Archive for the 'Relationships' Category

Rebounds and transition figures: doing it right after a divorce

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2010
in Divorce, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Marriage and Relationships
. 4 Comments

Another email, from Mallory. She writes:

I was married at 27 to my college sweetheart. This man checked all of the boxes dreamed of on the surface - doctor, boy scout-esque from a nice family - all of the family, etc. were thrilled when we were married. However, quite quickly after the wedding things fell apart and he told me essentially that he was not ready to grow-up and had to go find himself. I picked up the pieces, moved to another country with a business opportunity, and started over.

I started dating a man that is very fun, we have a great time together; he’s one year younger, we are very attracted to each other, he stimulates me intellectually and I care about him a great deal. However, I do not see it going towards a serious relationship and/or marriage. This is primarily for a mis-match in ambition levels, he is not willing to move countries, and I am not convinced he is fully ready to take on the responsibilities of a relationship on that level (needless to say a big sticking point after the last relationship).

Currently I do not want to be married, but I am ready to care for someone deeply again.
Being in my 30s, divorced, but not interested in dating lots of men, I feel like it should be okay to have a lighthearted relationship - but I cannot quite shake this feeling of maybe looking like the overweight, middle aged comb-over guy in the red Porsche when dating someone I have no intention of being serious about.

When does it become counter productive to engage in flippant relationships? Am I listening to society too much, or not enough to my gut?

Though I am fond of marriage (I’ve done it four times), I don’t think lifelong monogamous commitments are the only sort of relationships worth pursuing. I’ve come to believe, instead, that at different seasons of our life we may need different sorts of relationships to help us grow. And one of the most important kinds of relationships we can have after a divorce is with a “transition figure” who can help us process the lingering wounds and doubts that almost always remain in the aftermath of the end of a marriage.

I’m not talking about using people. I’m not talking about relying on one’s own pain as an excuse to deal cavalierly and recklessly with another human being. One basic dating maxim for grown-ups: our past history of suffering doesn’t vitiate our responsibility to avoid hurting others. It’s not enough to simply say “I’m on the rebound, watch out!” and then, having broken the heart of the person with whom we rebounded, to exclaim “What did you expect? I was on the rebound!” Nothing we’ve endured gives us the right to disregard our responsibility to consider how a sexual relationship we’re having may affect the other person emotionally. Misleading another person into believing that what is temporary might turn out to be permanent is bad form indeed, particularly for those old enough to know better.

That said, I think there’s a distinction between a “rebound” and a “transition relationship”. The difference lies in three things: our willingness to assume complete responsibility for our own actions, our honesty — in both word and deed — with the other person about what we can and can’t offer, and our own internal clarity about what purpose this relationship plays in our life. If we’re scrupulous about these things, “transitional relationships” which are time-limited but intense can be enormously healing for those who have them. Continue reading ‘Rebounds and transition figures: doing it right after a divorce’

Reprint: On Rebuilding Trust

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 02, 2010
in Relationships
. 0 Comments

This post originally appeared in December 2007.

A regular reader asks:

I do have a question for you that you may be able to answer. I am wondering if it is possible to reconcile with a person where trust has been broken and be able to rebuild the trust back again. Have you any personal experience in this area that you can shed wisdom on?

I’m not a relationship expert: three divorces by age 35 are proof of that. That doesn’t stop me from offering advice and reflections, and it doesn’t stop people from asking. So with the standard caveat that my opinion is only that, an opinion, here goes.

I’m going to assume my reader is writing about reconciling with a romantic partner. When trust is shattered in a sexual relationship, it’s usually qualitatively different than it is in other friendships or among family members. But I’d like to touch on the loss — and the restoration — of trust in a variety of relationships, because I’ve got a considerable amount of hard-earned experience in this area.

I had my first major mental breakdown in April 1987, shortly before I turned 20. I had my last (God willing) in the summer of 1998, shortly after turning 31. Over that eleven-year period, I was hospitalized more than half a dozen times. I also struggled very publicly with a host of addictions. And I know full well that addicts break the hearts of those who love them, over and over again. My mother, father, brother, and sisters suffered more than anyone. None of my friends, lovers, or wives were part of my life for that entire period; I very successfully chased everyone who wasn’t bound to me by blood out of my life.

My lies were the standard ones: “I’m sober”, I would say — when I wasn’t. “I’m seeing a great therapist” — when I cancelled all my appointments. “The meds are helping” — when they weren’t. Above all, my most consistent lie was “I’m fine.” Anglo-Saxon reticence, and the concomitant dissembling it requires, were part of my family culture. I spent many years on the stage as a child, and my acting skills came in handy when it came time to cover up the pain, the despair, and the appalling acting-out behavior that characterized my life in my late teens and twenties. Continue reading ‘Reprint: On Rebuilding Trust’

“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Relationships and Youth
. 22 Comments

I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named May, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading ‘“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence’

When a “can” ought to mean a “should”: on men and empathy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2010
in Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 24 Comments

I got an interesting email from one of my regular commenters who uses the handle “Randomizer”. He sends me a link to this post at Overcoming Bias which references an intriguing study that appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin back in 2001: Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand . The abstract:

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Bold is mine.

For the second week in a row, someone sends me a link to promising research.

In plain English, the studies suggest that the notion that men lack the capacity for empathy — equivalent in degree to that more commonly displayed by women — is simply false. When motivated to put a dormant skill to use, the study suggests men can be every bit as intuitive as women. For a psych journal, the phrase “wiped out any difference” is very strong stuff indeed — it leaves no room for those who insist on men’s diminished capacity to love, to connect, and to care on which to stand.

So this raises the question that gets discussed at the Overcoming Bias site: if men can empathize every bit as well as women, why don’t they? Randomizer points to one of the commenters at OB, a fellow calling himself BD. BD writes:

(In the masculine) value system, empathy is not connected to caring for someone. It’s connected to believing that the person can’t care for themselves Or believing that the person is a threat. “Don’t ask me to treat you like a child. And don’t ask me to treat you like a boss whose volatile ego I have to tip-toe around.”

And there can be a “Golden Rule” thing going here as well. ” He may not want to treat her “like a child” because he doesn’t want to be treated “like a child” either.

With his peers, he can just relax and be himself. Male friendship and peerage is often a rough and tumble thing. It’s not to say that male friendship doesn’t have its own rules. Its just that significant empathy is not part of that. When he is dealing with people he cares about, he tends to default to his most comfortable and peer-like relationship model, which happens to feature minimal empathy…

I think BD is right in one sense, in that I think we do indeed teach men to associate empathy with the burden of managing someone else’s fragile emotions — a boss who needs placating, or a child who can’t yet self-regulate. But if he’s implying that men and women have different but equally valid interpretations of the purpose of empathy, I think that’s much more problematic. In BD’s formulation, men are taught to see empathy as a tool to be used in a certain select set of scenarios, two in particular: first, when a reward is available, such as from a boss (or, in the case of the study we’re citing, cash-for-empathic display); two, when dealing with someone needier and more vulnerable than themselves, such as a child or the victim of a particular tragedy. It is not, in other words, a relationship tool — indeed, in “guyland”, a relationship in which empathy is not required is far more egalitarian than one in which it is needed.

Here’s how culturally constructed masculinity warps us all: for far too many men, empathy gets associated with manipulation and dependency rather than intimacy. The message seems to be: You can have my empathy, or you can have my respect as my equal. But you can’t have both. I don’t think that marks a “healthy difference” between men and women. It’s absurd to imagine that we can sustain healthy relationships when one sex believes empathy is a necessary component of all our interactions and another sex believes it to be an unpleasant tactic, a tool to be employed in a few instances, most of which involve a hierarchy of power and respect.

So the good news: one more bit of evidence that the full spectrum of human emotion is available to every member of the species, regardless of biology. The study reinforces the truth that the reason so many members of each sex utilize less than that full spectrum is attributable to socialization and choice, not to physiology. But we need to do more than say, “Huh, isn’t that interesting”. We need to recognize that this is one of those instances where ability translates to obligation; if men can empathize, than I think it’s fairly clear that they should do so far more often than they do.

Why? Merely to make wives and girlfriends and sisters happier? No, though making relationships better is nothing at which to sneeze. It’s that in the end, all great cruelty is, as Timothy Findley so famously said, a failure of the imagination. And the kind of imagination at which men so often fail is not the ability to imagine alternate universes or other fantastical things — it is the simpler failure to imagine what another person feels. When men regard that kind of imagination as a tool or a burden rather than as a gift and a responsibility, they become the chief architects of human suffering. To refuse to empathize is to be complicit, in a way either large or small, in the ongoing great crime.

I’ve often said that one of my two or three favorite novels ever written is Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I’m hardly alone in my deep love of the book and its world view. And I’m hardly alone in trying to remember, always remember, the simple epigraph of the text: “Only connect.” That is true of prose and passion, it is true of Americans and Haitians, and it is true of husbands and wives.

We can do this. And if there was ever an instant when ability leads inexorably to obligation, I think this is it.

“I’ll show you!” Of fidelity, reciprocity, drunkenness, and fear

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 10, 2010
in Addiction and mental illness, Memories, Relationships, Sexual ethics and transformation and Sexuality
. 31 Comments

I got a note from a former student of mine last week. Sophrosyne writes:

I know it has been a while since I’ve spoke to you, but I am going to lose my mind or at least it feels like it. I have been dating this man for seven months and two weeks ago I made the mistake of driving drunk. This is an extremely sensitive issue for him because three years ago he lost a girlfriend (she got hit by a drunk driver while driving) and a best friend (similar scenario). I know it was a terrible mistake to make, it was something I’d never done before and am quite sure I will never, ever do again. I didn’t get caught or into an accident, and that is a miracle. But my boyfriend found out anyway.

Ever since the incident he has been very upset with me. He has remained in the relationship, but I feel that he is being very disrespectful. He has been hanging out with past lovers and ex-girlfriends, spending lots of time with them on the phone and in-person (something he had agreed not to do when we got together.) I don’t know what to do or think. He tells me he loves me, but I feel like I am being punished. I made the decision to give him one month as of February 1st to either try to forgive me and move forward or I will walk away from him.

I feel like a fool for tolerating his behavior, but at the same time I did make a mistake. In his mind, he feels that driving drunk is worse than cheating. I need advice…I am having difficulty sleeping, eating, studying, just functioning. I don’t know what to do.

Soph gets that she made a mistake, one that could have had deadly consequences. Since she gives her word it was a one-off, I don’t know that there’s much more that can be said about her drink driving incident.

Many years ago, when I was much younger and far more willful than I am now, I behaved similarly with a girlfriend of mine. “Ethel” and I had met in a sober living house, and despite warnings from those who knew our fragile state better than we, we embarked on an instant and intense relationship. We ended up spending eighteen months together on and off, moving into our own place when we were both thrown out of the sober living situation. As it turned out, I had an easier time getting sober than she did (though this was long before my last relapse in 1998). While I began to put weeks and months together, Ethel had a hard time staying clean for more than a few days at a time. For the first time in my life, I found myself in a co-dependent relationship with an addict whose disease was, at least in its obvious manifestations, worse than my own. I drove home from school each day, my stomach in knots, wondering if Ethel would be sober — and if not, in what condition she and our little apartment would be.

Eventually, I started cheating on Ethel. My rationalization was much the same as that of Soph’s boyfriend: I was giving myself some emotional protection from hurt by seeking consolation with others. Ethel found out (when it came to covering up my infidelities, I was about as subtle as a kibbutznik at a D.A.R. convention). We had volcanic arguments. I justified my cheating by pointing to her drinking, suggesting that if she wanted me to be faithful, she needed to be sober. I insisted that I was entitled to a quid pro quo relationship (I remember that even as I made it, the argument sounded false, ugly, and hollow.) Ethel pointed out that the thought of me sleeping around was hardly an encouragement to get sober. And on it went, month after month. I “cheated at” Ethel; she “drank at” me. It was one of the more painful relationships of my life, both because I was (despite my inability to live up to any sort of commitment) desperately in love with Ethel, and because I was choking on my own sense of fraudulence and narcissism.

Soph and her boyfriend aren’t quite where Ethel and I were. But it seems clear that he too is using the “quid pro quo” argument; he too is “cheating at” his girlfriend. Soph is not chronically drink-driving (something Ethel did with alarming regularity, even after her license was suspended), but she is being punished just the same. Of course, her boyfriend’s fears are powerful, linked as they are to his own painful memories of loss. Many of us respond to fear by trying to anesthetize ourselves, which is one reason why I so regularly cheated on Ethel. Flirtation and intrigue with others outside of our primary relationship, even if physical sex doesn’t take place, is a powerful prophylaxis against getting hurt — it is a marvelously passive-aggressive response. On some level, Soph’s boyfriend probably knows that he is dodging the issue and taking the easy way out, and I suspect that stings him.

Fidelity, for the umpteenth time, is not just a promise to a partner. It’s a promise to ourselves: a promise that we are not the sort of person who will quickly turn into a liar or a cheat. Obviously, if a relationship comes to a clear and final end, then the expectation of fidelity ends with it. But while a monogamous relationship continues, part of being a grown-up is not making one’s fidelity contingent on the other person’s day-to-day behavior. If my wife is cross with me, or annoys me in some way, I am not justified in seeking sexual or romantic solace with someone who will, ahem, “understand.” The whole “I’ll show you!” aspect of conditional monogamy is not only juvenile and reflective of an incomplete understanding of what a relationship requires, it is clear and incontrovertible evidence of fear and the inability to self-soothe. Soph’s boyfriend is entitled to be angry that she drove while drunk. He is entitled to share with her his own particular reasons for reacting so strongly to the incident. And she does owe him a promise that it won’t happen again.

But Sophrosyne doesn’t owe her beau her patience while he displaces his anger and anxiety into flirtations, intrigues, or worse with his exes. Her mistake is not a justification for his abrogation of his commitment to put all of his romantic and sexual energy into her. And despite her serious error, she has not lost her right to demand that he not only bring her all of that energy, but bring her his pain and fear and his truth as well.

“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.

Neither too much to expect, nor too much to ask: how Lesley Garner gets rape, marriage, and men all wrong

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 18, 2009
in Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Rape, aggression and violence and Relationships
. 105 Comments

Via Amber, whose blog I’ve long admired, I found this horrific English advice column and this blistering retort from M. Le Blanc.

A woman, Eva was raped by her boss while abroad on a business trip. Upon her return to the UK, her husband noticed something was wrong, and Eva told him the terrible story. She also discovered that the rapist had impregnated her; she made the difficult choice to keep the baby. Too upset at the prospect of raising another man’s child, the Eva’s husband left her, and has never seen the son to whom she gave birth. Seven years on, she’s still single — as is her ex-husband — and she’s written to a Telegraph advice columnist about the possibilities of reconciling. The advice columnist, Lesley Garner, is breathtakingly unsympathetic to her, writing:

You decided to continue with the pregnancy in the absolutely unrealistic expectation that your husband would be happy to bring up the child of another man, his wife’s rapist. This is a no-brainer, Eva. No man could contemplate this. He would have found your decision inexplicable.

M. Le Blanc, Amanda Hess, and many of the commenters at the Telegraph site, are appalled both with Garner’s dreadful analysis and the beastly behavior of Eva’s husband. Amber, with whom I generally agree, surprised me by sympathizing with the ex, rejecting Hess’ characterization of him as a “total dickwad”:

It is baffling to me how the same people who would (rightfully) snap if a female rape victim was told not to abort her pregnancy because she’d love the baby as soon as it was born, or that tons of women are stepmothers or social workers and thus raising other people’s kids is no big deal, are incensed at the idea that a man might not be able to embrace this situation.

Count me in the camp that labels Eva’s husband a complete and utter “dickwad”.

There is nothing remotely analogous about, on one hand, forcing a woman to carry to term, against her will, a fetus conceived as the result of a rape — and on the other, expecting a husband to support his wife’s decision without equivocation. Even in marriage, a woman’s body doesn’t become her husband’s property; he doesn’t get to be sovereign over her reproductive choices. Obviously, in terms of their shared sexual life, a couple should, ideally, make decisions together about every aspect of family planning. Real life, however, wreaks havoc with our ideals. Men still rape women, and sometimes those women get pregnant as a consequence. While it would be a rare married couple who would have discussed this potential scenario in advance, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect a husband like Eva’s to share his wife’s burden to the best of his ability — and to share in the joy and responsibility that comes when a child is born.

This doesn’t mean that a man whose female partner is raped isn’t entitled to the full spectrum of feelings that would seem natural, given the situation. He’s entitled to feel ambivalent about raising a child conceived in an act of violence. But he wasn’t raped, and he’s not carrying the child. To leave his wife because he “can’t handle” the constant reminder of what happened is to elevate his feelings above her, to suggest an indefensible false equivalence between the harm done to his wife and the harm done to him.

This is, in yet another nasty form, the old “myth of male weakness”. This version suggests, as Garner does, that men are incapable of bonding with a child not biologically their own. I know a great many adoptive dads, including some wonderful gay male couples who parent together, who would be flabbergasted to learn this. (Parenthetically, I’ve always thought that what makes Joseph, husband of Mary, a saint in the Catholic tradition is not his willingness to raise a son who is clearly not his own. That was his moral if not his legal obligation, and ought to be expected of any husband. What made him saintly was his willingness to stay in a marriage that would never be consummated, the lasting companion of the ever-Virgin!) It is not “asking too much” of husbands to expect them to stick by their wives following rape and an unwanted pregnancy — unless we believe, as Garner does, that the male ego is terribly fragile, and the male capacity to love so very small indeed. Continue reading ‘Neither too much to expect, nor too much to ask: how Lesley Garner gets rape, marriage, and men all wrong’

Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 28, 2009
in Class, Family, Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Feminist theory, Race and Relationships
. 20 Comments

The discussion below this post has grown heated, with the topic of debate being less the original post itself and more feminist epistemology and what is sometimes called “standpoint theory.” SamSeaborn quotes Elizabeth Andersen, who writes:

Feminist standpoint theory claims an epistemic privilege over the character of gender relations, and of social and psychological phenomena in which gender is implicated, on behalf of the standpoint of women.

Sam wants to know how that impacts my marriage (which I labeled as “feminist”), but he also seems to be asking how this “standpoint theory” affects the role of male allies in feminist settings. Though he kindly takes me at my word when I note that I don’t go through my married life with an apology for being male always on my lips, he wonders how a male feminist cannot help but defer to what, according to Andersen, is the “epistemic privilege” of a woman’s perspective. Sam gets a vigorous, and to my mind, very effective response, from commenters Oldfeminist and Mythago, and I recommend folks check out the whole thread.

I may be the son of two philosophers, and I may have done a graduate field in medieval scholasticism many moons ago, but I am no theorist. Phrases like “epistemic privilege” make my head hurt, and I must bite back the urge to plead, “But I am a bear of very little brain.” I’ve labored through Cixous and Irigaray and Butler because they’re important and necessary, but feminist theory ain’t my bag. I defer to the many wonderful folks in the blogosphere whose intellectual capacities exceed my own, and whose talent for explicating in plain English the difficult philosophical nuances of feminist theory is infinitely greater than mine.

That said, I do have some thoughts on standpoint theory and its practical application.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. In a relationship between two people who are of different sexes, classes, or ethnic backgrounds, it’s reasonable to assume that each person’s knowledge of the world will have been shaped in no small part by their status. Class and sex and race and faith are some of — but surely not the only — prisms through which we see and interpret the world. Patriarchy, the complex system through which male identity is privileged in an extraordinary number of ways, impacts everyone. Yes, as the famous phrase notes, it “hurts men too.” But one particular thing that patriarchy does is warp our understanding of everything around us, particularly things like power dynamics, sexuality, and how we communicate with one another. Feminists point out the deeply obvious: the class of persons most likely to be discriminated against by the system are also those most likely to be aware of the system itself. This “greater awareness” is the epistemic privilege to which Andersen refers.

Epistemic privilege means that in a heterosexual relationship, it is generally — though not universally — the case that the woman will see gender-based power imbalances more clearly than will her boyfriend or her husband. This isn’t because of “feminine intuition”, it’s because folks in an historically oppressed class are always required to be more aware of power dynamics than those who belong to the dominant group. The same epistemic privilege can occur in race and class relations, regardless of the sex of the people involved.

Obvious example: rape and parking lots. Both men and women are cognizant of the reality of rape, and most understand that it is men who generally do the raping and women who are generally the ones attacked. But because of his privilege, a man can walk into a parking lot by himself at night and forget about rape, because his maleness affords him the luxury of remaining unobservant of the possibility of sexual danger. A woman walking alone in a parking lot at night will have a different experience, rooted in her vulnerability as a member of a class targeted for sexual violence. Not only is she more vulnerable, but her very understanding of the issue is superior to that of a man walking in the parking lot. He has the privileged luxury of ignorance; she’s forced to reflect, constantly, on rape and its threat to her. That means that when the discussion of women’s vulnerability to assault comes up, women ought to enjoy “epistemic privilege” in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”’

How does a feminist ally fight fair? A follow-up on men and women’s anger

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 21, 2009
in Favorite Posts 2009, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 18 Comments

We’ve had more than 90 comments below this post examining the degree to which women’s wariness of men is justified. It’s a fairly good discussion, for which I am grateful.

I wrote a few years ago a post called Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger. An excerpt:

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

The first task of the pro-feminist male in this situation is to accept the reality and the legitimacy of the frustration and disappointment and anger that so many women have with men, and to accept it without making light of it or trying to defuse it or trying to soothe it. Pro-feminist men must work to confront their own fears about being the target of those feelings.

I’d like to say a bit more about how men can do this last bit, as it’s not something I addressed in the original piece. I don’t want to imply that I think that a feminist man simply “stands there and takes it”. One of the ideals of traditional American masculinity is of the man as “sturdy oak”, able to withstand any tempest, even that of a woman’s righteous anger. That comes dangerously close to reinforcing the notion that women are “naturally” more volatile (at least emotionally), perhaps even hysterical (a dangerous word, given its origins) — and that is a “real man’s” job to hold his ground, silently, in the face of what will be a formidable, but (it is to be hoped) brief feminine storm. Though I’d like to believe my readers of the original post didn’t infer that I was reifying this myth, it’s important to clarify how I think we ought to help men respond to women’s anger. Continue reading ‘How does a feminist ally fight fair? A follow-up on men and women’s anger’

Of iron, copper, and fighting fair: some thoughts on men and conflict in romantic relationships

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 04, 2009
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Men and Masculinity, Relationships and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 13 Comments

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day; she and her boyfriend of several months are “taking a break” from their relationship. He’s in his early thirties, she’s in her late twenties; in different ways, each carries the “baggage” of family, faith, and previous lovers.

The fella — I’ll call him “Gordy” — is a bit overwhelmed by the gal, “Calliope.” Gordy, apparently, does something that I very much remember doing in relationships when I was younger: retreat in the face of intense emotion, particularly in the face of a woman’s anger. Many young — and not-so-young — men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling a bit as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got — or he feels he hasn’t got — the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code”. And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.

I’ve been over this ground before in the three posts in the male transformation series. The three posts from the autumn of 2007 explain aspects of the problem — and the solution — in considerably more detail. But what I want to focus on today is Gordy’s need to “take a break” from the relationship, and the reasons that seem to undergird it. It’s entirely possible, of course, that “wanting a break” is code for “I really am tired of this relationship, and want to get out for good, but lack the courage to say so directly.” But from what I can tell, there’s something else at work. Gordy doesn’t want out; he has fallen in love with Calliope and wants to be with her. He also finds her — the complete package of Calliope-ness — to be more than a little overwhelming. He’s not calling an end so much as he seems to be calling for a time-out.

Let me say again (though my MRA critics don’t hear this) that I don’t think women are always blameless when heterosexual relationships go south. Women have their own lessons to learn — and in the case of sexist acculturation, it might be more apt to say that they have their own lessons to unlearn. But I write much more often about what men can and ought to do because, well, I’m a man. I’ve lived 42 years in a male body, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional relationship expert, I’ve lived a bit — and thought a lot — about the ways in which culturally constructed masculinity undermines our collective happiness and our ability to function intimately with other human beings. And so I focus more on what men can do, respecting the reality that women have had plenty of experience being told how to behave by the males in their lives. Continue reading ‘Of iron, copper, and fighting fair: some thoughts on men and conflict in romantic relationships’

A long post about dating, rejection, affirming and redirecting

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 02, 2009
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 219 Comments

The comment thread below this post from last Thursday is still active, and has taken a number of twists and turns. There’s been much discussion of the “seduction community”, lookism, privilege, and the difficulty in finding people to date. It’s been remarkably civil to boot. I think I’m gonna give out the “best comment thread of the year” award in December, and so far, this looks like the winner.

One comment jumped out at me, from “Eurosabra”, who wrote yesterday about the difficulty of meeting women:

…by the 50th sidewalk café, you’re feeling pretty tired and put-upon and wondering when you’re going to be seeing some of the mythical “female sexual agency” directed at you. So it’s a cart-horse problem, compounded by the fact that (at least in college) everyone is always constantly meeting people, it’s just that some people get…no results. And straight women’s means of showing interest are so indirect, because of that whole slut-shaming thing….

it really makes me feel like I have to put myself out there and hope, hope to be chosen, while initiating everything.

I’ve spent my share of time being quite tough on young men like Eurosabra, but having read enough of his comments, it’s clear that he’s not coming so much from a place of male entitlement as from a place of genuine hurt and disillusionment. And that hurt and disillusionment, that sense that meeting potential dates requires constant receptiveness to rejection, is widely felt among many men I know. Some lose all claim on sympathy with misogynistic tirades rooted in a sense of frustrated privilege. But others don’t claim that women are obligated to be attracted to them. They don’t secretly believe that they are God’s gifts to women. They’d just like to meet women with whom they could perhaps have a relationship, and the system for meeting potential dates seems so opaque, so difficult to understand, so set up to guarantee disappointment after disappointment after disappointment. No wonder some of these men retreat into pornography addiction, or turn to the slick purveyors of seduction techniques. No wonder that others just, well, get very sad and a bit cynical. Continue reading ‘A long post about dating, rejection, affirming and redirecting’

“Feminism made women too picky”: more on male rage, sexual entitlement, and backlash

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2009
in Men and Masculinity, Money, Relationships and Working
. 154 Comments

I can never figure out the blogosphere. I start blogging less frequently, and my traffic — and comments — go up. May 2009 has seen my highest number of visitors this year, despite a notable reduction in the number of posts. Go figure. Perhaps less is more?

Lots of discussion below last Thursday’s post, much of it both civil and thoughtful. I’m appreciative. Once again, the theme of male insecurity has been raised and discussed; once again, we find ourselves discussing the topic of feminism’s impact on men. Reading the comments, however, I’m struck by something that seems both logical and ever more apparent: one source of the resentment so many men seem to feel towards feminism and what it has wrought lies in their perception that it has made women less, rather than more, sexually available to them.

We recently debated the “problem” of men “never feeling hot.” Commenters of all sexes shared painful stories of feeling unattractive and unwanted. No question, it’s hard to live with the sense that one is physically undesirable, particularly in our beauty-obsessed culture. The psychic toll that sense takes on men and women alike is real and undeniable. But where it gets really ugly (intended word) is when we see flashes of male entitlement, part of what is often called the “Nice Guy” syndrome. That entitlement manifests as the angry, indignant claim certain men make that women “should” see past their physical shortcomings and their social ineptness: Why can’t they see what a nice guy I am? Why are women such superficial bitches? Many women have been on the receiving end of hostile, sometimes whiny tirades such as these. Whatever sympathy might be possible for the unlovely and the awkward vanishes utterly in the face of such astounding entitlement.

I wrote last fall against the tired old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” thesis peddled by an array of social conservatives from Brad Wilcox to Kay Hymowitz. The thesis is that men “need to be needed”, and in the absence of feeling needed (by women) they will behave badly. Therefore, women need to make themselves vulnerable and dependent, forcing men (or giving them the opportunity) to take charge, to play the role of the knight-in-shining-armor, to feel indispensable. To listen to the right-wingers tell it, once men are given the sense that they are indispensable, they will shape up and fly right, illegitimacy and crime will vanish, the rise of the oceans will cease, and all God’s children will say “Amen.” Or something like that. Of course, in order for men to feel indispensable, women will need to surrender, become docile and nurturing rather than independent and ambitious. We’ve heard this hooey a million times before, but like supply-side economics, this belief in the “responsibility for vulnerability” transaction remains a difficult bogeyman to slay. Continue reading ‘“Feminism made women too picky”: more on male rage, sexual entitlement, and backlash’

Does shyness change the rules? A response to Luisa and Hector

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2009
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Flirting and Relationships
. 40 Comments

In a comment below yesterday’s brief post which quoted from a new sci-fi anthology, Luisa wrote:

A lot of sexually confident young women are attracted to nerdy, geeky guys, particularly if they’ve got that “nerdy in a hot way” thing going. I’m in a relationship with a woman, but sometimes get crushes on this sort of guy myself! Does the sexual confidence differential that favors the student somehow compensate for the academic power differential in this case?

And Hector chimed in:

It’s true that people vary a lot in their sexual confidence as well as in other, more visible axes of distinction like age, wealth, or power. Sometimes I feel like Hugo is unable to grasp that there are some of us, men and women, who have very little sexual confidence, regardless of how much ‘power’ we might have in other regards.

I need to repost something I wrote nearly five years ago: Loving the Bookish and the Cool, in which I made it quite clear that I was hardly a model of masculine confidence as a youngster:

I was an introverted, clumsy, bookish, unathletic, slightly chubby teen boy. I was teased and harassed throughout my elementary and junior high school years. I found solace in two places: books and the theater. I spent years working with a community theater group as a kid, and it was in drama that I first found “folks like me” who felt like misfits. Most of my good friends were girls — and boys who were on their way out of the closet! I was not remotely good-looking. I had unrequited crushes on several of my female friends, who thought I was “nice, but…” I had only one straight male friend in high school, and even that was often a tense and ambivalent relationship… I think my bona fides as a certifiable geek are in place!

Much as changed in the quarter century since I began to emerge from awkward adolescence, but it’s not as if I’ve completely forgotten what it was like to be paralyzed by self-doubt. And whatever later “success” I enjoyed with women did not erase the memories of what it was to feel undesirable, inarticulate, and at a complete loss as to how to negotiate romantic and sexual terrain.

One thing I learned: it was not anyone else’s job to do for me what I felt unable to do for myself. To put it another way, my geekiness wasn’t a woman’s problem to solve. It is true that my first girlfriend in high school asked me out (I was too scared to make that first move). I was a virgin, she wasn’t. But I learned quickly that fear is not a justification for passivity. While I had no reason to be ashamed of my shyness, I did have an obligation to learn to be more assertive. And among other things, I also learned that whatever frustration I had felt as a consequence of feeling unattractive and geeky and unwanted was not my girlfriend’s pack to carry. I remember feeling those brief flashes of anger, flashes which I think are quite common among those who end up as men’s rights activists, when I thought about my years of feeling unattractive and unwanted. And my first lover was blessedly assertive enough to make it abundantly clear that while I was entitled to my feelings, I was not entitled — ever — to be desired by others. I wasn’t owed the feeling of being wanted, nor was I owed any particular deference because of my fears and inexperience. Continue reading ‘Does shyness change the rules? A response to Luisa and Hector’

Scarleteen article up

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 22, 2009
in Grief, Links, Relationships and Youth
. 0 Comments

I’ve long been a fan of Scarleteen, and now I’ve co-authored a short piece with the sublime Heather Corinna. Check out Boys do Cry: How to Deal with a Breakup Like a Man.

“My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 07, 2009
in Divorce, Favorite Posts 2009, Friendship, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 23 Comments

I’ve been thinking lately about some friends of mine, getting a divorce after more than a decade of marriage. Children are involved, but the two spouses are as amicable as one could hope to expect. What is clear, however, is that the husband and the wife each have very different support networks — or more accurately, that the wife has a fairly strong support network of family and friends, and the husband has virtually no one. And looking at the two of them is a reminder of one of the particularly unfortunate ways in which we structure white American middle-class masculinity; too often, not only is a wife a man’s best friend, she is his only friend.

We live, after all, in a culture which shames displays of male vulnerability. Though some sociologists detect signs of a shift among younger men, millions of boys in this country still grow up with the “guy code” and its rules about toughness, competitiveness, and a steadfast refusal to cry. Even those young men who do everything they can to avoid playing by the “guy rules” — the sensitive, bookish lads, let’s say — find it difficult to find other men with whom they can be open, vulnerable, and safe.

A great many young women have had this experience: they’ve been dating a fellow for a while, things have started to get serious. A fight happens, or perhaps the dude has a setback of some sort or another. One night, he breaks down in front of her, surprising them both with his sudden vulnerability. He may say something like “This is the first time I’ve cried in years” or “I’ve never cried like this in front of someone before, not since I was a kid.” Now, it’s possible that he’s just being manipulative, seeing how far this kind of emotional flattery will take him. But dollars to doughnuts, there’s a good chance that he’s being honest — it’s only in romantically and sexually intimate relationships that many men find the chance to be vulnerable.

One rather flippant but generally sound piece of advice I gave (and still do give) in youth group about sex: “Don’t get naked until you’re ready to get naked”, meaning that in relationships, it’s often wise to have some degree of congruence between emotional and sexual intimacy. Generally speaking, emotional intimacy is a good precondition for sex; the danger lies in the attempt to reverse cause and effect, and using sex as a way of generating enduring intimacy. But of course, for many men, sexual intimacy is a kind of trailhead into some deeper and more concealed parts of themselves. This doesn’t mean that heterosexual men can only trust those women with whom they are sleeping, but it does mean that sex gives a kind of permission for a man to be vulnerable. (If I had a dollar for every woman who has ever asked me if it was “normal” for men to cry after sex, I’d have enough to take my family out for a nice vegan dinner. Many women are floored by these sudden post-coital displays of strong emotion; though not universal, it’s more common than many think.) Continue reading ‘“My wife is my best friend”/”My wife is my only friend”: the Guy Code, and the inability to get naked without getting naked’