Archive for the 'Men and Masculinity' Category

When a “can” ought to mean a “should”: on men and empathy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2010
in Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 24 Comments

I got an interesting email from one of my regular commenters who uses the handle “Randomizer”. He sends me a link to this post at Overcoming Bias which references an intriguing study that appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin back in 2001: Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand . The abstract:

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Bold is mine.

For the second week in a row, someone sends me a link to promising research.

In plain English, the studies suggest that the notion that men lack the capacity for empathy — equivalent in degree to that more commonly displayed by women — is simply false. When motivated to put a dormant skill to use, the study suggests men can be every bit as intuitive as women. For a psych journal, the phrase “wiped out any difference” is very strong stuff indeed — it leaves no room for those who insist on men’s diminished capacity to love, to connect, and to care on which to stand.

So this raises the question that gets discussed at the Overcoming Bias site: if men can empathize every bit as well as women, why don’t they? Randomizer points to one of the commenters at OB, a fellow calling himself BD. BD writes:

(In the masculine) value system, empathy is not connected to caring for someone. It’s connected to believing that the person can’t care for themselves Or believing that the person is a threat. “Don’t ask me to treat you like a child. And don’t ask me to treat you like a boss whose volatile ego I have to tip-toe around.”

And there can be a “Golden Rule” thing going here as well. ” He may not want to treat her “like a child” because he doesn’t want to be treated “like a child” either.

With his peers, he can just relax and be himself. Male friendship and peerage is often a rough and tumble thing. It’s not to say that male friendship doesn’t have its own rules. Its just that significant empathy is not part of that. When he is dealing with people he cares about, he tends to default to his most comfortable and peer-like relationship model, which happens to feature minimal empathy…

I think BD is right in one sense, in that I think we do indeed teach men to associate empathy with the burden of managing someone else’s fragile emotions — a boss who needs placating, or a child who can’t yet self-regulate. But if he’s implying that men and women have different but equally valid interpretations of the purpose of empathy, I think that’s much more problematic. In BD’s formulation, men are taught to see empathy as a tool to be used in a certain select set of scenarios, two in particular: first, when a reward is available, such as from a boss (or, in the case of the study we’re citing, cash-for-empathic display); two, when dealing with someone needier and more vulnerable than themselves, such as a child or the victim of a particular tragedy. It is not, in other words, a relationship tool — indeed, in “guyland”, a relationship in which empathy is not required is far more egalitarian than one in which it is needed.

Here’s how culturally constructed masculinity warps us all: for far too many men, empathy gets associated with manipulation and dependency rather than intimacy. The message seems to be: You can have my empathy, or you can have my respect as my equal. But you can’t have both. I don’t think that marks a “healthy difference” between men and women. It’s absurd to imagine that we can sustain healthy relationships when one sex believes empathy is a necessary component of all our interactions and another sex believes it to be an unpleasant tactic, a tool to be employed in a few instances, most of which involve a hierarchy of power and respect.

So the good news: one more bit of evidence that the full spectrum of human emotion is available to every member of the species, regardless of biology. The study reinforces the truth that the reason so many members of each sex utilize less than that full spectrum is attributable to socialization and choice, not to physiology. But we need to do more than say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting”. We need to recognize that this is one of those instances where ability translates to obligation; if men can empathize, than I think it’s fairly clear that they should do so far more often than they do.

Why? Merely to make wives and girlfriends and sisters happier? No, though making relationships better is nothing at which to sneeze. It’s that in the end, all great cruelty is, as Timothy Findley so famously said, a failure of the imagination. And the kind of imagination at which men so often fail is not the ability to imagine alternate universes or other fantastical things — it is the simpler failure to imagine what another person feels. When men regard that kind of imagination as a tool or a burden rather than as a gift and a responsibility, they become the chief architects of human suffering. To refuse to empathize is to be complicit, in a way either large or small, in the ongoing great crime.

I’ve often said that one of my two or three favorite novels ever written is Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I’m hardly alone in my deep love of the book and its world view. And I’m hardly alone in trying to remember, always remember, the simple epigraph of the text: “Only connect.” That is true of prose and passion, it is true of Americans and Haitians, and it is true of husbands and wives.

We can do this. And if there was ever an instant when ability leads inexorably to obligation, I think this is it.

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.

Rip Van Winkle comes to the Super Bowl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 09, 2010
in Men and Masculinity and Sports
. 5 Comments

Lots of folks are talking in the blogosphere and the mainstream media about the misogynistic tone of so many of the ads during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast. Since my family resisted a television until 1978, my football viewing memory goes back no farther than Super Bowl XIII — but I’ve seen most of the games since that Steelers-Cowboys epic, and agree that this year’s batch of ads were the most consistently sexist that we’ve ever seen.

The good news,of course, is that virtually every news outlet in the country pointed this out. The feminist blogosphere was not alone in decrying the orgy of woman-hating (and the concomitant celebration of the caveman myth) that went on during Sunday’s broadcast. When a staid entity like Time magazine exclaims “Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?”, we’re making real progress. So many of the ads were so unrelentingly puerile, so clumsy in their attempt to suggest that modern American men are just so many latter day pre-nap Rip Van Winkles, that even folks who don’t normally use words like “misogyny” found that that noun came quickly to their lips. To the extent that the overreach of these ads was so astounding that it forced even the mainstream media to criticize the relentless sexism, I think there’s a fairly substantial silver lining to what we saw on Sunday.

It’s also a golden teaching opportunity. Spring semester classes don’t get underway until February 22, and I’m not teaching at the moment, so I don’t have the chance to have a discussion this week about the ads with my students. I did note the sexism of the ads in a Facebook status update, and got a number of comments and messages in response from friends who don’t necessarily share my feminism, but did share my indignation at what we saw during the Super Bowl. For those who insist that sexism isn’t a problem any longer, who think that the feminist case that we live in a world which continues to hate women is whoppingly oversold, Sunday afternoon was a wake-up call. I’m excited about the implications.

I reference Rip Van Winkle for another reason. The story of Rip Van Winkle was written in 1819 by Washington Irving; it featured the basic plot line of half of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials. An amiable man married to a woman who needles and nags him relentlessly, Rip takes a hike in the hills to escape his wife. He runs into an all-male group — the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew, male adventurers who came to America without women. They hand him a Budweiser (well, not quite, their magic liquor) and Rip gets very, very drunk. He falls asleep and wakes to discover that twenty years have passed and his wife has died.

Rip thus gets to be single (and the envy of other henpecked husbands) without ever having to confront his wife. He is rescued from the misery of marriage by bonding with a group of men who embody an ultra-masculine archetype, and that bond is cemented by drinking their special brand of alcohol. While drunk, his problems magically disappear and he reemerges into civilization liberated and free. If that isn’t a hefty part of the plot of most of what we saw two days ago, I don’t know what is.

The absurdity of the story is that Rip Van Winkle was written in an age when coverture was the law of the land — husbands had almost total legal control over their wives. Rip could beat his wife, divorce his wife, and abandon his wife with virtual impunity; his own unwillingness (which he probably falsely imagined as inability) to engage with his spouse is the source of his frustration. Just as so many men still do, Rip blames his unhappiness on what he imagines are the voracious and inexhaustible demands of a perennially dissatisfied woman. Plenty of men run away from intimacy and engagement to seek comfort in booze and masculine cameraderie. None in real life have the magical outcome that we see in Rip’s case. But the power of the story lies in its promise that alcohol and male bonding can make one’s troubles (always personified by a woman, either a wife or a mother) vanish.

Washington Irving ought to sue several Madison Avenue agencies for copyright infringement.

Men and the Work/Life balance: an upcoming radio program and campaign

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 19, 2010
in Mass media, Men and Masculinity and Working
. 0 Comments

I’m delighted to announce that I will be participating in Feminism 2.0′s first 2010 “Wake-Up” campaign, which kicks off next Monday. The summary:

Fem2.0 is kicking off the New Year with Wake Up, This Is the Reality!, a campaign to help change the way Americans talk and think about work and to begin shifting the national narrative away from privileged “balance” and corporate perspectives to one that reflects the reality on the ground for millions of Americans and American families.

On January 25, we will launch a two-week blog radio series on how work policies impact specific communities. That will be followed by a week-long blog carnival (Feb. 6-13) that will flood the public space with articles, opinions and personal stories about what it’s like to work in America today.

One week from today, on the 26th, I’ll be participating in the Work/Life and Men: Superman Versus Family Man radio show. Click on the hyperlink for more details on how to listen; there will be a podcast made available for subsequent download.

Details:

Tuesday, January 26, 1:00 PM EST

Host: Marc Chimes

Scott Coltrane, Dean, University of Oregon; Author, Gender and Families
Hugo Schwyzer, Blogger, hugoschwyzer.net
Joan Williams, Director, Center for WorkLife Law at University of California - Hastings

What does it take for a caring, responsible father to be both a breadwinner and a family man? If there is a work/family balance, it appears to depend on where you stand in the social order. Come investigate with our panel the daunting barriers working fathers face in sharing responsibilities in the household. Join with America’s leading experts as they discuss the problems, possibilities and policies surrounding fathers in the workplace.

Neither male nor female: Jesus as man, Jesus as role model

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 11, 2010
in Christianity and Men and Masculinity
. 4 Comments

A reader named David writes:

I find myself deeply entrenched in one debate about God and how God created us in God’s image “male and female” and what, if anything, that reveals about God. Some men I have run into believe that manhood is a trait designed by a masculine God and that certain characteristics (ordained by God, in a sense) of manliness are exclusively specific to masculinity. I guess that so their argument goes there is no spectrum of gender, only masculine & feminine and if you fall in between or share some qualities of each than that’s on you and not something Godly. This line of thinking always ends up with chivalrous expectations of manhood and that bad men are either not chivalrous or less than manly (or both and women are to be passive & rescued).

I’ve always contended that God is neither male or female or, in fact, God is both. Though we gender God as “father” and “He” and Jesus is referred to as “he” and “son of man”, the Holy Spirit is often referred to as having feminine qualities in the Old Testament. Thus, since God is “3 persons in one” and those 3 persons make up God then how can we be created wholly in God’s image? Are we to be three persons in one or simply have full range person-hood like God?

Not for the first or last time, let me first recommend the many resources on this topic available through the website of Christians for Biblical Equality.

I’m not a theologian. I’ve read theology, talked about theology, studied theology (medieval Franciscan scholasticism was a doctoral field of mine at UCLA), but I’m not a theologian. Others have wrestled with these questions for centuries, and feminist theologians in particular (one notes at this point the passing eight days ago of the important, if controversial, Mary Daly) have offered critical analyses of our reflexive habit of referring to God as male.

Jesus, however, certainly was physiologically male. In his human aspect, he was a man (the early church fathers struggled against those who could not bring themselves to acknowledge that Jesus pooped and peed). And from my standpoint, the maleness of Jesus Christ matters because in his life and ministry and relationships, Jesus himself embodies a full and complete manhood. Traditionalists, desperately seeking biblical support for archaic gender roles that have nothing to do with faith, like to emphasize Jesus as warrior. Jesus chasing the moneychangers out of the temple always gets mentioned by those who promote the “Muscular Christianity” agenda, even though it is only in the last gospel, John, that the story gets embellished to include the use of a whip. (The synoptic gospels don’t mention the weapon at all.)

Jesus got angry, clearly. Jesus also wept publicly, but we rarely hear my traditionalist friends using His example to repudiate the “big boys don’t cry” ethos. Jesus allows Himself to be anointed by a woman, infuriating his disciples who are upset about the cost of the perfumed oil — but perhaps also upset by what seems, to them, like an almost feminine vanity on His part. The examples of Jesus engaging in tender and nurturing behavior far outnumber those in which he behaves as the muscular He-Man of conservative traditionalist teaching.

For me, as a man, it matter that Jesus was a man. When Christ came into the world, the world already knew of women’s capacity to nurture and care for the vulnerable. The rigid gender roles of a broken world meant that empathy, intuition, and compassion were rarely, if ever, associated with men. If Christ had been a woman, come as a servant to heal the world; to insist on the primacy of Love over all else; to die for others — She would have fulfilled an expectation that we have about women’s supposedly innate willingness to serve and sacrifice. The religious authorities expected a proper, muscular king; what sort of messiah behaves as Jesus behaved? What sort of messiah dies on a tree without lifting a finger to fight back? What sort of messiah allows women who aren’t his wives to touch him? (Women were, of course, allowed to touch other women.) The answer is, of course, an unexpected messiah, one who comes in the body of a man to teach all of us of each male’s potential for full, radical humanness.

Many women in the church struggle with Christ’s maleness. Those who have been betrayed and abused and exploited by men find it difficult to believe that a man, be-penised and be-Y-chromosomed as Jesus was, could prove worthy of trust, prove capable of both selflessness and non-sexual intimacy. I understand that reluctance to embrace the male aspect of God, particularly when one has known little that is good from men. At the same time, I think that one of the countless ways in which the story of Jesus is redemptive is in His maleness — by coming in a man’s body, the God-made-flesh offers the world a radically revisionist model for what it means to be a man. In his commitment to non-violence, in his courage, in his capacity to resist formidable temptation, in his willingness to display his own emotion fearlessly but never destructively, he serves as a model for all of us — but in a very real sense, for men in particular.

When Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “there is no male or female in Christ”, he’s referring to the notion that relationship with God through Jesus is available to all. But there’s another way of reading that passage that I find helpful. Jesus was physiologically a man, but He lived fearlessly unchained by traditional gender roles; he could be both masculine and feminine, and in that sense, he transcended gender categories themselves. For men who outsource their self-control and their own emotional maintenance to mothers and wives, girlfriends and daughters, Jesus’ life — upon which Christians are called to model their own — is a stern rebuke.

I live as a man, in a man’s body, but I refuse to be bound and limited by the straitjacket of culturally-constructed gender roles. In my own imperfect efforts to slip from that straitjacket, I have many wonderful role models, both living and dead. And as a Christian, I have Jesus too.

Perfection of the Life and the Work: the tragic hubris of Urban Meyer

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 28, 2009
in Men and Masculinity and Sports
. 7 Comments

If you’re a college football fan, you surely didn’t miss the breathless coverage of the mixed messages sent this weekend by Urban Meyer, the head coach at the University of Florida. Meyer, recently voted the “coach of the decade”, announced Saturday he was stepping down from the position in order to focus on his health and his family; on Sunday, he changed his tune, noting that he was taking only a “leave of absence”, and expected to be back on the sidelines for the two-time national champions soon. The paper of record summarized the most wrenching aspect of the story:

One of the most poignant moments of the Urban Meyer resignation-unresignation as Florida coach came Christmas Day.

After weeks of soul searching, prompted by a trip to a hospital, he told his family that night that he would be leaving his job, Meyer said to The New York Times.

Meyer said that upon hearing the news, his 18-year-old daughter hugged him and said, “I get my daddy back.”

A day later, Meyer was gone again. Not completely gone. He announced Sunday that after a day away to think about things, he had decided to stay put. He is merely taking a leave of absence.

Jeremy Foley, Florida’s athletic director, made it clear — to fans and to recruits — that order had been restored in Gator Nation. “He is the head coach taking a leave of absence,” Foley said.

In 24 hours, we went from the perfect holiday story to a tale about the relentless pull of the coaching profession. The king leaves his throne for his family and then decides — or is convinced — that the throne was not so bad after all and announces that for a time he will be the power behind the throne.

What do we make of this bizarre drama?

The bit about Meyer’s daughter is heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Football coaches occupy a particularly significant niche in the American psyche: as archetypes, if not always in reality, they are the most hyper-masculine of older men. (Meyer is a youthful 45.) In a culture where the young warrior and the youthful athlete are those with the greatest masculine cachet, gruff generals and taciturn football coaches have the unique privilege of claiming unimpeachable toughness even as they soften and age. The demands of both war and coaching tend to be all-consuming, involving long separation from family — and as we all know, the classic masculine archetype is of the man who chooses a world away from women and domesticity. Think of Hector pushing away Andromache before he goes out to die at Achilles’ hand; think of Gary Cooper in “High Noon”, turning away from new bride Grace Kelly to take on a desperado who threatens his town; heck, think of three-quarters of the movies you’ve ever seen. And think of Urban Meyer, torn between his daughter’s tearful longing for her daddy and his own sense of responsibility, not to his family or to his team, but to a masculine ideal of work and sacrifice that has torn apart Western families for millenia.

And it’s hard not to think of Yeats:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Urban Meyer wants, like so many Americans, to imagine that he can have both the perfection of the life and the work; he seems, judging from his mixed messages this weekend, to long to “be there” for his daughter and still be the relentlessly driven coach of the most successful college football team of the past half-decade. Like so many ambitious men, he tells himself “If I just work harder, or pray harder, or learn a new technique, then I can manage to ‘do it all’”. The Greeks knew hubris when they saw it, and the modern manifestation of hubris is the belief so common to so many men that they can live their lives in compartments, keeping everyone happy and winning praise from all. Meyer’s hubris isn’t that different from Tiger’s: both the philandering golfer and the workaholic football coach believed that they could lead double lives with impunity. Tiger’s deception is the more obvious, but Meyer’s — rooted in the tragically mistaken belief that one can serve two masters, ambition and family — is no less destructive to those who love and rely upon him.

I rejoiced when I heard the news on Saturday that Meyer was stepping down: a man putting his health and his relationships ahead of his career, how refreshing! As the father of a daughter, I thought of Meyer’s girls weeping with relief that they were getting their “Dad back”, and I teared up a bit myself. And then came Sunday’s “vanity”, and I thought of his daughters again — and all the rest of us who are the collateral damage of the heroic ideal.

“If they could see me now”: sex, homosociality, and the internalized male audience

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 10, 2009
in Homosociality, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality
. 7 Comments

In the comments below yesterday’s post about Tiger Woods and homosociality, Tom questions my use of the concept in describing the golfer’s infidelities with a certain type of woman. If homosociality drives men to use women to seek status in the eyes of other men, he wondered, how does it explain the behavior of men who have (what they thought were) clandestine affairs? Doesn’t the desire for secrecy vitiate the argument that the behavior is driven by a longing for validation from other men? It’s an important question, and deserves a longer answer than can fit in the comments.

In 2005, I wrote a long post about the task of helping women silence their internalized audience. The internalized audience is that Greek chorus in one’s head, made up of parents, peers — perhaps pastors and professors — and so forth. When one does something, even in secret, that one imagines might either delight or scandalize members of that audience, one spends time ruminating “What would they think if they could see me now?” For many women in particular, that internalized audience is incapacitating and shame-reinforcing, as I wrote in that post and again in this one.

The notion of homosociality dovetails nicely with the male version of the internalized audience. In other words, status-seeking young men don’t just perform for other flesh-and-blood males (fathers, brothers, coaches, Alpha guys) — they perform for the internalized audience of those figures. In Guyland, Michael Kimmel’s marvelous work about contemporary young men, Kimmel interviews a fraternity member who recalled having sex with a young woman whom all of his “brothers” thought was incredibly hot. The young man remembered that all he could think of while hooking up with this woman was what his “bros” would think if they could see him at that moment. The homosocial boost to his ego, in other words, was more powerful than his own sexual excitement — even though his fraternity brothers were not, in fact, watching or (yet) aware of his “conquest.”*

This young man wanted his male peers to find out eventually. But his pleasure came not merely from letting them know that he had sex with a particularly desirable woman, it came from contemplating their reactions before they knew about it. This is a not-uncommon scenario; the actual revelation of “what happened last night” is almost anti-climactic compared to the delicious validation that comes with imagining other men’s envious, even awed responses to this evidence of his masculine prowess.

In describing his own coming-of-age in rural Mexico, Amherst professor Ilan Stavans writes in the anthology Muy Macho of his ritualized first visit to a brothel:

Losing our virginity was actually a dual mission: to ejaculate inside the hooker and then, more importantly, to tell of the entire adventure afterward.

It’s not a leap to imagine that the thrill while with the prostitute lies chiefly in the imagination of how the recitation of the night’s events to one’s peers will go down!

For men who, for any reason (often because of adultery) need to be secretive about their extra-marital sexual lives, it’s certainly possible, even probable, that the validation that comes from imagining the status-boost that would come if their buddies knew who they were bedding is almost as good, or perhaps even better, than actually letting them know. Just as so many little boys, playing alone on a court or a field, imagine that they are in a stadium in front of a huge cheering audience, so too slightly older boys, getting it on in a hotel room with a gorgeous young woman who isn’t their wife, may imagine something remarkably similar.

*It is popularly believed that in single-sex groups, it’s common for women’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with men to be much more graphic than men’s discussion of the sex they’ve had with women. If this is true, then it reinforces the point that men’s story-telling is not about the exchange of detailed information, but about the opportunity to gain status in the eyes of other men. Other men may want to know that you got the “hot chick” into bed, they may want to hear your claims of how good it was (and how good you were), but any further detail about what transpired is positively unnecessary. For homosocial reinforcement to work, that it happened is enough — how it happened is irrelevant.

Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 09, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Infidelity, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexual harassment
. 100 Comments

(The title of this post differs slightly from when it was first put up this morning.)

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere these past few days about this Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post: Tiger’s validation complex. Robinson, who is African-American, is troubled by more than the famous golfer’s equally famous multiple infidelities. He’s troubled by the type of woman that Tiger seems to have pursued:

Here’s my real question, though: What’s with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story — and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn’t variety but some kind of validation…

…the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an “official” standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious — a control freak even when he’s committing “transgressions.”

There is a long and painful history in the African-American community revolving around the penchant that a great many successful black men have had for pursuing white women. Indeed, the problem (if we can name it that) is a staple of magazine articles and fiction aimed at African-American women. I’m not a commenter on race, so it’s best that I merely note that the reaction Robinson is having is connected to a bitter and complicated history that is a good deal older than the now-disgraced superstar golfer.

But there’s a part of Robinson’s piece that isn’t just about race; it’s about the way in which men of all ethnicities use certain types of women as “trophies.” It is almost axiomatic that female beauty is a commodity which men employ to boost their status with other men. I wrote about this in April 2006, in a post about men, women, homosociality and weight. An excerpt:

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

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

“Whiteness” can function similarly to “thin-ness”, particularly for men of color. America has a long and bloody history of violence towards dark-skinned men who were even suspected of a sexual interest in white women. For some men of color, to be with a white woman — particularly one who embodies the all-American “Barbie” ideal — is to say to the world “See, I’ve made it. You can’t touch me; I’ve achieved sufficient power and wealth so that I can have ‘access’ to what was once forbidden and could have gotten my grandfather lynched.” I’m not saying that was Tiger’s motive (Robinson is, and he’s in a better position than I to do so). I am saying that bedding whiteness, in the misogynistic homosocial economy, gives status points.

One of the important challenges we all need to take up is that of separating out what aspects of our desires are organic to us, and what aspects are socially constructed and reinforced. Men who are afraid to date heavier women “because of what my buddies will say” or women who are reluctant to date shorter men “because of how we’ll look together in public” do have, I think, an obligation to distinguish their fear of losing status from their actual desires. As we all know, the human libido is flexible but not infinitely so; it can be influenced but not entirely molded by culture and experience. Most of us have preferences and types, as I wrote in 2005, that are to some degree essential to us:

…feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.

Most of us — not all — have certain physical “types” to which we are often drawn…A “type” does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an “Asian fetish” that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women “know how to treat a man better.”

I’d add the Tiger corollary to that, which is that individual preferences are fine insofar as they are not thinly (sorry) disguised excuses for pursuing a particular type of woman in order to gain validation and status in the real or imagined eyes of other men. Untangling what we want sexually from what we ourselves want in order to meet cultural or familial expectations is a universal challenge. Unlike my postmodernist friends, I do believe we have an identity and desires that are deeper than our culture; our sexuality, although more malleable than many imagine, isn’t entirely a tabula rasa. (If that were so, there’d be far fewer GLBT kids growing up in conservative Christian households than there in fact are.)

Part of becoming a responsible, sexually mature adult is doing the often difficult work of discerning what one craves inherently from what one has been taught one ought to crave, and what one has learned will win approval from parents or peers. It ain’t rocket science, but it isn’t easy either. And while Tiger may “organically” crave youthful white women with Barbie-esque proportions, one suspects that for all his achievements, he has not yet come close to gaining insight and understanding of the role sexuality plays in his life. And the consequences of lacking that understanding are, as we have seen in his case, devastating.

Neither too much to expect, nor too much to ask: how Lesley Garner gets rape, marriage, and men all wrong

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 18, 2009
in Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Rape, aggression and violence and Relationships
. 105 Comments

Via Amber, whose blog I’ve long admired, I found this horrific English advice column and this blistering retort from M. Le Blanc.

A woman, Eva was raped by her boss while abroad on a business trip. Upon her return to the UK, her husband noticed something was wrong, and Eva told him the terrible story. She also discovered that the rapist had impregnated her; she made the difficult choice to keep the baby. Too upset at the prospect of raising another man’s child, the Eva’s husband left her, and has never seen the son to whom she gave birth. Seven years on, she’s still single — as is her ex-husband — and she’s written to a Telegraph advice columnist about the possibilities of reconciling. The advice columnist, Lesley Garner, is breathtakingly unsympathetic to her, writing:

You decided to continue with the pregnancy in the absolutely unrealistic expectation that your husband would be happy to bring up the child of another man, his wife’s rapist. This is a no-brainer, Eva. No man could contemplate this. He would have found your decision inexplicable.

M. Le Blanc, Amanda Hess, and many of the commenters at the Telegraph site, are appalled both with Garner’s dreadful analysis and the beastly behavior of Eva’s husband. Amber, with whom I generally agree, surprised me by sympathizing with the ex, rejecting Hess’ characterization of him as a “total dickwad”:

It is baffling to me how the same people who would (rightfully) snap if a female rape victim was told not to abort her pregnancy because she’d love the baby as soon as it was born, or that tons of women are stepmothers or social workers and thus raising other people’s kids is no big deal, are incensed at the idea that a man might not be able to embrace this situation.

Count me in the camp that labels Eva’s husband a complete and utter “dickwad”.

There is nothing remotely analogous about, on one hand, forcing a woman to carry to term, against her will, a fetus conceived as the result of a rape — and on the other, expecting a husband to support his wife’s decision without equivocation. Even in marriage, a woman’s body doesn’t become her husband’s property; he doesn’t get to be sovereign over her reproductive choices. Obviously, in terms of their shared sexual life, a couple should, ideally, make decisions together about every aspect of family planning. Real life, however, wreaks havoc with our ideals. Men still rape women, and sometimes those women get pregnant as a consequence. While it would be a rare married couple who would have discussed this potential scenario in advance, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect a husband like Eva’s to share his wife’s burden to the best of his ability — and to share in the joy and responsibility that comes when a child is born.

This doesn’t mean that a man whose female partner is raped isn’t entitled to the full spectrum of feelings that would seem natural, given the situation. He’s entitled to feel ambivalent about raising a child conceived in an act of violence. But he wasn’t raped, and he’s not carrying the child. To leave his wife because he “can’t handle” the constant reminder of what happened is to elevate his feelings above her, to suggest an indefensible false equivalence between the harm done to his wife and the harm done to him.

This is, in yet another nasty form, the old “myth of male weakness”. This version suggests, as Garner does, that men are incapable of bonding with a child not biologically their own. I know a great many adoptive dads, including some wonderful gay male couples who parent together, who would be flabbergasted to learn this. (Parenthetically, I’ve always thought that what makes Joseph, husband of Mary, a saint in the Catholic tradition is not his willingness to raise a son who is clearly not his own. That was his moral if not his legal obligation, and ought to be expected of any husband. What made him saintly was his willingness to stay in a marriage that would never be consummated, the lasting companion of the ever-Virgin!) It is not “asking too much” of husbands to expect them to stick by their wives following rape and an unwanted pregnancy — unless we believe, as Garner does, that the male ego is terribly fragile, and the male capacity to love so very small indeed. Continue reading ‘Neither too much to expect, nor too much to ask: how Lesley Garner gets rape, marriage, and men all wrong’

How does a feminist ally fight fair? A follow-up on men and women’s anger

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 21, 2009
in Favorite Posts 2009, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 18 Comments

We’ve had more than 90 comments below this post examining the degree to which women’s wariness of men is justified. It’s a fairly good discussion, for which I am grateful.

I wrote a few years ago a post called Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger. An excerpt:

Part of being a pro-feminist man, I’ve come to realize in recent years, is being willing to face the real anger of real women. Far too many men spend a great deal of time trying to talk women out of their anger, or by creating social pressures that remind women of the consequences of expressing that anger. Many men, frankly, are profoundly frightened by women who will directly challenge them. In a classroom, they don’t really fear being struck or hit. But by comparing a verbal attack on their own sexist attitudes towards physical violence, they hope to defuse the verbal expression of very real female pain and frustration. I know that it’s hard to be a young man in a feminist setting for the first time, and I know, (oh, how I know) how difficult it is to sit and listen to someone challenge you on your most basic beliefs about your identity, your sexuality, your behavior, and your beliefs about gender. It’s difficult to take the risk to speak up and push back a bit, and it’s scary to realize just how infuriating your views really are to other people, especially women.

The first task of the pro-feminist male in this situation is to accept the reality and the legitimacy of the frustration and disappointment and anger that so many women have with men, and to accept it without making light of it or trying to defuse it or trying to soothe it. Pro-feminist men must work to confront their own fears about being the target of those feelings.

I’d like to say a bit more about how men can do this last bit, as it’s not something I addressed in the original piece. I don’t want to imply that I think that a feminist man simply “stands there and takes it”. One of the ideals of traditional American masculinity is of the man as “sturdy oak”, able to withstand any tempest, even that of a woman’s righteous anger. That comes dangerously close to reinforcing the notion that women are “naturally” more volatile (at least emotionally), perhaps even hysterical (a dangerous word, given its origins) — and that is a “real man’s” job to hold his ground, silently, in the face of what will be a formidable, but (it is to be hoped) brief feminine storm. Though I’d like to believe my readers of the original post didn’t infer that I was reifying this myth, it’s important to clarify how I think we ought to help men respond to women’s anger. Continue reading ‘How does a feminist ally fight fair? A follow-up on men and women’s anger’

Guys, men and the straitjacket of false dichotomies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 01, 2009
in Favorite Posts 2009 and Men and Masculinity
. 15 Comments

The “Modern Love” column in the New York Times is rarely dull, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful, and frequently the source of eye-rolling and general exasperation. In the latter category falls this Cathleen Calbert piece that ran almost a fortnight ago: Forget the Men. Pick a Guy. It begins:

I’ve never liked men. I like guys. Guys are often in between things like jobs and houses, which means they’re more likely to stay up with you all night, drinking wine and playing gin rummy. They’ll rub your belly. They’ll lick chocolate off it. They’ll like your cute little dog. A guy is never going to shoot Old Yeller in the woods.

Then again, guys don’t remember to tell you the doctor’s office called. They don’t check your tires before your big trip. They don’t say, “Call me when you get there.” They say, “Love you, have fun,” because they can’t imagine anything bad happening to you. Which is good, and somehow bad. Guys don’t tell you what to do. This also is both good and, oddly, bad.

Calbert, a professor at Rhode Island College, contrasts her late father — a model of remote, uncommunicative, protective masculinity, the template of “man” in her consciousness — with the more accessible, egalitarian, articulate and yet invariably unreliable “guys” to whom she proclaims her enduring attraction. The piece alternates between the mildly witty and the genuinely painful, as when Calbert relates her father’s reaction to her own molestation by two teenagers (boys? guys? men?) when she was 10.

There’s much to pick apart in Calbert’s offering. True, the dichotomy she offers bears passing similarity to the far crueler and rigid separation we create with different types of women, dividing them into madonnas or whores, into mother figures or temporary diversions, “girls you marry” and “girls you have fun with.” Any man who reacts with justifiable indignation to Calbert’s bifurcated view of American males would do well to reflect on the ways in which he has been acculturated to do something similar to women. But there’s nothing particularly progressive or redemptive about doing to men what has traditionally been done to women, particularly when the dichotomy she employs reflects such a straitjacketed view of human potential.

Calbert writes: I want the E.M.T.’s who show up when I’ve collapsed to be men, not guys. I don’t want someone responsible for saving my life to be torn up about the death of his dog or how some chick hurt his feelings. She reflects a common view, I suppose, but a disastrously mistaken one. She imagines that competence and decisiveness, the qualitites she values so highly in “men”, are radically incompatible with the sensitivity and sensuality that she finds so attractive in her “guys.” Put another way, what Calbert is saying is that he who feels too deeply can’t take action in a crisis; certainty and empathy are, at least in her taxonomy of American males, like oil and water. Continue reading ‘Guys, men and the straitjacket of false dichotomies’

Lust and humanity, desire and dignity: some thoughts on an all-male Consent Day workshop

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 25, 2009
in Consent trainings, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Rape, aggression and violence, Sexual ethics and transformation and Youth
. 72 Comments

I’m heading back to New York City after a couple of days in Providence. The weather, so humid yesterday, has turned wonderfully brisk and autumnal. I think of my native state, sweltering and drought-ridden and smoke-filled, and feel — almost — guilty that I’m not there with the millions of other suffering Californians. Home on Tuesday.

Brown University’s first annual “Consent Day” was a great success, not least because of the immensely popular t-shirts (a photo here) designed by Catherine McCarthy, the student who led the organizing team for the event and who first contacted me about coming to speak. The front of the shirt is visible in the photo, the reverse includes the reminder “Consent is active, enthusiastic, and freely given.”

I gave a workshop entitled “Sex, Consent, Enthusiasm, and Stoplights: Rethinking the Language of Yes and No”. The basic thesis is familiar from this post, but I also touched on the “all men are dogs” (myth of male weakness) ethos which undergirds so much of the way we socialize modern males (and socialize women to think about them). I also brought in what my women’s studies students know as the “upside-down triangle”, which I wrote about in this post.

There was some good give and take, and some very thoughtful questions from a mixed audience of Brown students.

In the second part of the workshop, we held a male-only discussion group. It is, of course, important to do anti-rape work with both men and women. When doing survivors workshops, it’s obviously beneficial to have women-only spaces. (And yes, men can also be survivors of sexual assault, though usually at the hands of other men rather than women — which may make all-male space more problematic, but that’s another topic for ‘nother post.) But in dealing with issues around sexual consent, the topic on yesterday’s table, single-sex space can also offer an opportunity for a higher degree of safety. And I was eager to meet with at least a few of the young men who had been through the workshop to hear their thoughts and feelings.

As our hour together Thursday evening bore out, many young men (certainly all of those who, gay and straight alike, participated in our closed discussion) are frustrated by the absence of a discourse of healthy male sexuality. This was a self-selecting group; these were guys who had volunteered to participate in Consent Day activities and who identified themselves as sympathetic to feminist goals. Several were already involved in peer counseling or in campus progressive politics. They were energized and excited by the discussion about enthusiasm and consent; there were no rape apologists to be found. But the real hunger that many of them articulated very well (not surprising for Brown University students) was a hunger for some kind of validation of their sexuality as good, healthy, okay.

“I know all the things not to do”, one guy said; “I work really hard at being a good ally. But I sometimes feel that in order to be a good ally, I have to pretend that I’m asexual; my fear is that women won’t trust me as a friend if I show any sign of sexual desire.” This lad hastened to add that he wasn’t sexually interested in most of his female friends; what he’d like to be able to do is talk about his sexual feelings (as some of those friends talk with him about theirs) without losing their trust. Several of the other men in the room nodded in agreement. We talked at length about the familiar but still-powerful compartmentalization phenomenon, one in which “good guys”, those who strive to do justice with their lives and with their bodies, live a separate, secretive sexual life (usually involving pornography) that seems, at least to the guys themselves, to be something profoundly shameful.

Timothy Beneke’s Men on Rape is now out of print, but one of the many memorable lines within that invaluable text is this: “I’m not aware of any common English phrases that allow one to express sexual desire in a way that acknowledges both lust and humanity.” Beneke captured a truth about our idiom, but he also captured a truth about the way in which we see male sexuality in our culture. For a host of excellent reasons, rooted in countless painful anecdotes and our own collective witness, many of us — perhaps most of us — have a difficult time believing that heterosexual desire doesn’t invariably compromise a man’s capacity for empathy. We men can’t want sex, our culture tells us, and while still seeing the people we want to have sex with as they really are. “A hard dick has no conscience”, we say with resignation or cynical bravado. But as is so often the case, our language in this instance doesn’t so much reflect an immutable reality as it creates and maintains a distorted understanding of our nature and our potential. Continue reading ‘Lust and humanity, desire and dignity: some thoughts on an all-male Consent Day workshop’

On the now-notorious happiness gap

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 23, 2009
in Happiness and Men and Masculinity
. 20 Comments

I’m in New York, getting ready to take the train up to Providence later today; giving my presentation on consent and male weakness at Brown University tomorrow evening.

There’s a very worthy discussion at Feministe about this Maureen Dowd piece in Saturday’s Times on the question of why, since the early 1970s, women’s happiness seems to have declined while men’s seems to have increased. Gracie and Jillian offer some good responses and analysis.

Assuming the data on happiness (from the General Social Survey) is correct, social conservatives might make hay with this by suggesting that women are suffering the consequences of too much liberation. That conclusion is dampened somewhat by the interesting tidbit that having children increased rather than decreased the likelihood that a woman would report being unhappy. To believe the anti-feminist pop media, it is childlessness that leads aging women to despair; the data suggests exactly the opposite. But as Dowd and her commenters are all aware, it’s difficult to attribute the “joy gap” to any one cause.

Let me suggest two things: first, more than a few men underreport their own unhappiness. Most American males are raised with the “big boys don’t cry” ethos. For a great many adult men, admitting to despair or angst is a form of “crying”; to complain (particularly to a stranger, like a researcher) is a display of weakness. Time and progress have not entirely eradicated the “self-made man” myth from the American psyche; the self-made man is, almost by definition, relentlessly optimistic. Despair and depression are much more likely to be interpreted by men as evidence of personal failure, as proof that one “can’t hack it” in the tough but opportunity-filled real world. The rise in reported male happiness may be evidence that that myth is — blessedly — losing its hold on some men. But it also is equally likely that men are still less likely than women to report unhappiness; one need only look at video games and action movies to see that heroic stoicism is still very much a masculine virtue. Thus when boys and men say “It’s all good”, we do well to probe a bit deeper.

Secondly, women’s unhappiness is surely tied at least in part to the “second shift” phenomenon. The feminist movement has succeeded in opening up new professional opportunities for women, particularly middle and upper-middle class women. Though we have not yet hit the longed-for full parity, women’s wages are much closer to those of their male counterparts than they were thirty or forty years ago. Far more women are working full-time for wages. Many of these women are wives and mothers, and all of the evidence suggests that men’s willingness to work inside the home hasn’t kept pace with women’s willingness and opportunity to work outside the home. In many dual-career families in which both partners put in equal hours in the workplace, the wife still does the lion’s share of the housework as well. Men’s willingness to take on traditionally female roles has, not surprisingly, lagged behind women’s willingness to take on traditional male roles. And as a result, far too many women are utterly exhausted from working what Arlie Hochschild famously called the Second Shift.

Happiness isn’t rocket science, but it is, for so many, elusive. “The noblest and pleasantest of things”, according to Aristotle, happiness comes from a sense of purpose, a set of meaningful relationships, a sense of being valued, an opportunity to have and to share pleasure. But happiness is neither easy nor obligatory, and this study gives us much with which to wrestle and upon which to reflect.

“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’

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’