Archive for the 'Books' Category

Time to Grow Up: a review of Philip Gulley’s “If the Church were Christian”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 11, 2010
in Books and Christianity
. 7 Comments

I recently received a copy of If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus. Written by Philip Gulley, a former Catholic turned Quaker minister, If the Church were Christian is a brief, highly readable, and impassioned call for a a rethinking of our faith along progressive lines.

We are a society that has grown fond in the past decade of polemical tracts from across the political and theological spectrum. The Christian marketplace groans under the weight of books calling for reform and transformation of one sort or another. Few in the church look at contemporary Christianity and say “Yes, this is exactly what Jesus intended.” But even fewer make a coherent case for what the church ought to look like, and of those, hardly any do so with the grace and the winsomeness of Gulley.

A little over a decade ago, I read John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Though as a liberal evangelical, I shared most of Spong’s progressive views on sexual liberation and economic justice, I winced at the former bishop’s tone. Spong hectored and belittled those who clung to more traditional views; he couldn’t resist mocking those for whom the Virgin Birth and the resurrection were precious articles of faith — and fact. Spong did little to win the hearts and minds of traditionalists; rather, despite his good heart and his excellent politics, he became an easy target for them because of his tendency to be so relentlessly intemperate. I’ve been waiting ever since for a progressive manifesto that argued for the same end goal — but did so with a far greater respect for those who continue to hold conservative views. My wait is over. Continue reading ‘Time to Grow Up: a review of Philip Gulley’s “If the Church were Christian”’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some related posts of mine:

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

Dating to Disappoint: the Bulworth Solution

Dare to Disappoint: Cheering on Sandra Tsing Loh

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

GLBTQ History Spring 2010 reading list

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 23, 2009
in Books and GLBTQ
. 6 Comments

I’ve finished putting together my reading list for History 24F, my survey course in American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered history. Given the expense of books (and the problems we have putting together readers on campus), there’s no such thing as a perfect syllabus — but here are the four texts I’ll be asking my students to buy. It’s a fairly significant change from when I taught the course a year ago – but it’s good to experiment about.

Gay L. A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians, Lillian Faderman.

Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America, Leila Rupp

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel

I read Stone Butch Blues years ago, but only thanks to recent suggestions have I decided to include it in next year’s syllabus. The Bechdel book was suggested by several folks last week — I picked up a copy, and read it over the weekend. It’s pitch-perfect. Many thanks to all who recommended it to me!

“The Fountainhead”, Muggledom, and a road to feminism: why I both loathe and appreciate Ayn Rand

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 17, 2009
in Books, Feminist Pedagogy, Teaching and Youth
. 24 Comments

In my reprint of a post about young conservative students, I made a crack about Ayn Rand. Since Rand has been the subject of a pair of recent biographies, and has been much discussed on the right as a kind of ideological mother figure of the so-called Tea Party Insurrection against the Obama Administration, I think it’s time to say a bit more about her work.

I discovered Ayn Rand at 16. A friend of mine finished “The Fountainhead”, and came to me one morning before class: “This book has changed my life, Hugo, and it will change yours. Read it!” I liked and respected Lisa, and accepted the thick and battered paperback she proffered. I took it home, and showed my mother, a philosophy professor. She took one look at the book, grimaced, and then said “Darling, I won’t say anything. Make up your own mind.”

It wasn’t until I read “American Psycho”, many years later, that I had a comparable experience of near-instant loathing of a text, an author, a prose style, and a worldview. I was a young lefty at 16, struggling through John Rawls and Herbert Marcuse. My favorite novel that year was Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” one of the most polemical works that the great local writer (I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula) wrote. Rand was ideologically and stylistically abhorrent to me at 16, and though it’s been years since I’ve picked up any of her work (I finished “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” through sheer acts of will in my youth), my general feeling of disdain on every imaginable ground remains.

But I’ve met many young people, more often women than men, who — like my friend Lisa in high school — find great inspiration in Ayn Rand. Generally, there’s a specific type of teen who falls in love with either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. She’s usually very bright, raised to one degree or another with the “pleasing woman discourse” (what I call “the Martha Complex.“) She often finds her classes dull and her teachers pedestrian. She suspects she’s destined for something extraordinary, that she’s somehow different from everyone else — but unlike the immensely talented dancer or athlete or actor, she doesn’t have one specific skill that stands out as a ticket to stardom. She vacillates between feelings of intense superiority — and feelings of equally intense guilt for the way in which she looks down on so many of those around her.

She picks up Rand, and suddenly it all makes sense. She is superior, one of the elect. She isn’t what a far more interesting and talented writer would call a “Muggle”. She has an exalted destiny, just as she had suspected. Rand inspires her; telling her that it’s time to throw off the chains of obligation and guilt which have left her confined and miserable. In an odd way, Rand — who would be exceedingly difficult to classify as a feminist — is often a gateway into feminism for some young women. It’s through reading Rand that not-insignificant percentages of young women begin to think seriously about what they want for themselves rather than what others want for them. Young women who have the false impression that feminism is about collective victimization find temporary inspiration in “The Fountainhead” — and in due course, when they encounter real sexism in the real world, they reluctantly concede that perhaps those nasty old feminists had a point after all. I’ve met a hell of a lot of strong young progressive feminists in their twenties and early thirties who were enchanted by Randian philosophy in their teens.

So yes, I think an infatuation with Ayn Rand is developmentally appropriate for adolescents. She flatters and inspires the bright and the isolated and the uncertain; she’s useful for helping some young people, girls in particular, break the deadly people-pleasing habit. So if reading “Atlas” or “Fountainhead” is what it takes to inspire the lonely, the introverted, and the insecure — then may the God that she rejected bestow blessings upon that poor unhappy soul that was Ayn Rand.

This post has been altered from the way it originally appeared earlier today, ill-considered references to comic books, Star Trek, and New Kids on the Block were deleted.

Call for book suggestions

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 16, 2009
in Books and GLBTQ
. 6 Comments

I’m revising my syllabus for my GLBTQ American history course in the spring. If anyone has any cool books on the various subjects contained within that vast category they’d like to suggest (that would work for a college audience) I’d be grateful. Can’t keep up with all that’s out there.

A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 03, 2009
in Books, Feminism and Politics
. 4 Comments

It’s been a year since the most exciting election in my memory (and, according to my septuagenerian mother, a certified political junkie, of hers as well.) The books and documentaries about the 2008 presidential campaign have arrived full force in the market place. One focuses on the trio of women who helped define this extraordinary moment in very recent history: You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe by Leslie Sanchez, a Republican activist and CNN contributor. Sanchez looks at the way the media and the nation itself responded to Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama — and what those responses say about the state of feminism at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century.

(Other feminist bloggers have already reviewed YCALWM, including Clarissa, Amelia at Equal Writes, and Stacyx.)

As a registered Republican and liberal feminist who longs to see a return to progressive values within the GOP (the party of Millicent Fenwick, a political hero of mine), I’ve admired Leslie Sanchez as a sensible voice for inclusion and moderation within a party that has far too few such voices. Hers is a welcome perspective, and the fairness with which she treats both Clinton and Palin is perhaps the book’s strongest suit.

Sanchez, no supporter of Hillary, explores the pivotal question of why so many younger women saw a vote for Barack Obama as a far more revolutionary act than a vote for the first of their sex to have a serious shot at winning the presidency. She suggests that Clinton tied herself too closely to older white feminists, commonly identified with the Second Wave, and lost a generational connection with younger voters. Sanchez is right about this, I think; there’s no question that the gap between Second and Third Wavers (represented by women over and under 45) about Clinton was a significant one, much covered in the press and lamented in the feminist blogosphere. But Sanchez, whose feminist credentials are slight at best, is too dismissive when she talks about the “brashness and tired agendas of the women’s rights advocates (backing Clinton”. It wasn’t the agenda that was wrong — it was the generational disconnect that doomed the junior senator from New York. Continue reading ‘A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book’

Doubt and desire, faith and feminism: on “Jesus Girls”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 07, 2009
in Books, Christianity and Faith and Feminism
. 0 Comments

Anastasia McAteer is a fellow Pasadenan and Fuller Seminary alum whose blog Feminary has long been one of my favorites. From her blog and from Facebook, I learned about the new anthology to which Anastasia has contributed: Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Female and Evangelical, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. For anyone interested in the intersection of feminism and faith, the title alone makes the book indispensable, and I ordered a copy. (It’s cheaper from the publisher than it is on Amazon, where the book is out of stock at the moment. Click the link.)

As Notess writes in her introduction, one of the defining experiences of American evangelicalism is the offering of a “testimony” — the story one tells to those as yet “unsaved” of one’s conversion experience. Even for cradle Christians, evangelicalism generally requires that each believer be born again, even if that rebirth happens at age eight; all must make “a decision for Christ.” Jesus Girls is rich in testimony, but not of the sort taught in Sunday Schools. The nearly two-dozen essays within its pages bear witness to the extraordinarily diverse, yet surprisingly similar ways in which young evangelical women come to grips with their sex and their faith. Though all were raised under the umbrella of evangelicalsm, we have stories from women who grew up in a wide variety of traditions — Free Methodist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Reformed, and, of course, “non-denom”, meaning unaffiliated.

The essays are arranged by theme: Community; Worship; Education: Gender and Sex; Story and Identity. Some of the women who write have left the church, but most are still committed Christians, though their faith has changed since they were little girls. Beyond the themes imposed by the editor, the essays reflect similar experiences, some of which are hardly unique to evangelicalism. The desire to please parents and teachers at any cost, to not be a bad girl and to fit in, is one with which we too often raise our daughters both in and out of the church. But growing up evangelical adds a twist: God is watching, watching all the time, and nothing escapes His gaze. That theme of relationship with God and Jesus appears again and again in the collection, sometimes explicitly and others obliquely, but frequently touching on the difficulty of developing a relationship with the Lord that goes beyond the people-pleasing with which women are invariably inculcated.

For those who have stayed in the faith, the stories in Jesus Girls reflect the ways in which their faith has had to grow in new and unexpected ways. In her “Why Isn’t God Like Eric Clapton”, Andrea Palpant Dilley embraces traditionally masculine imagery, and the tensions it creates to do so as a believer embodied as a woman:

My doubt was my desire, to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God…I am at core an Old Testament Christian: prone to Job’s questions, David’s psalmic longing, Cain’s wandering, and Solomon’s love of beauty and dominion. My faith has been more predatory than anything else, a hungry prowl in the dark and a practical, unrefined pursuit — like chasing a ten-foot tiger with a carrot peeler — something larger than life that has to be found with the inadequate tools of mundane life.

The theme of rejecting, reclaiming, and revisioning relationship with God is beautifully explored in Heather Baker Utley’s “The Journey Towards Ordination”. Raised a liberal United Methodist, Utley became an evangelical in college, and flirted with embracing the female submissiveness (the complementarian heresy) so much a part of more conservative churches. In time, however, Utley realized she needed to do more than simply accept the liberalism of her childhood or the traditionalism of her late adolescence; she had to do something new, something adult:

My identity wasn’t supposed to be defined by a gender role or an occupation — it was suppoed to be defined by God. Maybe I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and use my pastoral gifts elsewhere, but if that was true, I wanted to make those decisions as a function of my own spiritual growth, not as a result of the church giving me a gender-based identity to become submissive and maternal. Gone were the role, the traditions, the “liberal” way I was raised and the “conservative” life I’d adopted. I felt empty without these pieces of my identity, but I was filled with hope. I knew I was going to start over — just God and me — and I was going to rediscover who I was defined only by my relationship with him.

Emphasis mine, and it’s in bold because it encapsulates the theme of the book. So many books about women and the church are written from one of two perspectives: a secular progressive standpoint, deeply suspicious of any attempt to reconcile feminism and faith — or froma rigidly conservative position, eager to push both sexes into narrowly-defined, “God-ordained” complementary roles. Jesus Girls is particularly welcome because it is a book written by women whose Christian faith, for the most part, remains at the center of their lives, but it is a faith that they have defined and redefined for themselves. Some have left the churches of their childhood (Anastasia McAteer grew up Evangelical Free, flirted with collegiate pentecostalism, and is now an Episcopalian), others have stayed in the denominations in which they were raised. But each has wrestled with what it means to be a woman, to be a Christian, to be in relationship not only with God but with God’s frequently exasperating, sometimes lovely, and invariably imperfect people. The stories of that wrestling are the heart of the book.

For progressive secular feminists, Jesus Girls will burst some commonly-held assumptions about evangelical women. For women still in the churches who have not yet found a way to give voice to doubt, this anthology will be a great comfort. For all of us, it is a reminder that faith and feminism can be reconciled — and that reconciliation isn’t just a theory, it’s something that women are living out every damn day. That reconcilation takes many forms, and in the rich variety of stories within this slim book, there are examples and inspiration aplenty.

A new book on the evangelical left

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 28, 2009
in Books and Christianity
. 1 Comment

Brian Auten, who blogs at Withered Grass and with whom I share a number of Fuller Seminary connections (his wife is a Fuller grad; my last ex-wife was as well) has a wonderful and very interesting two-part interview with David R. Swartz, a Notre Dame PhD who is preparing a book about the history of the modern evangelical left. Here’s part one of the interview and here’s part two.

I’ve focused much more on my feminist blogging in recent years, but I still consider myself a member of the evangelical left, heavily influenced by Anabaptist critiques of both Reformed and Catholic Christianity. Many of my students and colleagues are floored when I come out to them, often in casual conversation, as an evangelical, born-again Christian. And my faith still informs my politics more than the other way around.

Men and Feminism: a review of Shira Tarrant’s newest

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 09, 2009
in Books and Male feminists
. 18 Comments

A year and a half ago, I wrote a review of the very fine anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant of CSU Long Beach. I was honored to be among those asked to contribute to the volume, and am glad that the book has been generally very well-received.

Shira — with whom I will be speaking on a panel at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in November — has a new book out which I’ve been tardy in reviewing: Men and Feminism, published by Seal Press as part of its wonderful “Seal Studies” series focusing on various aspects of feminism, history, and society. Barely 160 pages, Men and Feminism is a quick primer rather than an in-depth analysis of every aspect of this fascinating topic. Yet despite its brevity, Shira’s book is a marvel of economy, offering an astoundingly comprehensive survey of the role of men in American feminism from even before the First Wave down to the present.

But Men and Feminism is more than a history text; it offers a short but thorough introduction to the contemporary understanding of how masculinity is constructed in American culture. Shira offers concise summaries of the insights of the most important pro-feminist writers on men’s issues; in a few short pages, the reader is introduced to the work of Michael Flood, Michael Kimmel, Jackson Katz, and Robert Jensen — perhaps the most indispensable theorists and activists doing this work today. In her chapter “Gender Advantage”, Tarrant offers a devastatingly effective case that, despite the shrill claims of right-wing men’s rights activists, male privilege is an omnipresent reality in the lives of Americans of every social and ethnic group. She quotes the aforementioned, and also cites the wonderful blogger Barry Deutsch (of Alas, a Blog) whose “male privilege checklist” is indispensable reading for newcomers to men’s work. For the guys — and the women — in your life who continue to insist that “feminism has gone too far” and that “men have it harder today”, this single chapter in the center of the book offers a bracing corrective.

As Shira says in her introduction, this book is “about what men can offer feminism and what feminism can offer men.” I’ve been a self-described male feminist for over half my life, and I’ve been teaching women’s studies for a third of the time I’ve been on the planet. Though I label myself in many ways — Christian, vegan, husband, father, teacher, mentor, brother, son, progressive, runner — there are precious few terms that have meant as much to me as that of “feminist.” Feminism gave me a chance to be a complete human being rather than a stunted caricature; feminism gives me a chance to explore a full range of emotional possibilities for my life and for my relationship; it is feminism as an idea and the feminists I’ve known throughout my life who extricated me from the straitjacket of masculinity. To paraphrase a line from my favorite Merwin poem, it was and is feminism that helped me “wake and slip from the calendars, from the creeds of difference and contradictions, that were my life and all its crumbling fabrications.”

The feminist movement doesn’t center men, nor should it. But Shira Tarrant’s book suggests that the feminist movement is at its strongest when it reaches out to men as well as women, and when it does so without compromising its message in order to soothe male anxieties. The feminist movement surely doesn’t need men as leaders, but it does need men as activists, particularly as agents of change in the lives of other men. Men and Feminism offers a long list of opportunities for men to get involved in the ongoing struggle for gender justice, and in its short span, makes an irresistible case that men have vital, perhaps even indispensable roles to play in that struggle. For that reason alone, this book is both timely and welcome.

I’ve used other books in the splendid Seal Series in my classes; my women’s history students find Rory Dicker’s A History of US Feminisms to be very helpful. I’ll be incorporating Shira Tarrant’s Men and Feminism the next time I teach my Introduction to Masculinity class; in the meantime, let me shower it and its author with well-deserved praise.

Marilyn French, 1929-2009: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 05, 2009
in Books, Feminism and People
. 3 Comments

The great Marilyn French has died at 79. Many appreciations are appearing this week, see here for more.

Marilyn French is best known for her wonderful — if now dated — The Women’s Room. It’s perhaps the most important novel to come out of what is commonly known as Second Wave Feminism, and it remains a vital, fascinating, at times infuriating text. In 1986, when I was first beginning to think about doing women’s studies and feminist work, a friend of mine recommended the book to me. “Read it”, she said, “and tell me what you think.” I read the book the fall semester of my sophomore year, and was galvanized by it. Much has been made in the obituaries of French’s anger, and there’s little doubt that in many respects “The Women’s Room” is an angry novel. But righteous anger in the face of blind privilege, reckless entitlement, and crushing social norms is no vice — and I found French’s work to be a powerful and damning indictment. At 19, I recognized aspects of myself in some of her less sympathetic male characters — and in no small way, the book contributed to the beginning of my intellectual journey to (at least attempt to) become a different sort of man.

I also loved her Beyond Power, now out of print. One of the first organized discussions of feminism in which I ever participated (if we don’t count sitting quietly in the room while my mother hosted meetings of the League of Women Voters) came in late ‘86, and the topic was French’s then brand-new and dazzling meditation on patriarchy, resistance, and sexuality over the entire course of human history. Most of my younger feminist colleagues who’ve read the book tend to roll eyes or snort derisively when I talk almost worshipfully of French; for some, she’s the very epitome of a certain kind of privileged Second Waver, the sort whose feminism is often alienating to those born long after Watergate. But it’s still on my shelf, and it’s still a terrific text. It’s influenced more than a little of my teaching.

I confess that “The Women’s Room” and “Beyond Power” are the only two Marilyn French works I’ve read. But like most of the books which have served me well, I take great pleasure in re-reading them. I’ll track down some of her more recent novels soon, and urge those who have never read her work to start with her most important and influential offerings.

UPDATE: Jha has a great tribute here.

Exposing the abstinence agenda: a review of “The Purity Myth”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 25, 2009
in Books, Virginity, Youth and Youth ministry
. 38 Comments

I got my copy of Jessica Valenti’s newest book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women last week. If the editor-in-chief of Feministing continues to crank out books at this pace, I’m going to suspect that she harbors a secret Calvinist work ethic. Four books in two years is a remarkable achievement.

The Obama Administration offers hope that the long national embarrassment known as the abstinence-only movement is soon to be finished. Early signs are that funding for more comprehensive sex education will eventually come through, and that government support for the “purity movement” — a hallmark of the Bush years — is at long last coming to an end (though not rapidly enough for many of us.) Jessica’s timely, accessible book looks at the damage wrought by the “purity myth” and at the noxious agenda which hides behind the cry that “True Love Waits.” Her book went to press too early to include the most recent findings on the failures of the abstinence movement, which is a pity; all the best research indicates that a focus on “purity” has been an unmitigated disaster, leading to a spike rather than in a decline in unplanned pregnancies among American teenagers.

In The Purity Myth, Valenti employs the same accessible, conversational style — punctuated by hilarious asides and personal anecdotes — that characterized her first book, Full Frontal Feminism. As several hundred of my students have told me since I first started assigning FFF a year and a half ago, that style works to engage them and to challenge them in a way that a more formally-written text would not. This is not to suggest that my students are incapable of wrestling with books written in academic prose — but when it comes to a subject as personal as contemporary sexual ethics, a breezy conversational tone lends considerable legitimacy to the argument being made. And that tone and that legitimacy are on full display once again in this wonderful book.

The Purity Myth has many strengths, but perhaps the central theme of the text is the thorough and devastating debunking of the notion that a woman’s worth is in any way connected to the amount of sexual experience she has had. For teen girls, bombarded as they are by the twin lies of the abstinence movement and the crass, pornified “Girls Gone Wild” media culture, there’s a desperate need for sound, sensible, compassionate messages that emphasize the simple message that a woman’s sexuality belongs, in the end, to her and to her alone. It is not the property of a father or a future husband (Valenti’s take on “purity balls”, where Dads “date” their daughters and pledge to safeguard their purity, is chilling — particularly for me as a first-time papa to a baby girl). It is not the property of the culture, it is not the property of predatory boys, it is hers. Continue reading ‘Exposing the abstinence agenda: a review of “The Purity Myth”’

“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 12, 2009
in Academia, Books, Feminist Pedagogy and Money
. 74 Comments

Yesterday, I posted Lauren’s response at Faux Real Tho to Courtney’s Feministing piece on a day in the life of a feminist activist, and Ann’s, also at Feministing response to both. I’d rather that folks read the exchanges, but the best summary that I can offer is that these posts capture the stark reality of economic, geographic, and professional privilege — a reality made all the more stark by the dismal nature of the current global financial crisis. The discussion at Feministing (again, I highly recommend reading all the posts as well as the comment threads) has turned to what feminist life looks like in the current climate, with unemployment and under-employment and collapsing social services all around. It’s a sobering, as well as uplifting discussion.

This is in my head this morning as I read about the projected state budget deal which will strip $8 billion from California schools and community colleges. The bleak summary:

This month, tax refunds were suspended, along with payments to vendors and some welfare and college grants. And now much of state government is shutting down two days a month, furloughing most employees without pay.

Under the new budget agreement, cuts to other state services would be deep and long-lasting.

Schools and community colleges, which account for nearly half of all state spending, would lose nearly $8 billion. Only part of that would be backfilled by Washington. Several state requirements on how schools allocate their money — including on class size reduction — would be suspended for several years.

School officials say the plan could lead to the elimination of after-school activities, elective classes such as art and music, classroom supplies and thousands of teaching jobs.

Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for school districts, said, “For the first time, people are really going to see tangible negative impacts from cuts.”

State colleges and universities, where tuition has been steadily rising for years, would lose $890 million.

Scheduled cost-of-living increases for public-assistance recipients would be canceled, and mental health and early childhood education programs created by voter-approved ballot initiatives would be cut by over $830 million. The state would cut spending on local public transit by $459 million.

My newborn daughter is, on her father’s mother’s side, a seventh-generation Californian. I am saddened to think that she will not know the California I knew growing up, just as my parents and grandparents were (I have been told many times) sad that I would never see what the Golden State looked like in their eras. The dream that brought my ancestors and my wife’s here — from places as disparate as Croatia and Colombia, Ulster and Illinois, Austria and the Piedmont — is not now what it was, nor is it likely to be so again.

But this is not the place for nostalgia. Frankly, I’m as concerned about my students as I am about my daughter. My classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own PCC. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what Ann and Lauren and Courtney are blogging about, I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading ‘“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well’

Towards the “pleasure-affirming vision”: a review of the magisterial “Yes Means Yes”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 07, 2009
in Books, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Mass media, Men and Masculinity, Rape, aggression and violence, Sexual ethics and transformation, Sexual harassment and Sexuality
. 6 Comments

In mid-December, I ordered a copy of “Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. YMY is an anthology filled with essays by writers well-known in the feminist blogosphere, and others who aren’t; by cis- and trans-gendered men and women; by people across the sexual (and chronological) identity spectrum. But each piece in the collection offers a new and different insight into the questions of rape, consent, power and pleasure. Taken as a whole, these 27 essays constitute a visionary and immensely important contribution to the work of creating a new sexual dynamic between men and women, between men, between women, and within ourselves.

The foreword to the anthology comes from feminist comedian Margaret Cho, who in her familiar funny and painfully insightful style, sets the tone for the collection. She writes about the complexity of that simple word, “yes”, and the insidious variety of ways in which our sexist cultural rules work to extract that monosyllable from women. Though the title of the collection is “Yes Means Yes!”, Cho and the editors understand that an authentic “yes!” can only come in a dynamic where “no!” can be said safely. Just as it is infuriating and exasperating to have one’s genuine “yes!” overanalyzed, shamed, or denied, there are also huge psychic consequences to saying “yes” just to placate, to soothe, to avoid a fight. Cho writes:

I am surprised by how much sex I have had in my life that I didn’t want to have. Not exactly what’s considered “real” rape, or “date” rape, like my first time, although it is a kind of rape of the spirit — a dishonest portrayal or distortion of my own desire in order to appease another person — so it wasn’t rape at gunpoint, but rape as the alternative to having to explain my reasons for not wanting to have sex…

Often I would initiate the encounter just to get it over with, so it would be behind me, so it would be done. It is the worst feeling; it is like emotional prostitution, emotional whoring. You don’t get paid in dollars, you get paid in averted arguments…

I said yes to partners I never wanted in the first place, because to say no at any point after saying yes would make the whole relationship a lie, so I had to keep saying yes in order to keep the “no” I felt a secret. This is such a messed-up way to live, such an awful way to love.

It’s dangerous for any feminist man to claim knowledge of “how women think”, but in countless journals and in group or private discussions, I’ve heard women say almost exactly what Cho says here. And I’ve heard it from one or two of my exes from years ago, women who were honest enough (and often, angry enough) to call me on my own privilege, my own presumption, and the thousand ways in which I (who ought to have known better) helped to create a dynamic where I needed soothing. One of the most humbling experiences I’ve been through is listening to a lover recount to me, in excruciatingly candid detail, the way in which I worked (with her complicity) to silence her “No”, to “get” her “yes”. This is not to suggest that my male pro-feminism is rooted in a desire to make amends, or even worse, to reclaim some lost pride. But a great many men are oblivious to the ways in which their sense of entitlement — and women’s culturally ingrained people-pleasing behavior — work to make sex legally consensual but emotionally unwanted. For men who care about their partners, the realization that a woman has had sex to soothe, to placate, or “just get it over with”, is and ought to be devastating. And it ought to be an impetus to action, to candor, to hard work, and to conversation. Cho’s foreword sets a tone for all of that, while serving to remind us in scathingly honest fashion of the consequences of remaining silent. Continue reading ‘Towards the “pleasure-affirming vision”: a review of the magisterial “Yes Means Yes”’

Against “too much information” in literary biography: of Naipaul, Larkin, Bottum, and happy ignorance

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 17, 2008
in Books
. 12 Comments

In the current issue of the Weekly Standard, poet and editor J. Bottum reviews the new Patrick French biography of the celebrated Anglo-Indian-Caribbean author, V.S. Naipaul. I haven’t read the French book, but I have read some things by the 2001 Nobelist, who is not one of my favorite authors. I read the review more out of fondness for Bottum, who is a magnificent essayist and a fine third-rate poet. (Third-rate is not an insult in my book. If Shakespeare and Dante are first-rate, Yeats and Auden second-rate, and Rod McKuen ninth-rate, then third-rate is a good thing to be.)

Bottum notes the tendency in literary biography towards de-mythologizing celebrated writers by revealing their pettinesses, their narcissism, and their abysmal people skills. But even by the modern execratory standard, the French biography reveals Naipaul to be a world-class wretch:

Naipaul shows himself arrogant beyond belief, and vile-tempered, and as self-obsessed as a man simpering while he looks at himself in the mirror. His letters and conversation are full of references to “niggers” and dismissals of Africans and dark-skinned Indians.

The man was capable of bouts of extraordinary cruelty: Unhappy with Margaret at one point, Naipaul explains, “I was very violent with her for two days. .  .  . Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.” But then, he was capable of ordinary, everyday cruelty, as well: “You are the only woman I know who has no skill,” his wife’s diaries reveal Naipaul once told her, just in passing. “You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” He moved on to the mistress who would become his second wife because his inamorata Margaret had simply grown unworthy of his use: “middle-aged, almost an old lady.”

Bottum writes, not unreasonably, that “I didn’t need to know all this…” And he’s right. We don’t need to know this about the writers we admire, even if, as in the case of the all-too-much alive Naipaul, he apparently wants us to know it. Naipaul evidently authorized this biography, cheerfully turning over pages and pages of material documenting his sadism, his snobbery, and his deeply depressing inability to muster anything even remotely approaching empathy for other living creatures. There’s no sense, according to Bottum, that Naipaul is confessing behavior of which he is ashamed and for which he seeks absolution. Rather, he just wants the world to know who he is and what he was, without apology or embarrassment. It’s very ugly, and it walks the line between pathetic and appalling.

And more to the point, as Bottum rightly points out, it ruins Naipaul for any thinking reader. Bottum’s review is an excellent reminder of the reasons why I don’t enjoy reading literary biographies, at least not of authors whose works I admire. I’m not unhappy to know of the peccadilloes of great politicians or musicians, because my appreciation of their achievement is not contingent upon an imagination that they are a particular way in their private world. Whether or not Mick Jagger is a saint or a monster or something in between will not affect the pleasure I take in hearing him perform: whether or not FDR was faithful to Eleanor doesn’t change my view on the overall success of his presidency. But when it comes to novelists and poets, writers who draw me into their own particular vision of reality, who show me new ways of thinking about people and things and relationships, then yes, their private behavior does impact how I read their work. And to know too much can spoil things completely for me. Continue reading ‘Against “too much information” in literary biography: of Naipaul, Larkin, Bottum, and happy ignorance’

Our sons, our brothers, our guys: part one of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s new book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 10, 2008
in Books, Men and Masculinity, Michael Kimmel's "Guyland" and Youth
. 63 Comments

This is the first of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s new book.

I order a lot of books (which I then pass on or recycle dutifully), but I’ve awaited no book in 2008 more eagerly than Michael Kimmel’s brand new Guyland: The Perilous World where Boys Become Men. As anyone even remotely connected to the gender studies field knows, the last half-decade has seen an explosion of alarm over the “boy crisis”. Pundits and physicians, mostly on the political right, have written anxious and angry jeremiads about how, thanks to feminism and other innovations, our sons are ignored, stifled, shamed, and alienated. The astonishing rise in autism and ADHD diagnoses among boys, and the increasing demographic domination of women among the college-educated, are regularly cited as evidence that the system is failing our young men.

Of course, concern for young people is not a zero-sum game. Success and opportunities for young women has not come, and indeed never need come, at the expense of their brothers. Much of the “boy crisis” (or its counterpart, the risible notion of a “War Against Men” recently promoted in a lamentable bestseller) is manufactured as a vehicle to push a tired anti-feminist agenda. But the fact that the problem with boys is often oversold (in order to market books to anxious parents and indignant right-wingers) doesn’t mean that growing up male in American society today is particularly easy. Young men today must navigate through a confusing and contradictory series of messages about their identity, their purpose, and their relationship to others. There is a real problem, and those of us who care about young men cannot let our exasperation at the flagrant misdiagnosis of its cause distract us from working on a solution.

This is why Michael Kimmel’s new book is so welcome. Kimmel (professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook) is perhaps the leading American scholar on the subject of men and masculinity. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to say that the growing field of “Men and Masculinity Studies” owes more to Michael Kimmel than to anyone else. His indispensable primer, Manhood in America, is now in its second edition. (I use it in my men’s studies course.)

Guyland focuses in on young men in one crucial decade: the years between 16 and 26. For the book, Kimmel interviewed more than four hundred men who fell into that age range, from a wide variety of economic and cultural backgrounds. (He notes how easy it is for academics to focus their research on their own students, who tend to be predominantly middle and upper-middle class. Kimmel assiduously seeks out young men who aren’t the sort to be found in selective four-year colleges, as well as those who are.) His conclusions, as a result of these extensive interviews and his own decades of work on masculinity, are sweeping, profound, and immensely important.

Kimmel, blessedly, skewers those who suggest that the “boy crisis” is in some way a consequence of feminist advances in education and elsewhere.

The idea that feminist reforms have led to the decline of boyhood is both educationally unsound and politically unstable. It creates a false opposition between girls and boys, assuming that the educational reforms undertaken to enhance girls’ educational opportunities have actually hindered boys’ educational development. But these reforms…actually enable larger numbers of students to get a better education, boys as well as girls. Further, ‘gender stereotypes, particularly those related to education’, hurt both girls and boys, and so challenging those stereotypes and expressing less tolerance for school violence and bullying, and increased attention to violence at home, actually enables both girls and boys to feel safer at school. (Emphasis in the original.)

What then of the evidence that girls are starting to surpass boys in terms of academic achievement, not only in the humanities but increasingly in maths and science? Kimmel makes the case that this is a less a result of anti-boy prejudice and more a consequence of the disastrous attempt on the part of many young men to live up to what he calls the “Boy Code” (more on that later). Continue reading ‘Our sons, our brothers, our guys: part one of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s new book’