Archive for the 'Parenting' Category

Fatherhood and feminism: not a zero-sum game.

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

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

It’s an image America needed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parents, children, candor, and embarrassment: a note from a blogging father

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 07, 2010
in Blogging, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Father and Parenting
. 10 Comments

Several times in the past year, friends both in cyberspace and in “real” life have asked me the same question: Do I ever pause to consider the impact that this blog will have on Heloise, and any other children with whom we may be blessed, when they are older? Though it’s been a quarter century and more since I was a teen, I’ve been working around them continually almost since I stopped being one. And though there are some surprising exceptions, the general rule continues to be true: most teens, particularly at the onset of puberty, go through a stage where they are acutely embarrassed by their parents. Call it the “please drop me off a block from school” phenomenon — it’s a rare fourteen year-old who wants his or her friends to know much detail about his or her parents’ lives.

I write and speak openly about my past and my present. Compared to the degree of disclosure now common among teens on social networking sites (both in terms of words and images), what I’ve shared here is pretty tame. Of course, I write as an adult — and though I have plenty of youthful indiscretions in my past, I cannot claim the excuse of youth when it comes to explaining my reasons for choosing to be so candid about certain aspects of my life on this blog.

I cannot protect my daughter entirely from future embarrassment. No doubt there will come a time when how I dress, or walk, or even breathe will be a source of intense annoyance to her; I know adolescents well enough to know that that those moments of deep disgust with her parents (perhaps particularly her father) will be brief albeit (probably) intense. And no doubt she’ll wince when and if (realistically, just when) she reads what I’ve written and continue to write about my life and my past.

I remember vividly a conversation I had with my father not long after I had lost my virginity. I was seventeen, and he was fifty. He was in Carmel visiting us for the weekend (when my parents divorced, my mother took my brother and me to the Monterey Peninsula while Dad stayed in Santa Barbara, where he remained until his death.) Papa and I took one of our long walks and talked about many things, mostly about my new girlfriend. Dad remarked, as we strolled on San Carlos Avenue, that I was younger than he had been when he lost his virginity; “I was nineteen and in the RAF”, he said. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his own sexual life to me, and I felt that familiar mix of revulsion and curiosity so common to adolescents when a parent begins to offer what my cousin Dinah calls an “over-share”. He told me a little about the “girl from the village”, how they had met and so forth, and I listened with eagerness and trepidation, not knowing how much I wanted to know, afraid of hearing more than I wanted but fascinated by my father’s sudden burst of almost uncharacteristic candor.

We walked on for a few more moments in silence, and then Dad asked “Were the lights on or off?” I said something like “Jesus, Dad, what a question!” I told him that the lights had been off but the television had been on (videos on MTV). My father seemed puzzled and asserted that he preferred the lights on. And that was the last we said of the subject; indeed, in the remaining 21 years of his life, we never had a similar conversation again. But what I’ve noticed, as I play through my memories of my father in my head, is that the embarrassment I felt discussing sex with my father has faded completely. What remains is the recollection of a precious glimpse into his youth, of what life in England in the early 1950s might have been like for this bookish, gentle, funny young man doing his national service before heading off to university. What remains after the awkwardness is the memory of intergenerational intimacy, tinged as it was with the mutual incomprehension that comes with an age gap and a different cultural vocabulary.

To put it simply, what made me cringe when I was seventeen is now a fond and precious recollection. And it is in that light that I think about my daughter’s future reaction to my own writing, so full as it is of stories about my past. There will be a time, I am sure of it, when Heloise will wish very much that her father had not been quite so forthright, so inclined to what my generation often calls “TMI” (too much information). But I also suspect, based upon my memories of my father, that when she is older still, what once seemed so embarrassing will become considerably less so. Though our culture does do its damndest to turn adolescence into a quarter-century process (at least for men, and not an insignificant number of women), psychic puberty does end. And as far as I’m concerned, psychic puberty ends when we cease to blame our parents for our own adult mistakes, when we absolve them of responsibility for the outcome of our lives, and when we no longer cringe when we contemplate them in all their lovely, flawed, perfect humanness.

What humiliates and infuriates at fifteen becomes the happy recollection at forty; the story I shared above is hardly the only such instance. And it is a good reminder to parents and children alike about the need to balance both candor and respect for boundaries, and to forgive generously when that balance becomes skewed, as it inevitably will.

Things her soul already knows: more on children, obligation, and parental dreams

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 23, 2009
in Parenting
. 5 Comments

In the comments after the reprint of my 2005 post (immediately below) on moving away from home, Metamanda asks if my views on the matter have changed in the past four years. Metamanda, like many of my commenters below this post and the original, called me out not merely on my privilege but on some of my misconceptions about why people might choose to do all that they can to stay near their families.

My views have changed on many things, but when it comes to the values I professed in ‘05, I’m still where I was when I wrote this:

I still see offering people “choices” as among the highest of moral imperatives in a good society… My brother and sisters and cousins have pursued their dreams unconstrained by geography or guilt — what could be more worthwhile than that? If we only see each other at weddings and funerals and other special occasions, it makes our reunions all the more sweet. Once we moved off to college, we all began to make the series of choices that would shape our lives and carry us to the various corners of the earth. We traded physical closeness for the privilege of pursuing our individual dreams, and on balance, I’d say, it was worth it…

Now, of course, I’m a father. Becoming a dad has made me rethink a lot of my views. I’m certainly not as ardent a pacifist as I once was; on the other hand, the importance of the feminist struggle for autonomy has been affirmed. My views on children pursuing their dreams with minimal parental interference have also been solidified rather than called into question since Heloise was born.

Heloise’s personality is starting to take shape. She’s a curious, adventurous girl. But both her mother and I are very clear on one thing: we have no idea what dreams our daughter will dream. She is not merely a blank slate upon which we can inscribe our biases and our beliefs. Though we will, of course, raise her with our particular values about the world, we are clearer than ever that our words will be tempered with the reminder that ours is only one of many paths. As much as her mother and father love her, Heloise will be told — at an age-appropriate time — that our certainties may not be hers. Our faith tells us that our daughter is not ours: she belongs to the light, to God, and to herself. We are the loving stewards into whose care she is committed during her vulnerable years, and we intend to do all that we can to pour our love and devotion into her.

As I’ve written before, I don’t want my daughter burdened by history and obligation. In April, I wrote:

I owe (my daughter) the stories I was bequeathed; I owe my ancestors the bequeathing of those stories. But beyond that, I owe very, very little, just as Heloise Cerys Raquel (whose names all come from no known forebears) will owe us little, even as she owes the world and its creatures so much.

I’d like to say more about that last line.

I want my daughter to learn that she has a purpose. Her mother and I have no idea what the specifics of that purpose will be, but we know this and we will remind Heloise of this often: she was created to know joy, and she was created to do justice. Her goal will be to find the place where the desires of her heart, her particular talents, and the needs of the world intersect; we intend to do all we can to help her discern what each of those are. Heloise was born with a certain set of privileges that will become evident to her as she ages. While we don’t intend to raise her with noblesse oblige, she will not grow up unaware that to those to whom much has been given, of whom much is expected. But what that second “much” will look like — that is largely going to be hers to decide.

My wife and I dress our daughter up in USC and Cal gear, each of us joking that she will choose our own alma mater to attend. But Heloise might not choose college at all. She might decide to go to the fire academy, or to be a dancer, or to be a mechanic. If she longs to go to school on the far side of the country, we’ll do all we can to encourage her with (heavens forfend) nary a word of selfish reproach on our part. If she decides to live at home and attend a local school, we won’t force her out the door, insisting that she “sink or swim” on her own.

We don’t know our daughter’s heart yet, and we don’t know her particular calling. What we do know is that she was made for joy, made for delight, made for happiness. What we do know is that she, like all of us, is called to serve. What we do know is that she has been given talents and gifts as yet unrevealed, talents that can help her find that delight — and be of service. It’s our job to remind her of these things; remind her, I say, because these are things that I suspect her soul already knows.

Happy update

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 18, 2009
in Parenting
. 6 Comments

Heloise said “dad-dah” for the first time this morning. She had said “Mama” for the first time three weeks ago, and I had been waiting very patiently.

Embracing the family bed, and retracting an old stance

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 26, 2009
in Parenting
. 11 Comments

In the post immediately below this, a reprint from 2007, I wrote (among other things):

When we have children — and I’m saying this now and Lord help me if I take it back — they will never spend time in our bed, even if they wail for the privilege.

When you take strong stands, you are sometimes given the pleasure of publicly repudiating a past position. I stand by everything else in that piece from two years ago, but want to say clearly that becoming a father to HCRS (nine months old today) has radically altered my view on the issue of children in bed. Our daughter sleeps between us many a night; we have adopted what is called “the family bed” approach. (Strongly endorsed by our pediatrician, who favors “attachment parenting”, which we are also enthusiastically — if sleepily — practicing.) Blog in haste, repent in leisure; I have no trouble saying that I was wrong, utterly wrong to rule out sharing the bed with one’s babies.

And no, you’re not gonna get more details than that about our nocturnal practices.

Princesses, princes, daughters and dads: against emotional incest

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 22, 2009
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite Posts 2009, Marriage and Parenting
. 13 Comments

Our daughter Heloise Cerys Raquel (often abbreviated as HCRS) is almost nine months old, and continues to amaze and delight her parents. She’s standing and crawling now, and making ever more comprehensible noises. She’s a happy baby, prone to shrieks of delight and an enthusiastic wind-milling of arms when she sees a returning parent or other beloved care-giver. We have a nanny to help out some of the time, but most of the care is done in carefully orchestrated shifts shared among my wife, her mother, and me. (My mother-in-law moved in with us after we moved from Pasadena to West Los Angeles at the beginning of summer, and that has been a special blessing for all.)

In August, I posted “She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness in which I noted the extraordinary number of folks who expressed to me their certainty that I would treat Heloise as a princess whose whims I could not help but indulge. I’d like to touch on another aspect of the father-daughter relationship I’ve noted.

Becoming a parent for the first time in one’s forties has myriad advantages, not least that one has had the opportunity to watch a great many of one’s peers “do it all first.” (I have two high school friends of mine who are already grandparents, mirabile dictu.) And I’ve seen, a time or nine, an unhealthy triangulation occur with dads, moms, and their daughters. While the dangers of physical incest and abuse are real, there’s a kind of emotionally incestuous dynamic I’ve witnessed between fathers and daughters, one in which dads seek from their daughters the validation and affirmation that they feel they are entitled to, but are not receiving from their wives.

Little children adore their parents. Really, it’s a lovely thing to come home each day and be welcomed, as I invariably am, with gales of excited laughter and delight. (I’m the primary care giver for much of the weekend and most late afternoons and evenings; my wife handles the mornings, my mother-in-law and the nanny work splendidly in the gaps.) My daughter’s love is an impressive thing to feel, especially as she’s gotten better recently at wrapping herself around my neck and squeezing me tight. No matter what has transpired during the day, no matter what I’ve said or done (or failed to say or do), Heloise seems to adore me. It’s a wonderful thing, and I eat it up with wonder and gratitude and delight. I’m told that her devotion will only grow more intense; many little girls begin to bond more intensely with their fathers in their second and third years of life, presuming that a dad is around. One looks forward to this.

Of course, spouses aren’t the same as children. My wife loves me, a fact of which I blessedly have no doubt. But she most certainly doesn’t have me a on pedestal, doesn’t think I’m flawless, and doesn’t greet me with shrieks of joy everytime I walk into the house. Eira engages with me as a partner, and she challenges me and pushes me and asks me for things; I do the same for her. In a good marriage, iron sharpens iron, and the more friction in the sharpening process, the greater and more enduring the heat. Anyone who’s met my wife knows that she’s a tall, strong force of nature. (This is a woman who can dress down Israeli soldiers on patrol and make them blush apologetically. If you know the men and women of the IDF, you’ll know how astounding that is.) She loves me and she encourages me as I do her, but she doesn’t conceal her displeasure when she’s unhappy, and she doesn’t come rushing to me like something out of a Marabel Morgan book when I enter the house. Continue reading ‘Princesses, princes, daughters and dads: against emotional incest’

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

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

Back to school with much work to be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feminist Harpies Deny that Babies are Fun, a response to Katie Roiphe

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 27, 2009
in Feminism and Parenting
. 6 Comments

Amanda Marcotte has her customarily devastating take-down of this Katie Roiphe piece that appeared on DoubleEX on Tuesday: Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants?

First off, it’s a confusing title. I read it and thought, for a second, that Roiphe — a first-time mom to a baby boy — worried that advocates for women’s equality go around denying that little babies experience pleasure. Of course, she means something else:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Amanda has done an excellent job unpacking the absurdities in Roiphe’s argument, and Amy Bloom points out all the feminist authors who did write about adoring their offspring, writers whom Roiphe either hasn’t read or ignored. There’s no question, of course, that Roiphe is not alone in experiencing this extraordinary sense of joy in being with a baby. My wife and I have had our lives turned upside down in the most delightful way by Heloise’s arrival. My wife seems to crave the baby physically; when she’s been away from Miss Mouse for more than a few hours, she goes through what she describes as “withdrawals”. For me, who did not carry this baby inside of me, the addiction is less physiologically intense, but it is powerful nonetheless. Roiphe’s feelings about her child ring true to us, as I imagine they would to many other parents.

Others have made the case that Roiphe is wrong about feminists, and plenty of folks agree that she’s absolutely right about the joy that babies can bring. But that pleasure isn’t felt universally; not every woman bonds with every baby she gives birth to in the ecstatic manner that Roiphe describes. And the problem, of course, is that she writes from a position of the very sort of privilege that feminists have fought for. She writes:

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

Newsflash, Katie; many mothers — many people, period — never get to spend much time in that “great world where people talk and think and write”. I get to be in that world, Katie Roiphe is in that world, but far more mothers have jobs outside the home that are dull and not particularly intellectually stimulating. And when you’re on kid #3, and the first two are still young and clamoring for your attention, there’s no time to stay in the “opium den”, no chance to close the shades and retreat into a world of oxytocin-infused bliss. And just to be clear, who is fighting for paid maternity leave so that more mothers have the time to close the shades? Those very same feminists Roiphe despises.

In the end, one excellent reason why feminists don’t over-exert themselves in paeans to motherhood is because so many other forces in our culture already do do just that and do it well. Feminists know well that for women, opportunity quickly becomes obligation — telling women that having a baby will be the peak experience of their lives marginalizes those women who genuinely have no interest in being mothers, repeating the old and ugly lie that a woman who doesn’t grow life in her tummy has somehow failed to fulfill her most important destiny. Feminists know that some women — many women — don’t respond as Roiphe does; the greater our rhapsodizing about the joys of having babies, the more we shame those who don’t find the process as ecstatic as they were led to believe.

As individual parents, feminist writers (Amy Bloom named several) have written a great deal about having children. Roiphe seems to have only heard of the books in which feminists expressed ambivalence about motherhood, or emphasized the toil that comes with reproducing and raising the result. In the blogosphere, plenty of feminists write about their love for their children and their joy in being mothers or fathers (I think of Lauren Bruce, one of my blogging heroes and designer of this blog.) There is no feminist consensus that demeans motherhood, unless you consider making the case that having babies isn’t the sine qua non of a woman’s existence to be demeaning.

To be fair, Roiphe’s condemnation in DoubleEXisn’t as full-throated as in her far more destructive The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism , a now-dated tract that functions as little more than a defense of rape. But the piece does end up titled “Why won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?”, and given that tack, it is not surprising that a great many feminists (including those who happen to be parents) roll their eyes.

“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 25, 2009
in Father, Favorite Posts 2009, Male feminists, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Parenting and Youth
. 23 Comments

Little Heloise Cerys Raquel is indeed an enchanting baby, at least in the eyes of her doting parents. Now seven months old, her delightful personality emerges more and more each day — or so it seems. One of my favorite things about being on vacation this summer was the chance to be with her virtually every second; as I type this in my office, I note the hours (about five) until I will be home to her.

When we’re in public and Heloise is in my arms, we invariably get the same remarks: “She’s got you wrapped around her finger already, doesn’t she?” Or, “Watch out, when she gets older, you’ll have to watch the boys like a hawk!” My wife frequently gets told how much our daughter takes after her, but never receives anything like these comments. (When we were in Britain over the past few weeks, we got almost the same comments as we do here in the States.) And as a male feminist and father to a daughter, I find the subtext of remarks like these troubling, even as I honor the innocuousness of the intent behind them.

The bit about a daughter having her daddy “wrapped around her finger” repeats the old myth of male weakness. The myth of male weakness suggests that men are inherently vulnerable to temptation and manipulation. Men, the myth insists, have a much harder time practicing fidelity than do women, as men are biologically less capable of resisting sexual temptation. Heterosexual men are easily seduced by women, or so the trope goes, and thus women can use this weakness to flirt their way out of, say, traffic tickets or into jobs and marriages. The parental corollary, I’ve been realizing, is that daddies are far easier for daughters to manipulate than mommies. Fathers, the myth suggests, are powerless to say no to the pleas of their infant (or adolescent, or grown) female children.

Fathers, like other men, are supposed to be at least somewhat aware that they are being manipulated. I’ve gathered already that if I say “Yes, she’s already got me right where she wants me”, I’ll get indulgent smiles and teasing warnings about what she’s going to be like as a teen. And if I say — as I have said in one way or another several times — “I adore my girl, but she’s not going to get away with murder on my watch”, folks tend to shake their heads in real or mock pity at my stubborn refusal to acknowledge my own obvious frailty in the face of my daughter’s feminine wiles. A great deal of homosocial cameraderie is built and sustained on the theme of genuine or feigned exasperation at the supposed male inability to resist the charms of “hot chicks and pleading little girls.” Continue reading ‘“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness’

Sonia’s choice: of David Brooks, Barack Obama, the Supreme Court nominee and male privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 14, 2009
in Marriage, Parenting, Politics and Working
. 47 Comments

I have mixed feelings about David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative columnist for the New York Times. And I have mixed feelings about his column this morning about Sonia Sotomayor. Brooks, noting the oft-retold story of Sotomayor’s rise from humble origins to a Supreme Court nomination:

It’s the upward mobility story — about a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way.

As you read the profiles, you can almost draw a map of her relationships during each stage in her life. In some areas, her relationships are thick and fulfilling, but in others, there are blank spaces….

As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.

Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, “I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.”

Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, “The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.” She addressed him, saying that he had filled “voids of emptiness that existed before you. … You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.”

That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. “You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,” a friend of hers told The Times.

Brooks’ point is a fair one: we live in a closer approximation of a meritocracy than at any time before, where a Latina from the Bronx can, through hard work and brains, rise to the top. This is a good thing. But as we have opened the doors of the Ivy League universities to the Obamas and the Sotomayors, we’ve also created a culture of exhausting workaholism which leaves little room for balance or enduring intimate relationships. When only a member of the male WASP elite could get into Harvard and climb to a Supreme Court nomination, the chances were good he would have a wife who sublimated her own ambitions to his. (In a not-so-distant past, he would probably be able to afford servants, too.) Men of that world surely worked hard, but it was the labor of others that allowed them to enjoy leisure, marry, and have children while climbing into the rarified air at the very top of the social ladder. As the sons and daughters of the lower middle class have, like Sonia, made it to the top, they have found it far more challenging to “have it all”. The old saying that a woman of color would have to “work twice as hard and be twice as good to be taken half as seriously” still carries the sting of truth, and Brooks points out the cost of this.

Where I take issue with Brooks is with his suggestion that this burden falls equally on men and women:

This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

His parenthetical point is well taken, but it seems false to suggest that men have the same trouble striking a work-life balance, or finding partners who will be patient with their workaholism. Think of Sotomayor’s fellow baby boomer and fellow first-generation Ivy League lawyer, Barack Obama. The Supreme Court nominee edited the Yale Law Journal; the president of the United States was president of the Harvard Law Review. Both were pioneers. Barack Obama married a woman with a marvelous education, and that woman chose, in the end, to sublimate her career to his. In the end, the future president did not have to choose between his public ambitions and his private longings. By all accounts a devoted husband and a wonderful father, Barack Obama is not unlike other men of his and Sotomayor’s generation: hardworking, tremendously ambitious, and able to find a brilliant and devoted wife who, despite her own considerable professional achievements will, when the chips are down, put her aspirations aside to support her spouse. Continue reading ‘Sonia’s choice: of David Brooks, Barack Obama, the Supreme Court nominee and male privilege’

Sovereignty and stewardship: some thoughts about fatherhood and a child’s body

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 07, 2009
in Affection and Parenting
. 31 Comments

There was a great post at Womanist Musings a few weeks ago about children and touch. (Forgive me, I can’t remember which reader tipped me off to it.) The post begins:

Sunday was Father’s Day and so we went out to dinner to celebrate. When “Destruction” (the author’s son) was telling the waitress what he wanted to eat, she reached out and pinched his cheek. After she left, he told me that it hurt and that he really did not like that she had touched him. Upon her return after clearly thinking about the incident, he politely told her that she hurt him and he would appreciate it if she did not pinch him again. Destruction has always been protective of his personal space. I remember when he was three and got into a scuffle with a Walmart Greeter when she wanted to hug him.

Once he became old enough to understand what I was saying, I began asking if it was okay to kiss or hug him. I never presumed that I had the right to have access to him because he is my son. Most of the time it is always an enthusiastic yes, however occasionally it would be no I’m not in the mood. I have never gotten upset or felt rejected, I simply tried again later…

As a feminist first-time father of a five and a half month old daughter, I’ve been thinking a great deal about issues of parenting and body integrity. As I wrote not long after Heloise was born, my shift back to a firm pro-choice position was solidified by watching my wife go through pregnancy and childbirth. My sense of the importance of women’s sovereignty over their own flesh was strengthened, not weakened, by sonograms and the like. And in a not dissimilar way, caring for my daughter is solidifying my belief that physical autonomy is an indispensable right for all.

Each day that passes, my daughter gains greater control over her own flesh. She’s learned to roll over. (There was a one-week lag time between being able to roll from back to tummy to being able to roll from tummy to back.) She can raise up her head easily; she can reach out and grab with ever-increasing force and accuracy. She can suck her toes, getting her foot into her mouth in one fluid motion. And she is achingly close to crawling, something we think she’ll be able to do in a matter of days. Heloise’s body responds more to her will each and every day; in a very real sense, we’re watching the miracle of the growing assertion of sovereignty.

But still, our daughter is radically dependent. We change her and bathe her and dress her. We strap her into her car seat and carry her about. She has very little say in how or when she’s touched, but that doesn’t mean she has no voice. We notice when she reaches out for us (something she started doing within the past month); we can tell when she wants to be held and when she’s perfectly happy playing by herself. We try, as best we can, to respond to her needs; when she wants cuddling, she gets cuddling. And when she tries to wriggle out of an embrace, something she does on occasion, we are quick to allow her — within the bounds of reason and safety — more freedom and mobility. She may be less than six months old, but she’s learning that her needs matter. Her body is hers, even if that body — for now — requires our active and constant care. Continue reading ‘Sovereignty and stewardship: some thoughts about fatherhood and a child’s body’

By request, some more thoughts on feminist fathering

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 17, 2009
in Housework and Parenting
. 12 Comments

Four days shy of my first Father’s Day as a parent to a human child, and nine days shy of my daughter reaching five months of age, it’s a bit premature to declare myself a master of Feminist Fatherhood. Still, each passing week brings new insight and experience, and my learning curve remains wonderfully steep.

Heloise is rolling over now, her personality and her energy shining through more and more each day. She’s growing rapidly, still on breastmilk only. And we’ve developed a family schedule that works well for us at this point, revolving around three essential caregivers in baby’s life. Our weekdays look like this:

I get up early, somewhere between 4:45 and 5:45 depending on the day. Heloise is restless at night, but often does her deepest sleeping just before and just after dawn. I go running while my wife and daughter rest. While I’m out, my mother-in-law comes over and takes the baby (if she’s up) so my wife can sleep in later. I shower and go off to school. My wife wakes up, feeds the baby, and goes to work for a few hours, coming home around noon to relieve my mother-in-law. My wife is with Heloise most of the afternoon until I get home. Once I’m home, I’m the primary caregiver; my wife gets more work done or heads out to the gym. Heloise usually goes down sometime after 9:00PM — and my wife and I get a bit of time alone together. I’m usually in bed by midnight, my wife a bit afterwards.

Heloise sleeps fitfully at times, but is usually down for most of the period between 10-7. When she wakes up in the night, I’m in charge of changing and soothing; my wife (obviously) in charge of feeding. We average two waking episodes a night now; each one lasts about 30-40 minutes. (Yes, as a result, I’m probably getting only four hours of sleep a night during the week; I get more on weekends.) And during the day, my wife, mother-in-law, and I each take an equal share of the time being the primary caregiver, though obviously my wife alone can get breastfeed; Heloise can go four hours comfortably without eating. Some days, my wife takes the baby in to work with her, and my mother-in-law is less involved.

Folks, I’m not soliciting advice about how to “do a schedule”; I’m simply sharing what works for us. There’s no one right way, surely, to work out a co-parenting routine. The point is that while it’s a bit tiring, it’s a routine that works for us right now. We get done what needs getting done, and we let slide what we can let slide, and we (my wife and I) do everything we can to make sure that we’re bonding with our daughter and meeting all of her needs and then some. And gosh, I don’t feel disposable or irrelevant! Who are these men who feel as if they have no role to play in an infant’s life? When I get home from school and see my daughter’s face light up at my return, I’m ecstatic; her sweet smile is a better antidote for exhaustion than any other I’ve known. Continue reading ‘By request, some more thoughts on feminist fathering’

Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 15, 2009
in Father, Feminism, Housework, Male feminists, Parenting and Working
. 41 Comments

This post by Jessica at Feministing, responding to this risible Neil Lyndon piece in the Daily Mail has revived many of the familiar arguments about feminism, the men’s rights movement, and gender essentialism. It’s all part of a response to the latest flurry of op-ed pieces (far too numerous to which to link) suggesting that feminism has proved a failure, largely because so many women today (especially middle-class American and European women, presumably those most likely to have benefitted from the movement) report being exhausted, overworked, anxious and, well, unhappy.

If you follow the feminist blogosphere, this topic has been debated over and over again in one form or another since the earliest BBS discussions of the mid-1990s. I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments, though the latest round of anti-feminist bromides seem unusually poorly constructed. Most are guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if women are anxious or frustrated or unhappy after the coming of the first three waves of feminism, then they are anxious and unhappy because of the first three waves of feminism. One might as well make the same argument about the arrival of the cell phone, electrolysis, or the designated hitter rule. Repeat after me, class: correlation is not causation.

What made me want to write today was the comment thread below the Feministing piece, a thread in which a number of classic MRA (men’s rights activist) arguments were raised. The basic thesis: feminism has created a world hostile to men (at least in the industrialized West). Feminists have co-opted judicial, political, and educational institutions in order to advance what the MRAs call a “victim ideology”. Men and boys are alternately harangued and ignored, viewed by the feminist elite as either dim-witted oafs or dangerously calculating and predatory. Men are dying earlier and committing suicide more frequently because of their alienation from these woman-centered institutions, say the MRAs; the legions of young men hooked on pot or porn or Playstation (or all three) are the inevitable result of their cultural and social emasculation at the hands of a shrill and craven matriarchy. Or so say the MRAs.

So let me say this in defense of feminism, not only from the perspective of someone who makes his living in no small part by teaching it, but from the perspective of a new father: my relationship with my infant daughter is, in a very real way, made possible by the critical work feminists did to reframe traditional gender roles. It is thanks to the gains of the feminist movement that I was encouraged and expected to go through every aspect of the pregnancy and birthing process with my wife. It is thanks to the cultural shift initiatied by feminists and male allies that I was able to take the time away from work to be there for my wife (a right alas not yet universal). It is thanks to the feminist movement that a generation of committed and dedicated fathers has emerged, fathers who actively practice co-parenting with the mothers of their children. Though men neither get pregnant nor breastfeed, these biological inadequacies are no impediment to developing the capacity to nurture, something I am living out as best I can every day. Continue reading ‘Feminism, fatherhood, and enduring male privilege’

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

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

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

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

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

One’s head hurts.

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

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