Archive for the 'Myth of Male Weakness' Category

“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Myth of Male Weakness, Roommates, Sleeping patterns and Youth
. 6 Comments

One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. Continue reading ‘“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire’

“Divided you fall”: the myth of male weakness and young women’s internalized misogyny

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 09, 2010
in Feminism, Friendship and Myth of Male Weakness
. 26 Comments

I’m thinking once again about the “myth of male weakness” this morning.

Jonah Goldberg has a piece this morning with the whoppingly patronizing title “Where Feminists Get it Right.” (Don’t get excited, folks. Hell remains unfrozen.) Jonah concludes his piece, which largely focuses on the now-familiar yet ever-depressing litany of abuses against women in the less-developed world, with this gem:

Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

As I sigh at Goldberg’s piece, I think about an email I got from my friend Emily. She recounts a Facebook exchange she had with a female friend of hers, a fellow Christian. Em’s friend posted on her status update that she was “really disappointed w/the female human species.” When Em inquired why, and whether her friend was also disappointed in men, she got this response:

It appears as if men are weaker when it comes to sex, money, power. With that I am realizing that it is the women that should be held at a higher standard because we need to set the tone for our weak counterparts. If women looked at themselves as holy temples and didn’t allow anything less than excellence this may force men to step up their integrity and priorities…

We could go through the gospels, pointing out over and over again the places where Jesus demands that men show self-restraint comparable to that demanded by women. But I’m not just interested in responding to a fellow Christian. Rather, what concerns me here is one of the most troubling aspects of the myth of male weakness: it creates an atmosphere in which both men and women feel justified in policing other women’s behavior.

If men cannot control themselves, and women can, then it is (as Emily’s friend suggests) women’s task to set the limits for men which men cannot set for themselves. All bad male behavior, it quickly follows, is invariably a woman’s fault. We’re all familiar with the loathsome notion that a cheating husband or boyfriend deserves less ire than the woman with whom he cheated. (The “he couldn’t help it, but she ought to have known better because she’s a woman” theory). The end result is a culture of mistrust and hostility among women.

A great many of the young women I work with claim to have trouble liking other women. Call it the “most of my good friends are guys” phenomenon, which is sufficiently common as to merit a word other than “phenomenon”. Many young women — even in feminist spaces — will list the countless ways in which they have felt judged, policed, or betrayed by other women. Many will say things like “I expect men to let me down. But when a woman hurts you, it’s worse because she doesn’t have an excuse.”

The point that feminists try and make in these discussions is that the myth of male weakness is at the very root of this internalized misogyny. The logic is inescapable. The less self-control women believe men have, the less they hold men responsible. The less they hold men responsible, the more responsibility they ascribe to themselves and to other women. The less they believe in men’s capacity to self-regulate, the more hostile they are trained to become to any woman who seems unwilling to engage in the rituals of female self-policing. At its most extreme, every mini-skirt becomes not only a threat to the fragile order women have established for mutual protection, it is perceived as an act of both betrayal and hostility towards one’s sisters. The hisses of “slut”, “whore”, and “bitch” soon follow. Continue reading ‘“Divided you fall”: the myth of male weakness and young women’s internalized misogyny’

“He Might Rape”: the myth of male weakness and the convenient exploitation of low expectations

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 18, 2010
in Myth of Male Weakness and Sex work
. 45 Comments

The indispensable Figleaf (not necessarily a work-safe site for all) has a terrific commentary up today on the recent study, reported in the Guardian, on men who visit prostitutes.

Fig quotes one of the more troubling passages of the Julie Bindel piece:

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

It’s not hard to see that this belief — part of what I refer to as the myth of male weakness — serves a particularly important self-justifying function. “I need to have sex with prostitutes”, the line goes, “or I might rape.” We see something similar in arguments about pornography, in which men (often husbands or boyfriends) explain that the use of erotica “prevents cheating”. Call it the “You should be bloody grateful that this is all I’m doing” narrative.

Many women who are uncomfortable with their male partners’ porn use (or visits to strip clubs, etc.) tell themselves (and concerned friends) that they’re grateful that their guys “don’t do anything worse.” Perhaps there are some who genuinely believe what the men in the Guardian study claim to believe: that prostitution provides a necessary sexual outlet for fellas whose supposedly insatiable needs cannot be met in any other way. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations writ large, with the twist that the most painful consequences affect those who hold these assumptions — rather than those about whom the expectations are held.

It’s worth noting that the two men quoted in the Bindel piece use the second and third person to describe what “you” or “a desperate man” might do. Perhaps this is a way of claiming cover under the myth of male weakness without risking the sobriquet of a potential rapist. On the other hand, perhaps these lads don’t use the first person because in their hearts, they know it isn’t true. The “prostitution is necessary because otherwise men would rape” thesis is useful enough to be repeated; it is hoped that wives and girlfriends will believe it, and thus co-sign men’s hiring of sex workers as the lesser of two evils. But because these guys know well enough that in their own experience, lust is not a catalyst for rape (anger is, but that’s a different story), they are unwilling to use the first person singular or plural. They want the myth of male weakness to work because it serves their agenda; they know that in their own lives, the myth is oversold. This is cynical, yes, but devastatingly effective.

Until we dismantle the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire we cannot build a just and safe world for all.

Spoilsport feminists and the monogamy ideal

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 14, 2009
in Infidelity, Marriage and Myth of Male Weakness
. 11 Comments

Andrea sends me a link to this Jay Michaelson piece that ran last Wednesday at the Huffington Post: It’s Not Just Tiger: Monogamous Marriage Is An Anomaly. The title is, one admits, historically accurate; marriage, as Stephanie Coontz has shown so ably, is a dynamic rather than static institution, and it has meant different things in different cultures. Certainly monogamy (at least for men) hasn’t always been expected, and in making this rather familiar and unoriginal observation, Michaelson is on solid ground. But once we get past the title, we’re off to a bad start:

It was understood - in the Bible, in the Talmud, in Protestant Europe, in colonial America - that married men would visit prostitutes. And while this may have been a sin, it was everyone’s sin - and not a particularly serious one.

That’s simply bizarre. I assume Michaelson has read Midrashic commentaries on Judah and Tamar, for example, or Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America. Godbeer, an old friend of mine, ably demonstrates that the Puritans actually believed that men had more (rather than less) self-control than women, whom they regarded as disordered by the unfortunate condition of hysteria. The notion that in deeply religious Western cultures men were always seen as entitled to sexual release outside of marriage is absurd. Certainly, men were generally (though not always) punished less severely for sexual transgressions than were women, and prostitutes treated more harshly than their patrons — but to say that the record of Western civilization is one that reveals that men’s use of prostitutes was largely accepted is to grossly misrepresent the evidence.

But that’s not the real objection to Michaelson’s piece, which is written, more or less, in defense of philandering. (As a post, it stands as a terrific illustration of how to “praise with faint damns”.) It turns out, according to Michaelson, that feminists — who else — spoiled the fun men had been having for centuries by insisting on companionate, monogamous, egalitarian marriages:

What changed all this was, ironically, feminism. The first feminists weren’t bra-burning radicals: they were pious scolds, who in late 19th century America mobilized for purifying American manhood. They cleaned out the brothels and closed the pubs - feminists were the first prohibitionists. What had for hundreds of years been the common practice of men of all social classes became a great vice to be eradicated.

Twentieth century feminism added another layer of condemnation: after all, why should men be allowed to philander while women were expected to remain faithful and stand by their (abusive, cheating) men no matter what? Why are promiscuous men heroes, and promiscuous women sluts? Women aren’t slaves, feminism taught us, and men need to respect them as equal partners in marriage. Infidelity had been a religious sin - now it was a secular one as well.

Nineteenth-century feminists, as Michaelson doesn’t know, were far more concerned with fighting prostitution because of what it did to the lives of women and girls; purifying American manhood was about saving their wives and sisters and daughters and mothers from exploitation and misery. Of course, Michaelson is, like a great many men, attached to the idea that any woman who demands responsibility from a man is a hen-pecking killjoy who fails to understand men’s earthy, rambunctious, eternally puerile nature. And Michaelson ignores the countless male advocates for sexual restraint and fidelity, like Sylvester Graham, John Kellogg, and Anthony Comstock, whose influence was (probably unfortunately) far more significant on Victorian American culture than that of Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Continue reading ‘Spoilsport feminists and the monogamy ideal’

“Are you gonna step up and pat the pony, or do I need to go to the rodeo down the road?”* On myths of male weakness and having the marriage discussion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 24, 2009
in Myth of Male Weakness and Relationships
. 27 Comments

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about dating difficulties. “Laura” is 30, single, heterosexual, and interested in — eventually — getting married and having children. It’s not, as she says a “ticking clock thing”; rather, she’s clear that at this age, she’s done having casual relationships with men that drift for months and years. She wants to, as my evangelical friends put it, date “intentionally” — that is, with the explicit intention of moving towards marriage. If a guy isn’t marriage material, or has no interest in getting married — or is planning on waiting indefinitely until he is “struck by certainty”, Laura wants to know sooner rather than later so that she can move on.

Laura asked yesterday: “When is it best to bring up what my goals are? If I say — on our first coffee date — that I’m looking to get married, I’m worried I’ll scare most men away. On the other hand, I don’t want to wait indefinitely. If a guy is very clear that marriage and children are off the table for the next few years, I want to move along before I get too invested. So when’s the best time to bring it up?”

Tom Leykis, a repugnant, misogynistic, and yet undeniably talented talk show host in Los Angeles, famously advocates his “three date rule” to his mostly male audience. “If a woman won’t have sex with you after three dates”, Leykis advises, “dump her. She’s not worth investing any more time in.” I think there’s a far more helpful version of the “three date rule”: by the third date with a prospective partner, one needs to initiate the “what are you looking for in a relationship” conversation. If the initial answer is a bit evasive, something along the lines of “let’s just go slow and see how things develop”, it’s not too soon for someone in Laura’s position to explain what it is that she wants. If the other person flinches at this point, that’s a fairly definitive sign that your goals are unlikely to be mutual.

The reason I bring this is up is because of still another corollary to the “myth of male weakness”. This is the notion that men are “easily scared off” by women who are too frank about their interest in enduring commitment or children. It repeats the old lie that even grown men in their late twenties and thirties are little more than overgrown, feckless adolescents desperate to remain single and avoid being “trapped” into a monogamous relationship with a woman. It suggests that all men need to be treated like brash young colts who will buck and kick should the saddle appear too soon. Above all, this particular corollary insists, as Jack Nicholson famously did in a film with men in its title, that most guys “can’t handle the truth”.

To be clear, no one is under any obligation to marry. I don’t think marriage is for everyone, nor do I think it to be the only vehicle for personal growth. But the ones whom the likes of Laura can weed out quickly are those who are adamant that they will never marry. The ones who are more problematic are those who, often while already well into their thirties or beyond are open to marriage somewhere in the very distant future, sometime after the end of Obama’s second term — and only after they are, as they naïvely imagine must surely happen, “struck by certainty.” It is these latter lads with whom one needs to have a serious conversation by the end of the third date.

I’ll say it again: the capacity for self-reflection and the ability to articulate one’s thoughts and fears was not given only to the be-uterused. Yes, most American men are raised in a culture that discouraged the development of a vocabulary for the inner emotional terrain — but lack of familiarity is not the same as genuine inability. (Pace, my friends whose loved ones suffer from autism or Asperger’s; there are exceptions.) Men are indeed under no particular obligation to commit to any one particular person, or to commit at all. But they are, like all of us, under the obligation not to shy away from serious conversation about one’s short-term and long-term goals. And any man old enough for a thirty year-old woman to sleep with without violating state law is old enough to handle a discussion about the possibility of a shared future by the end of the third date.

* Years ago, an ex-girlfriend of mine initiated just this sort of discussion with this line. I’ve never forgotten it.

Tired of being coddled and feared: standing up to the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 08, 2009
in Male feminists, Modesty, Myth of Male Weakness and Sexual harassment
. 53 Comments

A reader writes in from the East with a query. “Micah” is an undergraduate, taking a class on Gender Issues in the Workplace. He writes of a problem he has with his female professor and her reactionary views:

… in our discussion on sexual harassment, we got into a (I’m
shy to call it a discussion), on how woman’s clothing is partly to blame.
She took the position that women should dress more conservatively, and that
it’s their responsibility in this way to prevent sexual harassment. Her answer to my question “If we make this opinion the norm, doesn’t it negatively affect a woman’s ability to seek redress after being harassed, in that she as the victim is blamed?” was simply, “No”.

I don’t want to create an adversarial relationship with my professor, but at the same
time I’m frustrated at the message she’s sending to both men and women in the class. It’s awkward to be a male student trying to take a feminist stance with an anti-feminist female professor! I’m having trouble explaining my concerns, and am wondering if you could offer some insight into approaching the situation.

Certainly, Micah is in a difficult situation. Indeed, it’s frequently problematic for a male feminist to engage in an argument about gender justice with an avowedly anti-feminist woman. Most men who embrace feminism in a public way run into this particular pickle sooner or later, and it is made exponentially more challenging when the anti-feminist woman is an academic authority figure.

Despite the awkwardness, there are a couple of tacks that Micah can take if he’s willing. The best one, of course, is to challenge his professor’s low expectations of men. The notion that women are responsible for “inviting” harassment by the way they dress is rooted in the belief that male sexual desire is a problem that is women’s to manage. It’s the old myth of male weakness, a myth that suggests that those of us who are incarnate as males simply lack the capacity to control our urges. Therefore, it is women’s job to set boundaries and to “help us” overcome temptations that we are incapable of overcoming on our own. It’s a myth that’s damaging to women, but Micah can point out that it’s incredibly insulting to men.

To borrow a phrase of which conservatives are over-fond, it’s a variation on the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s a complex bigotry to be sure, as the real victims of the myth of male weakness are not those presumed to be weak but those who are, because they are presumed to be morally strong, forced to assume the role of sexual gatekeepers. In the sexual harassment dynamic, the myth insults men by suggesting that all of the be-penised are knuckle-dragging, simple-minded thugs who would never get anything done at all if it weren’t for women’s careful encouragement and cajoling. The myth insults women by suggesting that while men’s sexual appetites are extraordinarily voracious and uncontrollable, women’s sexual desire either doesn’t exist at all or is so weak that it can be easily managed. (If a woman does experience intense desire, the myth suggests that there may be something wrong with her.) And above all, the myth holds women accountable for bad male behavior, forcing women to second-guess themselves endlessly while depriving men of something they desperately need, which is the chance to grow into kind, rational, self-soothing and self-controlled human beings.

Micah is right to be indignant in the face of the myth of male weakness. As a young male feminist, he is right to be furious at what sexual harassment does to women, and he is right to be exasperated at the pervasiveness of the belief that women somehow bring mistreatment on themselves through their behavior or their dress. He is certainly right, too, to be frustrated at what the dominant discourse about men, women, and harassment says about him and his fellow males. If he’s old enough to be in college, he probably already knows what it’s like to live as a relatively privileged American man: alternately coddled and feared, loathed and loved. If he pushes back — in a polite but robust way — against the damaging message his professor is sending, Micah will send a message to his classmates that not all of their male peers are willing to be complicit in the Great Lie. Whether he gains any traction with his prof is another question.

See more in the Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness categories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 14, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Myth of Male Weakness and Science
. 43 Comments

Below last week’s post on toplessness, Brian takes issue with my suggestion that men are capable of empathizing with women’s nearly-universal experience of being objectified. He writes:

Dialogue between the starving and the force-fed ain’t easy; even establishing a common frame is hard; nevermind agreeing on whether something looks tasty.

It should be easy enough to see terms aren’t used the same way. It comes up often enough that men can’t readily distinguish between objectifying and finding aesthetically appealling. (I know I can’t). Lack of a frame of reference.

The “force-fed and the starving” image refers to the experience of most men (who never feel themselves as objects of desire) and many women (who are objectified and ogled for much of their lives.) It’s an offensive analogy, because it suggests comparable injury between never being wanted and being harassed on a daily basis; the subtext is that women should even feel grateful for the attention they receive, and think sympathetically of men who never know what it is like to be whistled at. Given that we live in a world where a large number of men sexually assault women and use their own desire (inflamed by a woman’s choice of clothing, or behavior, or something similar) as an excuse, it’s silly to suggest any equivalence whatsoever. (Note that I am not unsympathetic to men’s lack of experience of feeling desired; see this post.)

Besides the problem of false equivalence in Brian’s remark, there’s a corollary to the “myth of male weakness” in what he writes. The myth of male weakness suggests that all men are cavemen; brutish and hyper-sexual, our civility is a thin veneer that can drop at any time. Driven by the irresistible forces of the Y chromosome and testosterone, we are to be applauded (so say the peddlers of the myth) for even the most half-hearted efforts at self-restraint. Because of our inherent vulnerability to temptation and our concomitant single-mindedness, the myth suggests it is women’s job to protect us from ourselves. Women need to cover up so as not to distract us; women need to flatter and cajole us rather than ask us directly for what they want; women, in other words, need to treat men like potentially dangerous but nonetheless loveable overgrown infants rather than as full and complete equals. And of course, while this sounds demeaning to men, the real pain of the myth is born by women — who are held responsible for men’s inability to exercise self-control. (This is a good place to recommend, again, Martha McCaughey’s magisterial corrective to all the bad evolutionary biology in the popular media, The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science.)

Brian’s corollary is a familiar one: men are too simple-minded to understand women, who are infinitely more complex. The “men are simple, women are complicated” myth works to serve the interests of a sexist status quo. The myth excuses men for being uninterested in women’s inner lives and inattentive to women’s concerns; it suggests that a man trying to understand a woman is like having a toddler try to grasp advanced mathematics — taught in Finnish. It is not flattery to tell women that their inner lives are infinitely more rich and nuanced than those of men. It’s part of a very clear agenda to tell women that asking men to “get” them is an unreasonable and bootless request. It may be the soft bigotry of low expectations in a new form, but the real victims are women, who are urged not to expect too much. And the beneficiaries, whether they realize it or not, are most men, who are excused the challenging but certainly not impossible task of listening to women, developing empathy, and remembering what it is that they have heard. Continue reading ‘“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness’

Reposting a rethink about Naomi Wolf, monogamy, myths of male weakness, and the oversold erotics of concealment

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 11, 2009
in Myth of Male Weakness and Reprints
. 16 Comments

This post first ran in the spring of ‘07, but the celebrated Naomi Wolf article to which it refers has now found a new life on Facebook, with many people reading it for the first time. Since it deals with the issues of modesty, monogamy, and myths of male weakness that have come back up again this week, I’m reposting it now:

Vanessa at Feministing takes issue with Naomi Wolf’s cover piece this past weekend in New York Magazine: The Porn Myth. It’s not a new article, it just seems to keep getting recycled. I commented on it back in May 2004.

One of the things about blogging for several years: one’s opinions and views evolve, and one is then left with the interesting archival evidence of that evolution. While consistency is surely a virtue, so too is a willingness to rethink one’s stance on key issues, especially in light of new information or further reflection. So, since Wolf’s piece reappeared online this week, I’m going to revisit what I said in 2004. More to the point, I’m going to reject much of what I had to say three five years ago.

I am as thoroughly anti-porn as it gets, as any visitor to my pornography archive will quickly read. (That sounds more titillating than it us.) I agree with Wolf’s view that pornography tends to destroy authentic sexual appetite. She writes:

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Wolf talks of chats with college-aged women who relate their anxieties about competing with pornography, and what she writes rings true with me. Where Wolf falls down — and where Vanessa was right to challenge her, and I was wrong not to do so in 2004 — is that Wolf urges women to adopt modesty and concealment as a strategy for reenergizing the male libido. Wolf is enchanted by the story of an observant Jewish friend of hers, a woman who allows only her husband to see her hair, and the rest of the time, keeps it concealed under a wig or a scarf. Wolf writes:

I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.”

The red flag for me in 2007 (which wasn’t there in 2004) is the verb in bold. The implication is that in and of themselves, men lack the incentive and the ability to maintain a strong and vibrant sexual focus solely on their wives. It’s a great passage from Scripture she quotes, mind you, and one I love. Married men are called to direct all of their sexual energy towards their wives, even as both they and their wives age. But it’s not women’s job to “create mystery” in order to keep men excited! While marriage is surely a partnership, it is deeply misguided (if very traditional) to suggest that wives must strategize to keep their husbands from straying in act or thought, with flesh-and-blood mistresses or with cybersex. Continue reading ‘Reposting a rethink about Naomi Wolf, monogamy, myths of male weakness, and the oversold erotics of concealment’

Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 09, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Feminism, Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness
. 64 Comments

A reader named Tracy sent me a link to this Meghan Pleitcha piece that originally ran on Nerve and was then reprinted at Alternet: What Happened When I Legally Exposed My Breasts in Public. This summer, Pleitcha took advantage of a New York state law that permits “gender equity” when it comes to baring chests in certain public settings; she sunbathed topless in Central Park, and wrote about the reactions she got from men, from women, and from her inner voice. It’s a thoughtful piece, and Tracy wanted to know my thoughts on female public toplessness and how that issue connects to the “myth of male weakness” about which I have written so often.

I’ve got a whole category of posts about modesty, and the ways in which our fears about uncontrollable male sexual desire result in our shifting the responsibility for self-control from men to women. I don’t want to keep rehashing points made over and over again, so let me offer just a few links:

In this post, we looked at the word kosmios (the koine Greek term, translated as modesty in the New Testament) and how it has nothing to do with showing skin, but instead refers to refraining from lavish displays of wealth.

In this post, the “argument from testosterone” is considered and rejected.

And I posted about breasts and the notion that men can’t help but stare here.

Though some might not regard the right to bear one’s breasts in public as the single most pressing issue on the feminist agenda, I do support the expansion of the already-extant New York law mandating gender equity when it comes to the exposure of the human chest. What “must be concealed” is a societal variable which has evolved over time. As we read in the news this week, Sudan canes women for wearing pants (something for which women were arrested in this country little more than a century ago.) In some societies, women’s hair has tremendous erotic value, perhaps as much as breasts themselves; in many cultures, concealing the top of the head is mandatory. And as anyone who has watched National Geographic specials or spent time on the beaches of Europe knows, the idea that female breasts are universally arousing to men is silly — what we find arousing is almost entirely culturally conditioned, and has far less to do with our hard-wiring than the peddlers of pop-evolutionary biology would have us believe. For reasons of fairness, as well as for the reason that the male lack of self-control is a construct rather than an immutable truth, it makes good sense to change our laws to permit women to go shirtless in public. Continue reading ‘Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation’

“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 25, 2009
in Father, Favorite Posts 2009, Male feminists, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Parenting and Youth
. 23 Comments

Little Heloise Cerys Raquel is indeed an enchanting baby, at least in the eyes of her doting parents. Now seven months old, her delightful personality emerges more and more each day — or so it seems. One of my favorite things about being on vacation this summer was the chance to be with her virtually every second; as I type this in my office, I note the hours (about five) until I will be home to her.

When we’re in public and Heloise is in my arms, we invariably get the same remarks: “She’s got you wrapped around her finger already, doesn’t she?” Or, “Watch out, when she gets older, you’ll have to watch the boys like a hawk!” My wife frequently gets told how much our daughter takes after her, but never receives anything like these comments. (When we were in Britain over the past few weeks, we got almost the same comments as we do here in the States.) And as a male feminist and father to a daughter, I find the subtext of remarks like these troubling, even as I honor the innocuousness of the intent behind them.

The bit about a daughter having her daddy “wrapped around her finger” repeats the old myth of male weakness. The myth of male weakness suggests that men are inherently vulnerable to temptation and manipulation. Men, the myth insists, have a much harder time practicing fidelity than do women, as men are biologically less capable of resisting sexual temptation. Heterosexual men are easily seduced by women, or so the trope goes, and thus women can use this weakness to flirt their way out of, say, traffic tickets or into jobs and marriages. The parental corollary, I’ve been realizing, is that daddies are far easier for daughters to manipulate than mommies. Fathers, the myth suggests, are powerless to say no to the pleas of their infant (or adolescent, or grown) female children.

Fathers, like other men, are supposed to be at least somewhat aware that they are being manipulated. I’ve gathered already that if I say “Yes, she’s already got me right where she wants me”, I’ll get indulgent smiles and teasing warnings about what she’s going to be like as a teen. And if I say — as I have said in one way or another several times — “I adore my girl, but she’s not going to get away with murder on my watch”, folks tend to shake their heads in real or mock pity at my stubborn refusal to acknowledge my own obvious frailty in the face of my daughter’s feminine wiles. A great deal of homosocial cameraderie is built and sustained on the theme of genuine or feigned exasperation at the supposed male inability to resist the charms of “hot chicks and pleading little girls.” Continue reading ‘“She’s got you wrapped around her finger”: fathers, daughters, and a variation on the myth of male weakness’

Blood, birth, and eros: against the myth of the frail male

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 09, 2009
in Body, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness and Parenting
. 37 Comments

The latest entry in the “men today have it so hard” sweepstakes is this Jonathan Last piece that ran in the June 4 Wall Street Journal: Present at the Creation. Remarking on the excellent new Judith Leavitt book Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room, Last wonders if our contemporary cultural insistence that men be present when the mothers of their children give birth is such a good idea.

Explaining how the dinosaurs once rationalized keeping men in the Stork Club (the waiting room for expectant fathers), Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor’s argument from the mid-1960s: “As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby — a negligee will never hide this apparition.” Another doctor concluded: “On the whole, it is not a show to watch.”

We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: “No thanks, I’ll be in the waiting room with cigars.” Ms. Leavitt’s fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

One’s head hurts.

Last strains to connect the increased expectation that Dads will be present with an increasing divorce rate (never mind that the divorce rate has been in decline throughout the admittedly brief 21st century). If there’s a need for a case study for correlation without even a whiff of causation, this WSJ piece might be a good place to start. One is left to wonder if Last actually believes that men are more inclined to divorce their wives after witnessing birth; perhaps he imagines that the delicate masculine sensibility is so easily overwhelmed by the sight of the “bloody show” that future marital relations are inexorably damaged as a consequence.

This, in other words, is just another bit of popular sexual “wisdom” from the purity peddlers and the chastity crowd. Last implies that men’s sexual desire for their spouses (or the mothers of their children to whom they are not wed) is contingent upon denial about the bloody reality of how life comes into this world. Women, of course, can be expected to endure childbirth — despite the pain and turmoil inherent in the process — and then turn around and long to do again with their men the very act that ended up putting them through the whole traumatic (albeit, presumably, rewarding) experience in the first place. Women’s libidinousness, in other words, isn’t allowed to be contingent upon some carefully enforced ignorance about bodily functions. Instead of marveling that so many modern women are willing to give birth more than once, to make love with their husbands with the memory of what lovemaking can lead to still embedded in the consciousness, Last worries about the poor lads whose fragile sensibilities might be permanently scarred at the sight, sounds, and smells of a delivery room. This is the myth of male weakness writ large indeed. Continue reading ‘Blood, birth, and eros: against the myth of the frail male’

Reprint: “A man should love his wife more than she loves him”: rebutting a nasty old piece of conventional wisdom

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2009
in Myth of Male Weakness and Reprints
. 8 Comments

I will return to new blogging, albeit at a slower pace, next week. Until then, one more reprint, this one from March 2007.

On Tuesday afternoon, I was talking to a woman with whom I regularly work out. While chatting about her recent break-up with her boyfriend, my pal repeated a line I find particularly exasperating. She said she’d been on her phone with her mother recently, and her Mom had said:

The best relationships are those in which the man loves the woman just a little bit more than she loves him.

My buddy was wondering about the wisdom of that oft-repeated line, and it occurred to me that I haven’t blogged about it.

I didn’t grow up with that particular piece of wisdom. The first time I heard the suggestion that “marriage is best when the husband is more in love with his wife than she with him” was when one of my cousins got married. My cousin’s new sister-in-law and I were chatting at the wedding (comparing the relative dysfunction of our respective clans) and she mentioned that her brother was absolutely enraptured by my cousin. She said something like:

“I know she loves him, but my brother loves her more. And I think that’s the way it should be. When a man loves a woman more, he’ll pay attention to her and won’t break her heart. When the love is equal, or the woman is the one more in love, there’s a much greater chance he’ll stray.”

This was not the sort of conventional wisdom we shared in my family, so I nodded politely at my new relation-by-marriage and wandered off to explore a new food station. But what she said stuck in my mind, and I began to check it out with my acquaintances. To my very great surprise, this notion that “the man should love the woman more” was actually fairly widespread. In completely unrelated situations, in the past couple of years I’ve had perhaps half a dozen women mention to me that they were raised with this particular relationship philosophy. And talking to my workout buddy on Tuesday really got me thinking about it.

As my regular readers know, if there’s one thing that really sticks in my craw, it’s the various ways in which our popular culture reinforces the “myth of male weakness.” Whether it’s armchair evolutionary biologists opining that promiscuity is hard-wired into the male brain, or misguided Catholic bishops insisting that women cover up to protect weak men from lust, or pop psychologists suggesting that women ought to accept male porn use as natural, a tremendous amount of damage is done by those who reinforce the lie that men lack women’s capacity for self-control, commitment, and relationship. Call it the “all men are dogs” theory, call it what you will — it’s a belief about human behavior that’s shockingly widely accepted, in and outside of religious communities and across vast political and cultural spectrums.

The bromide that “the man should love the woman more” is rooted in the expectation that virtually every man, sooner or later, will prove to be a colossal disappointment to the woman who loves him. If she loves him just a little less, however, this gives her a small “bargaining chip” with which to forestall his presumably inevitable infidelity or abandonment. The romantic imbalance, when it “works in her favor” gives her the chance to manipulate. If she loves him as much as he loves her, however, she loses that chance. And she leaves herself far more vulnerable to being heartbroken when he does disappoint, as popular culture seems to insist he invariably will.

One particularly frustrating way in which the myth of male weakness functions is to relentlessly urge women to lower their expectations for male behavior. Beginning when they hit adolescence, if not earlier, we often send messages to girls to “tone it down”, “don’t be too aggressive”, “don’t be too smart”, “don’t be too sexual”, “don’t want too much.” Older adults and cultural sages urge women not only to give up their girlish longing for a handsome prince, but to prepare themselves to “settle” for a “good-enough guy.” We urge young women not to have too many hopes about finding a man who is sexually attractive, capable, ambitious in his chosen field, emotionally articulate, willing to embrace monogamy in all its rigor and all its joy.

(Parenthetically, at the risk of getting flamed for racism, I see this “culture of diminished expectations for male behavior” particularly alive in my Latina students. Many of them were raised by their mothers to believe that the best one could hope for in a “good” husband was that he “doesn’t drink too much” and he “doesn’t hit” too often and he “doesn’t go to prostitutes.” While that particularly low threshold for masculine decency is certainly not unique to one culture, I do hear it more often from those whose families recently emigrated from Latin America to the USA. Perhaps the issue is more class than race.)

I am not defending genuinely unrealistic expectations for a romantic partner. Insisting that “perfect abs are a non-negotiable must-have” is silly, as is demanding one’s mate produce a seven-figure salary and a four-carat flawless diamond engagement ring. But there’s a world of difference between expecting a man to smother you in minks and jewels and expecting a man for whom emotional competence, fidelity, and a general sense of direction are givens! It’s one thing to teach women not to expect men to provide for all of their material needs; it’s another thing altogether to advise a woman that since most men will leave (physically or emotionally), she ought to “hedge her bets” by picking a man who will love her more than she loves him.

One of the most basic tasks of the men’s movement — not the MRAs, but the pro-feminist men’s movement — is really three-fold:

First, on a societal level, we need to work all the harder to deconstruct the “myth of male weakness.” We need to look at the various institutions (ranging from the inspid works of John Gray to the pious musings of church leaders who want our daughters covered up to the “popular science” articles that suggest that “evolution requires” men to be less capable of commitment, tenderness, and emotional depth than their mothers, wives and sisters) that promote the myth, and we need to take those institutions on directly. Whether the battleground is biology or theology, we need to rebut those voices that urge all of us to “give men a break”; we need to smash the Tammy Wynette school of gender theory. (Wynette famously sang that a woman ought to “stand by your man… because after all, he’s just a man.”)

Second, we need to raise young men’s expectations of themselves. Despite the claims of some men’s rights activists, pro-feminist men aren’t interested in transforming young men merely to turn them into the sort of lads who will fulfill female fantasies. Though raising consciousness and instilling accountability in young men will indeed serve to improve their relationships with all of the women in their lives, the real goal isn’t just ending rape or domestic violence, or improving romantic communication (as worthy as those goals are.) The real goal is to encourage young men to stop living lives of either quiet desperation or passive stupefaction. The real goal is not just to make men more responsible, accountable, and emotionally articulate (all good things) — the real goal is to make them active agents of transformation. It is to give them a sense that by living a life of justice, living a life of ambition, living a real life of sharing and generosity, they will discover a kind of happiness that they’ve never imagined. It’s about expanding their own sense of what it means to be happy.

Third, we need to continue to reach our daughters with a strong feminist message. We need to remind young women that a romantic relationship with a man is not the sole vehicle for personal happiness. But we don’t need to discourage an emphasis on love and enduring commitment altogether. While we can and should do more to encourage young women’s autonomy, we ought also to discourage young women from buying into the “myth of male weakness.” While some women’s fantasy desires may be unreasonable (insisting on the four-carat ring, for example) others are not (expecting fidelity, devotion, a commitment to egalitarian roles in the household, an ability to describe his own emotional terrain without becoming mute or haltingly inarticulate.) Though many women have had and will continue to have disappointing experiences that reinforce their sense that men cannot be trusted, we need to remind them that men are just as capable as their sisters of responsibility and forbearance.

And we need to assure them that settling for a man whom you love less than he loves you is selling everyone involved woefully, tragically, short.

Rihanna, Chris Brown, myths of male weakness and lies about transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2009
in Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness, Rape, aggression and violence and Relationships
. 66 Comments

I’ve avoided commenting on the Rihanna/Chris Brown drama for a host of reasons, not least among them that I haven’t had the time to follow the story. I knew, vaguely, who Rihanna was (thanks to the marvelously catchy “Umbrella” song), but had never heard of Brown until after his arrest. I learned a long time ago that my credibility with young people didn’t hinge on my being savvy about popular music as much as it hinged on my capacity for empathy and my willingness to listen. These days, when I look at the pop charts, I am usually unfamiliar with every artist; bluegrass and folk are the only genres with which I keep even a passing degree of currency.

As a feminist and as a gender studies professor, I’m saddened but hardly surprised by the way in which so many have responded both to the story of the original incident but also to news of the couple’s apparent reconciliation. The vile sort of people who think that Brown’s assault was somehow justified aren’t going to listen to anything someone like me has to say. But I am concerned by stories like this one, from the at-least-sometimes reliable Jane Velez-Mitchell of CNN: Brown-Rihanna case’s dangerous message. Velez-Mitchell, host of a program on Headline News, writes:

…less than a month after this ordeal, Rihanna has apparently forgiven him…

Rihanna’s apparent quick forgiveness for the alleged pummeling sends the worst possible signal – namely, that this sort of behavior is just par for the course when it comes to male-female relationships.

If she is going back to Chris Brown so soon, Rihanna is putting herself at risk and seems to be falling into the brutal cycle of powerlessness, fear and low self esteem that often accompanies abusive relationships. And it sends a message to Brown that he doesn’t have to change.

If the reconciliation is real, Rihanna is also setting a dangerous example for other abused women. Unfortunately, despite her incredible looks and talent, I think she is now the poster child for battered woman’s syndrome.

Our society must stop this cycle of helplessness that traps abused women. We must give them the help they need to escape the abusive spiral. But women must begin holding their loved ones to a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to violence.

Bold emphasis mine.

This is what passes for common sense these days, I realize, and I trust that Velez-Mitchell means well and is genuinely concerned both for Rihanna and for her legions of young fans. But her commentary falls woefully short of the mark by suggesting that it’s women’s job to send the right signals to men. Women “enable” bad male behavior, according to Velez-Mitchell; apparently, men are incapable of self-restraint unless guided and nurtured in the proper way by the women in their lives. This is the ugly, hoary old “myth of male weakness” in another guise. Continue reading ‘Rihanna, Chris Brown, myths of male weakness and lies about transformation’

Reprint: “A new creation” and the Christian feminist rejection of traditional masculinity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 10, 2008
in Myth of Male Weakness and Reprints
. 1 Comment

I’m on hiatus until August 29, and am reposting occasional old favorites. This post originally appeared in April 2006.

Lots of talk in the feminist blogosphere lately about "real men" and insecurity.  On Wednesday, Jill posted about a much-discussed MSN article in which a group of fellas discuss whether or not successful women intimidate them.  Yesterday, Amanda joined in.  And a few days ago, Ann Althouse took  on the lamentable Harvey Mansfield, who has written a new screed entitled "Manliness".

I haven’t gotten around to reading Mansfield, but I don’t like the excerpts I’ve read.  In her review of his book, Christina Hoff Sommers writes:

First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public realm and private life. In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy of gender neutrality. He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal opportunity to men and women. However, "our expectations should be that men will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women."

Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness; they must stop trying to feminize boys. A healthy society should not war against human nature. It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity." That means it has to civilize it and give it things to do. No civilization can achieve greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males.

In the private sphere, his advice is vivé la difference! A woman should not expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is; nor should she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends. Manly men are romantic rather than sensitive. They need a lot of help from females to ascend to the higher ethical levels of manhood, and Mansfield urges women to encourage them in ways respectful of their male pride.

(Emphasis mine).  In what I’m told is a compelling fashion, Mansfield is not just defending the essentialist notion that "men just are the way they are."  He’s doing something else that is much more insidious: insisting that women must serve as men’s catalysts for transformation into ethical, thoughtful human beings.  This is complementarianism (the notion that the two sexes have predetermined, specific roles to play in human relationship) at its worst.  It burdens women with the task of making men better.  It liberates men from taking responsibility for taking the primary leadership role in nurturing younger men into ethical, responsible adulthood.  And it implies, none too subtly, that destructive and violent men become that way because of women’s failures, not because of their own personal choices as males.

As a Christian pro-feminist man, few things make me angrier than the periodic re-emergence of the ugly "myth of male weakness."    Those who praise traditional manhood celebrate certain qualities: courage, initiative, wildness, aggression, honor.   But at the same time, the essentialists and the complementarians are convinced that  "real" men are incapable of emotional sophistication.  We’re "verbally challenged" when it comes to describing our own inner psychic terrain, and we’re destined to be blind to the subliminal clues that our sisters "naturally" pick up on.  We’re also more vulnerable to temptations to sexual infidelity and violence.  Women would do well to help guard us against temptation (because we are so weak), even as they tremble in excitement at our brave and heroic deeds.  In Mansfield’s world, we men are these strangely incomplete creatures:  at once dynamic and helpless; courageous in the face of gunfire but hopelessly overwhelmed by the demands of a simple conversation.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: “A new creation” and the Christian feminist rejection of traditional masculinity’