Archive for the 'Porn' Category

Of Popes and Playboys and Pueri Aeterni: Some thoughts on Hugh Hefner and the theology of the body

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2009
in Christianity, Porn and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 48 Comments

Through Dawn Eden’s blog, I found two interesting links: the first to a Nightline story about Christopher West, a popular evangelist for the “theology of the body” teaching now sweeping the church; the second, to a post by Father Angelo Geiger in response to West’s television appearance. The headline out of West was his comparison of Hugh Hefner to John Paul II, and this:

“I love Hugh Hefner,” said West. “I really do. Why? Because I think I understand his ache. I think I understand his longing because I feel it myself. There is this yearning, this ache, this longing we all have for love, for union, for intimacy.”

Father Geiger is concerned, and explains why. I’d never visited his site before, and I appreciate some aspects of his post, particularly his willingness to proclaim that asking women to cover up is not the right solution to the problem of male objectification of women. The padre gets props for this:

…men are perfectly capable of controlling themselves. I think too much attention paid to controlling women’s fashions… just leads to a kind of negative preoccupation with sexuality that does err on the side of prudery.

Nicely put. But then the priest goes off the deep end:

A more exalted view of human sexuality is needed and a preoccupation with the sinful nature of inappropriate sexuality should be avoided, but in this age when men have been so feminized and have so often recoiled from duty and consoled themselves in soft and lazy sensuality, they do not need to be encouraged to think about sexuality more, they need to be encouraged to mortify themselves, to be men, to be soldiers for Christ…
Hefner has been sleeping with multiple partners for his whole career. His playmates are exactly that, and he has never grown up. The man, now in his eighties, is sleeping with women that are barely legal. Hefner is quoted as saying “The interesting thing is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people.” That’s the fact and those fantasies are concupiscence run wild and fueled by a soft and effemninate indiscipline and by a very sophisticated and gnostic rationalization. God forbid that the association of John Paul II and such a “playboy” should end by promoting a religious version of that effeminate gnosticism.

Bold emphases are mine, of course. Geiger has completely — and bizarrely — misread Hefner, both in his assertion that the permanently be-robed octogenarian is a gnostic, and that his sexual exploits are somehow evidence of effeminacy. (Most Christian gnostics were radical dualists, rejecting the idea that Christ had ever been incarnate and exhibiting a hostility to the way of the flesh.) Hefner’s life is, in many ways, wrapped up in a rejection of the Protestant work ethic (with which he was raised) and with the rigid straitjacket of American male adulthood, characterized by a strange blend of self-sacrifice and frantic acquisitiveness. For Hef, the title of the magazine gives it away: “Play, Boy!” The opposite of play, of course, is work; the opposite of boy, is not “girl” or “woman”, but “man.” Continue reading ‘Of Popes and Playboys and Pueri Aeterni: Some thoughts on Hugh Hefner and the theology of the body’

Equally addictive, not equally pernicious: more epic fail from Mary Eberstadt

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2009
in Addiction and mental illness, Mass media and Porn
. 50 Comments

Mary Eberstadt is on a roll. A few months ago, she announced that “food was the new sex“, a conclusion I found historically inaccurate at best and deeply wrong-headed at worst. Clearly, however, our Mary has found what she regards as a fertile field; she’s back this month with Is Pornography the New Tobacco? (Since all good things seem to come in threes, prizes must go to those who guess the topic of her third installment. I’m tempted to write a first-century theological satire, based on debates among early Christians about changing purity laws: “Is Divorce the New Pork?”)

Like her food/sex thesis, Eberstadt’s suggestion that “Big Porn” mimics the earlier tactics of “Big Tobacco” seems alluringly insightful, but falls apart under scrutiny. She returns to her trope from the food-sex article by offering us “Betty” (a thirty-year old woman in the 1950s) and “Jennifer” (a contemporary thirty year-old) and contrasting their views on porn and tobacco.

Like many of her friends, and also like her husband Barney, Betty smokes cigarettes. She does so unselfconsciously and throughout the day — in the kitchen and most other rooms of the house, during her housecleaning, on the front steps, around the children, in the car, at the movies and in restaurants, even walking down the sidewalk. It’s not the sort of thing she gives much thought to, though when she does she sometimes feels conflicted. For Betty, the issue of tobacco may raise certain questions of expediency (she worries about the money she spends on it). She also wonders from time to time about its possible effect on her health, as people by 1958 are starting to talk about that too.

On the other hand, despite these occasional personal misgivings, Betty does not see smoking as a moral issue in its own right. It is rather, she believes, a matter of individual taste.

Jennifer, on the other hand, takes a similar stance on pornography:

On the one hand, like Betty, she does not think that this particular substance — in Jennifer’s case, pornography — poses any genuine moral issue. On the other, again like Betty, when she does stop to think about it she feels conflicted. From time to time, her boyfriend Jason has persuaded Jennifer into watching some together on the internet. On the outside, Jennifer goes along with this gracefully enough. On the inside, though, she is not so sure she likes it — more precisely, that she likes Jason liking it. One thing she is certain of is that Jason knows more about pornography than she does. She has more than once caught him unawares while he was watching it, and she’s overheard allusions to it among his friends.

Even so, and despite her occasional misgivings, about pornography as such Jennifer has the standard-issue generational opinion of her time. She is not a Kantian about it. She has her own personal likes and dislikes; she assumes everyone else does too. In sum, she does not think that pornography, when made by and for consenting adults, is morally wrong. She thinks it is a matter of individual taste.

Eberstadt is absolutely right that social mores change over time. This is not news. That which was unclean becomes clean; that which was permitted is now banned. (Think of the shift between the Torah and the New Testament on pork and divorce, for example, which I referenced above.) Of course, we have a responsibility to do more than accept social changes with a fatalistic shrug; we do need to be particularly critical about the ways in which our own sense of what is acceptable causes us to turn a blind eye to suffering. Continue reading ‘Equally addictive, not equally pernicious: more epic fail from Mary Eberstadt’

Vermont gets it right again: adolescent sexting, adult prurience, and the need for some common sense

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 17, 2009
in Photos, Porn, Youth and Youth ministry
. 19 Comments

As has been widely reported, Vermont (the first state in the notion to approve same-sex marriage through the legislative process) is now considering decriminalizing “sexting”, the much-ballyhooed practice by which teens take and send explicit images of themselves using their cell phones. The absurd prospect of having teenage girls arrested on child pornography charges for sending topless photos of themselves to prospective beaux has encouraged the sturdy Vermonters to do the eminently sensible thing; as Salon writes, “sanity prevails.”

From the standpoint of a teacher and a youth worker, the furor about “sexting” seems tinged with both media hype and an unpleasantly salacious curiosity about adolescent sexuality. The chief concern I have is with the emotional well-being of the young people who do share naked pictures of themselves; embarrassment is powerful and regret is real, particularly when — as so often can happen — an image meant for one person is shared with many more. I’m also concerned with the dynamics under which sexting takes place: to what degree do the young women (and, more rarely, young men) who take and send these photos with their phones feel pressured to do so? Coercion, peer pressure, and individual agency are key issues in any discussion of teen sexuality. Safe and responsible adults need to be able to initiate conversations with teens about their private lives — and the misuse of child pornography statutes to prosecute adolescent “sexters” is an ironclad guarantor that those conversations will not take place!

The Vermont law, as proposed, wisely distinguishes between a 15 year-old sending a naked picture to another 15 year-old and a 15 year-old sending that same picture to a 35 year-old she’s met online. In the latter case, the law could still be used, as we would want it to be, to prosecute an adult who solicits nude pictures from a minor. The minor would not be charged. Make sure that adults understand that soliciting and knowingly receiving sexually explicit photographs from minors is a crime. Apply that law with a recognition that a relationship between an 18 year-old and a 17 year-old is not dangerously exploitative (despite the minor-adult disparity) in a way that a relationship between a 17 year-old and a 28 year-old almost certainly is. The law, in other words, needs to center the emotional, sexual, and physical safety of young people; it does not need to center the scandalized indignation of adults.

In January, in a post about the “right to a past”, I touched on this issue. I’ve also touched recently on the issue of adolescent resilience, in a post written contra the “one mistake will ruin your life” narrative. To the extent that “sexting” is a reality rather than media-hyped phenomenon, it’s important for us to recognize the potentially coercive aspects of this adolescent innovation. But it’s also important that we avoid the lurid, exploitative hysteria that so often accompanies discussions of teen sexuality. As long as young people know that adult concern for them is rooted less in an obsession with their chastity and more in an interest in helping them develop healthy, mutually satisfying relationships, teens will be open with us about their lives. If we emphasize that foolish or impulsive decisions don’t necessarily need to lead to enduring shame or familial rejection, if we emphasize that our mistakes are character-building rather than soul-scarring, we empower young people to make better choices and recover quickly from the humiliation that is, in the end, the chief danger inherent in the “sexting” phenomenon.

As Vermont, so the nation. May it be so quickly.

Sins of Malice, Sins of Passion: of Jerry Falwell and Marilyn Chambers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 16, 2009
in Christianity, Politics and Porn
. 10 Comments

Conservative Catholic blogger Francis Beckwith is annoyed with what he sees as a media double standard in the coverage of the passings of porn star Marilyn Chambers (who died this past week) and conservative Christian activist and preacher Jerry Falwell, who died in 2007. Beckwith:

…the Rev. Falwell founded a university, started a social movement of great influence, pastored a church of several thousand for several decades, led many, many people to Christ, and as far as we know was a loving and devoted husband and father. (He was a person that even Larry Flynt called “friend”!) On the other hand, Ms. Chambers, who died young (as is the case with virtually everyone in her “profession”), is portrayed as a cultural trailblazer who enlightened our culture to the “blessings” of anonymous, promiscuous, widely diverse, and videotaped, copulation. For this reason, you will hear no lamenting of the innumerable lives on which her example made chic the infliction of countless miseries. You will not hear of the unborn children killed, the addictions borne and nurtured, the marriages decimated, the offspring abandoned, the spouses betrayed, or even the diseases contracted—spiritual, mental and physical—that her “trailblazing” facilitated.

We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to compare Falwell and Chambers, but I’m struck by Beckwith’s little post. Though it’s an obvious strawman to suggest that the left was uniform in its glee when Falwell passed (I was rather charitable, myself, or so I thought), it’s certainly true that many progressives were not overtaxed with grief when the founder of the Moral Majority gave up the ghost. It is also true that without bestowing upon Marilyn Chambers any particular degree of veneration, those of us fascinated by recent cultural history note her central role in elevating adult movie actresses to the status of pop icons. And we can disagree, as we do, about the degree to which pornography is responsible for the litany of ills which Beckwith, channeling Chesterton, provides.

Both Falwell and Chambers came to prominence in the second half of the 1970s; they became household names in the Carter Administration. Falwell was the ardent culture warrior, while Chambers was a symbol — at least for folks like the stout Baptist preacher — of the moral decay against which a coalition of indignant Christians ought to stand. But in one sense, a genuinely Catholic one, it may well be right to speak more gently of Chambers than of Falwell. Continue reading ‘Sins of Malice, Sins of Passion: of Jerry Falwell and Marilyn Chambers’

Perception, Intention, Pornography, and Competition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 28, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, BDSM and Porn
. 25 Comments

A few years ago, I wrote a post about healthy competitiveness, fantasy, and violence. I’m revisiting that post this morning in light of some of the recent posts I’ve had up about both relationships and pornography.

In July 2005, I wrote about running with my friend Mark:

When I race my friend Mark down the front stretch of the track at Arcadia High School, I’m not thinking “I’m going to kick his ass!” I’m thinking “Damnit, I’m going to keep up with you if it kills me!” Of course I love beating him (which happens one time in five, mind you), but after every hard interval together, we touch fists and say “Good job, brother.” I don’t want to dominate or humiliate him; our competition is a friendly rivalry. Deep friendship — even love — can comfortably co-exist with a real desire to defeat the very person one loves in a game or athletic competition.

The point I only made obliquely then, and would like to make more explicitly now, is about the way in which this anecdote displays that “love-of-self” and “love-of-other” can be fundamentally compatible. When I race Mark, I want to defeat him. I want to win, which will require him “not winning”. He and I have crossed the line together a time or two, and that feels great, but like most sports fans, I don’t consider a tie to be the grandest of accomplishments. What I want, when I race Mark, is to surpass him. He wants to do the same to me, of course. (It took me years to get comfortable with competition, and I still only fel safe being “ruthlessly competitive” with the folks whom I love and trust.)

Is it a failure of empathy on my part that leads me to want to beat Mark? If he is going to be disappointed even in the slightest by his failure to win, shouldn’t my regard for his feelings trump my own desire for victory? Of course not. After all, each of us has beaten the other many times in our workouts (he has the better record); each of us knows the disappointment of the loss is slight. But if one of us were to “throw” an interval to the other out of charity, the one who was the recipient of the gift would be angered and betrayed. To concede a race is not generosity, it is condescenscion at its most appalling. It says to the other “I think you’re too fragile to handle defeat.” It fails to honor the maturity and the dignity of the other. “Friendly competition” is that where each of us each believes three things about our rival:

1. He is playing by the same rules
2. He is capable of distinguishing between competition on the track and animoosity off of it
3. He is sufficiently emotionally resilient to handle defeat.

Unless I know these three things about the person I’m racing, I don’t feel I can give my maximum effort.

What on earth does this have to do with pornography? In my review yesterday of the Price of Pleasure, I noted that the anti-pornography documentary makes a compelling case that contemporary erotica is more and more likely to be focused on violence and degradation. (Even when I did regularly watch pornography, I found the harder, BDSM-oriented stuff to be distasteful. Without offering too much information about my own inner world, for all of the darkness I’ve put myself through, I’m clear that power imbalances are not particularly erotic for me. Power exchanges in the bedroom haven’t, in my experience, been either particularly healing or particularly interesting. Light-hearted reciprocity tends to be what makes my socks roll up and down. Your mileage may vary.) Continue reading ‘Perception, Intention, Pornography, and Competition’

Some thoughts on “The Price of Pleasure” (with notes)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 27, 2008
in Feminism, Movies, Porn and Relationships
. 121 Comments

Several weeks ago, I was sent a review DVD of The Price of Pleasure. The film, by first-time director Chyng Sun, explores the impact of contemporary American pornography on men, women, and relationships* It is not currently for rent or in theaters, but it is out on a national screening tour. It will be screened, with a panel discussion, this Thursday, October 30 here in Los Angeles on the USC campus. Exact time and location have not yet been announced, though I am prodding.

Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, two celebrated anti-pornography feminists serve as senior advisers for the film (referred to as TPOP for the remainder of this post.) I wrote a long review of Bob Jensen’s most recent work here. Dines is founder of Stop Porn Culture, and organization for which I have considerable admiration.

TPOP is less than an hour long, but it took me more than a week to sit through it. The documentary features a considerable number of outtakes and excerpts from porn, and though genitalia are “fuzzed out”, the effect is still searing and for some, potentially triggering. As someone who struggled with porn addiction in the past, I wanted to be careful about how I watched and responded to this film. I was relieved to discover that I didn’t find myself in the least bit tempted to “relapse” on porn use as a consequence of watching TPOP. I can recommend the film as “safe” for most folks, though some of the sound and imagery is violent and deeply degrading. Potential viewers will need to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of taking it all in. (It’s worth noting that some in the pro-porn world have complained that TPOP violates both copyright and federal obscenity rules. I’m not qualified to speculate.)

TPOP uses interviews with a wide variety of people: pornographers and porn actresses, men who use porn, women whose husbands or boyfriends use porn, and academic researchers who have studied porn. Pornography, we are told, is a $10 billion industry today, and thanks to the Internet and other technological advances, is far more ubiquitous than it was just a few years ago. One point that the film makes clear (particularly in an interview with Ariel Levy), is that today’s young people (those in their teens and early twenties) have grown up in a culture saturated with porn to a degree difficult even for those just two decades older to comprehend. Just as an eighteen year-old today cannot remember a time before mobile phones, so he or she cannot remember a time when porn was not “everywhere.” This jives with what I hear from the young people with whom I work; they describe porn as providing an “aduiovisual soundtrack” for their lives. Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on “The Price of Pleasure” (with notes)’

Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 06, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness, Porn, Sex work, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 90 Comments

I’m easing back into blogging this week. I have a bad cold, my first in months, probably contracted over the course of various recent travels. My wife and I spent Rosh Hashanah with the Kabbalah Centre International in Dallas, Texas last week; on Friday we flew up to Northern California for a weekend at our family’s country place in the hills northeast of San Jose. We went, in the damp and the bluster of an early autumn storm, to the Cal-Arizona State Homecoming game in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon. And our plane finally landed at Burbank Airport at 10:30 last night. I’m a bit groggy, but hoping to feel better as the week goes on.

And the emails! Folks, if you’ve emailed me recently, please be patient. I’m more than a little swamped. (Seven — count ‘em, seven — with questions about older men/younger women relationships in the last week alone. Flattering but overwhelming.)

The discussion thread below my post on “rethinking a virulent anti-porn/sex work stance” is approaching 200 comments, and is still quite active (and, all things considered, reasonably civil.) Amber Rhea put up a lengthy and thoughtful initial response at her place, and both she and Ren took issue with this remark I made in the original post:

I am keenly aware that porn can play a part in reducing our ability to connect with each other as full and complete creatures of light. Porn, it still seems to me, is the enemy of empathy.

That deserves some more explanation.

Empathy, of course, is the ability to not only imagine what an other person might be feeling(sympathy), but actually to understand what an other person understands, feels, and experiences. Contemporary English often confuses empathy and sympathy to the point that even many scholars seem to disagree as to the precise boundary that separates one concept from another — a point driven home to me in a few minutes of googling about this morning! Here’s one possible definition, from an article for physicians:

The origin of the word empathy dates back to the 1880s, when German psychologist Theodore Lipps coined the term “einfuhlung” (literally, “in-feeling”) to describe the emotional appreciation of another’s feelings. Empathy has further been described as the process of understanding a person’s subjective experience by vicariously sharing that experience while maintaining an observant stance. Empathy is a balanced curiosity leading to a deeper understanding of another human being; stated another way, empathy is the capacity to understand another person’s experience from within that person’s frame of reference.

I like that last bit, and it’s relevant to the experience that I think a great many men have with heterosexual pornography. One of the valid criticisms that gets thrown at Robert Jensen is that as a man writing about men’s use of pornography from a feminist perspective, he centers men’s experiences and reactions; his Getting Off contains relatively few women’s voices. (Given that he was writing a book about how pornography impacted men, rather than an overarching cultural critique of commercialized sexuality, this seems like a fairly reasonable editorial decision to have made. The problem, if there was one with Getting Off, seems to lie in his fairly brief and caricatured descriptions of the women who work in pornography — more certainly could have been done to hear what they were saying.) In any event, both Jensen and I come to the same conclusion: almost regardless of the conditions under which pornography is produced, the impact upon the men who “consume” it regularly is often a decreased ability to connect and empathize with other human beings. Continue reading ‘Pornography, empathy, and the misuse of the disease model: some further thoughts on a way forward’

Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 24, 2008
in Feminism, Porn and Sex work
. 210 Comments

If you ask most folks who have been blogging for a while, they’ll remember the one “break-out” post that got them noticed, or first attracted a significant number of comments and hits. For me, it was this post about pornography back in April 2004. I wrote in response to news that several major stars of the adult film industry were infected with HIV.

I wrote that post, and many subsequent posts on pornography from two over-lapping perspectives. I wrote as a pro-feminist steeped in the anti-pornography tradition of one branch of feminism; I wrote as someone who was moved by the desperately sad story of Linda Lovelace, moved by the razor-sharp incisiveness of Andrea Dworkin, challenged by the dazzling legal theory of Catherine MacKinnon. But my intellectual response to porn was mixed with my own experience of “addiction” to pornography, and a long struggle to overcome the compulsive use of sexually explicit material. Porn addiction, particularly in my youth (long before cyber-erotica became available) had done tremendous harm to me — and as a consequence, it had damaging repercussions in many of my relationships. So my feminism, my faith, and my own intense desire never ever to go back into that addiction combined to form a very strong anti-pornography stance.

It has been a long time since I’ve “used” pornography of any kind. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the possibility of relapse. Heterosexual married men in my position — teachers, pastors, mentors — are famous for living sexual double lives. (The examples, sadly, are too many to list.) While some fall from grace in spectacular ways –Ted Haggard — others commit “adultery” only with their computers. I know my own tendency towards workaholism and Calvinist striving; I know that that Puritanical streak can, left unchecked, feed a dark side. It’s so easy, after all, to feel heroic doing what I do: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, advising, chairing committees and giving lectures. It’s easy, too, to buy into the lie that I’ve “been so good” and I “deserve” a little “me time.” For a lot of men, including myself for many years, that “me time” involved the compulsive consumption of pornography.

I learned early that a fulfilling sex life with a partner or a spouse is not a prophylaxis against porn addiction. I’m very clear these days that it isn’t my wife’s job to keep me sufficiently sexually sated that I don’t stray, even in my mind. It’s my job. And staying faithful in body and mind involves many things, of which willpower is actually the least important. Staying faithful to my commitments is made much easier by honoring the needs of my body as they arise. I was much more prone to use porn when I was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired; I have become much better (thank God) at recognizing my triggers. I listen to the needs of my body, and I don’t suppress them. That doesn’t mean I indulge every imperious demand! It means I do take the naps I need; it means I do get the (very non-sexual) professional massages that release the tension and the ache in my flesh. It’s when I bottle everything up, I know, that I am at risk of “acting out.”

But writing about pornography from the perspective of a recovering addict is problematic. Most saliently, it leads me — as it obviously did in that 2004 post — to be dismissive of those whose experience with pornography was radically different from my own. I’m not talking about the Larry Flynts of the world, mind you; I have little time for them. I’m talking about feminist voices, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, voices of women who work or have worked in the sex industry. Like so many folks, I’ve been more willing to hear the stories that match up with my pre-existing world view. I confess I’ve given more credence to those who spoke of the sex industry in negative terms (exploitation and abuse and addiction) than to those who talked about genuinely enjoying the work they were doing.

What I am most guilty of is pathologizing those whose experiences do not match my world view. I am not alone in this; many of my fellow anti-porn feminists do the same. We of all people, who ought to know better, still regularly suggest that women who work in the sex industry (or merely those who enjoy watching porn) are — take your pick — “deceiving themselves”, “working through childhood abuse issues”, “filled with a self-loathing they cannot acknowledge.” Sometimes, we infantilize female sex workers, suggesting that they are in desperate need of “rescue” by we the enlightened, the middle-class, and the sexually vanilla. Continue reading ‘Bridging the Porn Divide: sex, feminism, empathy, and the commitment to stop pathologizing the other side’

Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 07, 2007
in Class, Food, Money, Porn, Veganism and Working
. 35 Comments

In the midst of the latest round of debates over sex here in the progressive blogosphere, I was struck by BrownFemiPower’s post about the kinds of oppression we sometimes ignore in our eagerness to focus on pornography.

I’m very very *very* tired of how sex work is framed as a labor issue by many anti-pornography activists–they chronically insist that porn is the worst worst worst job ever because it hurts females.

I hear this logic, and all I can think is, “Really?”

I’ve known women who have had to work 12-15 (or more) hours a day in 100+ degree heat with no breaks for water and no place to pee (I was one of those women). I’ve known women who have had to work on their knees the entire 12-15 hour shift (or in a squatting position), with a bag that digs into their backs and can carry 20-25 pounds of vegetables or fruits. I’ve known women who can not kneel at mass because their knees are so shot from the hard labor they’ve done most of their lives. I’ve known women who have worked in the fields since they were five or six. I’ve seen pregnant women, elderly women, young girls, disabled women all forced to walk up to two miles (after 12 or 15 hour days) to get back to their cars so they can go home.

I know women are being exposed to some of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. I know young girls are working in fields rather than going to school because their mothers aren’t being paid enough for the job that they do. I know women are being locked up and only allowed to leave the farms for up to two hours a week. I know women are working for wages that have not increased in 27 years. I know women who go to company doctors after exposure to pesticide clouds are being told that they have ‘female problems’ (rather than pesticide poisoning). I know women are giving birth to babies that die because of pesticide exposure. I know women are out digging ditches 20 days after they give birth. I know women are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know young girls are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know 90% of the female farmworkers in California say that sexual intimidation and harassment is a major problem at their jobs. I know women refer(ed) to a field in California as the “field of panties” because so many women were raped there. I know women are being threatened with guns by their field bosses.

At BFP’s, these last two paragraphs are filled with links that document what’s going on. Continue reading ‘Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace’

Against compartmentalization: a note on the repercussions of a local scandal

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 05, 2007
in Porn, Sexuality, Teaching and Youth
. 10 Comments

The buzz in Pasadena this past week has been over the arrest of a veteran teacher at local Mayfield School (a Catholic college prep school for girls) on charges of possessing child pornography. David Hassler, 62, who taught government, history, and religion, is on administrative leave after police found numerous printed images of child porn in his home, most apparently downloaded from the Internet. Mayfield, to its great credit, has been proactive in its response in terms of hosting forums and reaching out to its students, parents, and alumni to keep everyone informed.

In my eight years as a youth leader at All Saints Church, I worked with many girls who were Mayfield students. (A perhaps surprisingly high percentage of the teens in our Episcopal youth group were Catholic school students). I’ve also had a number of Mayfield alumnae in my classes here at the college. In the past week, since the news about Mr. Hassler broke, I’ve spoken to perhaps half a dozen young women, both current and former Mayfield students. One emailed me on Facebook to tell me what had happened, saying that she was stunned and upset and needed to talk. The reaction to the teacher’s arrest among the girls I’ve spoken with has ranged from shock to anger to concern for Mr. Hassler and what will happen to him. But there is a palpable sense of betrayal, and, in the words of one Mayfielder who wrote me this weekend, “an ugly feeling that I just can’t trust the way I did before.”

This post is not about David Hassler or child pornography. It’s about teachers and trust and the basic truth that if we want to be trusted, there must be radical coherence between our public values and our private behavior. When something like this happens in my community (and this sort of thing happens in many communities) I get angry. I get angry as a man who works with young people, because the David Hasslers of the world poison the well for those of us who are making a huge effort to earn the trust of kids and their parents. We live in a world that is frantic about the threat posed to children by sexual predators of one sort or another; in the public imagination, and rightly so, most of those predators are men. And sexual predators have time and again sought out positions of authority over young people in order to facilitate their own acting out. The secret lives of a few, when made public, make suspects of the many who are working so damn hard to love, nurture, and mentor young people in safe and healthy ways.

I’ve spoken to a couple of Hassler’s former students in the past couple of days. One girl said to me Monday: “Now I wonder what he was thinking about when he looked at me. It makes me feel so disgusting, as if my memories of Mayfield are being ruined. I know I’ll get over it, but right now, it’s just so shocking and upsetting and vile.” But even in her shock, this young woman couldn’t come out and say she was angry at Hassler. “I just keep thinking about him, and worrying about him. I’ve been afraid he’s going to hurt himself or something because of how awful this must be to have everyone know this. Is it weird that I’m so upset but also worried about him?” I assured her that hers was a very normal reaction, and that her anger — if it comes at all — may not come for a long time.

Watching this story unfold strengthens my conviction that in the end, our private lives are never really private. What we do in our own home, behind locked doors, bleeds into our public lives. I don’t have any interest in child pornography, and I never did. But thinking about David Hassler reminds me that everything I do matters. My students and mentees don’t need to know much about my private life. But if I am insensitive to my wife, if I nurture a secret porn addiction, if I relapse on drugs, if I cheat on my taxes or am cruel to small animals, those sins will, sooner or later, lessen my effectiveness as a teacher and a mentor and a friend. The young people in my life don’t need to see the details of what goes on behind closed doors. But if what goes on behind those doors is deceptive, exploitative, illegal or cruel, then sooner or later, those young people whose trust I seek will pay a public price for my own private misdeeds.

We lie to ourselves when we claim that we can compartmentalize with impunity. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that David Hassler lied to himself about his child porn use. Perhaps he told himself that as long as his students and his colleagues never found out, he could still be a good, safe, effective teacher. But it rarely works that way. His students — and indeed, the entire Mayfield community — are reeling from these very serious allegations. But believing what I do believe about the human person, I am convinced that the darkness Hassler’s double life engendered was already affecting those around him long before he was arrested. And I grieve that for him, and I grieve it more for the young women who this week have felt so shocked, so shattered, so betrayed.

Beyond heat and pleasure to joy and light: the third post on Robert Jensen, porn, and sexual ethics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 05, 2007
in Books, Porn and Masculinity Series, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 18 Comments

This is part three of my series responding to Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Part One is here, Part Two is here.

At the end of this short, powerful book, Jensen muses about sexual ethics. I was struck by what he has to say about heat, light, and pleasure:

Another common way people talk about sex, especially in the past decade, is in terms of heat: She’s hot, he’s a hottie; we had hot sex. In the world of hot, it’s natural to focus on friction, which is what produces heat. Sex becomes bump-and-grind,; the friction produces the heat, and the heat makes the sex good.

But we should take note of a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding; we say that such an engagement produces “more heat than light.”… So what if our sexual activity — our embodied connections –could be less about heat and more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if such touch were about finding a way to create light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better? If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path.

I read that and leaped to my feet, crying “Yes!” At its best, I am convinced sex not only brings pleasure but helps to transform the people who are participating in it. I am a better teacher, better friend, and better mentor because of the light that my wife and I reveal when we have sex with each other. After three divorces and countless short-term relationships, I understand what Jensen is talking about here, because my wife and I are living it out. Make no mistake, I don’t think marriage is the only arena in which this kind of light can be created. But a relationship in which one or both parties is expending sexual energy on pornography and fantasy is one in which there is very little chance of light indeed.
Continue reading ‘Beyond heat and pleasure to joy and light: the third post on Robert Jensen, porn, and sexual ethics’

Shame and self-hatred, guilt and self-esteem: part two of the series on Robert Jensen, porn, and masculinity

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Hugo Schwyzer
on December 03, 2007
in Books, Men and Masculinity, Porn, Porn and Masculinity Series and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 34 Comments

This is part two of a three-part response to Robert Jensens’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Part One appeared last Friday, I’m aimin’ to have Part Three up on Wednesday of this week.

Courtney Martin wrote last week that Jensen’s prose “reeks of self-hate and desperation.” Blogger “Sweating Through Fog” writes that “Jensen uses porn to indulge his hatred for masculinity.” In this second part of the series, I’d like to take up this issue of male self-loathing (or, to put it another way, the loathing of one’s own maleness.) Far from hating himself, or men, Jensen is calling men to love themselves, their fellow men, and women enough to transform. His argument hinges on understanding the distinction between shame and guilt, a distinction that may have eluded some of those who read (or have decided to condemn without reading) the book.

The charge of “self-loathing” is one of three classic slurs used against feminist men. Any man who is committed to feminism publicly will regularly encounter at least one (and likely more) of the following stereotypes:

1. All feminist men are gay, and thus not “real men”.

2. All feminist men are “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, using an outer veneer of egalitarianism in order to get women into bed.

3. All feminist men are filled with self-loathing; secretly believing that women are the superior sex, they project their own self-hatred onto other men.

From the time I began studying feminism and doing pro-feminist men’s work, I ran into all three of these charges on a regular basis. The men’s rights advocates (MRAs) who periodically comment here tend to use all three, with a few not-very-bright ones insisting that all three are true simultaneously. So when Robert Jensen makes a compelling, at times radical case against pornography — accompanied by a searing and entirely accurate indictment of contemporary American masculinity — it’s little wonder that even well-meaning folks bring out the “he must really hate himself, or at least hate his maleness” card. Continue reading ‘Shame and self-hatred, guilt and self-esteem: part two of the series on Robert Jensen, porn, and masculinity’

Part one of a series on “Getting Off”: masculinity, pornography, and the truth of what we don’t want to face

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 30, 2007
in Men and Masculinity, Porn, Porn and Masculinity Series, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 50 Comments

This will be the first (long) part of a three-part post. Parts two and three to come next week.

I started reading Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity over the Thanksgiving holiday, and finished the relatively short book earlier this week. As I said in my post immediately below this one, it has had a deep and profound impact upon me.

In this first post, I’ll look at the case Jensen makes against porn, particularly the arguments he marshalls against the idea that porn isn’t a “big deal” and that “normal people” can use it without negative consequences for themselves, their relationships, and society as a whole. In the second post, I’ll respond to the charge against Jensen — reiterated by Courtney Martin – that his prose “reeks of self-hate.” Self-loathing is a common slur tossed at pro-feminist men, and deserves a response all of its own. In the third post, I’ll look at Jensen’s proposals about masculinity and sexuality, particularly his remarkable suggestion that we ground our sexual ethics not merely in pleasure, but in joy and in light.

Robert Jensen is one of a small group (others include Jackson Katz, Michael Flood, and Michael Kimmel) who are the dedicated public faces of the pro-feminist men’s movement. Jensen, a professor of journalism at Texas, wrote the marvelous Heart of Whiteness, about which I also ought to blog someday. Getting Off sees Jensen take an enormously brave step. Balancing thoughtful analysis with deep candor, he makes the most powerful case against pornography that I’ve read since the late Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, a book now more than 25 years old. And yes, Getting Off is dedicated to (among others) Dworkin herself.

Jensen starts by reminding us of what we already know: we live in a porn-saturated culture. Technological innovation has made the furtive peeps at father’s Playboy an unknown experience for most young people today. Jensen, born in 1958, describes his own adolescent fascination with pornographic magazines and the lengths to which he and his buddies would go to acquire porn. My own experience with porn was similar; I “discovered” it in 1979, when I was twelve. The porn that so indelibly marked (and marred) my nascent sexuality came in print with magazines like “Club International” and “Penthouse.” What’s available today online –even for free — is infinitely more vivid, infinitely more hardcore, and infinitely more interactive than it was in my youth or in Jensen’s.

We know all this of course. What we don’t know — or, as Jensen points out, what we don’t want to know — is how truly ugly pornography is. For a host of reasons ranging from denial to civil libertarianism to sheer horny curiosity, a great many voices across the spectrum are unwilling to name porn as one of the most corrosive influences on our culture and on our humanity. Continue reading ‘Part one of a series on “Getting Off”: masculinity, pornography, and the truth of what we don’t want to face’

Previewing a post on pornography, masculinity, and Robert Jensen: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 29, 2007
in Links, Men and Masculinity and Porn
. 11 Comments

I’ve spent part of my time this week scribbling out some thoughts about Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, the genuinely extraordinary new book from Robert Jensen, professor of journalism at the University of Texas.

Deo volente and the crick don’t rise, I’ll finish my review tomorrow and post it. In the meantime, Courtney Martin has her own thoughts up at Feministing, and the comment thread below her piece is very interesting. Courtney is clearly troubled by the book, both by its insights into a world she has deliberately avoided, and by Jensen’s radical proposed solution: the eradication of masculinity as a category of human identity. I’m less troubled — largely because I think Jensen is more right than Courtney would like to believe.

I’ll say this as a preview: this is the first non-fiction book I’ve read this year that’s made me weep. It’s the best thing I’ve read about pornography in years, and it functions brilliantly on many levels. It’s so good that as I read, at times fighting back tears, I cursed Robert Jensen for writing the book I would have longed to write. Whatever I publish on pornography and masculinity in the future will be heavily influenced by this book and my response to it. I’ll explain tomorrow, and in the meantime, check out Courtney’s post.

UPDATE: The thread at Feministing has a lot on the problem of fantasy, and Greg raises the issue below this post. Let me, as a prelude to what I’m gonna write tomorrow, offer these links to old things I’ve written:

Why Pornography Bothers Me More than Depictions of Violence

Some Very Long Thoughts on Fantasy and Masturbation

Saturday reprint: Courtly Love and Double Standards

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 10, 2007
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Christianity, Feminism, Porn and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 9 Comments

It’s a long holiday weekend, and I won’t be back to regular posting until Tuesday morning. In the interim, here’s a repost of something I wrote back in March 2005:

The comments on this post from last week about accountability have shifted to the topic of bad male behavior, particularly the sort that takes place when no other fellow is around. Mythago recently wrote:

Chivalry has always been about good manners towards ‘ladies,’ not to women, period. It’s as true in the modern day as it was when The Art of Courtly Love was written.

She’s right about the Art of Courtly Love. Andreas Capellanus, who wrote that famous medieval tract, argued for immense patience in pursuing women of gentle birth. As for peasants:

“If you love a peasant woman, praise her and force her–peasants don’t respond to gentle wooing.”

So much for seeing all women as one’s sisters in Christ! Capellanus makes it clear that the pursuit of courtly love is likely to be immensely frustrating for a man — which is why peasant women make such a convenient outlet for pent-up sexual desire.

Mythago is right when she suggests that nine centuries after Capellanus wrote his tract, the attitudes within it survive. Many of the male commenters on my recent posts about responsibility and propriety have implied that good manners are essentially reciprocal. Their thesis? If a woman dresses appropriately, she is deserving of respect in return. If she doesn’t respect herself or her community, then she forfeits her right to be respected. In other words, “nice” girls, “demure” girls, have the right not to be objectified and openly lusted for; “bad” women (you know, the bra-less ones, the ones in short skirts), deserve the wolfish stares from their brothers and resentment from their sisters. Continue reading ‘Saturday reprint: Courtly Love and Double Standards’