women who do “choose” cosmetic surgery isn’t helpful, even if (as my use of quotation marks suggests) we are doubtful about the feminist authenticity of their “choice.” Our anger and our energy, rather, ought to be directed at those who repackage feminist language to market their wares. Feminism critiques the very standards of beauty that the cosmetic industry seeks to uphold; the surgeons offer women (at least the ones with money) the freedom to choose to alter their bodies to chase an ideal; feminists want women to have freedom from that very ideal.
Cognard-Black:
…it’s feminists who have emphatically and
persistently shown that cosmetic medicine exists because
sexism is powerfully linked with capitalism—
keeping a woman worried about her looks in order to
stay attractive, keep a job or retain self-worth. To say
that a preoccupation with looks is “feminist” is a cynical
misreading; feminists must instead insist that a furrowed,
“wise” brow—minus the fillers—is the empowered
feminist face, both old and new.
Pick up the new issue of Ms. at your local newsstand, or better yet, subscribe. And visit these sites:
I know everyone else in the ’sphere is writing about the major new study on obesity and friendship, but I can’t seem to resist weighing in (ouch) as well.
The opening sentence in the Times report yesterday left me wincing:
Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too.
My first reaction is fury. Fabulous, another excuse for the shunning and shaming of fat folk. I can almost hear it: “Bob, you know I love you. But the New York Times says that obesity is contagious, and I’ve noticed you’ve gained a lot of weight lately, so I’d rather not spend as much time with you because I’m afraid you’ll infect me.” The phrase “much like a virus” is infelicitous at best and genuinely misleading at worst, and to have it in the opening sentence is deeply unfortunate.
The study’s point, of course, is that other people’s behavior and appearance can impact our feelings about ourselves.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.
I’m not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. After all, we’re all well aware that the media (in its nearly infinite manifestations) has a huge impact on women’s self-image; the endless message that one must be thin and toned has done demonstrable damage. The struggle to emulate movie stars and supermodels, the struggle to achieve an unattainable ideal, breaks hearts and spirits and bodies year after year after year. For most women, that struggle is played out in two dimensions — in private acts of self-denial and in public, shared acts of self-loathing. Poor body image is reinforced by peers (or parents) who make self-deprecating remarks about their own bodies, and it’s reinforced by the common and unhappy practice of “bonding” over mutual self-hatred.
When a good friend or family member begins to gain weight, it’s as if he or she has “opted out” of the destructive pursuit of an eternally elusive ideal. This opting out provides an alternative model for friends and family. Seeing a good friend gain weight can be liberating, as it raises the prospect that if you yourself put on some pounds, you won’t be alone to face the judgment of a hostile and censorious culture. Most of us who teach and practice feminism, after all, are eager to create “feminist communities” in which women and men consciously reject the culturally prescribed ideals for our appearance and our behavior. We know that it’s hard to opt out alone, and much easier to do so when you have visible allies. This study reinforces the importance of those visible allies.
While extreme obesity may be unhealthy, it may well be that the negative effects of modest weight-gain are exaggerated. Certainly, the social and psychological costs to dieting are immense. The damage that pursuing the thinness ideal does to men and women (especially women) is colossal. In many ways, the physical and spiritual damage brought on by a lifetime of dieting and self-loathing may be far worse than the threat posed by twenty, thirty, or even fifty “extra pounds”.
I’m a recreational athlete who is married to a recreational athlete; we spend a lot of our social time with other recreational athletes. We belong to a subculture in which exercise and competition is normative, and where discussions of the latest “brick workout” or the benefits of heart-rate monitoring are common at picnics and luncheons and around the dinner table. We reinforce not self-loathing, but a sense that a physically active life is an important one. This doesn’t make us in the least bit more virtuous; we’re simply competitive people who love exercising outdoors. The point is, we’ve created a small subculture in which our lifestyle choices are supported and reinforced. There’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with a group of people who don’t enjoy exercise and hate dieting mutually supporting each other as they collectively reject a societal ideal of thinness.
So there’s much about this study that is, frankly, potentially encouraging. But my fear is that the way in which it is being reported, and the way it is being discussed, will morph into still another tool with which to shame and shun those whose bodies don’t meet our societal standards.
As a volunteer youth minister, I was very interested to read this in my morning paper: Girl talk linked to depression, anxiety. It opens:
Constant venting over crushes, popularity or other personal problems may lead to anxiety and depression in girls — but not in boys, according to new research.
A study of 813 students ages 8 to 15 found that excessive discussions and rumination about problems strengthened friendships for both sexes, but those tighter bonds came at a cost for girls.
The study appears in this month’s issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.
Lead author Amanda Rose, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said the results might reflect a cultural tendency among girls to blame themselves when they aren’t invited to parties or when boys don’t call back.
“The more they talk about it, the more depressed and anxious they feel,” she said.
The findings add a cautionary note to the perennial advice to the young that they should share their problems rather than bottle them up.
“Talking about problems is a good thing, but too much talk is too much of a good thing,” Rose said.
I don’t spend much time working with younger kids (say, those in the 8-12 range). I have spent a great deal of time volunteering with both boys and girls in early-to-mid adolescence; if there’s one age group I spend more time with than any other it’s high school frosh, who are usually around 13-15.
I’m no expert in adolescent psychology, but the study does “ring true”. It’s certainly not the case that those girls who are the most consistently verbal and open about their feelings are always the emotionally healthiest. My concern, however, is about the reaction of adults to this study. The last thing that we need is moms and dads deciding, having skimmed an article or heard a television report, that their daughters need to spend less time talking to their friends and more time bottling up their feelings! Even more worrisome is the thought that some parents and teachers might overtly or covertly discourage girls from approaching them with their anxieties and doubts for fear that providing a listening ear will only worsen the problem.
One popular trend these days is to focus heavily on the “boy crisis”; pop psychologists (and men’s rights advocates) have loudly complained that we’ve spent too much time collectively worrying about girls, and not enough about boys. These advocates for boys are often convinced that love, time, and resources are part of a zero-sum game, and that the trend of the 1990s (epitomized by Mary Pipher’s colossally influential Reviving Ophelia) towards focusing on girls was misplaced and led to boys’ needs being systematically ignored. Boys, these folks argue, are actually much more at risk of low self-esteem today than girls.
But the study reported today suggests that peer support systems are still less effective for many girls than for boys:
Researchers first looked at whether depression or anxiety increased the likelihood that students would obsessively discuss their problems. They found that boys and girls with emotional difficulties were more likely to ruminate about their troubles.
Researchers then examined the effect of rumination on students’ emotional well-being and friendships.
Boys reported no change in feelings of anxiety or depression, but girls said they felt worse.
Since the boys in this study were already self-identified as depressed or anxious, their tendency to report that they didn’t feel worse as a result of discussing their problem can’t be attributable to a masculine desire to appear strong and impervious to psychic pain. Rather, it seems clear that something about the way in which “girl-talk” functions among the young serves to exacerbate rather than relieve many emotional problems.
In my own youth, I struggled with both an eating disorder and chronic self-mutilation. I often found myself in support groups for those who suffered with similar issues; typically, I was (as a male) very much in a minority. I also was often the oldest person in the group, as my anorectic and self-mutilating behavior peaked in my early twenties rather than in my early-to-mid-teens, like many young women. And in these groups, I saw quickly how vital it was to have all discussion moderated by either a therapist or a mature fellow sufferer who had a lot of recovery. Unmoderated, discussion about dieting or cutting quickly turned competitive; a girl would say something like “Yeah, I’m not doing so good, I only ate a banana yesterday.” You could count on having another girl say seconds later, “Yeah, me too, I only drank water and diet coke yesterday.” The subtle one-”upwomanship” often left many of the young women in the group even more depressed and alienated, and it took good and aggressive therapists to keep things positive. (This was back before the proliferation of the “pro-ana” sites on the web that offer “support” to those who are competitively anorexic or self-mutilating.)
As feminists, we need to recognize that the way in which girls talk to each other about their bodies or emotions is heavily influenced by a culture that encourages bitter female rivalry. We know that anxiety about body image and boys begins well before physical puberty, and that that anxiety is shaped in ways that emphasize competition with other girls. This rivalry is much stronger among girls than among boys. This doesn’t mean boys don’t compete, it means that their competition is far more limited. Boys tend to compete only about sports and grades and (later) real or imagined prowess with the other sex; girls compete over their appearance, and it seems, over their very identities.
To get a sense of this, listen to how girls use the word “hate” much more frequently to describe other women whom they envy. “She’s so pretty and skinny, I just hate her!” is a fairly common phrase to hear from fifteen-year old girls. When was the last time you heard a teen boy say of a peer, “He’s so handsome, I hate him” or “Peyton Manning is such a great quarterback, I just hate him”? (Boys may hate the star of the opposing team, but they are much less likely to loathe the lad who’s leading their own squad.) Intra-female conversation among teen girls is much more likely to be self-deprecating than that among boys, and it’s also far more likely to include disparaging remarks about the appearance or identity of perceived rivals.
It’s not the case that girls are “naturally” more introspective, or more filled with self-doubt, or are more cruel than their brothers. But because we inculcate in girls an absolutely impossible, unattainable ideal of physical and emotional perfection at such an early age, we set many young women up both for self-loathing and for hostility towards their female peers. It’s little wonder, then, that this study finds that talking about anxiety and depression isn’t as helpful for girls as it is for boys. It is a sign that those of us who care about young people need to be particularly attuned to the lack of resources that young girls have for safe and healthy opportunities to talk. Safe and healthy, by definition, means an uncompetitive environment, and it means providing them with understanding listeners whom these girls will not perceive as either judges or rivals.
This summer, my Wednesday mornings are going to start around 4:15AM. My poor showing in my last two marathons was due to too little mileage; one thing I’ve learned over the years is the value of a mid-week middle distance run. If I do a long run (16-22 miles) on Sunday, and I do a middling run on Wednesdays (10-12 miles, perhaps picking up the pace a bit during it), then I’m going to be much better off come marathon time.
Of course, with the temperatures starting to climb, and an 8:00AM class, that means I have to run very, very early. Getting up early isn’t hard for me; going to bed at a reasonable hour often is. Since I was a small child, I’ve liked getting up early; I hate being in bed when it’s light outside. I’ve never been much of a night owl either; much to my wife’s dismay, if I really had my way in all things, I’d go to bed at ten every night and get up at 4:30 every morning. When I’m eating right and light, I can do fine on 6 hours of sleep. If I start eating a lot of sugar or other heavy things, then I find I need another hour or two to feel rested.
I hit the pavement this morning just before 5:00, running a loop that takes me over into Glendale (for the locals, I ran from my house to the Rose Bowl, up Lida, past Art Center and into Chevy Chase Estates before swinging down through LCF and home). In the hills, I saw lots and lots of rabbits; the best time to see the bunnies is always right at dawn. I worry about them — the hills are so dry this summer, and they, like all the other critters, have to get closer and closer to people’s lawns and pools and bird baths in order to find water. That means a whole new set of dangers. I worried a lot about a lot of animals this morning as I ran, but I comforted myself with the certainty that the God who watches over me watches over them as well.
It’s a long day of teaching ahead — I do about six hours of teaching a day during summer school, all lecture or discussion moderation; it’s hard to be “on” for that long day in and day out. Caffeine helps, and the sublime endorphin high of a solid 12-miler will see me through the morning.
For my birthday dinner last night, my wife took me out to a great little vegan place in Los Feliz. Before dinner, we went to get massages. And I was reminded, not for the first time, of how much work I have had to do in my life to get to the place where I allow myself to be massaged and touched.
Though I’ve been running and doing other fitness activities for years, I didn’t have my first massage until I was 36. For years and years, the idea of having a stranger — or even someone whom I knew well — rubbing me all over freaked me out. No matter how sore or achey I got, I preferred to treat my pain with massive doses of ibuprofen. (At one time, when I was more foolish in my training, I was doing 2400 milligrams of ibuprofen every darned day, before, during, and after workouts.) It wasn’t the expense of a massage; I felt the same way about allowing a girlfriend or buddy to rub my neck or back.
I’ve always been an affectionate person. I’m a hugger, an enthusiastic back-slapper, a comforting patter of knees and shoulders. And I was always quite willing to rub the aching shoulders or neck of a friend or loved one. I never had a problem initiating physical contact; as long as I was in control of how much contact happened and how long it lasted, I was happy. Receiving was, to put it mildly, a different story. I had zero ability to lie back and enjoy any kind of physically pleasurable experience, unless that pleasure was provided by an inanimate object. (I remember discovering a massage chair in an airport lounge many years ago. Though I still had some trouble enjoying the experience, I was at least willing to try it.)
What I came to realize, with the help of she who is now my wife, is that I had a very serious control issue when it came to my body. As someone who battled eating disorders for years, and still has to watch his exercise addiction, I’m unduly infatuated with my own physical autonomy, particularly when it came to pleasure. I was very good — during my various youthful hospitalizations — about putting up with various medical procedures. I used to joke that I had an easier time being catheterized or having my stomach pumped than being given a full-body massage. (The former two experiences happened entirely too often.) So it wasn’t just about losing control — I could accept losing control when it involved suffering in a way that I couldn’t when it involved pleasure. What I couldn’t accept was the overwhelming discomfort that came when someone else seemed single-mindedly focused on giving pleasure to me.
The strange mix of guilt and anxiety that I felt just at contemplating getting massaged (by loved one or hired stranger) wasn’t rooted in any early childhood trauma, nor — as far as I could tell — was it connected to a profound sense of guilt about my body. My massage phobia was alive and well during the most promiscuous times of my life, when I had no trouble being sexual with people I barely knew, as long as those sexual experiences didn’t involve me passively receiving anything pleasurable. I had no trouble undergoing medical exams either; I’ve never been one of those men who is reluctant to go to the doctor. It wasn’t about a loathing of the body, it was about a mistrust of other human beings rooted in something so deep that I couldn’t name or see the source.
My very patient girlfriend, now my wife, worked on me gently and lovingly. I finally broke down and gave into a massage on Valentine’s Day, 2003. We were out in Palm Springs together, and when we woke up on the morning of February 14, she hit me with a bombshell: she had ordered a “couples massage.” Two men would be coming to our room that afternoon with tables and oils and New Age music, and they would rub each of us. For an hour. And there was to be no arguing; I was to give it a try as part of my Valentine’s present for her. And I gulped, swallowed hard, and agreed. I spent half an hour in the shower before the masseurs showed up, scrubbing myself clean. Though at this point I had been off drugs and alcohol for five years, I found myself longing for a quick little drink, or better yet, a handful of benzodiazepines to cope with the anxiety. But I went through the experience stone cold sober.
The masseur was wonderful, gentle, strong. He found the sore spots in my lower back and my chronically tight hamstrings right away. About fifteen minutes into the massage, I began to cry. I kept on crying, softly, until the hour-long experience was over. It was an extraordinarily cathartic mix of profound emotional discomfort, intense pleasure, and psychological release. After the men left, I felt overwhelmed with nausea. All of the toxins stored in my muscles for so long were now flooding my system, having been released by the massage; I spent the rest of Valentine’s Day 2003 puking. It wasn’t very romantic, but my gal was thrilled, knowing that I had broken through this phobia about pleasure and control.
I still only get massaged a couple of times a year. It’s still often a difficult experience to endure, though I’m getting better and better at receiving pleasure and healing work while I lie passive. I know I’ve got a strong puritanical streak within me. Most of the time, I think that puritanism is fundamentally good — after all, it’s rooted in the conviction that I must not allow my own selfish desires to trump my ethical responsibilities to the earth and its creatures. But there’s a thin line between restriction for the sake of sharing with other living beings, and anhedonia, the aversion to pleasure in its own right. Learning to accept massage, learning to accept touch, learning to accept caress and care is an important, if incredibly difficult, part of this journey towards making that vital distinction.
I’m still thinking a lot about the post immediately below this one, and the problematic relationship between veganism and feminism.
Let me reframe the dilemma, as I see it. Feminists are rightly concerned that too many women are too worried about their bodies, too anxious about fat. We are saddened by the huge amount of time and energy our sisters put into the pursuit of an unrealistic, cruel, unattainable ideal. (Let me say again how well Courtney Martin summarizes the problem). Part of the solution, of course, is helping women to see their appetite for food as fundamentally good. Feminism, at its core, rejects the notion that our longings to be full, to be satisfied, to have pleasure, are sinful and need to always be repressed.
But veganism demands intense scrutiny of labels. While it demands that scrutiny and mindfulness in the name of avoiding cruelty rather than in the pursuit of thinness, the end result is that the compulsive dieter and the vegan may both end up spending a great deal more time than the average person thinking about what they “should” or shouldn’t eat. Both the vegan and the compulsive dieter will have a hard time at restaurants, as they study the menus in hopes of finding something that in the first case has no animal product and in the second case contains the least amount of fat.
There’s another problem, one I’m fighting against in my own life right now. Mythago, who bluntly tells me where I’m right and where I’m not, periodically calls me on both my myopia and my condescension. Though it stings when she does it, I’m old enough to know that we learn more from honest critics than we do from our enthusiastic supporters. As someone who has set himself up to be a role model, who teaches and mentors, I am in regular need of having folks who point out the myriad ways in which I continue to fall short. And one big way in which I continue to fall short is around my continued tendency to quietly judge.
When I first became serious about being a male feminist, I quickly grasped that one of my chief “jobs” would be working to hold other men accountable. I understood I could no longer laugh along at the degrading humor, no longer (ever) darken the door of a strip club, no longer enable another man’s casual mistreatment of the women in his life. I lost more than a couple of guys from my life as a result. And today, one of the hardest things I have to work on is my tendency to judge those men in my peer group (I am easier on teen boys) who continue to lead lives that I view as secretive, irresponsible, chauvinistic. I often find myself quietly — and not so quietly — seething at these guys. Why haven’t they seen the light? How can they still do what they do?
Last Thursday, I stopped at a magazine stand to pick up the May issue of Track and Field News, my subscription having expired. I stood in line to buy my beloved collection of statistics and meet reports; two men (a bit older than me) were in front of me, one with a porn magazine. Perhaps to offset the “shame” of what they were doing, the pair were engaged in that boisterous bonhomie that so many guys use to cover guilt or insecurity, joking about the bodies of the models in the magazine. And while on some days I might have said something, last Thursday my stomach was upset and I was underslept. I just had no energy for an argument. So I stood there and I judged these two, feeling ever more smugly superior as I did so. And while it briefly felt good to judge, I walked away from the newsstand feeling even more nauseated than before, upset at my own temporary inability to love these men. I committed murder in my heart, if only for a moment, on Robertson Boulevard last week. And though it doesn’t happen often, it does occur often enough that I realize I need to be honest and open about this quiet, viciously judgmental streak.
It shows up around food these days too. It’s hard not to judge what other people put in their mouths. It’s not the “don’t they know that will make them fat” judgment, it’s the “don’t they know how that sausage was made” judgment. It’s the “don’t they understand how much pleasure they’re getting from another creature’s suffering” judgment. Sometimes, particularly when I myself am tempted by meat, I find myself flooded with a temporary but intense hostility to those who “don’t get it.” That hostility, alas, is accompanied by a feeling of superiority. Like most repentant libertines who turn to Puritanism of one form or another, I am unpleasantly prone to periodic bouts of holier-than-thou smugness!
But I know to my core that it is possible to live a life of radical justice without consistently condemning (in word or thought) those who fall short of that mark. I write this confession today because I see this tendency to judge, this periodic smugness, as another serious character defect to overcome. Living a spiritual life isn’t about achieving perfection, it’s about peeling another layer off the onion. A better image would be to say that our character defects are like layers of blankets thrown over a lamp. In order to reveal the maximum amount of light, we have to peel off one blanket after another. The light gets progressively brigher the more layers we lift, but there’s always still another one to remove. I’ve removed the blankets of reckless womanizing, drug and alcohol abuse, chronic disregard for my impact on those around me. The current layers that need to be lifted involve the bigger sins of pride and judgment and condescension. I’m making progress, but somedays, especially when I’m hungry or tired, it’s really hard.
So I want to apologize to those whom I have offended. I have worked so hard to create a very different kind of life for myself. I’ve worked hard to match my commitment to justice for women, justice for children, justice for animals, justice for the earth, with my own behavior. I’m by nature drawn to extremes, of course. To paraphrase Goldwater, extremism in the defense of the defenseless is no vice. But that extremism for me is about making a maximum effort to bring about change. It’s not about violence of any kind, and violence can be physical, it can be verbal, and yes, it can even be psychic. I don’t hit people and I don’t call them names, but sometimes in my head, I call down curses on my enemies that would have the psalmist gasping. (I do like the psalms so much, for just this reason.) And though King David himself called on God to break the teeth of his enemies, I’m convinced that God wants better than that from us.
Jesus calls us to live lives of love and justice. I’ve come so far in terms of working to embody that justice in my day-to-day life, in how I eat and make love and spend money. Now I need to redouble my effort to love, delight in, and enjoy the company of those who do not share my values or commitments. I need to work harder on overcoming my judgment of my brothers with their porn magazines or my sisters with their hamburgers (or vice versa). I have been where they are, and God’s grace was poured out on me. I am no better than they, and though I can try and model a different way to think about sex and food, in the end, all of this transformation is meaningless if I don’t genuinely love them.
Last week, a reader named Mr. Soul sent me an email:
I see that you have blogged extensively about what you
call “mental illness”–but you never use the word
“disability”–and have zero entries (in how many years
of blogging?) about disability or disability rights
politics. Do you think your dislike of using the term
disability, or the subject of disability itself (as
evidenced by the way you have consistently ignored the
topic) has to do with your fitness obsession, and the
way you conflate a healthy, fit body with godliness?
I’ll take it as a fair request, even though I think that there are some whopping and false assumptions behind the question he asks.
It’s true I don’t blog about disability issues. To be fair, I never intended this blog to be about all possible social justice issues. At its core, this blog reflects my own passions and interests, which tend to revolve around sexuality, gender, faith, and animal rights. I hardly ever blog about the Iraq war, for example, because I don’t think I have anything original to say on the topic. (My views are generally in line with those of, say, Dennis Kucinich, but he knows more about the topic than I.) The same is true of disability; it’s not something with which I am wholly unconcerned, but it is a topic about which I am sure I know less than many other fine bloggers.
Still, I do blog a lot about fitness. And at times, I admit, I do suggest that there is something inherently virtuous about paying close attention to diet and committing to regular exercise. Yes, I do believe that we are called to be both stewards of our bodies and stewards of the earth, and that — to me — means that what we eat and how we keep fit are issues of justice and responsibility.
Eating vegan (and whenever possible, eating “local”) is about taking responsibility for animals, for the earth, and for my own health. If I am to be of maximum service, I need to be as fit as possible. If my diet shortens my life, leaves me short of energy, and has me nauseated or depressed much of the time, then my food choices are holding me back from doing important work. If I eat such a big meal that I have to collapse into bed, leaving myself unavailable to my wife and friends, then my eating habits aren’t just hurting the planet, they’re hurting those to whom I am responsible. If I eat in such a way that I take years off of my life, then I steal from my future children time with their father. Heck, I won’t be a Dad until well into my forties — I have a moral responsibility to be fit, because being fit is one of the best guarantors I know that I will be around for my children as they grow.
So yes, I think that God calls us to eat justly and to keep our bodies fit. I do think vegetarianism (and better yet, veganism) is more than just one lifestyle choice among many: I think it’s a morally preferable choice because of its undeniable benefits both to the “eater” and the creatures of the earth who are not eaten. A meat-free, dairy-free, egg-free diet requires far fewer natural resources and far less land to maintain, and it involves far less cruelty to animals. A program of regular exercise keeps the body stronger, and thus more “available” to the world.
Mind you, it’s very easy to let exercise addiction become selfish. I work out much less than I would like. Left to my own devices, without outside commitments, I would happily train for an ultramarathon by logging 120-140 miles a week. I’ve got the build to do it, the determination to do it, the huge desire to do it — but it would eat into the time I spend with my wife, with my students, with my youth group, with my other (growing) volunteer activities, with my writing. I try and walk a thin line, one in which I maintain lifelong fitness (and get high on endorphins) without compromising my commitments to God and to His creatures. I’ve seen people abandon their families in order to run or bike or train for extreme fitness events; I understand the temptation to do so, but I cannot justify such single-mindedness.
I am absolutely convinced that working to live a healthy (or healthier) life is something virtually everyone can do, including those with severe disabilities. Those who are wheelchair bound or who face other huge physical challenges are no less fully human in my eyes — and I am deeply sorry if anything I have written has suggested otherwise. The ability to run marathons does not make me any more enlightened than someone who can’t walk. We are all called to do the best we can with what we have been given, and as the Paralympic Games have made clear, great fitness and profound disability are not as incompatible as we sometimes imagine. What matters is this: within the context of the choices we have, we ought to do whatever we can to gain or maintain health, with the caveat that that health ought not be bought at the cost of suffering inflicted on innocent creatures. (Hence my opposition to animal research.) What that specifically involves will look very different for different people, which is a very trite thing to say but is the most truthful and thoughtful thing I can contribute on the subject.
My prayers this morning go out to all those affected by the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy. I have a few Hokie alumni in my family (though far more who went to UVA), and I know a couple of folks still closely associated with the Blacksburg campus. I know that several of my readers are Hokies, and my thoughts and prayers are especially directed towards them.
It’s spring break (Pasadena City College has what must be America’s latest spring break), and I’m in our little study at home. I was in Virginia yesterday, if driving from the District to Dulles in a downpour can be considered being “in Virginia”. (We did find some great vegan Ethiopian food in a little strip mall in Ballston.) My wife and I spent the weekend in Washington attending the Art of Compassion gala to raise money for and celebrate the accomplishments of one of our very favorite charities, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
What I love about PCRM is that more than any other animal rights outfit, they adopt a holistic approach to personal and global transformation. PCRM is one of the leading organizations advocating vegan diets for all. Backed by a growing network of hundreds of doctors and nutritionists across the USA and Canada, PCRM is reaching out to millions through increasingly savvy media campaigns. (My wife and I are particularly pleased with — and particularly interested in supporting — PCRM’s brand-spankin’ new Spanish-language campaign.) PCRM also campaigns against the use of animals in medical research, and has played a leading role in developing alternatives. (PCRM helped create “Digital Frog” to help end school dissections; they’ve helped popularize TraumaMan to replace the use of live animals in emergency medical education.)
Most animal rights organizations — and Lord knows, they all do fabulous work — want to save animals. The folks who run PCRM, led by the remarkably energetic and charismatic Dr. Neal Barnard, want to do the same. But saving animals is about more than stopping a seal hunt, or shutting down a few fur farms or puppy mills. (All very worthy causes, mind.) PCRM’s point is that what is good for animals is also good for us and for our planet. A balanced vegan regimen requires far fewer natural resources to produce than a meat-and-dairy laden one. And the health benefits of veganism (or even its softer form, lacto-ovo vegetarianism) are sufficiently well-demonstrated as to be nigh on undeniable.
The world says: “Children need milk to build strong bones”. The world says “Beef is the best source of iron and protein, especially for women.” The world says “Without animal research, we can’t make necessary medical breakthroughs.” The world says “A vegetarian or vegan diet is too boring, too miserable, and too time-consuming for the average modern person.” And carefully, with painstakingly documented research, PCRM works to disprove all of these deeply-held myths. (PCRM helped expose the roots of the Vioxx tragedy: what had proved safe in animals turned out deadly for humans. Animal testing too often makes animals suffer and tells us nothing about what works for people.)
Sigh. This post is turning into an infomercial. That’s not what this blog is supposed to be about, and I apologize. This is how I feel after retreat weekends with my youth group, or after a men- against-rape training. I feel inspired and invigorated, and more than usually evangelical!
Last month, Stentor at Debitage put up this post: Moral Relativist Anti-Vegetarianism. Stentor, a trained amateur philosopher, has pointed out more than once that I have an exasperating habit of making sweeping moral statements — and promptly disavowing the idea that I am actually proselytizing, claiming at times that “this is just me.” He’s right. The truth is that a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle almost always is about making a universal moral claim. Stentor writes:
So what makes vegetarianism especially threatening whereas diversity in other parts of life evokes less hostility? One inescapable part of the picture — which unfortunately vegetarians spend a lot of time disclaiming in a usually futile effort to avoid the proselytizing charge — is that vegetarianism is a moral position. Aside from the small number of people who are vegetarians purely for health or henotheistic religious reasons, to become a vegetarian is to implicitly endorse a non-relativistic moral code*. Second, vegetarianism is threatening – becoming a vegetarian involves a significant change in a fairly fundamental part of one’s lifestyle. Third, vegetarianism is realistic. For all the joking about how life wouldn’t be worth living without bacon, vegetarianism is within reach of the majority of developed world adults. (It’s not without hardships for some, and I’m not endorsing a purely personal-lifestyle-change-based policy, but the fact remains that most North Americans could drastically reduce their meat consumption if they really put their minds to it.) Adding to the realism is the surface plausibility of the vegetarian position — it’s comparatively easy for even a committed omnivore to understand what makes vegetarians think they’re right. Bold emphasis is mine.
Stentor is frequently right, and here, he’s dead on. I realize that on this blog, I write about many things: diet, feminism, faith, exercise. As a progressive evangelical writing for a general audience, I’ve deliberately disavowed Christian proselytizing in this space. Do I wish more people would pursue a personal, transforming relationship with Christ? Yes. Do I believe that no one can be saved without consciously forming that relationship? No, I don’t. Do I wish more people — especially men — would embrace feminist principles of egalitarianism in every aspect of their public and private lives? Yes. Do I want every man (and woman) to stop using porn, to stop objectifying women, to stop the economic, sexual, and physical exploitation of their sisters? Yes.
So the question I’m wrestling with is this: does my veganism correlate more closely with my feminism or my Christianity? If it’s like my Christian faith, it’s a “personal choice” — one among many. I do believe that my Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Wiccan, animist, and atheist friends will be saved (though how, exactly, is not something I can always articulate.) I do believe that I am called to follow Christ, but I also believe that others follow Him even as they call Him by other names. What would make the world a far better place isn’t necessarily everyone becoming Christian; what would make the world a far better place is if everyone actually lived out the principles of their faiths and creeds. But if every man and woman on this planet saw women as equally worthy of dignity and respect, as equally entitled to share in resources and in decision-making, as equally prepared to lead, as equally deserving of being seen as a whole person — then heck yes, the planet would be better off. Feminism is, in that sense, essential.
And I’m prepared to start arguing that vegetarianism (or better yet, veganism) has the power to bring about tremendous change. It will improve the health of the individual and of the planet, and it will exponentially reduce the unnecessary suffering of sentient, conscious creatures. So yes, I’m going to risk alienating still more readers with a more explicit commitment to veganism here on this blog.
In the end, I’m trying to follow ever more closely Forster’s maxim: “only connect.” What I wear matters. What I eat matters. Everything we do connects us to other living creatures. Every darned thing I do every day matters. And my brothers and sisters, the same does go for you too. Every dollar you spend is a vote. The food you buy, the clothes you wear, the words you speak: these impact the world. And I’m asking you to consider making the best possible choices in your public, private, educational, familial, sexual, and economic lives.
My commitment to full veganism is relatively recent (I’ve been a vegetarian for longer.) It’s been a slow evolution rather than an instant decision. Like most lasting conversions, it has come gradually rather than in a flash of light. But you’re gonna be hearing more on this blog about animal rights, veganism, and how they connect to faith and feminism.
More about my PCRM weekend below the fold. Continue reading ‘A long post about PCRM, veganism and gettin’ evangelical’
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.
Is the left guilty of the opposite? Frequently. Many in the GLBTQ community have welcomed the increasing scientific consensus that the “cause” of homosexuality is biological, and thus not an individual choice. But there are problems with this, problems that the recent New York Times article hints at. Male homosexuality seems to be more closely correlated with pre-natal biology than female homosexuality. If GLBTQ activists attach themselves too closely to the scientific community, we end up with some awkward conclusions to wrestle with, particularly the serious possibility that women’s sexuality is far more mutable in adulthood than men’s. If we suggest that gay and lesbian rights ought to be based on the reality that some folks “are born this way”, we end up with an argument that might be much more helpful to men than to women.
I’ve never liked the “argument from nature” as a defense of gay rights. My support for same-sex marriage, for example, is not rooted in a sense that gay and lesbian folks were born “that way.” My support for SSM is rooted in a conviction that marriage is a fundamental good, and that we all ought to be free to marry the person with whom we feel we have the best opportunity to build a life most excellent. (In my case, that means trying over and over again until hitting the jackpot.) Whether or not someone’s brain is different from his or her brother’s isn’t of interest to me; who he or she longs to be with is, regardless of whether that longing is rooted in environment or heredity.
Evolutionary biology can go a long way, I think, in explaining why it is we want what we want. But there’s a colossal difference between understanding the origin of our desires on the one hand, and assuming that we have no choice in how we express those desires on the other. (See my “Biology and Bladders” post from last summer.) To quote myself:
What I do question as a pro-feminist man is whether our “nature” is ever an excuse for poor behavior. It’s one thing to acknowledge the very real presence of physiological factors that influence our wants; another thing altogether to suggest that men have little or no control over how they respond to those influences! What I find so exasperating is that so many men confuse an explanation for an excuse, denying their own ability (or that of the “average man”) to resist and control those impulses.
Obviously, I think same-sex marriage is a social good. Equally passionately, I believe that we all are capable of restricting and channeling our desires, whether those desires are rooted in our DNA, our brain, or our dysfunctional upbringing. No desire is so strong that it cannot be shaped by free will. At the same time, in a healthy and just society, we should challenge people to curb only those desires that have great potential for harm if acted upon. For a variety of reasons, I see prostitution and pornography as profoundly harmful — and argue that all of us can should choose not to make use of either industry. For a variety of reasons, I do not see cultural acceptance of homosexuality as profoundly harmful, and so I don’t see any reason to ask my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to transform themselves.
Mind you, I think our sexuality is highly mutable. Put another way, I do believe that if I wanted to be gay badly enough, and if I sought God’s help, I could make myself be attracted to men. I might even be capable of falling in love with a man. I see no reason to do so, of course. But my belief in the power of the will, aided by grace, is pretty profound. And my frustration with most popular coverage of science grows, as people continue to be tempted to use biology and evolution as an excuse to accept things — in particular, bad male behavior — as natural, inevitable, and beyond the capacity of the individual human being to change.
Last night I did my regular Tuesday night Pilates workout. I’ve been working out with Stephanie, for my trainer, for nearly two years. Slowly but surely, I’ve gotten more and more advanced.
Pilates is all about training the body’s core. And while I’d spent years doing crunches and side bends, it was only when I started doing Pilates that I began to discover a whole set of muscles that I had never imagined existed. Until 2005, I never knew that we all have something called a “pelvic floor”. I didn’t know about my transverse abdominus, or my psoas. And I certainly didn’t expect my strongest muscles to become those below my navel, above my pubis, and between my pelvic bones. I can say that after a couple of years of serious work, I’ve developed some pretty strong lower abs.
As I was talking with Stephanie last night, we discussed how few men do Pilates (even though Pilates is named for its male founder.) Our conversation turned, and it occurred to me how very few men I know (particularly young men) feel a sense of connection with their own bodies. We are trained in American culture to think of the male body as a performance machine; men evaluate their body’s worth based less on aesthetics than on functionality: does the body have the strength to lift heavy objects? Does the penis perform on command? Men call their arms “guns”; they refer to their penises as “rods” and “pistons” that “screw”. It’s the language of war, of car repair, of carpentry.
Many men are intensely anxious about their bodies. Though an increasing number of men struggle with eating disorders and a culturally imposed pressure to have perfect abs, even more men worry about their sexual performance. We live in a culture of epidemic male anxiety about erectile “dysfunction”; three hours watching commercials during a football game or fifteen minutes reading the ads in the sports section will make it clear that the worry about “getting it up” is nigh on universal among sexually active men. (I posted a bit about erectile dysfunction in May of last year.)
But the paradox is obvious: we live in a society where there exists tremendous male anxiety about sexual performance (as measured by drug company profits alone). At the same time, very few men bother to connect their sexual function with the health, strength, and well-being of the rest of their body. It’s as if they think of the penis as quite literally “standing alone”, like a house without a foundation. And in the rush to seek medical solutions to impotence and poor sexual control (premature ejaculation, weak erections), they ignore the very basic reality that strengthening the muscles of the lower core, particularly the pelvic floor, can have a dramatic and powerful effect on one’s sex life.
There’s a line between candor and gross “TMI” (what my cousin Dinah calls an “over-share”), and I’m not going to cross it in this post. I will say, however, that my sense of myself as a sexual person has been radically reshaped by an intense commitment to Pilates! My wife (who has also beecome an active and advanced Pilates practitioner) has noticed the difference, and our intimate life has deepened and intensified as a consequence. Though we’ve both been athletic for years, like most Americans we didn’t connect our sexual lives to our entire bodies. Too often, we thought of sex as involving primarily the brain, the genitalia, the heart. Committing to Pilates has been revelatory in more ways than one.
My core exercise is running, and as long as my hips and knees hold up, I’ll keep doing that. But I’ve decided to drop the boxing component of my work-out rituals; I’ve been training thrice weekly at a local boxing gym since January 2006. I’ve certainly learned a lot about the sport. But while my upper body is stronger, and my shoulders broader, I can’t say I feel as if I feel fundamentally transformed by the discipline of learning to hit things well. (Heck, I’m pretty ambivalent about hitting things to begin with; my neo-Anabaptist pacifism makes me question the whole world of amateur boxing.) Working out on the “reformer” and on the balls and mats with Stephanie not only tones and shapes me, it teaches me about the profound interconnectedness of my body and my soul.
In developing my core muscles as they’ve never been developed before, I begin to understand that though my body is indeed mortal (as opposed to an eternal soul) it is not(as so many of my brothers believe) a “machine to be maintained.” It is not a bag of bones and muscles and fat that carries my brain around. In my younger years, and even until recently, I had a sense that my body was always betraying me. It would get sick at the least opportune time. It would fail to do as I wanted it to, particularly early on in certain intimate relationships. It would suddenly overwhelm me with its imperious demands for food, sleep, sex. I felt as if I alternately indulged and disciplined my body, as if it was some sort of hyper-active child who needed to be placated, monitored, and periodically spanked.
My spiritual growth, my commitment to doing “deep work” on masculinity and pesonal transformation, my adoption of a vegan diet, and my now two-year long commitment to Pilates are all connected. I’m a fierce (and to many readers, tiresome) proponent of the idea that everything matters. What we put in our mouths matters; what comes out of our mouth matters; how we make love matters; how we spend matters; how we treat our bodies matters. Every action we take, no matter how small, is a vote — it either builds a more just society and helps us become the person we are called to be, or it takes us further away from those goals. Pilates doesn’t make me a more generous person per se; it does teach me (like nothing else) of the profound interconnectedness of my physical, psychological, sexual and even spiritual well-being.
I write from a place of profound privilege. I can afford a vegan diet. I can afford private Pilates training. I am not smugly demanding that others do as I have done. But there are inexpensive alternatives, and I ought to do more on this blog to publicize those. And it’s worth pointing out that we spend a fortune in this country on pharmacological treatments for erectile dysfunction (I know men whose spending on Viagra or Levitra would pay for a number of Pilates classes). Only a fraction of the men pumping these drugs into their system have no alternative. Most cases of erectile dysfunction, particularly in otherwise healthy men, are connected to performance anxiety rather than a genuine organic malfunction. And a huge part of the problem for many, many American men is that they are ignorant of the reality of how their penis works. It rises up from a man’s core, and as I (and anyone else who does serious Pilates or yoga work) can attest, it functions in harmony with the muscles of the lower core and the pelvic floor. The link between strengthening the deep core muscles of the body and enhanced sexual pleasure for both parties in a relationship is obvious and dramatic. And too many men are fundamentally ignorant of this basic physiological truth.
There are some good books out there on male bodies: David Friedman’s fine A Cultural History of the Penis and Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. (I use both in my men and masculinity humanities class — I’ll be teaching it in the fall!) But as I advance as a Pilates student, my own sense of the male body is being transformed. And there’s a need out there for some good writing that synthesizes the wisdom of Pilates (and its companion discipline, yoga) with solid contemporary research on men and masculinity. Most men who lead lives of quiet desperation feel some of that despair because of the perceived failures of their flesh. Reaching them is vital.
Last week, Jill linked to the results of a “modesty survey”. The survey collected responses from more than 1600 young Christian men, all of whom deigned to tell young women “what they really think” about dress and modesty. (Questions were submitted, anonymously, by more than 200 young Christian women.)
I’m not a social scientist, so I can’t vouch for the methodology of the survey. I am an evangelical, a gender studies professor, and a volunteer youth minister who works with teens at church, however. I’ve got a “dog in this hunt”, as it were, and I find the results of the survey disheartening, even appalling. If you browse the results, you find many gems (the best of which Jill has already noted in her excellent post). I found this one, written as a “final thought to young women” telling:
There are many Godly men out there, as I’m sure this survey will prove, that are dying to give you their utmost respect when you choose to follow God’s leading in this area of modesty in your life.
This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the sort of theology that seems so darned prevalent among the male respondents. One of the overriding themes of the gospel is that respect isn’t earned; Jesus embraces the very people (including women) whom the rest of society finds most disreputable, and he rebukes the very folk who assume that their lives and morals are above reproach. To say, as this anonymous lad does, that “we are dying to give you (our) utmost respect when you choose” to be modest is to misconstrue the Gospel message.
Christ reminds us over and over again that anyone can love the lovable; the test is to love the enemy. In the same way, we are called to respect and treat with equal human dignity those whose clothing choices we find most challenging. To paraphrase our Lord in Luke 6:
If you respect only those whose bodies and dress do not tempt you, what credit is that to you? Even ’sinners’ respect those who arouse no desire within them. . And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ’sinners’ do that.
In other words, the Christian life is about rejecting the notion that human relationships are quid pro quo. To live an authentic Christian life is to live out one’s commitments with those who (intentionally or not) challenge those commitments, not merely those who reinforce them.
What I find especially galling about the modesty survey is that it is hosted by some folks who call themselves The Rebelution. They explain it here:
The official definition of the ‘rebelution’ is “a teenage rebellion against the low expectations of an ungodly culture.” When you look around today, in terms of godly character and practical competence, our culture does not expect much of us young people. We are not only expected to do very little that is wise or good, but we’re expected to do the opposite. Our media-saturated youth culture is constantly reinforcing lower and lower standards and expectations.
The word ‘rebelution’ is a combination of the words “rebellion” and “revolution.” So it carries a sense of an uprising against social norms. But in this case, it’s not a rebellion against God-established authority, but against the low expectations of our society.
Oh heck, I’ll sign on to that. I’m all for challenging young people to lead lives of justice, of compassion, of hard work. I’m resolutely committed to the notion that young people today can embrace lives of service, of sharing, and, when called for, of self-restraint. But the bold rhetoric of “rebelution” is completely undercut by the modesty survey’s suggestion that most young men are, in fact, fundamentally weak and need their “sisters in Christ” to protect them.
To promote the idea that men’s sexual desire is stronger than women’s is not counter-cultural; it’s buying into a belief widely held in contemporary society. To promote the idea that young men’s lust is so powerful that it is nearly impossible to control without the active assistance of “modest” young women simply perpetuates one of the great cultural lies of our era: the myth of male weakness. The modesty survey, far from reflecting any true counter-cultural insights, simply reinforces two nasty untruths widely believed by Christians and non-Christians alike: first, that most young women do not themselves have a strong sexual drive; second, that male lack of self-control is at least in part due to female irresponsibility.
On the Rebelution site, they claim that their movement has a Viking battle cry: “Do Hard Things”! They write:
Here’s The Rebelution’s challenge: Do hard things. Learn a lesson from the Vikings. Do hard things and you will carry the battle every time. If you are willing to take on responsibilities that others delegate or neglect you will gain the benefits of that exertion.
Too often we delegate the responsibility for our education, our character, our future, etc. to others who hold far less of a stake in how things turn out. And more often than not a failure to perform in the areas of character and competence are due to a lack of past exertion.
Gosh, leaving aside the whole silly Viking thing, that’s a message I like. This distance-running, workaholic, over-committed, underslept, vegan professor and activist digs the idea of “doing hard things.” I’m a great believer that we are called to carry a cross, called to do the hard work of building a just and peaceable Kingdom. Whether his classmate is in sweats or a miniskirt, a young man’s responsibility to see her as a complete human being is always the same. When we teach young men that self-control is not contingent on women’s dress, then we really do teach them to “do hard things.” But such a message is clearly too radical for the folks at Rebelution.
UPDATE: Kate asks some excellent questions here. It’s a long meditation on the “theory of desire” (particularly the one articulated by the Modesty Project folks), and raises some interesting challenges to all Christian narratives of sexual desire.
A couple of women’s sports notes.
So much for women’s college basketball being less competitive than men’s! That old lie got put to bed these past few days. The lowest men’s seed to advance to the Sweet Sixteen was number 7 UNLV; the women have already sent a pair of double-digit seeds (Florida State, a #10, and everybody’s cinderella, Marist, a #13), to the regional semifinals. This is great for the women’s game, even though it shot my bracket. (I was surprised that Stanford lost, but as a good Cal alum, shed no tears for them.)
I’m late to the story that I read about both at Feministing and Feministe: Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals. In recent years, competitive weightlifting for girls (as well as boys) has become very popular in the Sunshine State:
Extracurricular club programs for girls have sprung up around the country since women’s weightlifting became an Olympic sport in 2000. But Florida, with 170 high school teams that have produced two Olympians and several dozen world team members, has “set the gold standard” for the sport, said Rodger DeGarmo, director of high performance and coaching for USA Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, the governing body that oversees Olympic lifting.
It’s a very positive article, and here’s hoping the sport catches on.
I have friends of both sexes who are serious lifters. The sport has never appealed to me, largely because I generally like to minimize my indoor workouts. But what I honor about lifting weights is its fundamental democracy: anyone, at any size, can become a very strong lifter if they work at it. There are few other sports in which “God-given natural talent” takes such an obvious backseat to persistence and determination. It’s much, much easier to make a weak young person into a strong lifter than a slow young person into a fast sprinter! This doesn’t mean weightlifting is easy: it is (not literally) often backbreakingly difficult; it takes time and effort and concentration; it takes mental toughness. More than most sports, doing it well involves intense visualization; it teaches those who practice it to see themselves completing the task before they actually attempt it.
One vital feminist task, of course, is teaching women of all ages — particularly the young — that their bodies belong to them. They are not baby-machines-in-training, nor are they objects to visually (or physically) gratify men. Building strength and muscle serves to undermine the ugly cultural fetish for young women’s bodies that appear emaciated, frail, vulnerable. Lifting ever-greater weights gives young women a tangible sense of physical success; they can measure their body’s progress in terms that have nothing to do with beauty or sex appeal or reproductive potential.
Leigha, the Spruce Creek senior, said she loved the competitive aspect of lifting.
“It’s a rush, it really is,” she said. “We have boards in our weight rooms with the names of all the record breakers, and you’re thinking about how bad you want your name on that record for everybody to see.”
I like reading that.
After all, “weight” is always a feminist issue. Since the 1920s, generations of young American women have desperately tried to lose it, even as we live in a culture that celebrates “weight” and “heft” as attributes of power and influence. We speak of folks “throwing their weight around”; we note that the words of someone we admire “carry a lot of weight.” To call someone a “lightweight” is never praise; it suggests superficiality, incompetence, immaturity. Outside of the discussion of women’s bodies, “weight” almost always connotes something positive and powerful.
Weightlifters, like dieters, are very concerned with numbers. But while the goal of the dieter is generally to become smaller and smaller, lighter and lighter, the goal of the lifter is to push more and more, to see the numbers rise rather than fall. As with wrestling, competitive lifting offers different weight classs to its participants; a team that wants to be successful thus must have a group of girls with very different body types. More so than virtually any other sport, this encourages coaches and teachers to recruit a wide variety of girls.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an exercise fanatic. My desire to share the gospel of fitness, however, is not motivated by a desire to get everyone to start chasing an unattainable physical ideal. We live in a culture in which most of us are alienated from our bodies, often ashamed of our bodies. The best kinds of fitness activity teach us to reconnect with our bodies, to love our bodies, to experience the power and pleasure our bodies can bring to us.
And in achieving this goal for high school-age women, Florida seems to be ahead of everyone else.
Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).
I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.
This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.
What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.
Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:
They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue.
Authentic virtue is never selfish, as Aristotle and a hundred other wise folks have pointed out. Authentic virtue is about balancing one’s own need to endlessly recreate and improve with one’s responsibility to the world at large. If our running gives us great pleasure, but leaves us so drained and self-absorbed that we are less available for our loved ones and our community, then we’re not being virtuous. We have to make choices, and in the past couple of years, I’ve made that choice. Many folks think I work out a lot (14-20 hours per week). But that’s nothing compared to what I would do if I gave up more of my outside commitments! Oh, how I long to take eighteen good months and train for a solid 100-miler. But running 120 miles per week would take too much from my wife, too much from my chinchillas, too much from my students and my youth group, my seven classes, my mentees, my colleagues.
The greatest danger for distance athletes, however, isn’t that we become selfish. The greatest danger, one that I see in the life of my ailing relation, is that we become so enraptured by our own physical capabilities that we begin to believe we are radically autonomous. Our bodies do such incredible things, and bring us such pride and satisfaction, that we start to think we’re indestructible. We become particularly loath to rely on others, jealously, often pridefully guarding our own independence. The phrase “our bodies, ourselves” takes on a radically different meaning: our identity as human beings becomes enmeshed with our sense of what our bodies can do.
We came into this world naked and helpless. We had no control over our flesh; we were diapered and dressed and spanked and bathed and fed on another’s schedule. We wailed and flailed, but for the first few years were utterly incapable of meeting our own needs. And unless we are taken young and suddenly, most of us will l