Archive for the 'Men and Masculinity' Category

Poor white boys: school leaving, male under-performance, and the disaster of masculine anti-intellectualism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2008
in Class, Men and Masculinity, Race, Teaching and Youth
. 27 Comments

Regular reader Frederick often likes to send me “grist for the mill”, as it were, and last week sent me this Telegraph article: White working-class boys becoming an underclass. In one of those periodic reminders that the UK and America are very different indeed, the paper reports:

White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups - even with the same A-level results, according to official figures.

The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education “underclass” in England.

According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university.

This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from Chinese families.

The full report is here, in a PDF file.

The causes of “male under-achievement” are many and complex, and this study does not concern itself much with them. But it does seem clear that whatever the matrix of influences that lead young men to underperform their female peers, feminism is unlikely to be one of them. The study notes that even among recent immigrant groups in Britain, groups in which it can be safely assumed that the Western model of liberal feminism has not yet been fully accepted, girls outperform boys:

Overall, 58 per cent of men from Indian backgrounds and 66 per cent of women go on to university. Among Chinese families, 60 per cent of boys and 65 per cent of women go to university.

Anti-feminist voices, under the guise of concern about the well-being of young men, suggest that contemporary pedagogy doesn’t meet the needs of boys, who aren’t suited to long periods of concentration. The underlying racism of that charge becomes apparent very quickly when one looks at the much-stronger performance of boys from, say, Indian or Chinese descent. For a very long time, white European men have questioned the masculinity of Asian men, seeing the latter as somehow more effeminate. When we posit the ability to concentrate and “do school well” as essentially a feminine trait, then bigotry and anti-feminism collude to explain why so many East and Southeast Asian lads are doing so much better than their white male counterparts. The implication is that Chinese and Indian males are “more like girls” than “real” (white) boys.

I do think we see a performance gap between boys and girls in many places in the Western world. Much of that gap is attributable, I think, to a kind of masculine anti-intellectualism that has developed in response to the relatively recent success of young women in school. In both British and American society we define masculinity as, first and foremost, the absence of feminine characteristics. “No sissy stuff” is the first rule of Western manhood. As long as girls were systematically excluded from education, boys showed great aptitude for intellectually rigorous activity. Once girls began to be admitted to the same schools as boys, and began to demostrate the same intellectual abilities, the life of the mind lost its exclusive masculine cachet.

Boys can sit still. Look at any group of young Marines on the parade ground; paying attention is something well within the range of masculine capabilities. “Boys can’t concentrate as well as girls” needs to go the way of “girls can’t understand science as well as boys”, discarded as a vile myth that shortchanges the full range of human potential with which each and every one of us is born.

The real problem, as I see it, is a culture of “masculine anti-intellectualism” that seems increasingly rife among certain sub-groups of young men. Young men, particularly in Britain perhaps young working-class white men, are more likely than their sisters to see little practical need for education. Too many of these young men under-estimate the value of education, and over-estimate their ability to “make do” on their own, perhaps by doing “a little of this, a little of that.” Many of these lads are filled with ambition, but with little sense of how vital formal education actually is to realizing that ambition. And too many of these young men are eager for a perverse kind of masculine distinctiveness with which to assuage their own anxieties. Dropping out of school to work gives them that masculine distinctiveness, particularly as school is no longer (as it once was) an exclusively male province.

Does everyone need a formal university education? Perhaps not. But I do lament the unwillingness of many boys to buckle down and work. Knowing that earlier generations of the be-penised and the be-Y-chromosomed were able to master complex material and learn by rote, I don’t accept that men as a rule can’t thrive as well as women in the contemporary educational model. The problem is a lack of strong male role models who value education, the problem is a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded.

Feminism, shame, and boys: responding (again) to Kathleen Parker and KJ Lopez

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2008
in Feminism, Men and Masculinity and Youth
. 38 Comments

Reminder: This is a feminist blog. Comments are welcome, but comments need to be “feminist-friendly”. Contrarians whose primary contribution is to ask “What about the menz” in one form or another may do so elsewhere, please.

Inviting National Review editor Katherine Jean Lopez and right-wing author Kathleen Parker to discuss feminism together is a bit like asking Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini to teach a seminar on the French Enlightenment. Whatever gets said, there ain’t gonna be much good.

It’s a confusing discussion. On the one hand, Parker trots out the tired old saw of gender essentialism:

Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends.

I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millenia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion? Continue reading ‘Feminism, shame, and boys: responding (again) to Kathleen Parker and KJ Lopez’

Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Marriage, Men and Masculinity and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 27 Comments

Amber Rhea gets the hat tip for this article in New York Magazine: The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage. That’s the title in the magazine, anyway, but when you click on the link, the title that comes up is What Makes Married Men Want to Have Affairs?, which is a very different sort of question. Asking why men want what they want is never, ever, the same question as why men do what they do.

The author, Phillip Weiss, gets us off to a depressing start:

When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine; it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’d only talked about my issue with any honesty over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and a therapist, they are all men.

So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. When people at dinner parties cried out, “What was Spitzer thinking?” I whispered to a friend that I knew damn well what he was thinking: He wanted some “strange,” to quote the old Kris Kristofferson line. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes. Straying, wandering eye, a blowup. If you have a pulse.”

What situation is that, I wonder? The situation of the middle-aged married male, caught between his promises and his urges? Apparently. Here’s Weiss’ stunner:

An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. “I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t,” says a forward-thinking friend. “There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity.” But like other of my male sources, he didn’t want me to use his name. “Don’t get me divorced!” was the refrain. All of these guys nursed a fantasy, as quaintly surreal as an old tinted postcard, of a perfectible world in which we might have sex outside our primary relationships and say that it doesn’t mean anything.

Yikes. Let’s just say, the piece goes down hill from there. The bold emphasis above is mine; it illustrates the classic fallacy of what I call the “myth of male weakness”. Here’s how the fallacy works:

1. Men naturally desire sexual variety.
2. That desire for sexual variety is very strong.
3. That desire is, in fact, so strong that it can never be resisted, and in the end, will always trump the will. It’s only a matter of time. Continue reading ‘Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue’

Girl-coddling feminists peeing in the pool of male privilege chased all the boys away: the nonsense of Kathleen Parker

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2008
in Books and Men and Masculinity
. 50 Comments

My former student Dolly sends me a link to this short Marie-Claire piece by Kathleen Parker, author of the forthcoming Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.

It’s hard to tell how Parker’s new book will differ from the standard anti-feminist bromides of everyone from Warren Farrell to Christina Hoff Sommers (two writers whose livelihood seems tied to propagating the notion that our country is somehow at war with men and boys). Then again, misogyny sells — especially, as Sommers and the likes of Ann Coulter have shown, it is being sold by a woman.

In the Marie-Claire piece, Parker writes:

“Boys hear how awful they are day in and day out,” she says. “We seem to understand that girls need high self-esteem to perform in school and society, but we pretend that boys don’t.” Teachers need to dial back their girl-coddling, she says, and society needs to better balance boys’ needs with girls’.

Say what? First off, the “boys are in trouble” industry is a decade old, Kathleen; you’re only the 435th person to get a book deal making the case that we’re overlooking our sons. More to the point, what evidence is there that we’re “coddling” girls? Jeepers, the right-wing can’t make up it’s mind! Half the time they’re whining that we are coddling girls, and the next minute they’re complaining that we push girls and women too hard to be “unnaturally” competitive (witness the recent hysteria about knee injuries for female athletes). In my experience as a youth leader and college professor, I see a lot of young women who are exhausted and anxious and stressed. They’re hardly being coddled; it’s their brothers, too often addicted to the unholy trifecta of pot, porn, and video games, who are being given a free pass by parents and teachers.

Parker continues:

IT’S RAINING ON MEN:

30 to 40% of all American children sleep in a home separate from their fathers.

60% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in this country in 2012 will go to women.

The fact that a great many American men have abandoned their children out of an unwillingness to be burdened with responsibility is, apparently, the fault of the women with whom they conceived the child. Or better yet, it’s the fault of feminism, for daring to suggest that real love between men and women required equality and inter-dependence rather than subjection and need.

As for the 60% of bachelor’s degrees going to women, that’s hardly feminism’s fault. Think about it: young men are much more likely to be locked up in prison or in the military than their sisters, thus reducing the number of males available for college. Blame the war or the prison-industrial complex; blame video games and pot and porn; blame an absence of strong male role models, but for the love of Pete, stop blaming girls and women for their brothers’ collective lack of success.

If there is a “boy crisis”, its roots lie in the decision of a generation of older men to walk away from their responsibility to care for, inspire, and mentor. These men were not pushed away by women, not forced away by the courts, they left of their own free will, abandoning their sons. We are reaping that consequence now. Parker misdiagnoses the cause of the male malaise, and her remedy is radically, disastrously wrong.

Yet another post on men, suspicion, youth ministry, and cheerfully proving one’s innocence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Men's Movement, Sexual harassment, Youth and Youth ministry
. 29 Comments

A reader, responding to the thread below this reprint, writes:

…talking about false allegations keeping men out of these fields (working with kids) and referencing things like To Catch a Predator and the McMartin / Buckey case to make out like the fear of abuse is totally overblown really hurts, you know? I try not to let things bother me. I’ve had to stop reading certain blogs because of the prominence of thinking that downplays the reality of child sex abuse… For someone to portray what concern that exists now as hysteria makes me feel invisible. For almost every woman I’ve known well enough to have a personal conversation with and almost every female family member, this is a big part of their reality, part of their life story.

I wasn’t able to do much moderating while I was in New York, and perhaps I ought to have weighed in a bit. Whenever I’ve posted about working with youth, and particularly about working with underage teens (see this category archive), men’s rights activists tend to show up in the comment threads. They often show up to give me a “friendly” warning that I risk being hit with a false accusation, or to lament what they see as a broader cultural climate that is deeply distrustful of men who work with young folks. As I said in this post and many others, the collective bad behavior of a great many men (not just a few “bad apples”) has led to a justifiable degree of suspicion on the part not only of the survivors of abuse but on the part of parents, communities, and the broader culture. My two-fold point has always been the same:

a. I welcome the opportunity to “prove myself safe” through a repeated willingness to submit to scrutiny, a scrupulous willingness not to be entirely alone with a minor, and a cheerful and undefensive willingness to answer questions about my actions and my pedagogy from any stakeholder in the community.

b. At the same time, I’m going to be fearless about being warm, loving, and where appropriate (and sometimes, it is very appropriate) physically affectionate with young people of both sexes. Good youth ministry with any group of teens is impossible without an environment in which non-sexual, affirming, touch is available. Continue reading ‘Yet another post on men, suspicion, youth ministry, and cheerfully proving one’s innocence’

“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotype

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2008
in Feminist Pedagogy, GLBTQ and Men and Masculinity
. 29 Comments

Frederick sends me a link to this article from last week’s University of Chicago paper: Men find Academic Home in Gender Studies.

Sexuality, masculinity, and interracial pornography have held particular allure for David Klein since high school, but only after coming to the U of C did Klein find a theoretical framework for talking about his interests.

“Theories of gender and sexuality have a part in everything. I think queer theory has a lot to offer in terms of frameworks for looking at the world,” said Klein, who is a second-year in the College.

Klein is one of only three undergraduate men currently declared as gender studies majors at the University.

Since the creation of the major in 1996, men have comprised around 20 percent of undergraduate gender studies majors. However, with an average of only four undergraduate gender studies majors per year, the small department often graduates classes without any men at all.

Men historically make up around 10-15% of the students in my women’s history class. They make up around 45% of the students in my men and masculinity course, 40% of the students in my “beauty and the body” class, and traditionally make up about half of my gay and lesbian history survey. We don’t have formally declared majors at the community college, of course. I do know, however, that I’ve been successful in “converting” a number of students to a Women’s Studies/Gender Studies track after transfer. But of those students who do transfer on as Gender Studies majors, most– about 80% — are women. It’s one thing to get guys to take the classes, and another thing altogether to get them to make it the focus of their academic careers. Continue reading ‘“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotype’

More on the “Godmen” and the heresy of the hyper-masculine Christ

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2008
in Christianity and Men and Masculinity
. 2 Comments

In October 2006, I wrote a post about the “Godmen” phenomenon. That post begins:

Godmen is, according to the organizers, “a series of testosterone-fueled Christian men’s gatherings across the country. Their purpose: to reassert masculinity within a church structure that they (the organizers) say has been weakened by feminization.”

Uh huh. Or, in other words, Godmen is about giving men who feel overwhelmed and challenged by a Gospel message of egalitarian justice a chance to worship God without having to let go of the very things that Jesus asks them to surrender.

Now, happily, Christianity Today has a very critical piece up about the Godmen and other similar groups anxious to “reclaim Christ” as a hyper-masculine role model. (Cap tap to reader David, who sent me the link.) Brandon O’Brian, writing in CT, makes good sense here:

The masculinity movement would have us emulate the glorified Jesus—the one who will return on horseback and brandish the sword of judgment. That is certainly the Jesus we worship. But it is not the Jesus we are commanded to imitate. The only times Jesus appears in Scripture as a warrior are in his pre-incarnate debuts in the Old Testament and post-resurrection glory. Our model of behavior, then, is the suffering Son, not the glorified one.

That’s good. And further signs that Christianity Today, the flagship journal of American evangelicalism, is open to genuinely egalitarian principles:

Arguing for common characteristics between men and women is not to argue for identical roles. I don’t intend to downplay the significant differences between the genders or the distinct challenges in discipleship that men and women each face. I mean that if courage is Christlike, then men and women should both develop courage…

…we should mistrust any interpretation of Scripture that simply confirms our instincts. If it is more natural for a man to be aggressive and a woman to be passive, then a genuine encounter with Christ should challenge a man to become gentle (Gal. 5:23) and a woman to become bold (2 Tim. 1:7). The challenge of discipleship is extended equally to both men and women.

A-flippin-men. Bold emphasis is mine. And while I’m not sure how “natural” masculine aggression and feminine passivity really is, the reminder that a relationship with Christ challenges each of us to become fully and completely human is most welcome.

Off on America’s latest spring break, and a Friday reprint

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 11, 2008
in Housework, Male feminists, Marriage and Men and Masculinity
. 15 Comments

It’s a crazy Friday, and I’m not sure how much time I will have to post over the next ten days. I’m off on Spring Break next week (Pasadena City College has America’s last spring break, I’m nearly certain), so posting will be intermittent (but not entirely absent) between now and April 22.

Here’s a reprint of a 2005 post: Relinquishing Control: Some Thoughts on Men, Women, and the Domestic Sphere.

The comments below this post continue to come in, and there’s an interesting exchange worth following up on.

Stacer wrote:  it can be very hard for women to relinquish control over what is traditionally her domain, especially if she was raised traditionally and/or has family members who pressure her in that regard.

I replied: Helping wives to relinquish that sort of control is a task that men, especially those who also come out of a conservative background, ought to consider embracing.

Caitriona asked in response: Uhm, just how do you propose that men "help" their wives relinquish control in these areas?

This is getting into some tricky stuff.  Let’s see if I can wade through it.

I’ve known a fair number of women who have been raised with the notion that the home is their domain.   The cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, and the general presentation of the household are things they see as entirely, or nearly entirely, within their bailiwick.  While many feminists have rightly asked their boyfriends and husbands to "step up" and take an active role in domestic tasks, many traditional women have not.  In some instances, they don’t ask because they don’t expect their male partners to be interested or willing to help.  But in other cases, these women have bought in to the notion that their very identity as wives and mothers is inextricably linked with how they "keep house."

Again, it’s difficult not to share too much from personal experience.  I’ve lived with quite a few women (some to whom I was married, some not).  They came from widely divergent social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.   In some of these relationships, my partner and I agreed to live in a kind of low-key slovenliness.  (I’m a bit of a slob, as anyone who has seen my office can tell you!)  In other cases, we agreed to keep the house or apartment up to a "higher standard", and we either shared the labor or (more recently) hired help to do it for us.

Continue reading ‘Off on America’s latest spring break, and a Friday reprint’

Girlfriends, boyfriends, feminism: a long response to “Gwynn”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 7, 2008
in Feminism, Links, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 32 Comments

A reader named Gwynn writes:

I’ve been thinking about you recently as my boyfriend and I have been talking about feminism.

He’s 25, I’m 34, but this is not about our age difference per se. A bit before we started dating, I told him I was a feminist, and he took the kind of not-uncommon position something like “well as long as you’re not mad at me personally…” But when we spoke further, I found him very receptive to feminist ideas. He was simply clueless, which isn’t uncommon in either sex, I suppose.

I gave him a bunch of links to read (from this blog and elsewhere).

So everything was great and I’ve been calling him a feminist. But lately he’s admitted he’s not comfortable calling himself a feminist because of his lack of actual education about it, and because he’s afraid someone like his sister or mom will argue with him if he uses that title. And also, feminist stuff is starting to seriously stress him out and sometimes when it comes up, it makes him really miserable, partly from a generic perspective (”the world is really fucked up!”) and partly selfishly.

The way I can approach sympathy for his position is as a white person. Racism is an issue where I’m in the oppressive majority, so I can understand the discomfort that comes with that position. Otherwise I’d probably get truly irritated when he says things like “I just don’t like having so much anger directed at me that I don’t deserve,” etc. I talk him through this stuff as best I’m able.

He’s also freaked out around ideas like “what can I personally do about misogyny?” and “seriously, I can never use the word ‘bitch’ again?” and “do men really have a vested interest in keeping women down?” and “but how does patriarchy benefit me personally?”

I’m not a gatekeeper of feminism. I’m a student of it, like most people. I don’t want to be his feminist authority.

I’m pretty good at answering the questions and challenging him. We had, for instance, a whole discussion in which I convinced him that the position that all heterosexual sex is rape is, while (IMO) wrong, not actually ridiculous. He’s open to everything that I say. He agrees that gender stuff is fucked up. (Of course, he’s especially receptive to arguments about how patriarchy hurts men, but I’m fine with that. I hate how patriarchy hurts men too, and as long as you’re not using that as a way of saying “so shut up, bitches, at least you don’t have to do dangerous jobs”, I’m totally cool with discussing it.)

I wish he had a male feminist mentor of some kind, but I don’t see that happening. I wish he was more well read about it, but he’s been reading “The Republic” for about the past year, which indicates how much time he spends with books and how slow he is at it.

I guess my sort of general question is, without doing all of his work for him, or letting him off the hook, how does a girlfriend help a boyfriend with feminism?

One of the problems in any age-disparate relationship — particularly when the older partner is committed to a spiritual or political ideal about which the younger knows little — is that a kind of complicated mentoring relationship can develop. The younger partner, so often infatuated with the older, can easily associate their new love’s beliefs with the new love himself or herself. In other words, the interest in feminism could (and in Gwynn’s boyfriend’s case, I don’t know for sure) become inextricably linked with Gwynn, and his receptivity to feminism thus rises and falls with the status of the relationhip. That’s always problematic.

But there are two basic issues here: how to get young men to understand — and embrace — feminism, and how can a romantic partner help in that process, if at all? Continue reading ‘Girlfriends, boyfriends, feminism: a long response to “Gwynn”’

Humiliation and becoming human: how erectile dysfunction made me a better man, husband, and person

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 14, 2008
in Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Memories, Men and Masculinity, Penis, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 31 Comments

I count fellow Angeleno and men’s rights advocate Glenn Sacks as a friend, even though he and I are likely to disagree on virtually every issue. I winced a bit, however, at his rather snarky linking to my re-post in praise of erectile dysfunction. Glenn writes:

I guess if it’s humiliating to men, it must be good. Feminist professor/blogger Hugo Schwyzer recently wrote a blog post “in praise of ED.” Schwyzer writes:

“In my Humanities class on the ‘body’ yesterday, I noted in passing that there was much to be said for erectile dysfunction. I have always maintained that men would be far more insufferable than they otherwise are trained to be if the penis was, in fact, a muscle entirely under their control….ED literally softens the penis; it can also figuratively soften a man by forcing him to rethink his allegiance to a cruel and unattainable standard.”

In light of this, it kind of reminds me of an odd interaction I had with Hugo when he was on my radio show a couple years ago. We were discussing something related to sex–I can’t remember what–and I said something like “Of course, Hugo, men’s perspectives change as they get older. Like me, I’m sure you’re not quite the stallion you used to be.”

Hugo is a very nice guy, and it’s hard to get him angry over anything, but he was not happy over this remark. I was surprised, and didn’t quite know what to make of it. Any amateur psychologists out there have any ideas?

Uh, amateur psychologists? Leave your remarks over at Glenn’s place, please.

But my praise of periodic bouts of ED is not rooted in the internalized misandry of which I — and all other male feminists — are regularly accused. It’s rooted in many things, not least my own experience, about which more (because there’s a fair amount of TMI) below the cut. Continue reading ‘Humiliation and becoming human: how erectile dysfunction made me a better man, husband, and person’

Revive us again: noting an old post in praise of ED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 13, 2008
in Body, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality
. 6 Comments

In my Humanities class on the “body” yesterday, I noted in passing that there was much to be said for erectile dysfunction. I have always maintained that men would be far more insufferable than they otherwise are trained to be if the penis was, in fact, a muscle entirely under their control. For those who want to read my original post on the subject, here it is.

The money quote: ED literally softens the penis; it can also figuratively soften a man by forcing him to rethink his allegiance to a cruel and unattainable standard.

“God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines”: more on Spitzer, sin, redemption

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 11, 2008
in Faith, Men and Masculinity and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 11 Comments

As we await what must be the inevitable resignation announcement from Eliot Spitzer, it occurs to me I’ve posted a few times on the all-too-well-known theme of a fall from grace on the part of an admired — invariably male — public figure. Here’s a selection:

Private virtue, public justice: some very long thoughts on men, leadership, and the lie of “compartmentalism”

“There Never Was a War that Was Not Inward”: a long reflection on Ted Haggard

“The inner darkness of the redeemed”: in defense of Mel Gibson

Lengthy musings about Clinton, feminism, erotic justice

The titles of these posts are sufficiently descriptive as to require no further explanation. What I’ve said about Bill Clinton, Antonio Villaraigosa, Ted Haggard and Mel Gibson (an odd quartet indeed) more or less applies to Eliot Spitzer. And the bookers from the major chat shows have already called up the legion of pop psychologists who appear at times like this, all proffering an answer to the timeless question: “Why would a man like X, in his position, with so much going for him, do something so monumentally stupid?” By now we know all the answers: sexual addiction; deep-seated shame and the desire to be punished; self-destructiveness; mid-life crises; good, old-fashioned hubris. And because falls from grace are often breathtaking in their suddenness, we are fascinated as the ancients were fascinated. These are, as everyone points out, very old stories. Continue reading ‘“God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines”: more on Spitzer, sin, redemption’

Spitzer sadness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2008
in Men and Masculinity and Politics
. 9 Comments

I’m saddened by the announcement today that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a promising and exciting progressive voice in American politics, has admitted involvement with a prostitution ring.

Spitzer’s record on women’s issues has been solid. This revelation from the married father of three is devastating, not least because it reinforces what we all insist should still be seen as a myth: that progressive, pro-feminist men are incapable of matching their public language with their private lives. (Roll call: Bill Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Antonio Villaraigosa, Henry Cisneros, and so on and so on.) It’s not that only progressive men commit infidelity, and it’s not as if “ordinary” marital infidelity is entirely equivalent to involvement in prostitution. But those who work for justice for women, and do so publicly, connect the cause for which they fight with their own personality and their own behavior. I’ve made the case that private morality does matter, in this post here. Continue reading ‘Spitzer sadness’

Shame, mystery, and vulnerability: a very long post about the penis and the longing for acceptance

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 6, 2008
in Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Men and Masculinity, Penis and Sexuality
. 38 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching my Humanities course on “Beauty and the Body in the European-American Tradition” again. I’ve only taught it once before, four years ago, and frankly, it feels as if I’m teaching it for the first time. I always love the rush of a new course; as much as I enjoy my core Western Civ and Women’s Studies courses, the material is so familiar to me that I long for new challenges from time to time. “Beauty and the Body” certainly brings that.

We’re using a variety of texts in the course, including Susan Bordo’s The Male Body. Her first full chapter, famously, is about the penis. Not the phallus, mind you, that phantom symbol of patriarchy that haunts courses in psychoanalysis and literature. (In the underworld, I will be forced to sit in a Lacan seminar for four hours on Friday afternoons. Ask me how I know that this constitutes hellishness). Bordo is talking about the “real” penis, that flexible appendage which is a source of so much desire, anxiety, pleasure, distaste, and sheer bafflement. And so yesterday afternoon, we had what I rather roguishly enjoy referring to as “penis day # 1″. (My lecture schedule calls for two more over the course of the semester.) More below the cut (hah), and though there are no images, the topic is obviously a, uh, sensitive one. Continue reading ‘Shame, mystery, and vulnerability: a very long post about the penis and the longing for acceptance’

“The chance to become something more than a man”: a review of “Men Speak Out”: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 5, 2008
in Books, Men and Masculinity and Men's Movement
. 9 Comments

I’ve been taking my time to make my way through the nearly forty essays in Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power. The anthology, deftly edited by Shira Tarrant, is a marvelous one, with a breadth and diversity of men’s voices that is impressive — and moving. Though I got a copy in mid-January, it’s taken me nearly two months to read all the essays, generally moving at the pace of no more than one or two per day.

A few of the essayists are celebrated names in the small world of the pro-feminist men’s movement: Michael Flood, Robert Jensen, Michael Kimmel, and Jackson Katz (who penned the introduction.) But most are not as well known. These male voices are ethnically, chronologically, and sexually diverse, united by a strong commitment to gender justice and to creating a different understanding of what it means to be a man in the modern world. The essays are organized into themes: Masculinity and Identity, Sexuality, Feminism, and Points and Perspectives. And yes, I have a short piece in the anthology as well.

Refreshingly, few of the essays are written by academics. This is not to say that those of us who “labor” in the ivory tower (whether in the Ivies or at community college backwaters) don’t often have excellent perspectives on gender, sexuality, and feminism. But the dynamics of the culture being what they are, it has often proved true that the men best positioned to publicly identify as feminists are those who enjoy the protection of tenure. Tenured professors have a firmer rock on which to stand than do their brothers in, say, the military, or the corporate world, or in a factory, or in graduate school. The men who contributed essays to this anthology come from all those places and more, and there is a richness and an authenticity to what they have to say about their lives. Continue reading ‘“The chance to become something more than a man”: a review of “Men Speak Out”: UPDATED’