Archive for the 'Favorite posts 2007' Category

More on young women and perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the enduring fear of the “slut”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 25, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Sexuality, Teaching, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 15 Comments

It’s a busy day here, and the great disappointment of the next few hours is that I won’t get to see any of the Liverpool-Chelsea Champions League semifinal.

I saw Courtney Martin on MSNBC this morning, talking about her book. I’ve got her book, and Jessica Valenti’s new one, both coming in the mail. I look forward to reviewing them both on this blog. Based on excerpts that appeared here, I had some comments here and here about the Martin tome.

I am so glad that a larger discussion of women’s perfectionism and people-pleasing is really taking off in the blogosphere. Of all the posts I’ve put up this year, my Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary is perhaps the one of which I am most proud. And I was delighted to read an outstanding take on this same subject, also inspired by the Martin book, from Amanda Marcotte. Read the whole post, but this insight is key:

My theory is that perfectionism is the tribute that women with opportunities pay to sexism.

Read the rest of the post to see that idea fleshed out.

One of Amanda’s commenters got me thinking, asking:

Any thoughts, Amanda, on the connection between perfectionism and purity? I sometimes feel as if perfectionism is the new purity, or the traditional demand for female purity in new clothes, or women’s response to still-current demands for female purity, but I’m wondering if you see this connection as well.

Amanda hasn’t answered yet, but I’ve been mulling it this morning.

One aspect of perfectionism and people-pleasing that I haven’t touched on is related to the “purity” obsession, and that’s the tendency I’ve noticed in many young women for perfectionism (and compulsive dieting) to be closely connected to sexual guilt. Bear with me, as I’m musing here — this is a theory in process of being developed, but it’s grounded in years of teaching and youth work.

A disturbing number of young women still seem profoundly conflicted about sex. Statistics tell us — and my own experience as a pro-feminist gender studies professor and longtime youth leader tells me as well — that a great many teenage girls and college-aged women are “having sex.” Some of them come from conservative backgrounds in which pre-marital sex is seen as immoral and sinful, and some come from more liberal environments where “safety” rather than “purity” is emphasized. Some speak (and write in their journals) enthusiastically and positively about their sexual decision-making, while others seem tormented by ambivalence, anxiety, and guilt.

It’s remarkable how persistent the notion that “good girls don’t” has proven. Young women born in the last two decades, a generation after the sexual revolution, and raised in tolerant, even feminist households, still sometimes quietly report (and again, folks, this is all anecdotal based on my teaching and mentoring experience) guilt and conflict over their sexual choices. Even when they didn’t absorb the “True Love Waits” message from parents or pastors or peers, they couldn’t help but pick up the romantic ideal of “waiting ’till marriage” from somewhere in the broader culture. Though Disney movies never explicitly reference virginity before marriage, the girls I work with “assume” that the “princesses are all virgins.” And the number of high school and college-aged young women whose views were partly shaped by the “princess” culture — which is surely part of the “purity” culture” — is stunningly high.

Again, all anecdotal: I think there is a connection between guilt (or at least ambivalence) over pre-marital sex and an intensified perfectionism. Far too many of our little sisters, far too many of my students, still internalize the message that having sex too early makes them into “bad girls” and “sluts.” And whether or not they articulate that sense of undeserved shame, it seems to me that many of them overcompensate by trying all the harder to be “perfect and pure” in other areas. The desire to mold the body to more closely meet an unobtainable ideal often seems to intensify once a young woman becomes sexually active, and I don’t think it’s always because of an anxiety about pleasing a boyfriend. It seems at least partially linked to a desire to prove that “even if I’m having sex, I’m still a ‘good girl’, and I prove my ‘goodness’ through self-denial, through exercise, through even more of an effort to live up to a societal ideal.”

Even in our own relatively liberated era, pre-marital virginity remains an explicit ideal for many and an implicit ideal for many more. Many of my students talk boldly and confidently about their sexual decision-making in one breath, and express occasional wistfulness about “a white wedding” and “waiting until then” in the other. (Some, of course, are completely unconflicted, and I don’t mean to diminish them. Then again, there are some young women who don’t feel tortured by the ideal of slenderness either. Would that their numbers were greater!) Many of them seem to feel as if by choosing to become sexually active, they’ve fallen short. And some of these seem to compensate for their own perceived failure in this one area by redoubling their efforts in another. Call it the “if I’m earning straight As and I’m volunteering 20 hours a week and I’m on this committee and president of that club and playing this position on that team and keeping my body at that weight, then I can’t possibly be the bad girl that somewhere inside of me I’m afraid that I am” syndrome.

Some of my secular feminist allies may doubt that this guilt (and the concomitant compensation with perfectionism) is linked as closely to sex as I suggest. My conservative friends may embrace the theory as further “evidence” that pre-marital sex is bad, particularly for young women. If even women who weren’t pressured to “wait” by their families still seem sometimes to feel conflicted about their sexual choices, my right-wing buddies will no doubt argue, isn’t this evidence that pre-marital sexual activity violates some natural desire on the part of all women to save themselves for their husbands? I am reluctant to give that old canard any credence at all, and I fear that I may be doing so here. (After all, it’s obvious that chastity is no prophylaxis against anxiety or people-pleasing; spend time in any conservative evangelical community, and you’ll run into lots of exhausted, weight-obsessed virgins.)

I write as a professor and a mentor who has been teaching classes on gender and sexuality for well over a decade; I’ve read countless student journals and led innumerable small group discussions with both college and high-school women. I am convinced, as Courtney Martin is convinced, that guilt, perfectionism, anorexia, and people-pleasing are epidemic among young women today, and that that epidemic extends to every strata of American society. I am worried that despite generations of progress to create a more egalitarian society, many young women today still feel a crushing pressure to live up to unobtainable ideals. The shame and guilt they struggle with is different, perhaps, from that with which their grandmothers wrestled, but it is no less debilitating. And I am at least somewhat convinced that the ancient, ugly, lingering stigma of the “slut” and the “dirty girl” plays a considerable part in the “perfection projects” of a great many young women today.

Restraining the ego and leaving doors unopened: a note about crushes, flirtation, and the “desire to know”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 10, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Student crushes
. 18 Comments

Below this post on student crushes, a reader named “P” describes her crush on one of her (married) professors. I’ll quote a section that has me thinking this morning:

I was interested in your advice not to talk about it with the professor. I had been considering doing so, although not now because there are still letters of recommendation for grad school to be written and I most certainly want to maintain a level of appropriateness until his defined role as a professor is done.

On the one hand your advice makes sense because he can’t really help me work through a crush of which he is the object. That’s not my goal though. My concern is that a large part of the reason I still think about him now is a curiosity as to whether he feels the same way…

Bold emphasis is mine.

I’m going to step beyond P’s specific issue with her professor, and reflect for a moment on the extraordinary desire so many of us have “to know”. P seems less interested in actually having an affair with her married prof than she is in finding out if her feelings for him are reciprocated. If you read through the comments below that post — and indeed through the comments on all the student crush posts — it seems clear that for many folks with crushes on their teachers, this curiosity to know whether or not the object of their desire feels something in return can be overwhelming.

I can’t think of a more tempting — and more disastrous — reason to begin any love affair than “curiosity.” When I was younger, I cloaked neediness and compulsiveness in the language of intellectual (or at least romantic) curiosity. Time and again, I pursued someone because I was desperately curious to know certain things: Could I “have” them? Did they “want” me as I “wanted” them? What would it be like to “be” (however briefly) with someone “like that”? Firmly committed to the lie that “experience is always the best teacher”, I attempted to justify some fairly unjustifiable behavior with the explanation that I had “an insatiable desire to know.” (This is a particularly common trait, I know, among academics — many of whom are notorious for petty affairs and infidelities. We exalt the pursuit of knowledge above all other virtues, and periodically find it all too easy to confuse the gratifying of our own ego with the acquisition of genuine understanding.)

I posted in February about flirtation. I wrote:

Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent.

This connects to the kind of curiosity to which P seems to refer. Our ego longs to know if we are wanted. Our ego promises us “I won’t take things too far; just let me find out!” The ego has a way of making its demands seem alternately reasonable and irresistable. It tells us that there’s no harm, surely, in taking steps to “know once and for all” whether that cute, taken teacher or student or colleague has an interest. Surely there’s no way any normal person ought to be expected to resist the temptation to “open the door, just a crack” in order to find out whether or not he or she is the object of another’s desire. “I don’t want to do anything”, the ego protests, “I just wanna know!”

I came to this realization later than many, but I’ve become convinced that wisdom and happiness in no small way correlate with a willingness to leave some doors closed, certain opportunities unpursued. One tool I use these days to measure my own spiritual growth is my own willingness to live contentedly with what I don’t know. Not only do I not need to know if a student has a crush on me or not, I’m called to make certain I take no steps in order to “find out.” (Like a lot of people’s, my ego, unrestrained, had all the subtlety of an untrained Great Dane; left unleashed, it would pant and slobber and race after promising scents that suggested the delicious gratification it craved. It knocked a lot of things over, periodically knocked people down, and left a big wet mess.)

Committing to “leaving doors unopened” is a spiritual and psychological discipline. Like any discipline, it gets easier with practice and the passage of time. When I was younger, I thought wisdom would come as the natural result of the relentless pursuit of every possible new experience. I believed that in love (or at least its physical aspect), any door unopened was a “crime against eros”. I didn’t see my behavior as compulsive, needy, and childish — I honestly thought it vaguely heroic. That was my sad foolishness, but it was a foolishness that hurt many others as well as myself. And it’s a foolishness I see alive and well in many of my students and, more troublingly, in my peers.

I have no right to judge those younger than myself who are only doing what I was doing at their same age. But I am wary of the lie that bitter experience is the only way to learn. Jesus told doubting Thomas, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. I’ll take the huge liberty of rephrasing it: Because of all the doors you recklessly opened, you have become wise; blessed are those who have become wise while leaving the doors closed.

Saying “yes” to God and “no” to family: a follow-up on feminism and self-denial

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 9, 2007
in Christianity, Faith, Family, Favorite posts 2007 and Feminism
. 5 Comments

I’m in my office early on a Monday morning. I’m still without my keys, and must prevail on college staff to let me in and out of my own room as well as other offices on campus. I’m not grumpy about the long delay in providing me with new keys, as I know darned well it was my own fault for losing the old set.

I’m grateful for all the comments below my “no” piece of eleven days ago. SamChevre, a regular commenter and a fellow Christian, was troubled by one aspect of what I wrote. I had said:

Feminism is, however, opposed to a culture of compulsory sacrifice and endless self-denial.

And SamChevre wrote:

Christ, our perfect example, denied himself of all the power and glory that was rightfully his, denied himself of deliverance that was easily available, and did all this to benefit us.

So I’m having trouble figuring out why self-denial is a bad thing for young women, when it’s required for all the rest of us.

Mermade, my former student who blogs at Miss Sarikah, responded well:

Sam, as a Christian feminist, I think there’s a difference between saying “no” to God and saying “no” to people. There is also a difference between being a chronic people-pleaser in order to avoid a possible argument and in serving humanity.

Mermade hits on a vital point, one on which I’d like to briefly expand. In my fourteen Marthas, not one Mary post, I quoted the famous story of those two sisters, one consumed by duty and “shoulds”, the other willing to drop those duties to sit at the foot of the Lord. And I talked about that story only after referencing Matthew 10:37:

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…

There’s a marvelous spiritual truth in all of this: part of growing up into a mature Christian is learning that in order to say “Yes!” to God one has to start saying “No!” to parents, pastors, peers, and the assorted pressures they all impose. It’s absolutely true that Christ calls us to a life of service, a life of self-denial. But the great mistake that we make with young women is teaching them that dutiful people-pleasing is somehow a legitimate form of Christian service. God calls us to follow Him, and if one thing becomes abundantly clear over and over again in Scripture, it’s that following Him is frequently incompatible with pleasing one’s family.

The first commandment is, of course, that we are to have no other Gods before God. Whatever we put ahead of God is an idol, be it Baal or money or power. For many women in our culture — and in countless other cultures — family is the greatest and most powerful of idols. When we raise our daughters to be “yes-women” , when we raise them to feel pangs of guilt each time they choose to listen to a “still, small voice” within them rather than to their mother or their boyfriend, we raise them to worship an idol.

SamChevre wrote to me:

You seem to think self-denial is valuable and desirable when it makes you a better person (running, boxing, avoiding sex with young women) and when it makes the world better for your fellow creatures (chinchilla rescue, veganism).

His implication is that I don’t hold women to that same standard. It’s an odd kind of hypocrisy of which to be accused; while most hypocrites are harder on others than they are on themselves, SamChevre suggests that the reverse is true for me. But Sam, who is a valued commenter here, misses a key aspect of what it is that I’m advocating.

Like it or not, my focus on this blog is on “living a life most excellent”. Yes, I’m a self-confessed “growth junkie”. I’m sure I regularly come across as priggish and Puritanical, and I’ve responded to those charges before. And while I do advocate self-denial and self-sacrifice in many areas, and while I do restrict and redirect many of my own impulses and wants, I’m quite sure that in doing so I’m not “people-pleasing”! Whether I’m talking about masturbation or veganism, my advocacy of a life of self-denial is not about pleasing anyone; it’s not a strategy to avoid conflict, to soothe things over, to help everyone get along. Building the peaceable Kingdom tends to freak people out.

My views are not designed to placate my wife, my mother, my cousins or my colleagues. My views — which have been developed over a long period of reflection and prayer — are based on a sense of where God is calling me. And indeed, one classic way to know God is moving in our lives is if we experience greater conflict with our loved ones as a consequence. I do try and make the case for pursuing an egalitarian, cruelty-free life. It’s a way of living that involves quite a bit of self-denial. But it also is one that involves a healthy dose of disobedience. And it’s one in which saying “Yes” to God, something I struggle to do more and more in my life, means saying “No” to a great many people whose agendas may well be radically at odds with His plan for me. That’s the lesson I want the young people I mentor to learn.

Some quick thoughts on “no”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 29, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism and Teaching
. 37 Comments

One of the fairly consistent exercises that I give to both my women’s studies students — and to the girls in my high school youth group — is to begin to monitor how often that they say “yes” when they would rather say “no.” (I’ve posted about this before, but jeepers, I can’t find my own stuff in my archives any more.)

I’m not talking about learning to say no to drugs, or sexual pressure, though I’m fully aware that many young women do struggle in those areas. I’m talking about the difficulty of saying “no” to parents and other family members, to good friends, to coaches and teachers and mentors. As I’ve written before (most recently here), far too many of our little sisters and daughters have been raised since birth to be dutiful people-pleasers. Even in the early 21st century, after decades of feminist gains, an extraordinary number of young (and not-so-young) women feel intensely guilty when they say “no” to someone they love.

In the past, I’ve asked my students and youth groupers to keep a “log” of how often they say “yes” when they’d rather say “no” over the course of the week. Some of them actually have developed spread sheets, with columns! (People-pleasing taken to the platinum level!) They list to whom they said yes when they’d rather have said no; they list the request itself; they are encouraged to journal about why they said “yes”, and to speculate what the consequences would have been (both for themselves and the other person) if they had said “no.”

I don’t usually ask them to start practicing saying “no” right away. I find it’s often more effective to get young women to see just how often — and to how many people, and in how many varied circumstances — they say “yes.” Saying “yes” to things we would rather not do is of course part of living in community. But we raise women to find “no” a much more difficult word to say.

Later on, I ask the women to practice turning the “yes” into a “no.” Not to a necessary request (e.g.: “Can you drive me to the hospital?”), but to one that is redolent with another’s sense of entitlement and expectation (like a lazy brother asking to borrow $10, again.) The “no” needs to be said to someone with whom they are in relationship (parent, boyfriend, friend, close co-worker). And the real work begins after the no. The real effort, which is what I want written about, is to work through the guilt that so often accompanies a firm and final “no.”

One old criticism of feminism is that it makes women selfish. One feminist criticism of patriarchal culture is that it demands that women be selfless, endlessly self-sacrificing. Authentic feminism does not seek to sever women from their emotional ties to others, nor does feminism (despite the fantasies of some of its critics) want women to be so radically independent that they live outside of meaningful, mutual relationships. Feminism is not anti-family. Feminism is, however, opposed to a culture of compulsory sacrifice and endless self-denial.

And we start extricating young women from that hateful culture by teaching them to say what was probably their first word. The feminist journey often begins with a soft, firm “no.”

“Architects of our own adversity”: a long post about men’s complicity in their own oppression, and the difference between self-acceptance and self-love

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 21, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 21 Comments

Sorry folks, this is gonna be another very long post.

Over at Alas, A Blog, Amp has a good discussion up on the old question: Are Men Oppressed as Men? Amp cites a very interesting article by Caroline New, but warning, the article is tediously jargon-laden.

One strand of feminist thinking about male oppression is that men are rarely oppressed as men. Those who advocate this stance argue that black men are oppressed for their blackness, not their maleness; Muslim men for their faith, not their sex; inmates for ther status as prisoners, not their biological equipment. They also argue that authentic oppression requires a dominant oppressing caste whose identity is distinct from those whom they are oppressing: in other words, whites can oppress blacks, but blacks can’t oppress whites because of an unequal power differential. And blacks can’t oppress blacks because the dynamics of oppression are always the dynamics of oppressing what is Different, what is Other.

New, happily enough, is smarter than that simplistic reading. Most importantly, she notes that in certain instances, the oppressed can be complicit with their own oppression. A valuable and interesting discussion follows in the comments at Alas.

I am not a theorist. I’m not an intellectual at all, really, though I’ve played the part of one for a couple of decades. (I sometimes describe myself, self-deprecatingly, as the least intellectually curious Ph.D I know.) But I do think that feminists and male feminist allies need to have these sorts of thoughtful discussions, and I’m glad that folks like Amp host and provoke them.

On a less theoretical level, I am intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I spend a lot of time reading the literature of many “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. I spend a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce (I am, if nothing else, an expert on starting over.) And I mentor a lot of young male students and boys from my youth group at church. And in conversations with many of these boys and men, I hear “narratives of helplessness” emerging.

From the older, angrier voices of the so-called MRAs, the narrative describes a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack”, which is why many — not all — men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.

There’s not much point in telling these men, “you know, you’re an oppressor more than you are oppressed”. The “you’ve sinned more than you’ve been sinned against” trope doesn’t go over well!. These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel – often — impotent. And too often, our feelings become facts. Too often, we conveniently ignore the ways in which we played the part of volunteers, not victims. Too often, we deny our own complicity in our own misery.

Many men make the mistake of equating the role of the oppressor with a sense of personal fulfillment. If they really were oppressing women, they assume, if they really were part of a dominant class, they’d experience a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction. After all, if there really was a patriarchy, isn’t it supposed to benefit men? If men really did systematically take part in the dehumanization and degradation of women, wouldn’t more men feel the tangible benefits of that oppression for themselves? In other words, they ask the plaintive question over and over again: “How can I be an oppressor when I feel unhappy and powerless?” If most men are leading lives of “quiet desperation”, then surely those same men cannot also be agents of injustice. Right? So goes this line of thinking, or more accurately, this line of emotional reactivity.

Ten years ago, I began three interrelated journeys: I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I drank my last drop of alcohol, and turned to a Twelve Step program for recovery from my various forms of acting out. And I began to work to do more than espouse a superficial egalitarian philosophy — I began to make the effort to match my language and my life, to live a life of radical justice. Now it’s true that alcohol hasn’t passed my lips in nearly a decade, but I’ve had plenty of slips and falls on my walk with Christ. I’ve had quite a few struggles as I’ve sought to live in to an authentic pro-feminism. Growing up and taking responsibility isn’t easy.

One thing my faith, my feminism, and my recovery program all taught me: I was the architect of my own adversity. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t blame my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t blame my genetic inheritance for my predisposition to become an addict, and I couldn’t blame my hormones for my chronic infidelities. I certainly couldn’t blame the women I’d married. My misery was a result of a series of choices I made. Hormones and family history helped shape those choices, but the final decisions were always mine. I came to realize that my sense of my own helplessness was an illusion, one I used to justify my bad behavior and one I used to justify a chronic refusal to change.

It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression. The older lads who torment a younger were themselves tormented when they were his age. The “be a sturdy oak” rule, a rule that teaches men to be alienated from their own inner emotional terrain, is one that is almost entirely enforced by other males. The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.

The first task of authentic men’s work is helping boys and men get in touch with their own ancient wounds. Men need to re-feel the old injuries inflicted upon them. They need to rediscover the tears they suppressed. They need to go beneath the anger (most men have a considerable amount of anger not too far from the surface) to the root cause of their pain. And once they’ve dragged all that garbage out, then they need to be encouraged to understand themselves as active agents with a choice:

“So your father never showed you how to be there for his family? That’s terribly painful. But your father’s script isn’t yours. If you follow his example, it is not because it is your ‘destiny’: it’s because you are consciously ignoring alternatives. If you do to others what was done to you, you have become not only an oppressor, but a victimizer who has made a decision to be one.”

This is true in the big things and in the little things. The fact that we don’t raise men to be as in tune with their own emotions, to be as perceptive and intuitive as their sisters, doesn’t mean that men are destined to be shallow and obtuse. It’s appropriate for a grown man to express frustration when his own vocabulary for his feelings isn’t as deep and broad as his female partner’s; it’s not acceptable for him to shrug and say “Well, it’s the way I was raised” or “Well, that’s just the way my brain is wired.” To say those things is to be complicit; to insist on one’s own inability to transform because of one’s biology or one’s childhood is to buy into the seductive lie of our own helplessness.

I’m not big on self-acceptance. Really, I’m not. What I’m big on is self-love. Too much self-acceptance leaves me believing the idea that I’m okay as I am, even when I’m not particularly happy and I’m not making the world a better place. Self-love reminds me I’m a precious child of God. Heck, I’m God’s favorite! (And so are you, you, you, and you.) Self-love reminds me I’m worthy of joy, but that the world doesn’t owe me happiness. Self-love reminds me I am called to share with others, to live in community with others, to work to change and transform and heal the world and myself. My Jewish friends call this mandate tikkun olam. The Christians I worship with call it building the Kingdom.

But we can only heal the world and build the Kingdom when we know we have been given the power to do it. And if we buy into the lie of our helplessness, our oppression, our victim status, the world doesn’t change. We stay miserable, or maybe just vaguely dissatisfied. Our relationships are, at best, just okay. And we settle for so much less than we could have.

Tennyson and Sharon Olds, Ulysses and Telemachus: a very long post about endurance athletes, independence, and the single body alone in the universe against its own best time

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2007
in Age, Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite posts 2007, Poetry, Sports and Vanity
. 6 Comments

Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).

I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.

This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.

What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.

Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:

They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue.

Authentic virtue is never selfish, as Aristotle and a hundred other wise folks have pointed out. Authentic virtue is about balancing one’s own need to endlessly recreate and improve with one’s responsibility to the world at large. If our running gives us great pleasure, but leaves us so drained and self-absorbed that we are less available for our loved ones and our community, then we’re not being virtuous. We have to make choices, and in the past couple of years, I’ve made that choice. Many folks think I work out a lot (14-20 hours per week). But that’s nothing compared to what I would do if I gave up more of my outside commitments! Oh, how I long to take eighteen good months and train for a solid 100-miler. But running 120 miles per week would take too much from my wife, too much from my chinchillas, too much from my students and my youth group, my seven classes, my mentees, my colleagues.

The greatest danger for distance athletes, however, isn’t that we become selfish. The greatest danger, one that I see in the life of my ailing relation, is that we become so enraptured by our own physical capabilities that we begin to believe we are radically autonomous. Our bodies do such incredible things, and bring us such pride and satisfaction, that we start to think we’re indestructible. We become particularly loath to rely on others, jealously, often pridefully guarding our own independence. The phrase “our bodies, ourselves” takes on a radically different meaning: our identity as human beings becomes enmeshed with our sense of what our bodies can do.

We came into this world naked and helpless. We had no control over our flesh; we were diapered and dressed and spanked and bathed and fed on another’s schedule. We wailed and flailed, but for the first few years were utterly incapable of meeting our own needs. And unless we are taken young and suddenly, most of us will leave the world in that same way. Even if we retain the ability to use the toilet and feed ourselves up until the end, old age will rob us, sooner or later, of our precious independence. If we’ve spent fifty or sixty years building up a personal myth of indestructible autonomy, “alone in the universe against our own best time”, we’re going to be absolutely devastated by the slow surrenderings we will inevitably have to make as we age.

I’ve posted a bit about my Dad lately. His dying was relatively quick last year; he got the terminal diagnosis in mid-April and he passed on on June 22. A gentle man, not in the least concerned with “personal best times” or “faster and farther”, he surrendered himself easily to his caregivers. He was uncomplaining as he slowly lost his abilities to do for himself what he had done for nearly seven decades. He maintained his dignity and his sense of humor, and above all, he maintained his sense of self even as his body shriveled. My father, a philosopher by training and a wise soul by natural temperament, knew that he was not his body. While he had a hard time accepting the soul as separate from the flesh, he knew that his “Hubertness” was not defined by what his muscles and bones could do. That knowledge gave him the strength to surrender gently when his time came.

My ailing relative, my fellow endurance athlete, is not going so gently. He’s raging against the dying of the light. For him, the “light” remains connected to what his body can do, and losing those capabilities is devastating for him in a way that it wasn’t for my far-less competitive father. As for me, I have had both these dear men as role models all of my life. Though there is much I owe to my Dad, and though I love him still with all my heart, I did not get my manic restlessness from him. That longing I have to climb the next mountain, and the next, and the next, until I reach the final summit from which there is no descent — that obsession comes from somewhere else. My cousin has it in him; his were the first pair of eyes in which I saw what I so often see when I look in the mirror: the sense that life is a constant struggle against weakness, against darkness, against our own sense of limitations. And when at last our limitations overwhelm us… it’s hard.

On the list of the hundred most famous English-language poems, Tennyson’s Ulysses must rank near the top. I first read it in college in a frosh Comp Lit class. I loved it then and love it now, and remember fighting with my Marxist TA who insisted that it was the “Ulysseses” of the world who were responsible for colonialism and imperialism and slavery. She hated the poem (and hated Tennyson) and wanted her students to mock the sentiments within it. I nearly lost my temper, so eager was I to defend both the poet and his protagonist. And I think of Ulysses often as I think of my dear cousin, fighting so hard in his hospital bed.

Ulysses was a lousy husband, to put it mildly. He wasn’t much of a king either, if we take Tennyson’s view — he has no interest in doing what his son Telemachus does:

…by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness…

Ulysses is not centered in that sphere of common duty; he hears a different call:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!

It’s whopping hubris to compare oneself and one’s relations to the ancient heroes, of course. But when I think of my father, I think of one very gentle, loving, devoted Telemachus. My God, Dad was “strong in the sphere of common duties”! Though he was not a political man or a natural leader, he was a pillar of his family and of the broader community; the hundreds and hundreds of mourners at his memorial service were all touched and moved by him. In my life, especially since his death, I’ve sought to become more and more of the sort of man he was. Kindness and grace came naturally to my father, and I long to emulate him in those virtues.

But my cousin and I — like so many of my friends in the endurance running community — have the restlessness of a Ulysses. We are the ones who find “how dull it is to pause, not to shine in use.” And though we don’t kill monsters, we devote our lives to killing our own limitations. Contentment scares us; complacency unnerves us; we embrace domesticity with often considerable unease. We are capable of common duties, but we’re not centered there. Our center is always a mile further up the trail.

Near the end of the poem, Ulysses says:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…

That which we are, we are. I am thinking this morning of a man I love and admire, lying in his bed four hundred miles from here. A man who has climbed mountains, swum through oceans, run marathons on five continents. For him, the great question is finding the will to live now that so much has been taken. The question for him is whether “much abides”, and whether or not what remains is enough to continue to live.

Those with the spirit of Telemachus have an easier time letting go. They give up the bicycle, the running shoes, the car keys. They may mourn the loss of their independence, but they haven’t staked their identity to their autonomy the way those with the spirit of Ulysses have. And as one who struggles to reconcile his inner Telemachus with his inner Ulysses, I have much to think about this morning.

Is porn any more defensible when women use it? A response to Eric and Daddyslittlegirl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 14, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Porn and Relationships
. 22 Comments

I got an email a few days ago from someone named Eric:

After reading this post over at Ilyka Damen’s blog, I have to ask, what would be your perspective on the idea that it is okay for women to look at porn of men, porn in which the men are objectified? From being a fairly long-time reader of your blog, I know you are very strongly against porn (a sentiment I share), so I have an idea of what your response will be, but still I am curious.

For example, one of the pages linked from that post shows pictures of a man naked in an outdoor picture with clouds blocking his face. Is this not the same objectification and dehumanization (removal of thoughts, simply the portrayal of people as bodies for the viewers’ pleasure) of humans which leads us to believe that porn (featuring women) is morally wrong? I am not trying to waste your time with this question and I am not an MRA (though I am worried that is how I will come across in asking this), I really am trying to find an answer to reconcile this discrepancy. To say that the objectification of women for the pleasure of a man is wrong, but the objectification of men for the pleasure of a women is okay seems to be going against my notion that all humans are entitled to the respect and dignity of not being objectified in such a way.

The post at Ilyka, by the way, is from someone with the handle “daddyslittlegirl”, and yes, the links she puts up are indeed not safe for work. Frankly, for some of us, they may not be “safe” for home or Starbucks either. There’s more than one definition of safety, people, and the freedom to surf without being monitored by an employer is only one.

Perhaps facetiously, perhaps candidly, “daddyslitlegirl” writes:

…once I saw all the pictures of those hot naked guys on the page, I sorta lost track of what anyone else was talking about.

Let me see if I can work through some thoughts here.

One basic tenet of feminism is the refutation of the lie that women don’t have a “visual sexuality.” A great many men I know comfort themselves with the falsehood that “most women don’t like to look”. If men knew how often women were looking, one feels, a great many more men would feel considerably more anxiety. Because we live in a culture where women are shamed for openly lusting, fewer women — obviously — admit to doing so. But that doesn’t mean that women don’t have strong libidos that can be reinforced by various examples of eye candy, including those found in pornography.

Wearing my feminist hat, I can say that there’s a small part of me that responds positively to a woman publicly asserting her own sexual appetite. We live in a culture where women’s sexuality has been denied, suppressed, hidden, and repressed for, well, eons. Though we’ve certainly seen eras (think Puritan America) where men were held equally accountable for controlling their sexuality (Hawthorne got that wrong), in living American memory we’ve seen a culture where men have enjoyed tremendous leeway when it comes to living as sexual beings. The “sex industry” largely caters to men and reinforces the sense that male sexuality is not only powerful, but often uncontrollably so. We aren’t there for women, not by a long shot. So when a woman of any age talks openly about her own lust, she’s doing something countercultural in a way that a man who speaks the same way isn’t. In that sense, there’s something redemptive about the sort of frank post that daddyslittlegirl (I’m not commenting on her handle) has put up.

If you read through my “porn archive”, you’ll see that I object to porn on a number of levels. I object to it because of what it does both to the subject and the object in the visual transaction. I object to it because I believe that most women (and men) who work in the porn industry are exploited, placed at great risk, and generally undercompensated. The fact that a few porn stars become famous and rich, the fact that a few loudly trumpet their own sense of contentment with their work, doesn’t change the fact that a great many more young people (mostly women) suffer physical, economic, and psychic injury. In this sense, my veganism and my anti-porn stance are analogous: they are both based on the assumption that using another being’s flesh for my own pleasure is deeply and profoundly sinful. That’s a radical stance, but it’s one rooted in the best instincts of both the Christian and the feminist traditions.

Again, let me be clear: I’m not a killjoy. Neither were my Puritan ancestors! I’m not against lust or sex. Lust has a tremendously positive aspect; like any other hunger, it teaches us we’re alive. Desire, in and of itself, is neither bad nor good. But whatever our desire — for a new Mercedes, for a steak, for someone else’s ripped and toned body — when we act on that desire without regard for how our actions affect the world around us, we sin.

I’m also against porn because of what it does to the viewer. Even if every sex industry performer was well-compensated, emotionally well-adjusted, and receiving health benefits with a pension plan, I’d still be troubled by porn. I’m troubled by it because porn disconnects lust from commitment and responsibility; it teaches the lesson that the bodies of others are ours for the taking. I am convinced that spiritually and psychologically, “porn consumption” makes us a little less compassionate, a little less sensitive, a little less likely to connect our own pleasure with our responsibility to share joy and pleasure with another. Because I live as a heterosexual man, I’m more intimately familiar with how this works in the lives of men. But I’m well aware that a growing percentage of “porn product” is consumed by women. While some women surely pretend to enjoy porn in order to please their male partners, there’s no question that a great many others actively delight in viewing it and masturbating to it. And Eric is absolutely right that when he assumes that I find it no less troubling when women do it.

As a feminist, I rejoice that we’ve come so far in our struggle to get the world to acknowledge the reality of women’s sexuality. The “sugar and spice and everything nice” (read: asexual) ideal deserves to die a quick death. The stereotype that women trade sex for what they only really want, love (while men do the reverse) fails to capture both the potential power of the female libido and the potential depth of the male soul. But when it comes to pornography, when it comes to consuming the bodies of the young and the economically vulnerable with our eyes, I see no reason to believe it’s any better when the viewer is a woman and the object is a man. My anti-porn stance is hard, fast, and gender-neutral. (If that line seems vaguely subjective to you, for shame!)

I need to prepare a lecture on Esau, Jacob, Rebekah, Isaac, and birth order.

Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary: a retreat report and a long meditation on girls, pressure, parents, and people-pleasing

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 12, 2007
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Faith, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls, Youth and Youth ministry
. 23 Comments

I’m in my office, just before 8:00 on a Monday morning. Daylight Savings Time has arrived early, as almost everyone knows, and I am happy. (Even if getting up this morning at five for my boxing session felt particularly challenging.)

I had a wonderful time once again with the All Saints confirmation class this weekend on our retreat in the San Bernardino mountains. (I’ve written about past retreats on this blog: here are the 2005 and 2006 reports.). I was a bit disappointed by the abnormally warm weather and the nearly complete absence of snow, despite the fact that we were up in the mountains three weeks earlier than usual.

Though in 2005 we had more boys than girls in our confirmation class, this year our gender ratio was wildly skewed. After a couple of cancellations, we ended up taking fourteen girls and one boy up to Big Bear for the weekend retreat. (The boy, a very outgoing and relaxed kid, was more than delighted at his unique status.) In our intimate and emotional discussions Friday night and Saturday, one clear pattern emerged in the stories these young women were telling about their lives.

After years and years of teaching confirmation classes, I’ve noticed that each class has a slightly different “feel.” The 2007 “Seekers” confirmation class is not merely notable for being overwhelmingly female; this year’s crop is also marked by an often frantic desire to live up to the expectations of the outside world. Never have I gone on retreat with so many young women who were so completely exhausted! I’m not talking about temporarily underslept; I’m talking about girls who are 14-16 years old whose daily schedules are as demanding as that of a young Japanese businessman trying to climb the ladder at Sony.

Never have the youth leaders had to work so hard to convince so many kids to take a weekend away! These girls weren’t worried about missing dances or parties. They were worried about missing speech tournaments, SAT prep classes, and biology homework. They were worried about not being able to exercise and stay fit for their various team sport commitments. Many begged to be allowed to bring some books to study from “in our free time.” (We have a fairly strict “no homework” policy; the kids know about this weekend six months in advance.) And the thought of spending forty-eight hours away from their elaborately programmed schedules and responsibilities was terrifying for many of them.

Before a retreat, I always joke with the other youth leaders about “packing plenty of Kleenex”. We expect a lot of tears as we go through our emotional, spirit-filled weekend. But rarely have we had as many sniffles and wet eyes as we did these past few days. On Friday night, as we “checked in” with our fourteen girls and one boy about their lives and their faith journey, it was as if a massive dam had suddenly broken. One after another, they broke down. Some were angry at themselves, others angry at God, many confessed feeling utterly overwhelmed by pressure and expectations. The most common phrase I heard all night was one I don’t always anticipate to be the most common: “I feel so guilty.” These girls had guilt and shame weighing them down. I could see it in the slump of their shoulders, in the puffiness of their eyes.

The specific pressures vary. We have one girl who’s a dancer, a very good one; she’s trying to get ready to audition for professional companies at the same time that she’s carrying a full load of advanced placement classes as a sophomore. Another girl is captain of her debate team and active in student government at her school. Her days begin at five and end at midnight. She does three to four hours of homework a night, tutors underprivileged kids, prepares for speech tournaments and is gearing up to run for class president for next year. She’s a tenth-grader, but her anxiety about not “getting into a good school” and “letting everyone down” is so palpable that when she tries to relax she ends up sitting and shaking rather like a wet chihuahua.

As a feminist and a Christian, the desperate “people-pleasing” of so many of these young women troubles me. Many of them acknowledge carrying the double burden familiar to so many modern women: these girls know that they are expected to live up to traditional feminine standards of behavior and looks, at least much of the time. (Three girls talked quietly about their struggles with disordered eating and body self-loathing.) But in addition to the cultural expectation to be bright-eyed, cheerful, virginal and pleasing, they also feel pressured to be intellectually, athletically, and professionally successful. They all volunteer (often as part of school-mandated community service). Their parents have told them all their lives that they can “be anything they want to be”, which sounds great — until the girls are forced to excel at virtually everything they do in every facet of their lives so as “not to miss out” on any opportunity to succeed. The superwomen complex is alive and well in girls so young that some were born after Bill Clinton became president! That breaks my heart.

As we wrapped up our first session Friday night, I pulled out the Bible. I read two sections. From Matthew, I read my beloved 10:37:

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Honestly, it’s often twice as hard to get young women, raised since birth to please and to perform, to grasp this than young men. We are so much more tolerant of male rebellion; we are more tolerant of young men who “take time to find themselves” or who “are going through a slacker phase.” And to put it more simply, more young men seem to have an easier time daring to disappoint their parents. (Of course, there are plenty of boys near collapse from trying to meet other’s expectations. But their numbers are fewer.)

What I wanted the girls to grasp from this passage is that a real relationship with Christ is one that comes unmediated by parents or peers. To live in Christ means to follow Him with the very likely expectation that His plan for your life is not the same as your parent’s hopes. That doesn’t mean that Jesus is an excuse for narcissistic rebellion. But it does mean that if you put pleasing others, especially your parents, ahead of discerning God’s unique plan for your life, then you have missed the point. I made it clear to “my kids”: Christ comes to set captives free, and sometimes the jailers are the very people who love you most.

After praying silently for quick inspiration, I felt called to read Luke 10:38-42:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Earlier, as our fourteen girls shared, I had realized that I was sitting in a room filled to the rafters with Marthas, with nary a Mary to be found! Like Martha, they are “worried and upset about many things”. They don’t know how to rest; they are “distracted by all the preparations that (have) to be made.” These Marthas — my dear, beautiful, brave, overachieving, anxious, exhausted girls — live lives that are governed by an endless series of “to do lists”. They wake up with “have to’s” and go to bed with “ought to have’s” and spend their days thinking about their “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” But only one thing is needed, and that is to sit at the foot of God.

It says in Kings, “after the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” The earthquakes and fires in these girls’ lives are all that they hear; they hear only noise, only storm and fury. As I said to them, that “gentle whisper” (what the KJV famously calls the “still small voice”) can’t be heard until you learn to press the mute button at your peers, at your coaches, at your teachers, at Facebook, at Youtube, at Jane Magazine, and yes, at your parents. Martha is too busy to hear the gentle whisper. She worries too much, fearing what will happen if she stops to rest, fearing who she’ll be if she stops her endless motion, her endless people-pleasing. Choosing “what is better” is about placing one’s own spiritual growth ahead of everything else. Choosing Mary’s part over Martha’s is to risk the wrath of some who love and care for you; it is to risk disappointing those who raised you and nurtured you. It is to risk having to confront your own fear of not doing enough. And if you want joy, if you want fulfillment, if you want rest, it’s what you absolutely gotta do.

Thanks to the remarkable success of several waves of American feminism, the girls I work with today have more opportunities than virtually any generation before them. Though they have to confront a misogynistic backlash that has taken root in many aspects of our dominant culture, they have the chance to achieve more and do more and enjoy more than their mothers and grandmothers. But we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation. We’ve sucked the joy right out of their over-programmed, over-monitored, over-achieving little lives. True feminism and true Christian faith are absolutely congruent in their mutual opposition to the idea that young women ought to live up to an ever-more demanding set of duties and commitments.

As a feminist and a Christian, I want to see “my girls” becoming more like Mary, less like Martha. And if that means that some of the boys need to go and spend a few minutes taking over Martha’s duties so she can take a break, then they damned well can step up and do it.

UPDATE: My dear mother, long a defender of Martha, writes me today to remind me that many traditions say that Martha ended up in Tarascon, France, where she may well have slain a dragon. It’s a happy thought.

Working out, eating right, self-acceptance and the call to transform: towards reconciling a series of contradictions

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 8, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism and Food
. 18 Comments

One of the things about going vegan this year: no more Cadbury cream eggs. I’m thinking about this because my sources tell me that I’ve had several visitors who came here with the search query “cadbury eggs sweden”. Sigh.

I’m thinking about feminism and bodies again this morning. I read Sara’s post at F-Words yesterday. She notes that a poster appeared on campus at Washington State (she’s got the photo) with the caption: “Better your Body”. That wouldn’t have been unusual as an ad for a gym, but it was a flyer advertising free body composition testing in conjuction with WSU’s body image awareness week. Body image awareness programs have been around on college campuses for two decades or more, designed to combat the epidemic of eating disorders and self-loathing that is rampant among college students, particularly among young women. And if there’s something at the core of all “body image awareness workshops” it’s the notion that feminists ought to resist the imperative to be thin, to be overly concerned with body fat, to be endlessly obsessed with having a “better” physique.

Sara points out the absurdity of all this, and moves on to muse about what a truly “body-friendly” gym would look like.

It seems like there is so much emphasis on the idea expressed in that image - that we need to change our bodies, that we need to quantify them and judge them to be responsible and healthy - that it’s not necessarily a mentally-healthy environment.

In my body-friendly gym, there would be no scales. What do we need them for? No one leading an aerobics class would remind us that “swimsuit season” is coming. There would be fitness classes geared toward people whose bodies are different - classes for the disabled, for example. Even a person’s size can significantly change their experience of a class. I’ve found out (the hard way, having gained a fair amount of weight over a period when I was really into pilates) that having a belly makes pilates harder….

Mostly, I’d like a gym where a person’s current body was what’s being worked out and enjoyed. No matter how hard you work, you’re not going to lose actual pounds or gain actual muscle mass during any gym session. I’d like the emphasis on a future, perfected body to take a backseat to the things a person can appreciate about their current body.

I’m thinking about this at the same time that I’m thinking about an e-mail I got from a wonderful former student of mine. She enjoys the blog, but recently went through my photo albums at my old Typepad place, and was troubled that several of the photos were of me, shirtless. As I’ve explained many times before, I almost always run shirtless. I hike shirtless. When I’m down in Colombia on my wife’s family’s finca , I spend much of my time shirtless. (Drenched in SPF 50 sun lotion, mind you; I’ve had enough battles with skin cancer.) Mind, my student was not suggesting that there was a sexual or flirtatious component to these photos. What bothered her was that these pictures came in conjunction with the frequent notes I make on the blog about diet, exercise, and sport. My student admitted that it made her feel bad about herself, particularly because she saw me (rightly or wrongly) as a pro-feminist role model. In a very thoughtful and polite way, she made it clear that there was a disconnect between my very public commitment to working with young people to combat eating disorders and body dysmorphia, and my almost equally public fascination with the endless improvement of my own flesh. And while she could accept that disconnect in print, she had a hard time with it reflected in photos as well.

So, I’ve cleaned up all of my old Typepad photo albums. No more shirtless pictures. (I will still be shirtless all over the greater San Gabriel Valley this spring and summer, in mountains and on roadways, as I up my mileage for a July marathon.)

The connection between Sara’s post and my student’s e-mail? They’ve both got me thinking about ways to create a pro-fitness, pro-health culture that is radically respectful of body diversity. It’s got me wondering how we can do a better job of articulating fitness goals that aren’t visual. Gyms and health clubs and personal trainers often speak the language of health, but as Sara makes clear, the atmosphere of most clubs is one that encourages a pre-occupation with achieving a specific size goal. There’s an almost universal double-speak going on in which everyone claims to be doing whatever they’re doing in order to “get healthy”, but most feel compelled to emphasize aesthetic achievement over true fitness. I don’t know a lot of young women who worry as much about osteoporosis, heart disease, and breast cancer as they do about weight.

My mother is a big fan of the Curves franchise. She’s been overweight much of her adult life, and is — thank God — a cancer survivor. She started going to Curves a few times a week back in 2002, and she’s really enjoyed her experience in a mirrorless, women-only gym. She would never have joined an ordinary health club, but she found the non-judgmental, accepting atmosphere at Curves to be just what she needed in order to experiment with an exercise regimen. I’ve never been inside a Curves, obviously, but I hear almost universal praise from the women I know who have become regulars.

It’s often hard for me to write about fitness and body image issues, knowing that I still have miles to go on my own journey towards radical and complete self-acceptance. I don’t work out merely to improve my body’s appearance, of course. I don’t work out for health alone, either, at least not only for physical health. I work out so much because I’m addicted to endorphins; I am a nervous, restless energizer bunny who needs to burn off tension constantly. Running, boxing, Pilates, cycling — to one degree or another, they all get me high. And I like being high. It just so happens that my addiction has the side effect of a lean and toned physique!

My views on diet, too, are rooted less in an obsession with my own health and appearance and more in a commitment to justice. I gave up meat a while ago because of my commitment to animals; I’m now embracing a fully vegan lifestyle out of that same commitment. If it keeps me healthy, great. But while my health matters, my choices about what I put in my mouth are linked first and foremost to a desire to live as cruelty-free as possible. I’m not willing to eat what I’m not willing to kill, and I’m not willing to kill many things.

There’s an element of defensiveness to what I’m writing, and that frustrates me. I suppose that in the end, I’m torn. I position myself, quite deliberately, as a role model. I do it in my teaching. I do it in my volunteer work with youth. I do it in my blogging. I believe I’ve hit upon a set of values for living, rooted in my faith and my feminism, that have not only made me a better human being but might very well work for others. I keep making the case, over and over again, that what we do in every area of our life matters. How we eat and what we eat matters, not least because we are called to be stewards of our own bodies and stewards of the earth we share.

I realize that what I want to work on is this: further developing and articulating a pro-feminist “ethics of diet and fitness.” My core assumptions: health, fitness, and a sense of well-being are a priori goods. Self-acceptance is also an a priori good. Self-loathing is an a priori evil. Concern for how our dietary choices impact the planet is an a priori good. And yes, pleasure — as long as that pleasure is not at another’s expense — is still another fundamental good. Somehow, I want to put all of these “first principles” together and articulate an ethic that embraces both transformation and self-acceptance, that promotes ultimate well-being and is simultaneously radically accepting of body diversity.

I’ve seen others try to create a synthesis of pro-feminist values and a commitment to maximum physical fitness; I’ve seen them fall woefully short. And I myself continue to fall prey to my own contradictions around the body and self-acceptance. Too often, my words to others say “Love yourself just as you are!” while my actions show a man who is relentlessly committed to his own transformation.

One of the paradoxes of a strong Christian faith is this: Jesus loves us just as we are. He could not love us more. He loves the child molester just as much as he loves the saint; He loves Jeffrey Dahmer and Mother Teresa, Saddam Hussein and Martin Luther King. But for Christians, realizing that God loves us just as we are is not the same as God’s endorsement of what we’re doing. God loves us no matter what, but He longs for us to transform, to become more and more like His Son. We hold in tension two seemingly contradictory ideas: we are loved whether or not we change, and God longs for us to change and grow. This tension is familiar to any serious Christian, and to the followers of many other spiritual paths.

I’m convinced that there’s a way to apply this mixture (radical, complete acceptance and the radical call to growth) to a culture of fitness and diet. I’m going to figure it out, Lord willing, and when I get a clearer idea of how to articulate it, I’m gonna let you know.

Or maybe you’ll have to wait for the TV show.

A long post about flirtation, validation, and conversion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 22, 2007
in Age, Faith, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Vanity
. 20 Comments

I read a lotta blogs, and one I check in on from time to time is Amber’s. And a few weeks ago, she wrote a very brief, one-sentence post that brought me up short:

The deadpan flirtatiousness of certain married male bloggers is baffling to me.

Now, I was pretty damn certain Amber wasn’t thinking of me. I don’t know to whom she was referring, actually. But it made me reflect a bit about my past, about marriage, about neediness, and about unlearning flirtatiousness.

From early adolescence on, I was a student of flirting. I remember having the word defined for me in eighth grade by a girl named Jenny Nicholson. We sat together in math class, and I was a bit infatuated by her, a mild crush that was unreciprocated. But we chatted a lot, and one day she smiled and asked, in response to something I had said that I can’t remember, “Hugo are you flirting with me?” I said “no”, but obviously looked confused long enough for Jenny to throw out a definition: “It’s when you kinda like someone but don’t want to say it.”

I think I grunted out an “oh”, and left it at that.

I went home and asked my Mom about flirting. She gave me a more thorough definition, which I seem to remember as “Showing subtle romantic interest.” I also looked it up in a dictionary or two, and began to get the picture.

My mid-adolescent attempts at conscious flirting began not long thereafter, and they were predictably excruciatingly obvious, puerile, and unsuccessful. But my interest in girls was strong enough to help me overcome rejection after rejection, so I kept practicing what I thought of as my “technique.” I watched two of my older teenage male cousins, young men in college whose bodies were hard and chiseled and whose “patter” was smooth and (judging from their large number of girlfriends) successful. I watched their hand gestures, listened to their voices, studied their apparent effortlessness. Slowly, as my own body matured and changed, my confidence began to increase.

Bottom line, I spent years learning how to flirt. I suppose I only got good at it around the time I stopped consciously thinking about what I was doing and simply let myself “do what came naturally.” And for years and years, I did a hell of a lot of flirting. I flirted in and out of both of the disastrous marriages I had in my twenties. I found that my need for validation was stronger than any commitment I had made to any one particular woman. Even when I was physically faithful, I still loved the “intrigues” that had become second nature to me.

It was only in my early thirties, when I underwent my spiritual conversion, that I became willing to rethink my own flirtatiousness. Doing a written inventory of my romantic and sexual history, I realized that from 13 to 31 I had devoted a colossal amount of time and energy to flirting. The goal was rarely sex — the goal was validation of my own desirability. I was a first-rate narcissist, always eager to “stir the pot” to see if I could arouse a spark of interest in the various women I met in my life. It never mattered if I was single or attached, and I didn’t much care if these women were available or not. My ego needed feeding, and flirting was the best damn way I knew to get it fed. If the “intriguing” led to a short-term relationship or brief encounter, so much the better — but that was just icing on the cake. The “cake” in these instances was the knowledge that I was wanted. And knowing that I was desirable was the ultimate payoff.

I wrote last year about my 1998 “experiment with celibacy.” Not only did I not have sex or date, but for the first time since early adolescence, I consciously refrained from flirtations and intrigues. Cutting off that source of validation was extremely painful. I felt panicky and anxious. I was forced to do a lot of praying. And God was faithful. He brought me that sense of well-being that I needed so badly, that I had wanted so badly. My promiscuity and my addictive flirtatiousness had been all about filling a hole inside of me that only He could fill. But His grace could only fill that hole once I had made the decision to give up this habit that had sustained me and driven me for so long.

It’s been nearly nine years since that experience. And of course, I’m married once more, in a relationship that is deeper, richer, more challenging and more fulfilling than I have ever known. And finally, in this marriage, I can say that not flirting is truly second nature for me now. I still remember all of my old tricks, mind you. Even now, I often pause and examine my own words and actions to make sure that nothing I am doing or saying with any of the women in my life rises to the level of flirtation or intrigue. I’m gradually growing less hyper-vigilant as I learn to relax into my own skin. I’ve finally learned to stop using other people in order to feed that insatiable ego. And I’m finally in a marriage where all of those sparks, all of that heat, all of that “intrigue” is directed towards my spouse and my spouse alone.

Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent. I did it for nearly twenty years. It took several years more of hard work to break myself of the habit. Even now, I remain vigilant, knowing that it would be false pride to claim that I am forevermore immune from the temptation to soothe myself this way.

In my blog presence as in my “real world” life, I try and make it very clear that I am safe, romantically unavailable, happily married. I do this to honor my wife, of course, but there’s more to it than that. The other women in my life, be they colleagues, friends, or students don’t need me trying to pry out some sort of response from them. To put it vulgarly, using people sucks.

As it’s clear to regular readers, I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about getting older. 40 is just around the corner. And of course, there’s a little nagging voice that says “Hugo, whatever looks you’ve had are fading. Do you think you can still “pull” (as the English say) as you used to?” And it’s my job these days to quiet that voice and not let that ugly, poisonous, neediness back into my life.

When that voice comes into my head, I remind myself that my real validation comes from the truth that — just like every other creature on this planet — I’m God’s beloved favorite. That’s true whether I’m lean or soft, wrinkled or smooth, handsome or homely, 29, 39, or 59.

And my wife, bless her, thinks I’m hot. The chinchillas just want to know if I have their shredded wheat treats, and it’s time to fetch those for them.

Against predatory evangelism: thinking about Chris Clarke, the life to come, and how we share our faith

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 8, 2007
in Blogging, Chinchillas, Christianity, Faith, Father and Favorite posts 2007
. 33 Comments

I have little to say about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. She and I were exactly the same age, and I suppose all I can say is that while I never paid much attention to her career, I always felt a strange tenderness whenever I saw her face or heard about her. There was a very obvious frailty to her, a kind of vulnerability that I can’t really explain. It’s sad.

A few days ago, Chris Clarke made the difficult decision to put down his beloved dog Zeke. (He had posted last week about steeling himself for that fast-approaching decision). Zeke went peacefully; the not-safe-if-you-don’t-want-to-weep link to that story is here. As always, Chris writes with such clarity that it makes me ache, though I’m not sure if that ache is more from empathy with his grief or envy at the grace with which he writes about it.

Now that Amanda has moved on to serve John Edwards, Chris is writing at Pandagon. And he’s got a fabulous post up today (one in which I am quoted, but without being named). It’s a post about the various things people have written to him in the aftermath of Zeke’s passing. Chris is not much of a theist, but that hasn’t stopped the well-intentioned from assuring him that he and Zeke will be reunited in heaven. (Lots of references to the Rainbow Bridge.)

Chris and Becky don’t believe in the Rainbow Bridge. He writes:

Here’s the thing: I don’t believe in an afterlife. What’s more, in contexts like the one in which I live now, I find the whole concept of an afterlife to be profoundly unhelpful. No, that’s not strong enough. It’s like sticking a fucking corkscrew in my heart and yanking it out. After all, I’m not so completely rational that I don’t succumb to the temptation to stand on his grave and talk to him. After years of indoctrination in Roman Catholic dogma, the reflex of imagining the Pearly Gates dies hard. But it’s false hope, and both the glimmer of reunion and the fleeting thought that he misses us make me feel worse.

And Chris has asked folks to please not persist in foisting what he sees as false, perhaps even cruel reassurances upon him as he grieves his friend. Sadly, that request was ignored. Folks continued to push:

When people respond to a politely worded request to can the heaven stuff by ramping up the heaven stuff, that is an example of religious intolerance. When a person has to take time out from grieving to forgive people who’ve made him feel a lot worse, telling himself that he has to give them slack because they’re upset over the death of his family member, that he has to remember they’re just trying to make him feel better with promises of meeting again despite his express request, that is a symptom of religious intolerance.

Chris and I both love the rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. He hikes them with what seems like reverence; I tend to attack them with hyper tenacity, measuring my fitness on their slopes. We both love animals, and we’ve both lost creatures whom we adored within the past year. And when it comes to the great questions, the ones about life and death and the possibility that our souls endure, sentient and unique, beyond this world — Chris and I have different answers.

And because I know he and I have different answers, I don’t try and comfort him in his vulnerabilty with my answers. Authentic Christian evangelism is not predatory. Authentic Christian evangelism doesn’t see the grief of those who don’t share our faith as a “special opportunity” to do some witnessin’! And far too many of my brothers and sisters in Christ make this obnoxious error.

I use this blog to share my faith, of course. But the best way I can carry out the Great Commission is to lead a good life, a life devoted to justice and compassion, a life that is happy and considerate and brave. And when people see any goodness in me, or ask me where my strength comes from — then heavens to Betsy, I’m gonna share. But to paraphrase what they say in AA, evangelism is about “attraction, not promotion.” It’s about living out our faith in ways that will draw others to it; it’s not about foisting pamphlets on passers-by, and it’s not about saccharine promises to pray for those who have already made it clear that they don’t want to hear it.

Do I pray for non-Christians? Sure I do. Do I tell them about it, as if I’ve done them a special favor and tucked the spiritual equivalent of a $20 bill in their purse when they weren’t looking? No, I don’t. In his Pandagon post, Chris quotes what I wrote on his blog when I learned of Zeke’s death:

Much love to you and Becky from a man, a woman, and six chinchillas in Pasadena.

That seemed right. Chris doesn’t need to hear that I’m lifting him and Becky up in prayer, and imploring Jesus to soothe their pain. Chris doesn’t need me to tell him that more and more Christians are convinced that we may indeed find animals in the next life. He doesn’t need me to claim that I believe that he and Zeke will hike together again, each in uncorrupted bodies, climbing the true mountain in the undiscovered country that lies beyond the grave. I can write that sort of comforting, sophomoric bullshit very easily. It comes naturally to me. And it’s more than bullshit, I suppose; I not only am certain that there is a heaven, I am pretty danged hopeful that all the beings I have ever loved will be with me there. And there will be no more tears, for the former things have passed away… and so on.

When a fellow Christian asks for my prayers, I promise them that I will storm the very gates of heaven on their behalf. With those who do not believe in prayer, when they tell me of their grief, I share a gentl