Archive for the 'Mentoring' Category

Boy crushes, and further evidence of men catching up to women: some thoughts on the new Gallup poll

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 07, 2010
in GLBTQ, Men and Masculinity and Mentoring
. 0 Comments

In 2004, several years before the pop culture began to talk about the “bro-mance” (a term that describes straight men’s increasingly intimate friendships with male buddies), my All Saints kids let me know of a term that they were using regularly: “boy-crush”. I wrote about how I learned of the boy crush in this post. What struck me was how much less homophobic banter and anxiety there seemed among the young men I worked with compared to my own memories of high school. Though the teens at an affluent and famously liberal Episcopal parish in suburban Los Angeles might not be representative of all young American males, their ranks included representatives of all the standard cliques familiar to generations of adolescents, the popular and unpopular, the athletic and the bookish, and so on. Nearly across the board, the comfort level with same-sex affection was much higher than it had been when I was in high school a few decades earlier.

I thought about the boys in that high school program while reading this Charles Blow op-ed from Saturday’s Times: Gay? Whatever, Dude. Blow commented on last week’s Gallup poll numbers, showing that for the first time, Americans’ acceptance of what the poll called “gay relations” had crossed the 50% threshold. Blow notes the real surprise, which is that men’s acceptance of homosexuality may now exceeds women’s, an apparent reversal of long-standing assumptions about greater female tolerance of sexual diversity. (Blow does cite evidence that suggests that rather than surpassing women, men have merely “caught up” to women’s traditionally greater levels of acceptance.)

I was pleased that Blow interviewed Michael Kimmel, whose work on men and masculinity created an entirely new academic discipline and a professor who has done more than anyone else to broaden our understanding of male identity. Kimmel, whose recent Guyland is the opus magnissimum on contemporary manhood, is an optimist. Rather than joining those who insist we’re in a national masculinity crisis (a crisis usually blamed on feminism), Kimmel thinks we’re raising young men with far greater emotional dexterity than their father’s or grandfather’s generation. Leaving aside the legitimate concerns about addiction to pot, porn, and video games, the evidence in the Gallup poll backs up what many of us who work with young men have already started to see in the past decade: more than at any time in the past, guys today are developing an unprecedented capacity for intimacy and for friendship (with both sexes). Though hardly immune to anxieties about their masculinity, and overly enamored of cartoonish depictions of manhood (think of the wild popularity of MMA), the evidence is clear that a critical mass of young men are far more accepting of homosexuality than ever before. This is very good news.

Teaching at an urban community college where most students are first-generation immigrants, the young men I work with at school generally come from far less socially progressive backgrounds than those I mentored in my years at All Saints Church. But though class and culture have an undeniable influence on how many young men negotiate their way towards adulthood, it’s clear that this increase in acceptance is not confined to the ranks of middle and upper-middle class white boys. This shift is bigger than that. To see so many young men evincing the same degree of tolerance towards sexual diversity as their sisters — this is a wonderful reminder of the basic truism that high levels of testosterone and the presence of a penis never need be barriers to learning empathy.

We’re winning the fight for hearts and minds. But we still have a very long way to go.

We are always on the record: how the most interesting man in the world gets it very, very wrong

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 05, 2010
in Mass media, Men and Masculinity, Mentoring and Youth
. 10 Comments

Driving to school on Monday morning, I passed a billboard on Robertson Boulevard. Part of the immensely tiresome “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer, the slogan on this particular sign read “The Bulk of Your Life Should Be Off the Record.”

I’ve loathed some of the Dos Equis slogans. The worst one so far features an image of the hirsute interesting man and the words “He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.” My favorite: “At museums he’s allowed to touch the art.” Clearly designed to appeal to young men (though one suspects the boys most easily amused by this sophomoric humor are under legal drinking age in the USA), the Dos Equis campaign is typical of much modern advertising: it plays on young men’s longing for reliable, hyper-masculine father figures. The Most Interesting Man in the World dispenses something even more valuable than tips for how to get rich or get laid: he offers certainty about what it means to be a man. He is notable for a complete absence of self-doubt. Given that so many young men are crippled by the absence of mentors and a nearly paralyzing degree of uncertainty about their lives and their roles, the appeal of this sort of advertising is obvious.

But while most of the advice in the Dos Equis campaign is silly and puerile rather than truly misogynist, the suggestion that the bulk of one’s life should be off the record infuriated me.

At the very heart of what it means to be an adult — for those of you who like to gender everything, a man rather than a boy, a woman rather than a girl — is the commitment to matching one’s language and one’s life. To be a grown-up means to live with integrity; integrity literally means “wholeness” or “congruence.” Put another way, an adult lives his or her life as if they are always on the record, with no disconnect between public pronouncements and private practices.

This commitment to congruence doesn’t mean one speaks to toddlers the way one speaks to one’s lovers. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t save some behaviors for behind closed doors. To put it another way, the rest of the world doesn’t get to know what my wife and I do in the bedroom. The point is, if they were to find out or stumble in, they would see that how we connect intimately and privately is radically compatible with the public aspects of our lives.

The world needs grown-ups. And grown-ups know the shabbiness and the heartbreak of a life lived in compartments. They know that young people — and all of us, really — need role models whose words and actions match. And whether in the public eye or not, they’re always on the record.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from my comments as a response to those who think I’m taking this much too seriously:

As we all know, irony gets lost in translation (especially with American adolescents, who tend — despite their affected sophistication — to live in an irony-free zone). Think about the old Miller Light “Man Law” ads; the boys I knew in youth group adored them, quoted them, and, despite their awareness that the commercials were tongue-in-cheek,tended to take them very seriously.

All advertising is didactic. It teaches something, even as it flatters the audience into believing that they are in on the joke. That’s the thing about ads like this: they aren’t ironic. They appear to be; Dos Equis may want an urban educated audience to think “Hah, look at how we’re playing around with the problem of contemporary masculinity in a hyperbolic way”, but they know damn well that a substantial percentage of folks out there aren’t going to be able to do that kind of rapid meta-analysis. Particularly teens, who are always the target of alcohol ads, as they are the ones whose brand loyalties have yet to be firmly established.

And though I was never much of a beer drinker in my day, I drank a lot of Dos Equis in college. It was, for a long time, my favorite beer.

What does kill us can’t make us stronger: a note on youth, drugs, and mentoring

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 15, 2009
in Addiction and mental illness, Memories and Mentoring
. 10 Comments

The front pages of both the Pasadena Star-News and the Los Angeles Times today have major articles on the death of Aydin Salek, a popular and promising senior at South Pasadena High School who succumbed to apparent alcohol poisoning after a weekend party. Salek, the son of Iranian immigrants, represented his entire high school on the local board of education, was a staff writer for the student newspaper, and was widely regarded as a leader of his class. He died after consuming a large but undisclosed amount of alcohol; one factor in his death may have been that his friends, worried about getting in trouble for drinking underage, initially transported him by car to the house of another friend whom they thought knew CPR, rather than taking him directly to the hospital. An investigation continues.

I didn’t know the boy, but am confident that many kids I know did; many of my students here at the college come from South Pas, as it’s known, and that school was a major feeder into the All Saints youth program which I helped lead for seven years.

Of course, it’s an unspeakable tragedy to have a child die young. If I were inclined to turn this post into social commentary, I would note that the death of a student leader at a middle-class suburban high school receives front-page attention across the region, while deaths due to drugs, alcohol, suicide or homicide among the student bodies at less prosperous institutions happen on a weekly (if not daily) basis in Los Angeles County, but almost never make the front pages. (The Los Angeles Times this morning even printed a timeline of the final hours of Salek’s life. The last time Southern California’s paper of record offered something similar about an overdose was the day after Michael Jackson died.) If I were the parent of, say, a Hispanic or black teen in South Los Angeles who had died in a similar manner — and whose death was noted in a single sentence deep within the paper — I might be a bit miffed at the rather obvious classism of the Salek coverage.

But I’m not going to belabor the point; the Salek family doesn’t need anyone suggesting that their grief is undeserving of respectful coverage.

What I’d like to post on, briefly, is the heartbreaking reality that on some occasions, a single mistake can indeed ruin or even end a life. I blog a great deal about the resilience of young people (and of human beings in general). I’ve railed against the myths of male weakness and of female frailty. I’ve seen the damage done by baby-boomer “helicopter parents” who infantilize their teenage children, and — against all historical evidence — imagine that this generation of adolescents face greater peril than any before. I’ve seen time and again how well-meaning parental concern becomes a teen’s crippling, even incapacitating anxiety. Empowering young people means allowing them to risk more and more each year that they grow; healthy parenting (as I am beginning to learn firsthand) means resisting the powerful urge to cover the child in bubblewrap.

I’ve written many times about my own life, noting that I abused alcohol and drugs for many years, starting in high school when I was considerably younger than Aydin Salek. My drinking career began at a high school party in April 1982, and ended sixteen years turbulent years later. I was hospitalized many times, had my stomach pumped again and again, catheters and IVs inserted up and down my body. Recklessly and willfully and episodically, I put toxin after toxin into my system. My sexual habits were compulsive and undiscriminating, and though I ruined quite a few relationships and a couple of marriages as a result, my body remained strangely impervious to harm. I never “caught” an STI or HIV, when people who did far less than I did, did.

I talk about this narrative to stress the possibility of change and transformation, an enduring theme in my writing and my mentoring. I leave out details of the sort that seem overly titillating or likely to wound; I’m keenly aware that my daughter will someday wince at the words I write, and I do my best not to compound (in advance) her embarrassment. But I worry that the message that many of the young people I work with get from me is “You can survive anything, and therefore it’s okay to try anything. Look at Hugo — he screwed up six ways to Sunday and is now blissfully sober with his lovely wife and child. If he can make it through the drugs and the booze and the other compulsive acting-out behaviors, so can I.”

I like to attribute my survival to divine grace, excellent therapy, wonderful Twelve Step sponsors, and my own tenacious will to live. But the truth is that there’s another factor I’m less inclined to credit, and that’s pure old-fashioned luck. To be honest, “luck” doesn’t fit my worldview; it isn’t something I can encourage others to pursue, it isn’t something I can directly credit God or my therapists or my “program” for. If it could be drunk or snorted or smoked, I did, and I survived (though I needed a few urgent medical interventions along the way). I have — gratias deo ago, baruch hashem — no enduring physical or psychological damage to my body. I have scars a-plenty, but they are all on the surface. And the plain truth is that a great many people out there, including some I knew and loved, did the same things I did and they didn’t make it.

That we can survive anything isn’t a guarantee that we always will. Resilience varies, and what might kill one leaves another bruised and sick but otherwise unscathed. Those of us whose hearts were just a bit stronger, whose timing just a bit better, whose guardian angels a bit more attentive — we make a huge mistake when we look back on our lives and imagine that luck wasn’t a huge part of our survival. And when we talk to young people, who are often both a cynical and superstitious lot, we need to emphasize that our good fortune might not be theirs.

Many young people know Nietzsche’s famous maxim that “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” (Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker). I’ve never liked that much, which might be a surprise; Yeats came closer to the truth when he pointed out that “too long a suffering makes a stone of the heart.” I’ve seen people survive trauma but remain incapacitated by it physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. But the real problem with the Nietzsche maxim is that in order for the second part of the statement to come true, you need to manage not to die — and young people are, for all their surprising durability, not impervious to lethal substances — and other choices with lethal consequences.

We who were strong enough or lucky enough or graced enough to have both survived and thrived mustn’t reinforce the myth of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Yes, I have a certain amount of wisdom as a result of the life I’ve lived, but I’m not at all sure even now that I might not have turned out to be a better, kinder, and more successful human being had I been a little less reckless in my younger years. The pain I caused others left lasting injuries; even now, I suspect my mother still fears another phone call in the middle of the night. Though I did no lasting injury to body or mind or soul that I can discern, I can see the damage I inflicted in the people who still won’t speak to me after all these years, and in the flash of suspicion I see sometimes on the faces of my nearest and dearest.

Not every kid who drinks too much meets an unfortunate end like Aydin Salek. We must avoid hysterically overselling the risks; when we do, we earn the derision of young people who know better. (Think of the sex ed scenes from Mean Girls for an example.) At the same time, we mustn’t be too blasé about the fact that sometimes, some kids really do die doing things that others do with impunity. Striking that balance in a way that resonates with young people is at the heart of good mentoring, teaching, and coaching, and it is something to which I am re-committing myself today.

Why can’t guys mentor women?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 08, 2009
in Mentoring
. 3 Comments

Not a lot of time for a post this morning, but a reader sent this post from Double Ex along and it piqued my interest: Why Can’t Guys Mentor Women? Dayo Olopade asks:

We’ve all heard reports that Americans lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent…. can’t we also blame men in these disciplines who are less willing to mentor young women? Perhaps they are just not that into helping women along; or fearful that accusations of impropriety might fly. But in male-heavy fields, what’s wrong with dudes lending a hand?

It’s a good question, and I’ve touched on it before (I have a few posts on mentoring). I’ll repeat what I wrote in April 2008:

I understand that in this current climate, many men in academia or corporate leadership are reluctant to mentor young women. Feminists can say, over and over again, that the risk of a false charge of sexual harassment is infinitely lower than the men’s rights activists imagine, but our reassurances don’t seem to have much impact on some guys. Of course, if fear of litigation does act as a deterrrant to harassers, lechers, and boors, so much the better. But those of us who have experience and wisdom to share must be willing to do so, even if that means quieting our own anxieties. We must be willing, of course, to be honest with ourselves about our own motives as “senior” men mentoring young women. But, if we’ve done our work as adults, we’ll be able to work closely with a mentee, a student, or an employee without fear of having our sexual desire emerge without warning. And if we’re willing to set good boundaries, and make those boundaries verbally explicit, then we can do the vital work of raising up the next generation in our chosen fields.

In the end, all of us who have achieved some degree of success have a moral obligation to help those who wish to follow in our footsteps. And we must be willing to offer that help irrespective of the race or sex of the one who needs our mentoring. That means courage, that means clarity, and it means making and sticking to some world-class, kick-ass boundaries.

Obviously, I mentor young people of both sexes. And yes, I’m a gender studies professor who spends a great deal of time thinking about and writing about boundaries. But I’m not the only safe and responsible man, not by a long shot. And increasingly, one thing I see as my job is to encourage other safe and responsible men, my peers in academia and elsewhere, to “step up” and be willing to do what Olopade and others make clear is so necessary.

Perhaps a workshop, or a podcast, on how to be a good male mentor would be something for me to work on in my abundant and expansive free time.

Against the “Love Hurts and Feminism Stole My Babies” discourse: a response to Zoe Lewis, updated

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 06, 2009
in Feminism, Mentoring and Youth
. 20 Comments

Zoe Lewis is a well-regarded English playwright whose Touched: the Play opens this week in London. I can’t speak for the play, but can speak about her risible op-ed in yesterday’s Times of London: Madonna syndrome: I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking.

The title of the piece isn’t promising, and neither is the rant that follows. Lewis, 36 and single, devotes hundreds and hundreds of words to decrying the feminism she embraced in her youth, which she blames for her current unmarried and childless state.

I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen. I feel like a UN inspector sent in to Iraq only to find that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams - to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.

If she writes plays like she writes op-ed, I fear for those who have invested in the show. She can’t even get singular/plural agreement in her prose. And the rest of the piece isn’t much better, as it includes staggering gems of long-since discredited pop psychology like this:

I thought that men would love independent, strong women, but (in general) they don’t appear to. Men are programmed to like their women soft and feminine. It’s not their fault - it’s in the genes. Holly Kendrick, 34, who holds a high-status job in the theatre, agrees: “Men tend to be freaked out if you work as hard as them.” This is why many of my girlfriends are still alone. The truth, though, is not that men haven’t accepted women’s modernity - the alpha woman who never questions her entitlement to the same jobs, fun and sexual gratification as them - but that women haven’t either.

(My wife, an athlete and a successful business woman and a first-time mother at Lewis’ age, rolled her eyes when I read that passage to her. “My love”, she said to me just now, “is there something wrong with your genes?”)

I’ve long since given up fisking anti-feminist screeds of the sort that Zoe Lewis has put up. But what I do want to mention is a tactic Lewis uses that is too-little remarked upon by feminists, particularly those of us who are — or who work with — young women. At one point in her piece, Lewis writes, lamenting the progressive values with which she was raised, “I wish I’d had the advice that I am giving to my 21-year-old sister.” She’s taking on a role which we train women (feminists or not) to take on, that of the wise older sister giving advice about the world to a young and impressionable woman. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with mentoring the young — I do it both for a living and avocationally. But there is something wrong with the dynamic at work in Lewis’ piece, and in so many other places in traditional culture: the emphasis on teaching younger women to avoid older women’s mistakes.

I often ask my female mentees and my women’s studies students how often they’ve been on the receiving end of a “Don’t make the same mistakes I did” lecture from an older woman. At least three-quarters of the class invariably raise hands or nod. I follow up: “How often was this advice centered around relationships?” Almost all keep their hands up. Most girls learned what Lynn Phillips calls the “Love Hurts” discourse from older women by the time they hit puberty. A great many young women, particularly those with aunts and older sisters, were told time and again “Don’t believe anything a man says”; “Get an education before you settle down so you don’t have to rely on a man”; “Don’t do what I did and waste your heart and your time on a fool”. And so on, and so on, and so on. Much of the advice given is wise, at least in part: it is good, surely, to encourage our daughters to pursue education and to at least be somewhat leery of what teenage boys promise. Even Lewis offers some sensible points, noting that love and relationships ought not to be entirely neglected by the young and the ambitious.

The “Don’t do as I did, do as I say” discourse is an old one. And Lewis is firmly within that tradition, writing like nothing so much as a spinster aunt out of a nineteenth-century novel (only in that world is 36 “old” for a woman). She wants her younger sister to not let a good opportunity pass by, and not allow the “good ones” to slip away. Lewis is following firmly in the footsteps of Lori Gottlieb, who wrote a ridiculous paean in favor of “settling” a year or so ago, but she belongs to a much older tradition, even older than the era of Dickens and Austen: that of the not-so-old, not-as-insightful-as-she-thinks-she-is aunt or sister figure who dispenses warnings to young women who are, she imagines, just like she was not so long ago. What’s so toxic about this discourse is that it purports to offer assistance to the young, but ends up teaching another lesson altogether: women are invariably architects of their own unhappiness. To be a woman is to suffer, and the only satisfaction that comes as a result of all of that suffering (whether that suffering came from cheating husbands — or, as in Lewis’ case, the absence of a husband) is the chance to issue dire warnings to a new generation of impressionable and idealistic young women. Call it the “Love Hurts” discourse, or the “Feminism turned out to be a crock” discourse if you like, but it’s really part of something else: the “Women don’t know what’s good for them” discourse.

I don’t doubt that Zoe Lewis is well-intentioned. The young women I work with who “mentor” their even younger-sisters by offering cautionary tales from their own “mistakes” are, I’m quite sure, also well-meaning. But they ought to know better; as humans, we learn far more effectively from what our elders actually did than from what they didn’t do. The purpose of telling the young about one’s fuck-ups, in other words, is not to discourage them from making the same mistake, but to show them positive steps for overcoming the most painful consequences of what they did. My stories about my drug addiction, for example, are useless in terms of teaching a young person not to try drugs. My story of recovery, on the other hand, has the potential to be genuinely helpful. That’s true for all of us, men and women alike, and it’s true whether the subject is addiction or sex or career or marriage. Contrary to what our culture claims, we learn very little from the errors of others. We only learn from the way in which they dealt with those errors. This is a message missing from the stories told by Lewis or Gottlieb or any of the current generation of thirty- and forty-something women getting book deals and stage plays based upon their desire to lament both their own mistakes and the larger “failure” of feminism itself. Continue reading ‘Against the “Love Hurts and Feminism Stole My Babies” discourse: a response to Zoe Lewis, updated’

The confidence to knock on my door: a note about race, sex, perceived attractiveness, and mentoring

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 05, 2009
in Mentoring, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 9 Comments

Though I didn’t respond at the time, I’ve been mulling a comment made by Leslee below this post . I had written on Tuesday about daughters and the not-surprising fact that most of my mentees at the college are women (the high school youth groupers are more evenly divided by sex.) Leslee, who worked in my office for a colleague a few years ago, and knows me well, wrote:

I think the issue, Hugo, is that girls are more likely to seek out male mentors than boys are. And having worked in your office for your officemate, I’ve noticed that your mentees are disproportionately white and pretty. That doesn’t mean that you only choose white girls and pretty girls to mentor. But young women who feel confident about their looks, if not much else, are more likely to seek out a male mentor like you because they are more certain of getting some kind of attention.

As discomfiting as it is to read those words, there’s enough truth in them to deserve a response.

I bend over backwards to avoid, as much as is humanly possible, playing favorites. I do everything I can not to let a student’s appearance, or race, or even (as in this 2007 post about mentoring) bad body odor interfere with my attentiveness to him or her. As I’ve written before, when working with young people (or even with colleagues) I remember the prayer I was taught many years ago:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

And that works, and works better and better as I get older and more experienced as a professor, a youth leader, and a mentor to teens and young adults. But that previous post was about the importance of having really excellent boundaries, and it didn’t address Leslee’s point, which was that certain kinds of students, particularly those who perceive themselves as attractive or entitled by class and race, are more likely to be bold about seeking me out as a mentor. Continue reading ‘The confidence to knock on my door: a note about race, sex, perceived attractiveness, and mentoring’

Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 22, 2009
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Mentoring, Pasadena City College and Youth
. 2 Comments

About 15% of our students at Pasadena City College are of Armenian descent; Pasadena is part of the axis of the great Armenian Diaspora centered in nearby Glendale. Indeed, one of the periodic and cheerful debates we have ’round here is whether to classify Armenians as “white” or something else. My favorite form is one used at Glendale Adventist Hospital: there is one box to check marked “Caucasian” and another box marked “Armenian”. Some folks desperately, desperately need a lesson in basic geography! (If we’re going to start naming ethnic groups after mountain ranges, can I please be a mix of “Alpine”, “Pennine”, and “Sierran”?)

In any case, my women’s history course always seems to attract a disproportionate percentage of Armenians; on average, 20-25% of the women who enroll. And I’ve become familiar, after sixteen years of teaching here, with the particular brand of chauvinism that is so much a part of this otherwise marvelous culture. When it comes to the strictures of the modern double bind, no group seems seems as burdened as young Armenian-American women. Based on what I’ve learned from hundreds of students over the years, the pressure is uniquely overwhelming. On the one hand, most of my Armenian students are expected to study hard and do well in school and pursue the traditional careers of the first-generation upwardly mobile: medicine, law, engineering, business. (Gender studies is discouraged as a major.) On the other hand, there is a tremendous encouragement towards early marriage as well: no ethnic or religious group whom I have ever taught has as high a percentage of nineteen and twenty year olds with engagement rings on their fingers. (And yes, I’ve taught passels of Mormons, and anecdotally, they are less marriage-focused than first-gen Armenians).

Young Armenian women are generally expected to be beautiful (most wear make-up to school), to be feminine, and, it goes almost without saying, to be virginal until marriage (or at least, until engagement.) All dating is to be endogamous at the risk of rejection, ridicule, and rage. And even the best and the brightest young women are regularly told by their parents — I hear this story every semester without fail — that they can “forget” about going to university far away. The cultural rules require young women to live at home; USC and UCLA are filled with Armenians who would have loved the chance to go to Berkeley or Duke or NYU but who have been told in no uncertain terms that moving away is “not what a nice girl does.”

Some of my readers may be annoyed at this point. Is this another in my continuing series of posts that argue for the middle-class WASP virtues of self-discovery and autonomy at the expense of tradition and family? Is this another cluelessly elitist paean to the glories of daring to disappoint one’s parents? Maybe. But it’s based mostly not on what I think, but on the veritable catalogue of anguish and frustration and ambivalence I have heard from legions and legions of young Armenian-American women. And a few years ago, I got an idea about a sensible and culturally sensitive way to approach the problem. Continue reading ‘Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out’

Looking for “the inoculation against cruelty”: how to help boys through the trials of Guyland

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 17, 2008
in Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement, Mentoring, Michael Kimmel's "Guyland" and Youth
. 39 Comments

This is the third installment of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Part one is here, and part two is here.

In the first two parts, I looked at Kimmel’s concerns about young men in America, noting his insights into the “Guy Code”, homosociality, and the recurrent theme of escape in boys’ lives. Kimmel is as good as any in identifying the problem, and making a compelling case that there are some immensely troublesome aspects to the way in which our culture helps (or doesn’t) boys transition into adulthood. But it’s axiomatic that diagnosis is always easier to write than remedy; most of us see the wrong more clearly than we see the right. And in the end, the most valuable contribution that any of us in the gender studies field can make is to prescribe workable solutions to the problems we are usually so good at identifying.

Many writers of similar books spend the first four-fifths of the text laying out the case that something needs to change, usually with copious anecdotes designed to illustrate just how bad things have gotten. The suggestions for change and transformation, if they have any, usually only appear in the conclusion. Too often in recent years, I’ve read books about “youth in crisis” in which practical solutions appear almost as a rushed afterthought. It’s as if the author never meant to include them at all, and only did so, grudgingly, at the firm insistence of an editor. I am happy to say that Michael Kimmel weaves his vision for an alternative “guyhood” into every chapter of his book. Though the bulk of his strategy for change appears towards the end of Guyland, the whole text is shot through with thoughtful and compelling suggestions for how things can be different.

First off, we need to acknowledge that there is much that is good in our young men. One of the classic slurs that anti-feminist men’s rights activists (MRAs) throw at the likes of Michael Kimmel (or Jackson Katz, Robert Jensen, Michael Flood, and — if I may be so bold –myself) is that we are filled with masculine self-loathing. We then apparently project our own self-hatred onto other men, longing (apparently) to change “real men” into women. This charge has as much credence as the suggestion that Barack Obama runs an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, but like those whispers, the spurious charge of misandry has proven surprisingly resilient. Kimmel does what all of us do, though we get too little attention for it: he honors the worth and dignity of the young men about whom he writes, and he honors them as men. Continue reading ‘Looking for “the inoculation against cruelty”: how to help boys through the trials of Guyland’

Ronald Grace

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 16, 2008
in Mentoring and People
. 2 Comments

It’s always a shock when one discovers a familiar name on the list of those killed in a notorious tragedy. My wife learned only this morning that among the 26 killed in last Friday’s terrible Metrolink train crash was Ron Grace, her junior-high counselor and P.E. teacher. His obituary is here.

Mr. Grace, as she knew him, was a key figure in my wife’s early adolescent years. It was Mr. Grace, she told me today, who encouraged her to compete in the eighth-grade spelling bee; she won that bee. She has often remarked that that victory (which stunned her, but not Mr. Grace), gave her a shot of intellectual confidence that made a huge difference in the years that followed. Ron Grace was at the very beginning of his career as a mentor when he coached my wife on the athletic field and pushed her into the spelling contest. He died on Friday afternoon, on his way home, just 55 years old.

If you’ve got mentors, father figures, mother figures, old school counselors or beloved teachers who made a difference, let this be your encouragement to drop them a line. Now. No one, after all, knows the time or the hour when we are to be summoned home.

Being passionately interested without arousing interest: more on crushes, flirtation, and safety

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 08, 2008
in Flirting, Mentoring, Student crushes and professor-student relationships, Youth and Youth ministry
. 12 Comments

It’s one of those very hectic mornings.

I’m tired of discussing Sarah Palin and the merits of the other various candidates for president. (I might feel rejuvenated within 48 hours — it’s entirely plausible I’ll be right back to bloggin’ about politics again soon).

The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.

Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.

Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.

His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.

In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.

Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard. Continue reading ‘Being passionately interested without arousing interest: more on crushes, flirtation, and safety’

“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 10, 2008
in Academia, Age, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Male feminists, Mentoring and Teaching
. 3 Comments

It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.

At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.

But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading ‘“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict’

On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 08, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Sports, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 13 Comments

The New York Times has a preview up today of a long article coming out on Sunday in their magazine: The Uneven Playing Field. It’s by Michael Sokolove, and based on his forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (I’ve pre-ordered the book, and will review it this summer when it comes out.)

In this lengthy adaptation on the Times website, Sokolove writes about what he sees as the extraordinary number of knee (ACL) injuries that are being sustained by female athletes, soccer players in particular. His thesis:

(the epidemic is) part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

The rate (of ACL injury) for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

At this point, my heart was sinking. Was this going to be anti-feminist ideology dressed up as professed concern for the health of young women? Was Sokolove trying to scare parents into pulling their daughters out of competitive sports? I even wondered if Sokolove was some sort of shill for the anti-Title IX crowd, trying a new tactic in their never-ending crusade to roll back a policy of equal funding for women’s sports. As a passionate sports fan, married to a former club soccer star, I have a deep and abiding commitment to women’s athletics — particularly the “beautiful game” of what the rest of the world calls football.

Happily, reading the article to the end (it is ten pages long) makes it at least fairly apparent that Sokolove is committed to women’s sports. Rather than imploring parents to pull their daughters off soccer teams, he writes sensibly and knowledgeably about the causes of what is undeniably a common problem: catastrophic ACL injuries among young female soccer players. The chief culprits have nothing to do with inherent feminine weakness. Rather, they are two-fold: poor bio-mechanics and the exhausting “club” system in high school and college that leaves many talented girls playing a demanding sport literally year-round. Continue reading ‘On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article’

Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2008
in Academia, Mentoring, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 3 Comments

As most readers will know, the feminist blogosphere continues to go through an unusually painful period of discussion and debate about race, sex, and intersectionality. And while it really isn’t all about me, I find it, if not ironic, oddly serendipitous that this semester finds me on a hiring committee to select a new African-American specialist for a tenure-track position. The first round of interviews unfold this afternoon and tomorrow.

Confidentiality protocol bars me from disclosing too much about the hiring process, but I can share what has already been made public. After more than two decades, my colleague Pete Mhunzi, who taught both African and African-American history, is retiring. In this depressed budget climate, we had to fight tooth and nail to get a replacement position approved; some in the administration wanted to fill the Africanist position with a series of adjuncts.

At the beginning of the year, we sent out the standard notice for a new tenure-track hire. Because we are a community college, we need someone capable of handling several different intro courses: African-American history; the History of Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern Africa; modern U.S. Survey. We received a number of excellent applications, and starting at noon today, we’ll meet the most promising candidates, the one who survived the “paper screen” process.

When we were first writing the hiring proposal last year, there was some debate amongst the members of the committee about non-academic qualifications. We have only one professor who teaches African and African-American studies; the retiring holder of that position served not only as a classroom professor but also as a mentor to black students on campus, advising the BSA and so forth. Though just three decades ago, the campus was nearly 25% black, today the percentage of African-American students has plummeted to the mid-single digits. Some of that is due to the changing demographic of the San Gabriel Valley and of Southern California in general, some of that is due, frankly, to a decline in the number of African-American high school graduates who are attending any kind of college.

As far as I — and the other members of our committee — were concerned, it’s vital that the new faculty member we choose be committed not only to mentoring all students, but have a particular interest in working with young African-American men and women. Of course, this doesn’t mean we asked for or are demanding that the person we hire be themselves black. (Even with tenure, if I, as a member of a sitting hiring committee, announced on a public blog that race was a qualifying factor, I’d be in a massive heap of trouble. Heck, I might not be allowed to serve on a committtee again. Wait a minute… naw, bad idea.) Continue reading ‘Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist’

On male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 02, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Teaching, WAM 2008 and Youth
. 28 Comments

Another issue that came up in Saturday’s WAM session on “breaking the hold of the Old Boys Club” was that of mentoring. Ann Friedman brought up the often-problematic, often-rewarding experience of being mentored by older men. In her field, journalism, the majority of senior writers and editors are male; it simply wouldn’t be possible for her to seek out only women as mentors, as there aren’t enough of them around yet. Though the topic came up only briefly, several of the women on the panel talked about being hit on by “creepy” older men, but also about having had very kind, safe, nurturing older fellows play a welcome and vital role in their professional growth.

One of the things Ann said, before we moved on to other subjects, was something like “It’s difficult for a man, as a mentor, to send the right signal about his willingness to mentor a younger woman. Should he come right out and say ‘I’m not hitting on you, but I am interested in working with you’, or should he leave it alone? That’s a hard one.” Everyone else agreed, and since the topic of the workshop was not “how can older men safely mentor younger women”, we moved on to other things. After all, I was the only man over 25 in the whole auditorium.

I divide my mentoring work into multiple categories. In various church settings, I’ve worked with teens and young adults as a volunteer youth pastor. Here at the college, I’ve mentored students and, increasingly, junior colleagues. The mentoring with students is both academic and personal. Because I teach gender studies, and offer courses on emotionally charged, sensitive subjects like sexuality, GLBTQ history, and “the body”, I have an obligation to be present for students as they work through the various issues that these classes can bring up inside of them. Any given semester, I would guess that I’m actively mentoring around a dozen current students, as well as current and former youth group kids. Some come to my office hours, I meet others — when I can — for coffee and lunch.

Off the top of my head, I’d say two-thirds of the people I mentor are women. Pasadena City College is already 56% female, and my gender studies courses — from whose ranks most of my mentees come — are 70-90% female. Add in the cultural forces that make it more likely for women to ask for help when they need it, and it makes good sense that the majority of my mentees would be female. Most of my mentees are, these days, young enough to be my children. The students I am working closest with this year were born between 1986-89, the years in which I was a college student. Continue reading ‘On male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED’

Jack and Jill again: a response to Father Figure about mentoring and attraction

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 28, 2007
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite posts 2007, Mentoring, Older Men & Younger Women, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 3 Comments

It’s genuinely flattering that I get several e-mails a week from people who have read my posts and are asking me for input on issues ranging from chinchilla care to student crushes to youth ministry to older men/younger women relationships. I want to make it clear to those who do write me, however, that I assume all unsolicited email is “bloggable”. I am not able to offer replies or advice outside of the format of this blog. I will, of course, change names and details in order to protect the writer’s anonymity. That seems a fair policy.

Got an email last week from a fellow who calls himself Father Figure. Father Figure is married, and though he doesn’t specify his age, seems to be forty-something (I take great delight in calling myself a forty-something these days). He writes:

You seem to be very perceptive on the area of
crushes developing on mentor/father figures.

How does the mentor/father
figure disengage from such a relationship as he sees
himself being attracted to the young woman [half his
age!] who’s paying so much attention to him?

The last three years have been among the worst of
my life, mainly from being unable to forget about the
attention that this young woman gave to me for a few
months, but also from incredible guilt for the way
that I totally broke off contact with her. Even now I
tend to feel that if I see a mutual friend, I should
casually inquire about her, not so much because I want
to know, but out of concern that if the conversation
gets relayed back to her, it will hurt her that I
didn’t even ask about her. Her own father died or
left the home when she was a young girl, and it seems
that in some ways she related to me as a sort of
“safe” father-type figure. The problem was that I
fell for her, and so I found the only way to deal with
my feelings was to stop contact. But my breaking off
contact [when we had been fairly close friends] must
have come across to her as rejection of her as a
person. Hence, my profound feeling of guilt.

It’s a painful situation for Father Figure, and clearly equally painful (if not more so) for the young woman whom he has pushed out of his life.

My first thought is that those of us who do enjoy mentoring young people have an obligation to set strong boundaries with ourselves. I meet with and mentor a small group of young people; some are former students and some are former “youth groupers.” I mentor both men and women. One of my chief jobs as a mentor is to never, ever forget that my relationship with my mentees is one of mutual respect, but not one of mutual support. I am there for them in a way that they cannot and should not be there for me. In my relationships with my mentees, I make very little mention of my private life (less, in most cases, than I do on this blog). When I do talk about myself, it is usually only in order to share an anecdote from my past that may prove helpful to the mentee.

The mentor/mentee boundary is not as rigid as that between therapist and patient. No one is on a couch, and there’s no strict psychological protocol to observe. But I always remember that this young man or this young woman with whom I am sitting in my office or drinking coffee under a tree here on campus is there as an opportunity for me to be of service. My mentees are not potential “best friends forever”. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them, and heck, it doesn’t preclude me from starting to care very deeply for some of them. I love working with young people; it gives me a great sense of purpose and satisfaction to do so. But my students are not my dearest friends, and I don’t confide in my mentees as they confide in me. That’s not about power, that’s about respect for boundaries.

I wrote a long time ago about the story of Michael Gee, an adjunct professor and journalist who was fired from his teaching position after posting to a website his feeling that one of his female students was “incredibly hot.” As part of that post, I wrote about how we as teachers and mentors can respond to students whose bodies might be distracting to us. I wrote about an old student of mine named “Jack”, whose cigarette stench and body odor made our office hours together difficult; I wrote about “Jill”, whose unusually revealing clothing posed a different challenge. Jack and Jill were wonderful students, solid “A” students, both interested in having me mentor them. Jack’s smell was burdensome; Jill’s state of near-perpetual underdressedness posed a similar problem. With both students, my job was the same: to not allow their bodies to become my focus. I made a conscious effort to be there for Jack in all of his malodorousness, and to keep my eyes on Jill’s face. I’m not an instructor in grooming, fashion, or deportment; if I am only able to be present for those who are bathed and reasonably covered up, then I am a piss-poor mentor and teacher and ought not to be in this job. I learned a lot from Jack and Jill.

Perhaps it’s because I’m happily married, perhaps it’s because I’ve worked so hard to establish excellent boundaries, perhaps it’s because I’m in my forties now — but for whatever reason, I don’t any longer have the trouble “Father Figure” has had with this woman he mentored. That’s the result of some hard work on my part, and also the result of being willing to ask for grace to come into my life and guide my mentoring relationships.

With the Jacks and Jills of this world, there’s a prayer I use. It was one I learned many years ago, and it has served me in good stead. I use the same prayer with the potentially attractive as with the potentially hostile:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

Yeah, we have a problem with singulars and plurals here, but you get the point. I really do use that prayer, though much less often than I used to. God has been faithful to me, and I can say that when I have prayed that prayer sincerely, it has always been answered. I have never had to break off a relationship with a mentee because I was worried about my own growing feelings of attraction towards him or her.

Does that make me better than “Father Figure”, who did choose to break off his mentoring relationship with a younger woman to whom he was increasingly drawn? No, not really. It was far better for him to abrogate their relationship than to act on his feelings. But while seducing her would have been a profound betrayal of his commitment to her (and, of course, to his marriage), breaking off their contact (which had become important to her) without telling her why is a serious form of abandonment. There’s a general rule in working with much younger people, even when they are in their twenties: if you as a mentor cut off contact or withdraw from them, they will almost always assume that it was something they did. They will very rarely conclude that the problem was with the mentor; they will assume that they did something to drive him or her away. They may feel ashamed or guilty without quite knowing what they’ve done. It’s a serious wound, and I’ve seen it inflicted many a time.

Father Figure inquires as to what he should do. In the best case scenario, he would be able to resume his mentoring relationship with this young woman, taking responsibility for keeping his own feelings and desires strictly in check (and asking for spiritual help in order to do so.) Given that the young woman is an adult, his next best option — but not the best — is to be candid with her about his reasons for terminating their time together. He’ll have to be very emphatic that the responsibility is his and his alone, and that she did nothing wrong. It’ll be hurtful, but she’ll at least have (oh, overused word) the beginnings of some closure. The worst thing to do would be to continue to be distant and unvailable without giving a reason why.

I am absolutely certain that I will not cross a line with my students and youth groupers, either in act or in fantasy. I am confident that my intent will remain clear and my goals pure. Is this hubris? No, because I don’t rest this certainty on my own will alone. I’m a mortal human being, and I know all too well how quickly my own unchecked desires can run riot. My confidence lies in my faith in a faithful God, a God who will not give me any challenge I cannot handle if I ask for His help. I also have faith in my peers who hold me accountable, who ask me questions about my motives, who watch me. If I seem to be crossing a line, they’ll gently inquire and remind me of where it is that my priorities lie, what my obligations are.

If I can only mentor the unattractive, the well-groomed, the polite and unchallenging, I’m not doing my job. (Of course, the reverse is true: if I seek out only the beautiful and the brilliant to work with, something else is amiss!) If I were to find my own feelings getting in the way of my work with a mentee, I am confident that I would be given the strength to overcome those feelings. And by overcoming, I don’t just mean the strength to not act upon them. I mean the strength to eradicate them altogether. My wife is the human being in whose company I am happiest. If I were to be more excited about spending time with a friend or a mentee than with my wife, that would be a colossal red flag. And I am prayerfully, quietly confident that God would give me the strength to redirect my desires and my thoughts themselves if I asked Him to. But if for some reason that sustenance didn’t come, then I would have to terminate the mentoring relationship.