Archive for the 'Favorite Posts, 2004-2006' Category

Top Posts in 2006: the top five

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on December 12, 2006
in Favorite Posts, 2004-2006 and Top Ten in 2006
. 1 Comment

I’m not entirely done with regular posts yet; I’ll be back to posting normally tomorrow.

Last Friday, I posted the first half of my “Top Ten in ‘06″. Today, I offer the top half.

Were these the five best posts I wrote all year? I’m not sure, but they were picked because I’m proud of the writing or the insights within them; a couple were picked merely because they proved to be particularly popular or controversial. (I left out the OKOP, masturbation, and circumcision posts, though they attracted lots of attention.) Ranking them was not easy either, and if I were doing this in another month, I might well have a different order. But for now, these are my five favorites posts of 2006, in ascending order from fifth to first. (And why three of them ended up being from March, I have no idea. Perhaps my mind is more fertile at the onset of spring.)

5. Some Thoughts on Teaching and Student Crushes (March 24) Key excerpt:

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places! That’s what student crushes mean to me.

4. Closing the Door: men, aging, younger women, and ego (October 26) Key excerpt:

I am absolutely convinced that many of my peers (and men older than myself) chase younger women for precisely this reason. It’s not that women our own age are less attractive, it’s that they lack the culturally-based power to reassure our fragile, aging egos that we are still “younger than our fathers”, still hot and hip and filled with potential. Inspiring romantic or erotic desire in women young enough to be our daughters becomes the most potent of all anti-aging remedies, particularly when we can display our much younger mates to our peers. By comparison, the famous little red sports car reveals only the size of our pocketbook; attracting a girl barely out of her teens reveals the enduring power of our youthful appeal. And for those men who are desperately afraid of losing out on possibilities, afraid of closing doors, afraid of the humble acceptance that things have changed forever — then there is nothing, nothing more compelling than significantly younger women.

3. Some lengthy thoughts on feminism, traditional families, contingent happiness and daring to disappoint (March 14) Key excerpt:

I can’t truly know what it’s like to be a first-generation female college student, carrying the hopes and dreams of my parents and my ancestors on my shoulders, on my heart –or on my hymen. Sure, I’m privileged in ways that I probably don’t even fully understand. But I do believe that at the heart of the feminist project is this: women ought to have the right to pursue happiness. That happiness will manifest differently in the lives of different women; some will find their most sublime joy in marriage and motherhood while others will find it in on an archaeological dig while others will find it in the arms of another woman. And if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.

2. Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger (May 25) Key excerpt:

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

1. “My life doesn’t just revolve around you”: a note of gratitude for a feminist mom (March 20) Key excerpt:

So my belief in the importance of women’s autonomy and personal freedom — even as wives and mothers — came to me early in life. A first-born son growing up in a household without a father (amateur psychologists, have at it!), I was very close to my mother. I still am. And my adult feminism is linked in no small way to the lessons she taught me. Motherhood, I learned, is a role — but it need not be an all-consuming identity. The fact that my mother had a life outside of her children gave me the confidence to live out my life without fear that I would destroy her if I made mistakes or deviated from a planned path. Her commitment to her own happiness allowed me to make a similar commitment to my own — and for that, I will forever be tremendously grateful.

Top Ten in 2006: the first half

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 8, 2006
in Favorite Posts, 2004-2006 and Top Ten in 2006
. 1 Comment

For the past two Decembers, Bob Carlton at The Corner has organized a “Top Five” posts carnival. Those of us who have written interesting posts in the past year are invited to rank them and post links to them, perhaps with a small excerpt. I’m hoping Bob will do it for a third year in 2006. And for those of you who write longer posts (or just some shorties you’re proud of), please consider doing this!

Last year, I couldn’t limit myself to five favorite posts for the year, so I had to have ten. (Here’s a link to posts 10 through 6 in 2005, and here’s a link to the actual top five in ‘05.)

I will probably not have any particularly good posts in the remainder of December. In any event, I’ll post my top five of 2006 next week. But for today, here’s the first half of my top ten of this year.

10. The Happy Wasp Boy (March 30) Excerpt:

Yes, we’re WASPs. If you want to stereotype one aspect of us, we’re a Brooks Brothers wearing, Bloody Mary drinking, Buick Roadmaster station-wagon driving, fraternity and sorority joining, tennis-playing, mayonnaise and meat loaf eating, Junior League cookbook owning, monogrammed thank-you note writing, Town and Country magazine reading, English horseback riding, debutante ball attending, Social Register listed, pastel polo-shirt or sweater set clad clan. Without apologies.

9. “But you’re pretty!” A pro-feminist musing on why compliments don’t help (January 5) Excerpt:

…this “be very careful with physical comments and compliments rule” is applicable in the rest of the world, as well. Pro-feminist men must recognize that men constantly use compliments to gain access to women, and that that is a fundamentally destructive dynamic. How many bad pick-up lines start with overzealous praise of a woman’s appearance? Men use these lines because as hackneyed as they are, they know sometimes they work. By the time they reach college, most men recognize that a great many women are deeply and profoundly hungry for praise, and by offering that praise, guys will be able to gain an opening. When men praise the beauty of women they barely know, they are employing an old patriarchal strategy that preys upon a serious vulnerability.

8. Another Long Post about Pleasure, Feminism, Food, and Sex (November 16) Excerpt:

I don’t tell my students that they must masturbate without concomitant shame in order to be good feminists. I don’t tell them they need to eat cheesecake without guilt in order to be liberated. It’s not the place of a feminist professor (particularly a male one) to prescribe specific steps for transformation and growth in such profoundly personal arenas as sexuality and food. But at the same time, I am clear that there are few areas of life where it is more important to live out our egalitarian values than eating and sex. I am not advocating uncontrolled gluttony or destructive promiscuity. I am advocating an ethic that respects women’s pleasure as an a priori good. I am not advocating selfishness. (Heck, I’m a monogamous vegetarian; I understand the importance of balancing one’s own desires with one’s commitments to others.) I am challenging my students to see physical joy as their human birthright.

7. A long and personal post about agape, All Saints youth, and the progressive notion of salvation (February 9) Excerpt:

But when I think about agape and my youth group, I think of the end of the gospel of John. You know, the bit where Jesus makes breakfast for the disciples on the beach? He asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” And when Peter answers yes each time, Jesus tells him, “feed my lambs”; “take care of my sheep.” I suppose I’m not the only youth minister who thinks of his beloved teenagers as being like lambs. And in my heart, I believe that by trying my best to love everyone of these kids as much as I can, as intensely as I can, with as much openness and freedom from conditions as I can, I am feeding them just as Jesus wants me to. My conservative friends will tell me that I’m feeding them a diet of sweet sugar that tastes good, but is ultimately not enough to end real hunger — but I’m convinced and convicted that we at All Saints are giving them the real deal.

6. Between the Already and the Not Yet: a long post on premarital sexuality and doing “everything but”. (June 7)

I pass no judgment on those young people, Christian or not, who choose to have sexual intercourse before marriage. (I lost my seat in judgment city decades ago, and for good reason.) I honor those young people who believe that God has called them to an especially restrictive understanding of purity. I’ve been to weddings and watched a couple kiss — for the first time ever — after they were pronounced man and wife. I celebrate that choice! But I don’t think that it makes good sense to suggest that there’s nothing valuable about taking the middle ground position of “everything but.” For a great many young people, “doing everything but” offers a chance to explore and grow emotionally and sexually while remaining true to their spiritual and romantic commitments. Rather than ridiculing it, all of us who call ourselves older and wiser would do well to consider the possibility that “everything but” may represent not a foolish and indefensible compromise, but a healthy and spiritually mature middle ground.

Look for the top five of 2006 next week; I know which posts I’ve chosen, but am not yet sure in which order to place ‘em.

Another long post about pleasure, feminism, food, and sex

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 16, 2006
in Body, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism, Food and Sexuality
. 15 Comments

In recent years, as I continue to fiddle with my women’s studies syllabus, I’ve moved away from emphasizing certain themes and towards others.  One theme that has become more and more important to me: tracing the cultural history of women’s shame in America, particularly in regards to sexual pleasure, food, and other "selfish" desires.

I’ve emphasized this many times before, but my students are, overwhelmingly, non-white.  They are, overwhelmingly, first-generation college students.  And in my women’s studies class, overwhelmingly female.  But whether they are black, Latina, Asian, Armenian, they’ve almost all been raised with one enormously important — and colossally destructive — discourse: pleasure comes with penalties.

I tend to focus on the close relationship between attitudes towards eating and attitudes towards sex, largely because they seem so often to be inextricably linked.  The pleasure of food is our first pleasure; when we were tiny infants, it was what we screamed for and it was gave us comfort and delight.  Long after many of our other appetites may have faded, we will still take pleasure in what we eat.  (I’ve spent a lot of time with the elderly; my experience has been that in nursing homes, the subject of lunch tends to dominate conversations.)  Throughout our lives, in groups or alone, eating has the potential to be one of our greatest physical delights.

And we do not live in a world where women are permitted to eat to satiety without a considerable degree of shaming.  While their brothers are often encouraged to eat to excess, the majority of my female students grew up with a sense that they had to monitor what and how much they ate.  Many were first introduced to the idea that "pleasure has penalties" by mothers who warned them, as they moved into puberty, "don’t eat so much or you’ll get fat."  Others grew up with parents who were happy to have them eat all they liked, but as they transitioned into puberty, found themselves under the crushing influence of the broader culture, which idealizes a female body type at odds with healthy, indulgent eating. 

Bottom line: few students get to college without a considerable amount of shame surrounding their eating.  Most, if not all, have incorporated specifically moral language to refer to their food habits.  When I ask them "What does it mean when you hear a friend say ‘I’ve been good today’", all of them know that that refers to a particularly successful period of restriction.  When another friend says "I was so bad at lunch today", that never refers to skipping out on a restaurant bill; it’s always a reference to prioritizing pleasure over self-denial.  And as a feminist, few things make me sadder than to see so many of my students caught in that trap of oscillating between self-denial and indulgence, between bouts of puritanical pride in their own restriction and crushing guilt for giving into the basic desire to be sweetly, pleasurably, full.

I always connect this struggle around food to sexuality.  Just as my students vary in their eating habits, they vary widely in their sexual mores.  I’ve posted before about just how diverse they can be; I’ve had porn stars sitting alongside those who insist that kissing before marriage is a sin.   But if I can make some generalizations, I can say with confidence that most have been raised to view women as "gatekeepers" who must carefully guard their bodies against lustful, predatory, men. Too many have grown up with a sense that lust is a one-way street in which women are objects but rarely subjects.  Many were taught by their mothers how to be pleasing  and desirable; they were taught how to attract men while at the same time keeping them at bay.  For far too many, male sexual desire is a tool to be used with great care.  But few were raised with any sense of their own sexual agency (at least in the service of their own pleasure.) During a discussion a few semesters ago about the "discovery of the clitoris" by the male-dominated medical profession, one bold young woman said frankly:

"I’d sooner admit to sleeping with dozens of guys than admit that I masturbate.  Bringing pleasure to men is always easier to cop to than bringing pleasure to yourself.  It’s almost like masturbating for yourself makes you more of a slut — it’s like you can’t control your own desires, and that’s bad." 

While some students vigorously disagreed, it was clear that that comment had struck a familiar chord with many of the young women in the room.  (Nota bene: I do NOT ask students to disclose details of their private sexual lives to me or the class; I do, however, try and create a safe environment where those who wish to take such risks can do so.) 

Many of my students seem to have a sense of their own sexuality that reminds me of many folks with eating disorders whom I have known.  I’ve known quite a few women who regularly starved themselves.  And yet, rather than avoid food altogether, they became marvelous cooks.  I once dated a woman (briefly) who wanted to cook for me every weekend.  She made full-course fattening meals; she spent hours in the kitchen.  And she ate virtually nothing.  It became incredibly uncomfortable for me to eat in front of her, as she watched me with tremendous interest, constantly asking if I wanted more.  Obviously, she took some vicarious pleasure in watching someone else eat, but she clearly also had a perverse sense of personal agency.  For this woman, pleasure consisted solely in the capacity to bring pleasure to another.  She had no ability to enjoy food for herself; her delight was entirely contingent upon mine.  It was absolutely awful.

I’ve told that anecdote to a few of my classes, and seen many nods of recognition.  And it seems evident to me that for far too many young women, that attitude of "contingent pleasure" seems to carry over from the kitchen to the bedroom.  Even in our hypersexualized culture, most of my female students are taught more about how to provide pleasure to another than to experience it for themselves.  The agency that they are permitted is the agency that comes with mastering the male ego and the male body, learning how to flirt, learning how to seduce, learning how to bring delight and pleasure. They see porn everywhere, but rarely do they see a storyline written for them, one in which their own ecstasy is central rather than something feigned to soothe male anxiety.

I don’t tell my students that they must masturbate without concomitant shame in order to be good feminists.  I don’t tell them they need to eat cheesecake without guilt  in order to be liberated.  It’s not the place of a feminist professor (particularly a male one) to prescribe specific steps for  transformation and growth in such profoundly personal arenas as sexuality and food.  But at the same time, I am clear that there are few areas of life where it is more important to live out our egalitarian values than eating and sex.  I am not advocating uncontrolled gluttony or destructive promiscuity. I am advocating an ethic that respects women’s pleasure as an a priori good. I am not advocating selfishness.  (Heck, I’m a monogamous vegetarian; I understand the importance of balancing one’s own desires with one’s commitments to others.)  I am challenging my students to see physical joy as their human birthright. 

Though not all of my students are yet sexually active, all of them are "food active."   They’ve been eating for as long as they can remember, and will do so for the rest of their lives.   Part of beginning a feminist journey is making a commitment not merely to self-indulgence, but to the principle that all human beings are entitled to seek out pleasure.  It’s one thing to say those words aloud, another to live them out.  And since feminism is never merely about transforming the self for the self alone, it’s vital that men and women commit themselves to being advocates for shame-free pleasure in the lives of their friends and family.  Though our understanding of when and how we seek pleasure may be informed by our own spiritual beliefs, and though we ought never seek pleasure at the expense of another’s happiness, we can still boldly, loudly, and continually proclaim the God-given right to delight in our bodies.   

Creation, in all of its messiness, is a good thing.

Closing the doors: men, aging, younger women, and ego

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 26, 2006
in Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Older Men & Younger Women and Sexuality
. 161 Comments

I posted last Thursday about my friend Sean and his experience with a Starbucks barista less than half his age.  As you’ll recall, Sean had thought the young woman was flirting with him; it turned out that she was "checking him out" in hopes of introducing him to her mother.  Sean was bemused and crestfallen, but has promised to call the mom (whose number he was given.)  I’ll give an update when I get it.

A number of folks asked again what a man Sean’s age (my age, just on the cusp of 40) would see in a young woman of 19.  The socio-biology crowd usually trots out the fertility argument: older men are attracted to younger women because they can more easily conceive our children.  I have very little time for evolutionary biology as an explanation for human behavior, but then again, I’m trained in the humanities and the social sciences!   

In any case, let me offer a different explanation: the fragility of the aging male ego.  Sean and I — and a number of my other male friends — are in our (very) late thirties and early forties.   And though some of us are straight, and others of us are gay, and some of us are married, and some of us are fathers, and some of us are doing what we love and others hate what they do — all of us are acutely conscious of getting older.  The signs of our aging show up in countless ways.  They show up in the lines on our faces; the grey on our heads, beards, chests; the thickening of our middles.  The signs show up in other ways, too: our parents are becoming more frail.  We are starting to worry more about mom and dad than they worry about us.  For many of my peer group — as for me — our parents are dying.  I can think of half-a-dozen friends who have lost their dads in the past couple of years, just as I did in June.

We fight our aging in a number of ways.  In my case, now that I am seven months from 40, I’ve revamped my diet (I’m achingly close to being a true vegan). I work out a great deal, and have dropped fifteen pounds since my dad’s funeral in early July.  I also make sure to eat my veggies, and I check my skin assiduously for growths and bumps and moles.  (Running shirtless in  Southern California risks turning Hugo into a melanoma farm.)  I won’t bother with worrying about wrinkles or grey hairs, however.  My pride dictates to me that diet and exercise are the "right" ways to fight aging; cosmetics and (heavens forfend) plastic surgery are the "wrong" ways.   Forget the Botox, pick up the boxing gloves.

But it would be disingenuous to insist that my buddies and I are all fighting against death.  Yes, we want to be healthy; yes, we want to live long enough to see our grandchildren graduate high school — even if we don’t reproduce until our fifth decade.  We want to outlive our fathers.   Yet there’s more to all of this effort than keeping ourselves healthy, and it ties in with what was going on with Sean and his barista last week.  We not only want to be fit and youthful, we want to hold on to the world of "limitless possibility" that so many of us associate with our teens and twenties.

So many older men hit on younger women for reasons that have little to do with sex and everything to do with a profound desire to reassure ourselves that we’ve still got "it."  "It" isn’t just physical attractiveness; "It" is the whole masculine package of youth, vitality, charm, sex appeal, and, above all else, possibility. When a 19 year-old flirts with a 39 year-old (as Sean thought the barista was flirting with him), it feels like the world is reassuring the fella that there’s still time, there are still new opportunities, still a chance to be young.  What was so painful to Sean –even as he laughed about it — was that while he imagined the barista saw him in the category of "potential boyfriend", she saw him as "potential step-dad."  Where he wanted to present himself as filled with erotic potential, she apparently saw him as "safe" and "nice" and "perfect for my mom."  He was using  Starbucks gal as a gauge to measure whether he still had "It", and she gave him a very clear answer: No.

I am absolutely convinced that many of my peers (and men older than myself) chase younger women for precisely this reason.  It’s not that women our own age are less attractive, it’s that they lack the culturally-based power to reassure our fragile, aging egos that we are still "younger than our fathers", still hot and hip and filled with potential.  Inspiring romantic or erotic desire in women young enough to be our daughters becomes the most potent of all anti-aging remedies, particularly when we can display our much younger mates to our peers.   By comparison, the famous little red sports car reveals only the size of our pocketbook; attracting a girl barely out of her teens reveals the enduring power of our youthful appeal.  And for those men who are desperately afraid of losing out on possibilities, afraid of closing doors, afraid of the humble acceptance that things have changed forever — then there is nothing, nothing more compelling than significantly younger women.

Women our own age know us.  Really well.  A man my age finds that "lines" don’t work as well on women around 40 as they do on women around 20.  Experience is not the best teacher, but she’s not a bad one either; most single women in our peer group have heard it all before, six times over.  And when we string together sentences filled with eloquent bullshit, our female peers will smell it and call us on it.   While some younger women can also see through our sad little facades, the less experienced she is, the better our chances of deceiving her.  And when we deceive her, we get the chance to see ourselves through her eyes, as we would like to be seen: heroic, decisive, strong, sexy.  Women our own age are less likely to buy what we’re selling without a thorough test drive.  (Yeah, the metaphors are flyin’, but you get the point.)

As I near 40, I find myself constantly quoting the lines from the Donald Justice poem:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

One of the most important doors to close is the door marked "everlasting youth."  Part of growing up is learning to accept that our choices are finite, that our youth is temporary, that the sexual desirability we may have had (or wished we had had) at 25 is gone, or at the least, significantly changed.  Another door we  must learn to close is the one marked with the unwieldy phrase: "constantly in need of validation and reassurance."  This doesn’t mean we won’t always need affirmation from others, but the kinds of affirmation we need will change.  Whether we have "It" can’t matter anymore; whether we are loving, kind, safe, generous, and reliable will.  The world doesn’t need us to be sexy in middle age.  The world doesn’t need us to be "on the prowl".  The world needs us to close softly the doors to our past, to embrace our aging and changing bodies, to embrace our families (in whatever form those families come) and to embrace the great adventure that only promises to get better and more glorious. But it will only get better if we close those doors. 

And part of closing those doors is loving younger women as our daughters, not as gullible potential partners who offer us the chance to believe in our own immortality just a little longer.

Circumcised at 37: a personal story and a rebuke to the MRAs

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 11, 2006
in Body, Circumcision, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Men and Masculinity, Music, Relationships, Sexuality and Vanity
. 144 Comments

In January 2005, at the age of thirty-seven, I was circumcised.   I’ll get to the reasons why later in this post, but I figured I’d start by getting your attention.

Below this post, a men’s rights advocate (MRA) calling himself "ballgame" (!), offers a long comment that concludes with a reference to male circumcision as Male Genital Mutilation (MGM, a play on the term Female Genital Mutilation, which refers to a genuinely dreadful practice performed primarily in North Africa.)

One particular strand of the men’s rights movement that I find especially distasteful is the group that insists that the removal of the foreskin of the penis is equivalent to the removal of the clitoris.   The best known anti-circumcision lobbying group is NOCIRC.  The explicit equivalency between male circumcision and female genital mutilation is made by the folks at (get ready) the International Coalition for Genital Integrity. 

No one denies that there are "botched" male circumcisions.  But the NOCIRC and ICGI folks, and their men’s rights advocate supporters, fail to recognize that male circumcision is performed for radically different reasons than is female genital mutilation.  While the latter operation is designed to safeguard women’s purity (and make pleasure nearly impossible), circumcision is done for a variety of reasons, including increasingly legitimate health ones.

Though it is problematic to quote President Clinton in regards to this part of the male anatomy, the Guardian reported in August that

Bill Clinton called for the world to prepare to tackle the cultural taboos surrounding circumcision yesterday if, as many expect, trials show that it protects men and the women they sleep with from Aids.

Though a fuller study will not report until next year, a preliminary South African study released in 2005 made the compelling claim that male circumcision is a vital weapon in the fight against HIV.  Francois Venter, the head of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, described male circumcision as "what may be our most important HIV-prevention strategy ever."

No such medical benefits to the infinitely more barbaric practice of female genital mutilation have ever been reported.

Though the findings remain controversial, many doctors do believe that circumcision also reduces the risk of cervical cancer in women.   Warning: if you google about for information on this topic, you’ll note that non-medical anti-circumcision groups have had remarkable success in getting their results to the top of the queue of answers.  Much more will be known when we get the results of the first truly large scale study on circumcision and health from Africa next year.

My brother and I were not circumcised.  I was born in 1967, my brother in 1970; we were born in the United States at a time when virtually every baby boy was circumcised.  My parents had to be quite emphatic with the physicians at Cottage Hospital, Santa Barbara, to prevent what was a routine operation from being performed.  For my late father, the reason to avoid circumcision was linked to religion, ethnicity, and the Holocaust.  My father’s father was raised Jewish, but married my Catholic grandmother and converted.  When my father was born in Vienna in 1935, he was the first male Schwyzer in the family line not to have the foreskin removed.  My grandfather saw not being circumcised as a sign of assimilation, something he wanted very much for his family.  In Austria in the 1930s, only Jews were circumcised.  With the gathering clouds of anti-Semitism already clearly on the horizon, it was thought best that my father "not look Jewish" down there.

My father was of course no anti-Semite.  But like many Europeans, he retained the association between Judaism and circumcision.  He didn’t understand the post-war American custom of circumcising all boys routinely, regardless of their faith.  And quite understandably, he wanted his sons to look like him "down there."  Many fathers, I am sure, feel the same way.

It wasn’t easy being the only uncircumcised boy growing up.  Junior high locker rooms (where we had open, communal showers) were brutal.  I was teased relentlessly.  One memorable comment that has stuck with me since about 1979: "It looks like a pistol, instead of an apple like it’s supposed to."  My mother explained why I wasn’t circumcised with a simple "Your father is European, and it’s not done over there."  That explanation was all I got until I was in college, and it did little to ease the sense of being different.

In my sexual life, I found that some women were fascinated with the foreskin, others repulsed by it, others absolutely didn’t care.   But I did find — and here I’m walking dangerously close to what is known as TMI — that my foreskin did not always retract as easily as I would like for intercourse.  I had one very memorable, very painful visit to an emergency room when I was in college.   I’ve had stitches in my knees, on my scalp, on my arms — but stitching up a little tear "down there" was no picnic.   As I grew more experienced, I learned little tricks to make sure that I never had a foreskin tearing incident again, but it certainly made me worry for years and years afterwards.

The first person to recommend circumcision to me was the doctor at Cowell Hospital (in Berkeley) who took care of my "sex-related injury."  He said that it would make sex much easier, but I was emphatically not interested.  I didn’t consider circumcision again until just a few years ago.  There were many reasons for my choosing circumcision in my late thirties.  Some of those reasons are too private to get into in a public blog.  One reason, of course, was indeed to make intercourse more comfortable.  But there was another, profoundly personal reason as well that I will share (with my wife’s permission.)

I’ve alluded many times to a past of promiscuity.  While I am not ashamed of who I was or of what I did, when I met the woman who is now my wife and fell in love with her, I began to wish that I could offer her something radically new about me.  And it occurred to me one day that getting circumcised would be something tangible I could do to provide an outer manifestation of my sexual rebirth.   My wife would thus be the only woman with whom I had made love with that particular penis, as it were.   It was not her idea, it was entirely mine.  And that desire to create something wonderfully new, combined with the desire to avoid future trips to the ER, led me to call a urologist in early 2005.

The procedure was done outpatient.  It lasted just over an hour.  The application of the anesthetic stung a bit, but the actual circumcision (done by laser) was absolutely painless.  Dissolving sutures were applied, and I was on my way home.   I was running within two days, and my wife and I were intimate again within four weeks.  There was no loss of sensation or any other complication as a result of this minor, safe, medical procedure.  The physical benefits I had sought were exactly as I hoped, and the spiritual benefits were tremendous as well.  Every time I’m naked, my very flesh reminds me that I am not the man I once was.  I rejoice in that, and haven’t regretted my decision for a single second.

So that’s my story.  Hostile comments about that aspect of this post will be deleted, though you are free to take issue with my other contentions about circumcision. I write as a man who has intimate experience with the "before" and the "after", and whose "after" is physically and spiritually better than his "before."  I write as a pro-feminist angered by the "victim consciousness" of anti-circumcision advocates, who equate a quick, safe, beneficial procedure that rarely produces lasting trauma to an operation performed on girls that produces lasting pain and robs them of the opportunity for sexual delight. To suggest that male circumcision is equivalent to Female Genital Mutilation is like comparing the pain of a vaccinating needle to that of being stabbed by a knife.  It’s deeply offensive and indefensible to do so.

“Our lamb has conquered”: A defense of pacifism in the aftermath of the Amish school shooting

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 4, 2006
in Christianity, Faith, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Pacifism and War
. 96 Comments

First off, a confession.  A few weeks ago, I made the pledge that I would not get on the scale again until the end of 2006.  Yesterday afternoon at the gym, I "fell off the wagon" and weighed myself.  It’s a good comeuppance, for me, I suppose; I post so often on this blog about making commitments and redirecting impulses.  I’ve had so much success in so many areas of my life, but resisting the urge to climb on the scale is tougher than I imagined.  Just thought I’d share my slip…

It’s a busy day, and I suspect I will have time for only one post.  Both here and elsewhere, there’s been discussion of Monday’s shooting at an Amish school in Pennsylvania.  Thanks to my friend Jonathan Dresner, I read this particularly nasty piece from Judith Klinghoffer at my own History News Network.  Klinghoffer opines:

How low can one sink? No. I am not talking about the murderer, may his name be erased. I am talking about those who saved themselves by leaving the little girls at his mercy. Consider: 

"They found the suspect dead on the floor," Col Miller said. "Three other students between the age of six and 13 had been killed." He said that when Roberts, a non-Amish, first entered the school he apparently showed the handgun to the children and was "having some discussion in the class". "He told the kids to line up in front of the blackboard. Then, using wire ties and flex cuffs, he began to tie the females’ feet together. It appears that when he shot them he shot them execution-style in the head.

And they LET him. I have yet to hear about a single person who did anything to stop him. By doing nothing, they permitted a deranged man to fulfill his sick revenge fantasy.

This is the ultimate result of Amish pacifism. All evil needs to flourish is for good people to do nothing. Evil flourished in that schoolroom.

Bold is mine.  And here on my blog, thechief weighs in:

There’s something we need to realize about pacifists in general, including the Amish: They can afford to be pacifists because somebody else is holding a gun for them. They can afford not to raise their hand against evil because somebody else–a police officer, a soldier–is standing between them and true evil. Somebody else will do the dirty work of keeping them safe, except for those awful situations where the system somehow breaks down, like yesterday in Pennsylvania. Then the pacifists are going to be toast.

Let me be clear that I am an aspiring pacifist.  As Stanley Hauerwas always says of himself, I am a violent man trying to become peaceful.  When I read about stories like this one, my first thought is always "I wish I could have been there with a gun to blow the s.o.b. away."     That’s my first response, but happily, as a Christian, not my second.

Both Klinghoffer and thechief have a tortured, twisted view of what pacifism really is.  First off, most Christian pacifists don’t live in the United States.  The largest Christian pacifist communities are Anabaptists living in war-torn places like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Colombia.  The notion that pacifists are comfortable, middle-class white folks who are protected by a wise government willing to wield the sword is ludicrous and ahistorical.   Christian pacifism traces its modern roots to the blood-soaked Central Europe of the sixteenth century.    The pacifism of the peace churches (to which Mennonites, the Amish, the Quakers, and others belong) was a response to appalling violence by people who experienced that violence first hand.  The great lie that both Klinghoffer and thechief perpetuate is that pacifists are ignorant of the realities of human brutality; the historic truth is that pacifism was birthed by men and women who had infinitely more knowledge of the realities of violence than your average Marine in Iraq has today.

The other great lie is more simple: they equate pacifism with passivity.  A Latin lesson, girls and boys: pacifism comes from pax facere, to  "make peace"; it does not, contrary to popular misconception, derive from passus sum, to "suffer."  In other words, authentic pacifism is an active response to violence, not a passive one!   From the sixteenth century onward, pacifists have insisted that the goal of Christian witness is not to run and hide but "to get in the way."  Jesus says,  Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.  Soldiers quote that all the time, but wrongly.  Jesus calls us to the cross, He calls us to come and die, but He never calls us to kill.    From a theological standpoint, there is all the difference in the world between being willing to die for one’s friends and being willing to kill for them.  For soldiers, both may be true.   For cowards, neither is true.  For Christian pacifists, only the former is true!

The third lie about pacifism is that it is hopelessly idealistic and has no efficacy.  Once we convince our opponents that we aren’t cowards (after all, Christian pacifists are dying in places like Colombia and Iraq all the time), we usually get dismissed as "fanatics."   I mentioned in my post on Monday that I hoped that if it came to it, I would be willing to take a bullet for "my kids."  But I would not be willing to fire a bullet, even to protect the lives of my students or youth groupers.  That always strikes folks as irresponsible and prideful; I seem to be putting my theological convictions ahead of my obligation to protect the lambs.

But as a Christian, I know that there is more to our story than our life on this earth.  I love life, I love this planet, I love God’s incredible creation.  But my story — our story — doesn’t end here.  This is not my final home.  I am a "resident alien" in a beautiful, violent, scary, wonderful place.  I know that while death is overwhelming and terrifying, it is not the end.  Not only do I have an even truer home elsewhere, so too do those lambs I am called to feed.  They are Christ’s lambs, not mine.  Their lives are precious, but so too are their eternal souls.  Crazed gunmen can kill the bodies of the young and the innocent; crazed gunmen can break the hearts of a community.  But crazed gunmen don’t get to write the final chapter of the story.  After the tears, there will be rejoicing, no matter what, no matter what, no matter what.

It is with the certainty that death does not separate us from each other or from God that I can claim my pacifism. If I thought death was the end of the story, I’d probably be packing heat in the glove compartment of my Toyota Solara.  To prolong the short lives of my loved ones here on earth, I would do anything and everything.  But I know that love endures past the end.  I know that I am called to follow Christ first and foremost.  Thanks to Him, I already know how the story turns out in the end. Those of us who are true pacifists are not cowards who run in fear, muttering prayers of thanksgiving for the protection offered us by violent men. We are people who have seen the end of the book.  We know that after the crucifixion, comes the resurrection.  After the bullets and the terror comes the peace and the joyous new life.  With that certainty, we can offer up our lives non-violently.  It’s not that we seek death, or value life any less.  It’s that we are quietly, absolutely, peacefully certain that our Lamb conquered death for all of us 2000 years ago — and with fear, trembling, and yes, joyful certainty, we will follow Him.  No matter what.

A long and personal post about experience, sexuality, memory, and marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 3, 2006
in Age, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Marriage, Memories, Relationships and Sexuality
. 20 Comments

The post that got eaten this morning was a long explanation of a comment I made last week when writing about "wild oats."  I wrote on Friday:

Part of living a radically monogamous life is being intentional about "erasing the mental videotapes" of all prior experiences. 

I need to explain what I mean.  I meant to write primarily about the images of past sexual experiences, but before getting there, I want to touch on something else that led me to this conviction: weddings.

One of the innumerable things that I admire about my lovely wife is her extraordinary courage in becoming my fourth spouse.  As you might imagine, she took a tremendous amount of flak from her friends and family when she and I started dating.  At the time, I was thirty-five, going through my third divorce, with a conversion only four years old and a track record of reckless promiscuity, addiction, and mental instability behind me.  Well-meaning folks rushed to warn her off, but she trusted me, she trusted her instincts, and she trusted in my transfomation.

Still, it was particularly hard when we got engaged in the summer of ‘04.  One clod of a friend said to her: "Hey, just let Hugo handle all the wedding details; he’s done it three times before, he should be an expert."  On the day I went to buy the engagement ring, a colleague said "Hugo, I bet by now you really know your diamonds, huh?"  It’s not that these people were being deliberately cruel — but they were making it difficult to focus on the newness and the excitement of this particular marriage and this particular engagement.

Of course, I had vivid memories of my first three weddings.  But after I proposed to she who is now my wife, I realized that the greatest gift I could give her would be to make a conscious,deliberate, concerted effort to erase the images of these past nuptials from my memory.  I knew it would be hard, and it was.  But in Buddhist meditation, they teach you that with persistence you can direct your thoughts and control where they wander.  I may not be a Buddhist monk, but I appreciate discipline, and I respect its power.  I began to pray a prayer that summer of 2004: "God, make this engagement as new and fresh for me as it is for my fiancee; take from me the urge to compare the now and the yet-to-be to what once was." 

That prayer worked.  It really, really worked.  One of the most important gifts I was able to give my wife during our engagement was that radical excitement that comes when one does something brand new.  I shared her joy, and by an act of will (aided by grace, naturally) refused to reflect on my three prior weddings.

Did I delete the memories, the way one deletes information from a  hard drive?  Probably not.  If I were forced to recall the dates and details, I have no doubt that I could.  But even if they are still stored in some corner of my brain, they aren’t part of my consciousness.  They are stored and packed away in neat boxes, never to be opened again.

The same thing works, I believe, for sex.  Some advocates for abstinence argue that too much sexual experience (whatever that is) can ruin one’s future marriage.    They warn that if you’ve had a fair number of partners and a variety of short or long-term sexual relationships, you’ll find it impossible not to compare your future spouse to these past lovers.  They also warn that your future spouse may be tormented by worry over how they compare to those with whom you had sex in the past.  Thus, they argue, better to remain chaste before marriage — and stay married to the same person for life.  No pesky memories, no debilitating anxieties.

Such warnings give human beings far too little credit.  While it is absolutely true that for many of us, our sexual experiences get seared into our consciousness, it is — in my experience — false that we will invariably be haunted or titillated by those memories.  Obviously, if we choose to dwell on the past we’ll keep our memories of past sexual experiences alive and close to the surface.   Many people I know — including myself in my younger years — feel an intense desire to hold on to these recollections. 

Since human memory is notoriously faulty, what we end up holding on to is frequently a very edited version of what actually happened.  If we think of our memories as videotapes, what we’ve got in our consciousness is not actual raw footage, but a carefully reworked narrative that is edited and re-edited year after year.  Frequently, I’ve noticed, people tend to edit out the awkwardness and the anxiety, and add in extra doses of excitement.  The memory of a past sexual experience thus ends up being infinitely "better" than the actual incident was in the first place!

The danger is obvious: our very real present can rarely complete with the carefully edited film productions of our minds.   For those of us who have had considerable experience, the danger is that our current relationships may suffer by comparison.  In my previous marriages, I often found myself comparing the physical relationship we were actually having to these endlessly exciting, elaborately produced videotape memories in my head. It wasn’t fair at all to my partners at the time, and it made me feel as if i was destined for a monogamous life that I can best describe as "tender tedium."

Just as I made a commitment to my current wife to store and pack away all my memories of my previous weddings, I made a similar commitment a few years ago to do away with all the memories of my past sexual experiences.  For folks like me, who’ve "been around", I think this step is both difficult and vitally important.  This isn’t about denial, mind you.  I’m not hiding from anyone the reality that I’ve been married several times and done all sorts of different things.  Indeed, I’m not particularly sorry for the things I did in the past.  I had a considerable amount of fun, though I also suffered great deal of pain and I inflicted a lot of hurt.   For better or worse, those experiences brought me to where I am today.  But the fact that I am partially the product of my past does not mean that it is healthy or wise to indulge in reveries about what came before. While I am not torn apart with guilt over what I did, I am wary of the temptation to relive my memories.  Nothing good can come of that.

This post stands in parallel to my post in July, 2005, about being respectful of one’s partner’s past.  I wrote then:

When we marry, we promise each other many things: fidelity, devotion, and a willingness to share all one has.  For many of my generation who come to the altar after years and years of "experience", we perhaps ought to give another kind of pledge: the promise to focus on the future together, not on the past.   Real love rejoices in all the things that have made one’s husband or wife who he or she is today, knowing that without those experiences he or she would be a fundamentally different person.  But despite the often overwhelming temptation to pry, I’m convinced the wisest course is to acknowledge that there are some things none of us need to know, and we can give our partners and spouses the gift of an uncondemned, unchallenged, unquestioned past.

The corollary to that is that just as we have an obligation to respect our partner’s past, we also are obliged to place our own past in its appropriate place.  My wife’s job is to do her part to accept who I was and what I did and who I did it with.  My job is to make sure that my own memories of those experiences do not trouble our marriage. That means not allowing images or scenarios from the past to enter into my consciousness, and if they do flash across my screen, to make sure that I quickly redirect my thoughts.  For a long time, I wondered whether this would be truly possible.  Though I have no way of convincing my readers of the sincerity of my words, let me make it absolutely clear that it is possible to let the past be the past, the present be the present.  That’s not an easy thing for a historian blessed with an acute memory!  But it needed to be done, and I’ve done it.

A good bishop gets it dead wrong: more on women’s clothing, male desire, and God’s gift of self-control

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 13, 2006
in Body, Christianity, Faith, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Modesty and Sexuality
. 28 Comments

Continuing our theme of modesty, male weakness, and women’s clothing, Jill at Feministe links to this unfortunate letter by Bishop John Yanta of the Catholic Diocese of Amarillo, Texas: Modesty Starts with Purification of the Heart.  Here goes:

This time of the year, I (and am sure many of you also) hear complaints about a lack of respect and reverence for the house of God, the sacredness of the Lord’s presence in the liturgy, and lack of respect for others and the lack of consciousness of the battle for purity in which the opposite sex finds itself even while attending Sunday Mass.

Immodesty in dress is governed by two citations from God’s Law:

1) The Ninth Commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” (Exodus 20:17);

2) Jesus said: “Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).

To live our daily Faith as children of God (baptism), disciples of Jesus, and temples of the Holy Spirit, we are faced with moral choices constantly, many times a day. Conscience can either make a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law, or on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them (CCC: Catechism of the Catholic Church #1799).

Dressing or putting on one’s clothes is a moral act and wearing them is a moral act. There are different appropriate modes of dress for different occasions, e.g. in the privacy of our home, with our spouse only or with our children in our home, at work or school, in mixed company, at the lake or swimming pool, grocery shopping, at church, etc.

I don’t know where the good bishop got his theology degree.  But his choices from Scripture do not support his thesis! Both the Commandment and the passage from Matthew 5 address coveting and lust; both place the onus for avoiding lust solely on the one who is lusting, not on the object of the desire! 

Where, oh where in Scripture does Jesus say: "Women, attend to your dress that you may keep your bodies concealed and not distract your brothers"?  Did I miss that verse?  Is it perhaps in one of the Gnostic Gospels?

Jill, writing from a secular perspective, does a decent job of fisking Bishop Yanta’s letter.  But it’s vital that Christian men reject the bishop’s shoddy exegesis.  (I’m still enough of a Catholic to feel awkward about criticizing someone who carries the crosier).  What I find so compelling about the issue of lust in both the Old and the New Testaments is that women are not held accountable for male distraction and desire.  While secular culture does expect the male flesh to be weak, Christ Himself calls us to personal holiness — and that holiness is in no way, shape, or form contingent upon the behavior of even the most scantily clad of our fellow congregants.   The bishop quotes a homily given by Father Dominic Mary; that priest opined:

“To knowingly and intentionally dress like this (scantily) is sinful, and can be even seriously sinful, because one can become a temptation to sin for other people. We are all weak and can easily fall into many sins of impurity by someone else’s immodesty."

Let’s hear the Scripture to go with that assertion, Father Dominic!  I know, it’s dreadfully Protestant to demand Bible verses, but for heaven’s sake, the good father’s inverting the whole Gospel!  Bishop Yanta reaches with a reference to Galatians 5:26, which refers to "provoking another" (the only two words from the passage Yanta quotes).  But read in context, it’s particularly inappropriate to pull from Paul.   Let’s add in the four previous verses:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

The warning against "provoking" refers to being "conceited", while the previous verses (the bold is obviously my own) better capture the Christian case that to live in the Spirit is to have conquered one’s passions and to have the capacity for self-control.   Paul ought not be misused to hold women accountable for a male refusal to embrace this vital gift of the Spirit.

Sometimes, I hear my fellow Christians quoting Christ’s warning against "causing another to stumble."  I’ve often heard that verse used to justify insisting upon public modesty; many a woman in conservative churches has been explicitly warned that her breasts or legs, if not adequately covered, might lead a man to stumble.  But we’re off course if we use that famous line in this regard; Jesus uses the phrase only in regards to small children — not to adults:

Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea.

Well, unless a woman can be convinced that the grown man staring down her blouse counts as one  of the "little ones" to which the Lord refers, Mark 9:42 ain’t much use in making a case for women covering up.

Am I suggesting that we ought not have any standards for churchgoing attire?   Well, I’m a shorts and t-shirt guy myself.  I know better than to confuse corporate attire with genuine reverence, though I have no problem with those whose sense of worshipfulness is heightened by putting on their "Sunday best."   (On matters like this, I think Paul’s word in Romans 14:2 is applicable — to each his own.)  But whether the woman across the aisle from me is young and comely or wizened by age, whether she is in a miniskirt or wearing hijab, my eyes and my thoughts are still under my control — a control that is one of the promised gifts of grace.   I will not be tempted beyond what I can bear, and if it seems I am, the fault is mine — and mine alone. 

I’m in an ornery mood today.  Perhaps it’s the heat.  Perhaps it’s lack of sleep.  (Perhaps it’s  as my Kabbalist friends say, and starting today we’ve entered the three most negative weeks of the year, culminating on Tisha B’Av.  But that’s another topic.)   But honestly, I’m angry when my fellow Christians, men in positions of great leadership, seriously distort the radical message of our faith.   If our faith is so shallow that it can be rocked to its core by a bra-strap or a bikini, then we need to reconsider our receptiveness to grace itself.

Between the Already and the Not Yet: a long post on premarital sexuality and doing “everything but”.

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 7, 2006
in Christianity, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Sexual ethics and transformation, Sexuality and Youth
. 45 Comments

I’m happy with this post.

You read student journals in a women’s studies class often enough, and teach sex ed in a church youth group for a few years, and you eventually get accustomed to hearing one familiar question over and over again: 

Is it okay to do everything "but"?

We’re talking about sex again, of course.  And in the current climate of highly politicized public discussions of abstinence and safer sex, there’s virtually no one who defends those millions of teens and young adults who are virgins, but regularly engage in other forms of sexual activity.   Few Christian conservatives condone oral sex or other genital activity that doesn’t involve vaginal penetration. Most of those who argue for abstinence argue for nothing more than light kissing, and some of the most enthusiastic purveyors of the purity message argue that even a peck on the lips ought to be saved for marriage.

On the other hand, the "pro-sex" crowd tends to make fun of those folks whom they scornfully call "technical" virgins.  I’ve often heard from my secular friends that it’s downright silly for a young person to do "everything but".  "If they’ve already gone so far as to have oral sex — or mutual masturbation — what point is there in continuing to hold back?  Aren’t they just being silly and legalistic?  Why not go ahead and get the whole thing over with — it’s not like you’re perfectly ‘pure’ anyway!"

This year, a couple of the kids in youth group asked (through anonymous notes) how we (the adults) felt about doing "everything but."  And this semester, as always, more than one student in my women’s studies class has volunteered that he or she is a virgin, but regularly does "other things."  Mind you, I don’t pry; folks tend to volunteer this information.  And here at PCC, the students most likely to tell me that they are doing everything but are my fellow Christians.  They are often anxious to know how I feel about their choice to take a middle ground position between absolute abstinence and actual vaginal intercourse.

Let me say this loud and clear: I believe that for some young people, "everything but" is the best possible sexual choice that they can make. 

It isn’t just Christian kids who are in the "everything but" club.  I know lots of young people in my youth group and here at PCC who have said that they are waiting to "lose" their virginity with someone they really love.  Theirs is not an issue of fidelity to religious teaching, but rather a touching fidelity to romantic ideals.  Instinctively, they grasp that vaginal intercourse is somehow qualitatively different from any other form of sexual expression.  Of course, for young women, vaginal intercourse is loaded with the fear of pregnancy, a fear that can be alleviated by "doing other things."  And while oral sex can spread sexually transmitted infections, it doesn’t happen as easily as it does with actual intercourse. 

Most young people are, as any youth leader knows, far more romantic and idealistic than they may at first appear.   Virginal girls and boys alike, in my experience, still imbue their "first time" with great emotional importance — time and again, even in this modern age, I hear young people talking about the prospect of intercourse with a mixture of desire and anxiety, anticipation and uncertainty, longing and worry, fear and trembling.  Even if they can’t always articulate why this one particular act is so special, they believe that it is.  Perhaps that belief is rooted in our biology, and perhaps in a culture that elevates heterosexual vaginal intercourse to a special place in the hierarchy of sexual behavior.  But regardless of where these kids get the idea, a heavy majority seem to believe that intercourse is a unique experience, and that they have an obligation to make the first time "special".

We have to learn to sit up before we can stand, stand before we can walk, and walk before we can run.  In the same way, I think healthy sexual development is one that unfolds in distinct, marked phases.  Young people do well to move, at their own speed and according to their own comfort level, towards greater and greater sexual intimacy.  When I write this, I am not defending the oft-remarked upon practice of very young girls offering oral sex to boys as a means of gaining popularity and of "soothing" rambunctious male libidos.  But this image of "blowjob culture" (where girls receive no pleasure in return) may be an exaggeration foisted upon us by a hysterical press.  Recent academic studies (read this article) suggest a high degree of reciprocity among adolescents who are engaging in oral sex.  That’s something I find very encouraging.

Whether one is a Christian or not, it seems sensible to say that healthy sexual activity is characterized by respect, mutuality, reciprocity, and a concern both for pleasure and the emotional consequences of what is shared.  Many, many young people are — for reasons that may be psychological, spiritual, emotional, or romantic — unready for vaginal intercourse.  At the same time they are hungry for intimacy and sexual expression.  Put more simply, they’re horny.  Doing "everything but" makes good sense for many of these young people.  It allows them to learn about sex and experience intense physical closeness without the unique emotional and physical vulnerability that comes with actual intercourse. For a great many young people, "everything but" is not only undeserving of ridicule, it’s a heck of a good idea.

But what about for Christians?  I teach Christian teens in a youth group, and I tend to get questions regularly about the morality of "everything but" from Christian high schoolers and college students.  Many of these kids feel trapped between a secular culture which often urges them to "get it over with" and a conservative religious world which sees all forms of pre-marital genital sexual activity as fundamentally sinful.  Many of these young Christians are in the "everything but" club, but they are often ambivalent and guilt-ridden about being there.

The New Testament does not talk about "everything but."  Oral sex, mutual masturbation, and heavy make-out sessions are not addressed in the Gospels or the Epistles — or, for that matter, in the early writings of the church.  It’s safe to say that the mainstream position of Christian teaching is to say that actual virginity prior to marriage represents "God’s best".  But whether that "best" allows other forms of sexual activity, or only light kissing, or only hand-holding, we can’t say.  There are plenty of folks in the Christian world making a small fortune peddling their own theories as to what exactly constitutes "purity", but the Scripture they quote in defense of those theories is, to put it mildly, vague and unconvincing!

A wonderful student of mine and I were talking several years ago.  She was in an "everything but" relationship with her boyfriend, and he wanted to have intercourse — and she wasn’t sure.  A devout Christian and an enormously sensitive and compassionate person, she wanted to know whether there was any point in "waiting" once she’d already done "everything but."  I said yes, there was.  Speaking off the top of my head, I told her that she might think of God’s plan for her this way:

God wants you to have three things inside of you over the course of your life: the Holy Spirit, your husband’s body, and your child.    No matter what else you do, there’s something radically different — in a theological sense — about intercourse.  I think that for you, God’s best may be having just you take just those three inside of you.

Later on, I wondered if that didn’t sound silly.  But the young woman to whom I spoke these words is still a friend, and she reminded me quite recently  of how important those words had been to her some five years ago.  She’s not yet married, but to the best of my knowledge, is still a virgin. 

I pass no judgment on those young people, Christian or not, who choose to have sexual intercourse before marriage.  (I lost my seat in judgment city decades ago, and for good reason.)  I honor those young people who believe that God has called them to an especially restrictive understanding of purity.  I’ve been to weddings and watched a couple kiss — for the first time ever — after they were pronounced man and wife.  I celebrate that choice!  But I don’t think that it makes good sense to suggest that there’s nothing valuable about taking the middle ground position of "everything but."  For a great many young people, "doing everything but" offers a chance to explore and grow emotionally and sexually while remaining true to their spiritual and romantic commitments.  Rather than ridiculing it, all of us who call ourselves older and wiser would do well to consider the possibility that "everything but" may represent not a foolish and indefensible compromise, but a healthy and spiritually mature middle ground.

As Christians, we are told over and over again, to quote someone whose name escapes me, that we "live in the tension between the Already and the Not Yet."  That’s a nice way of thinking about the return of our Savior King, but it also is a nice way of acknowledging what it is to live between the onset of sexual feelings and one’s wedding day.  "Everything but" is, I think, often a laudable response to that tension.

“OKOP”, “NOKOP” and Oscar: a long post about class, family, and pride

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 2, 2006
in Class, Ethnicity, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Memories and Race
. 23 Comments

Here on the blog, I’ve touched on issues of race before: just over two months ago, my post "The Happy WASP Boy" generated some fairly heated responses. With tongue only partially planted in cheek, I wrote then:

But here’s the thing I’ve realized in my life:  though there is much that is vacuous and materialistic about North American middle-class culture, that has damn all to do with skin color or ethnic heritage!  I grew up with a father who was a European war refugee and a mother who came from an "old" California family of German, English,and Scots-Irish ancestry.  I spent most of my time with my mother’s side of the family, and they formed my values and my world view. 

Yes, we’re WASPs.  If you want to stereotype one aspect of us, we’re a Brooks Brothers wearing, Bloody Mary drinking, Buick Roadmaster station-wagon driving, fraternity and sorority joining, tennis-playing, mayonnaise and meat loaf eating, Junior League cookbook owning, monogrammed thank-you note writing, Town and Country magazine reading, English horseback riding, debutante ball attending, Social Register listed, pastel polo-shirt or sweater set clad clan.  Without apologies.

There was a lot of discussion in the comments, and it was pointed out to me by several people that my characterization of my family was less about skin color and more about class.  I think I was aware of that when I wrote the post, but honestly, felt awkward about writing about my family and my background in terms of class.  Where I come from, class is hinted at but never discussed: just in blogging about my family in these posts, I’ve violated some rules.  There are certain topics that aren’t to be talked about too openly, and issues of class and money are among them.

When we were cynical teenagers, my brother and I came up with the terms OKOP and NOKOP.  OKOP stood for "Our Kind of People"; NOKOP (obviously) for "Not Our Kind of People."  We used the words ironically, expressing our chagrin at what we saw as the subtle elitism and snobbery of many members of our extended clan.  My cousins of my generation picked up the terms, and at times, the line between the sincere and the ironic use of the acronyms became blurred.  Someone would bring home a girlfriend to meet the family, and she would tie her sweater around her waist instead of draping it over her shoulders.  "So NOKOP", we’d mouth to each other over the family dinner table.   I once brought a friend to a Fourth of July party who wore a "Porn Star" baseball cap.    "She’s nice", said one cousin, "but a bit NOKOP, don’t you think?"  What began as an expression to poke fun at certain elements of class consciousness in our clan became instead a way of reinforcing those same elements.   That’s what happens, I suppose.

Of course, we’ve become a much more diverse family over the years.  Half-a-dozen of us are in interracial marriages with people from a wide variety of social backgrounds.   A great many of us don’t care about the things an older generation cared about; only a handful of my cousins still worry about who’s in the Social Register and keeping up expensive club memberships.  And well over half of us vote solidly Democratic — something that would have horrified our great-grandparents’ generation.  (My mother’s father and his brother were the only members of their entire family who voted for FDR).

For years and years, I struggled to come to terms with whether or not I wanted to embrace or reject certain aspects of my "class background."  At Berkeley, I learned quickly that others were allowed to say with pride that they were the first in the family to go to university — but I couldn’t say "I’m a fourth-generation Golden Bear" without being greeted with rolled eyes and epithets like "f-ing snob".  Those of us who were from "old families" (a favorite euphemism of the upper-middle classes) learned to conceal it — or openly disparage it.  When I lived in a co-op at Cal (I had become the first male member of my mother’s family in a century not to pledge a fraternity), I knew one other gal in the house who came from a similar background to my own.  We both made a conscious choice to make fun of our privileges.  We wore our Che Guevara t-shirts and wallowed in white guilt like pigs in a trough.

My sophomore year in Ridge House, I had a roommate named "Oscar."  Oscar was from a Mexican-American family in the Central Valley; he was the first in his family to go to college.  Oscar was active in MEChA, as well as the society for Hispanic Engineers and Scientists (two organizations that didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but that’s another story.)  He talked with great pride about his family and what it was like to grow up the son of agricultural laborers, spending half his childhood in Michoacan and the other half in rural Fresno County. But I didn’t want to talk about growing up spending my childhood in places like Santa Barbara and Piedmont and Carmel by-the-Sea.  Where Oscar was proud of his family, I was ashamed of what I believed at the time to be unmerited good fortune and privilege. 

Oscar was a smart lad and a good friend; we went to church together.  One day he asked me: "Hugo, why are you so ashamed of who you are?"  I protested that I wasn’t, and he persisted: "You walk around apologizing for being a white boy from Carmel all the time.  It’s getting really old.  Your family is part of who you are, and you should be proud of your roots.  Period.  Even if you can’t pronounce your own name right."  (He insisted on calling me "Ooogo", rather than the English "Hugh-go" or the German "Hoo-go.")

I told Oscar it wasn’t that easy.   I said:  "People admire you for coming from where you’ve come from — they don’t feel that same way about white guys whose great-grandfathers went here.  It’s like I haven’t earned being here."   Oscar laughed and laughed:  "Shit, Oooogo, sometimes I worry everyone thinks I got in here because of affirmative action; you’re worrying you got in here because of your relatives’ influence.   We both doubt ourselves because of our backgrounds, as different as we are — that’s just classic!"  I laughed with him.   

And then I shared with him the terms "NOKOP" and "OKOP", and I believe I made his whole semester.    As soon as I explained the terms to him, he rolled on the floor in hysterics, gasping in two languages.  The English consisted of "Oh, you f-ing white people, you f-ing white people, I love you soooo much". As if this wasn’t bizarre enough, Oscar then picked up the phone in our room and called up a series of his friends from MEChA, telling them about me and NOKOP and OKOP. And if you were around Oscar or his friends in the 1986-87 academic year, you would have heard them using the acronyms constantly, often in exaggerated accents modeled on Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island: "Ernie, you ridiculous pocho imbecile, that outfit is soooo NOKOP."

Oscar met my parents and my aunt on one occasion, and was gracious as could be.  Though he and his friends enjoyed ribbing me, he was also sending me a very positive message: I shouldn’t take myself or my family so damned seriously.  Oscar taught me that my "white guilt" and my "working class chic" were both affectations that only reinforced my image as an earnest, clueless, elitist.   More than anyone else, Oscar believed that we are simultaneously products of our family background and our own unique choices.  He urged me to always separate the two, and he taught me that shame and guilt ought only be associated with the latter, never the former.  "Your family’s your family, man", he’d say; "Love them, be proud of them, and don’t pretend they aren’t who they are."

I haven’t heard from Oscar in over a decade; last time we talked, he was back in grad school pursuing a second Ph.D. — and I had just started teaching at PCC.   As he always did, he brought up NOKOP and OKOP.   The last time we talked, I had just gotten my nipples pierced (it was an impulse) and I shared the rather painful news with him.  He shrieked with laughter; "Ooogo, even I KNOW that has to be soooo NOKOP."  I agreed that indeed it was, and that my family would not take it well.   "Man", Oscar snorted, "you’re going to be all right."

I rarely use NOKOP or OKOP except in jest any more; neither do my cousins.  I don’t worry about whether or not my name is in the Social Register, and I’d rather tithe to God than pay dues to the Valley Hunt or the Jonathan Club.  But I don’t pretend, either, that those things were not at least a part of my heritage; I don’t deny my background any more.   My family taught me early on not to boast or brag — OKOP don’t draw attention to themselves.  But Oscar taught me that there is no virtue in being embarrassed by one’s heritage, and he taught me that constant apologies were just another sign of privilege.  Living in happy gratitude for one’s heritage –  with the assurance that one is neither above or beneath any other person because of that heritage — is what he urged. And it’s Oscar’s words I still try and follow these days.

More on Washika’s poem and some further thoughts on celibacy: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 1, 2006
in Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Poetry and Sexuality
. 29 Comments

I’d like to expand a bit on the topic raised by this morning’s short poem, Lady Ki No Washika’s "No".

When writing about my past, I choose my words carefully.  So many people I know and love read this blog, as do folks from church, my youth group, and my college classes.  Much of my private life is thus obscured, and rightly so.  Yet I think I can share a little bit that may prove useful, or if nothing else, may explain why this morning’s poem means so much to me.  As I wrote this morning, Washika’s little poem was vitally important to me a number of years ago when I went through an extended period of celibacy.

In late June of 1998, I had hit a kind of emotional, physical, and spiritual bottom.  My family was frantically worried about me, my friends had largely pulled away from me, I had spent time in handcuffs — and extended time in hospitals.  While in the last of these hospitals, someone asked me "Hugo, do you have any idea how to be alone?  I don’t mean single — can you really be alone with yourself?"  I admitted that no, I really didn’t know how to do that.  I had already burned through a couple of marriages, and was, for lack of a better time, compulsively dating.  I was a walking, talking, incarnation of toxic neediness!   In the year or two leading up to that watershed summer, I had been going out several nights a week with lots of different people, addictively hungry for connection.  The whole process had left me alienated, lonely, and miserable; it had also made me a bit of a pariah. 

In that long hot summer of 1998 — the summer of Bill and Monica, the summer of the World Cup in France — I came home to God.  It’s an easy phrase to write, and it doesn’t come close to capturing the extraordinary turbulence and excitement of that time of conversion and transformation.   I can only say that I prayed as I had never prayed before, to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in, and I was given peace beyond any expectation.  It was an amazing time, one I hope I will never forget.  "Born again" is such a trite, overused expression — and yet truly, that’s what it felt like.

One of my earliest spiritual directors told me that in addition to a variety of spiritual activities, I needed to be celibate.  He defined celibacy as not only no sexual activity, but also no dating, flirting, or what he liked to call "intriguing" (I love that verb) with women.  I asked how long this period was supposed to last, and he gave me the typical spiritual director answer: "You’ll know.  For now, just do this a day at a time."

(I had spent a brief period of time in my undergraduate years considering whether or not I had a vocation — a story I ought to post.  As I prayed and wondered about becoming a Dominican, I also kept hanging up on the issue of celibacy. I felt called by God to his Church — and at the same time, was terrified of giving up what I saw as the sine qua non of a happy life.  My fear of celibacy played the decisive role in my abandoning the process of joining the Church.)

Thinking about what my director was asking me to do, I realized that I had spent years and years chasing the next exciting relationship.  As much as I liked "going out" with various women, what I really loved was the fantasy  that that night’s date might be "the one", the one who was going to make me content and happy. I was always just one woman away from contentment!  Just the prospect of someone new filled me with tremendous anticipation.  I lived for years and years oscillating between hope and disappointment, idealization and disillusionment, neediness and loneliness.  It’s not a happy way to live, and I know plenty of men and women who’ve lived that way — and some who still do.

Before 1998, I had never consciously made a decision not to date or be in relationship.  There had been times when I didn’t have anyone in my life, but it wasn’t for lack of trying!   In that summer, I found out just how "addicted" I was to novelty, to the illusion of intimacy, to instant chemical connection, to promise.  I also found that God’s grace was stronger than all of that. Much to my surprise (but not to my spiritual director’s), I found that I had the power to live differently. My behavior changed, and then my thinking followed.  I discovered that in celibacy, I had an extraordinary amount of free time to do many new things!

It was during that summer that I first started running at a high level.  I had been running for a few years, but had never hired a coach and done serious track work.  With the money I was saving by not going out night after night, I could easily afford to hire a coach to direct my training. (That’s why all of my PR times came within the next nine months or so!)  I started going to church again, of course, and found that I had the time to volunteer for many things.  As many people in similar situations have found out, once I got out of my own self-obsession, I became infinitely more useful to others — not to mention happier with myself!  If I hadn’t made the conscious choice to be radically celibate,and if God hadn’t given me the strength to live into that commitment,  none of this would ever have happened.

As the weeks and months wore on, and the "newness" of my conversion experience began to wear off, the commitment to no dating/flirting/intriguing became more difficult to maintain.  It’s at this point that I found the Washika "No" poem.    It was one of two poems I recited to myself over and over again that summer and fall. I memorized it, and repeated it to myself as I ran.  (The other lines I used came in the form of this famous final couplet from Auden’s In Memory of Yeats: In the desert of the heart/ Let the healing fountains start/ In the prison of his days /Teach the free man how to praise.).   I knew what it was to trade an hour’s pleasure for a fiercer loneliness; living out that infernal exchange had made me (and many who cared for me) abjectly miserable.  Somehow, Washika’s words got through to me on a soul level when nothing else would.  Perhaps it was the title of the poem itself: "No."  Such a simple word, often a child’s first word, but before 1998, my least favorite word in the whole language and the word I found hardest to say.  This poem was an important part of my learning to say it.  Folks, I don’t just put up poetry because I like it — poetry has helped save my life, again and again and again. 

Of course, my advisor/sponsor was right: the time of celibacy did come to an end after many months, and it came to an end in a positive way.  Though I still had much growing and learning ahead of me, in the eight summers since that conversion time, I have lived very differently.  Today, my extraordinary wife and I have the sort of marriage I could never even have imagined having years ago.  Though I still have my petty neuroses, and God still is working in my life, I’m no longer the bundle of neediness (beneath a carefully crafted exterior) that I was in my pre-conversion days.  Of all the tools I used in those early days and weeks after I chose to live and live well, none save for prayer was more important than the discipline of celibacy.  It was only by completely quieting that aspect of my life that I got still enough to listen to God; it was only by learning that I could live without romance and sex that I learned how to have both of them in the same person in a joyous, life-affirming, enduring way.

Frankly, I think all of us need a celibate "time out" at some point in our lives.  Yes, I know most folks associate celibacy with refraining from physical sex.  But it’s more than that; you can be a virgin and addicted to flirting and intriguing, in love with love, hungry for validation.  Whatever your level of sexual experience, making a conscious decision to close down that area of your life — if only for a few months — can provide extraordinary rewards.  It did for me.

Poetry helped.

UPDATE:  Two readers, Glitch and Miracula, make some interesting points below this post that call into question my unfortunate (and not uncommon) tendency to generalize from my own experience.

And remembering the summer of 1998, I recall that both my running coach and my spiritual director ended up telling me the same thing.  Though the f