Hugo Schwyzer

I’m headed back from Russia; hope to have some fresh posts up next week. This post originally appeared in March 2007.

One strand of feminist thinking about male oppression is that men are rarely oppressed as men. Those who advocate this stance argue that black men are oppressed for their blackness, not their maleness; Muslim men for their faith, not their sex; inmates for ther status as prisoners, not their biological equipment. They also argue that authentic oppression requires a dominant oppressing caste whose identity is distinct from those whom they are oppressing: in other words, whites can oppress blacks, but blacks can’t oppress whites because of an unequal power differential. And blacks can’t oppress blacks because the dynamics of oppression are always the dynamics of oppressing what is Different, what is Other.

New, happily enough, is smarter than that simplistic reading. Most importantly, she notes that in certain instances, the oppressed can be complicit with their own oppression. A valuable and interesting discussion follows in the comments at Alas.

I am not a theorist. I’m not an intellectual at all, really, though I’ve played the part of one for a couple of decades. (I sometimes describe myself, self-deprecatingly, as the least intellectually curious Ph.D I know.) But I do think that feminists and male feminist allies need to have these sorts of thoughtful discussions, and I’m glad that folks like Amp host and provoke them.

On a less theoretical level, I am intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I spend a lot of time reading the literature of many “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. I spend a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce (I am, if nothing else, an expert on starting over.) And I mentor a lot of young male students and boys from my youth group at church. And in conversations with many of these boys and men, I hear “narratives of helplessness” emerging.

From the older, angrier voices of the so-called MRAs, the narrative describes a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack”, which is why many — not all — men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.

There’s not much point in telling these men, “you know, you’re an oppressor more than you are oppressed”. The “you’ve sinned more than you’ve been sinned against” trope doesn’t go over well!. These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel – often — impotent. And too often, our feelings become facts. Too often, we conveniently ignore the ways in which we played the part of volunteers, not victims. Too often, we deny our own complicity in our own misery.

Many men make the mistake of equating the role of the oppressor with a sense of personal fulfillment. If they really were oppressing women, they assume, if they really were part of a dominant class, they’d experience a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction. After all, if there really was a patriarchy, isn’t it supposed to benefit men? If men really did systematically take part in the dehumanization and degradation of women, wouldn’t more men feel the tangible benefits of that oppression for themselves? In other words, they ask the plaintive question over and over again: “How can I be an oppressor when I feel unhappy and powerless?” If most men are leading lives of “quiet desperation”, then surely those same men cannot also be agents of injustice. Right? So goes this line of thinking, or more accurately, this line of emotional reactivity.

Ten years ago, I began three interrelated journeys: I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I drank my last drop of alcohol, and turned to a Twelve Step program for recovery from my various forms of acting out. And I began to work to do more than espouse a superficial egalitarian philosophy — I began to make the effort to match my language and my life, to live a life of radical justice. Now it’s true that alcohol hasn’t passed my lips in nearly a decade, but I’ve had plenty of slips and falls on my walk with Christ. I’ve had quite a few struggles as I’ve sought to live in to an authentic pro-feminism. Growing up and taking responsibility isn’t easy.

One thing my faith, my feminism, and my recovery program all taught me: I was the architect of my own adversity. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t blame my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t blame my genetic inheritance for my predisposition to become an addict, and I couldn’t blame my hormones for my chronic infidelities. I certainly couldn’t blame the women I’d married. My misery was a result of a series of choices I made. Hormones and family history helped shape those choices, but the final decisions were always mine. I came to realize that my sense of my own helplessness was an illusion, one I used to justify my bad behavior and one I used to justify a chronic refusal to change.

It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression. The older lads who torment a younger were themselves tormented when they were his age. The “be a sturdy oak” rule, a rule that teaches men to be alienated from their own inner emotional terrain, is one that is almost entirely enforced by other males. The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.

The first task of authentic men’s work is helping boys and men get in touch with their own ancient wounds. Men need to re-feel the old injuries inflicted upon them. They need to rediscover the tears they suppressed. They need to go beneath the anger (most men have a considerable amount of anger not too far from the surface) to the root cause of their pain. And once they’ve dragged all that garbage out, then they need to be encouraged to understand themselves as active agents with a choice:

“So your father never showed you how to be there for his family? That’s terribly painful. But your father’s script isn’t yours. If you follow his example, it is not because it is your ‘destiny’: it’s because you are consciously ignoring alternatives. If you do to others what was done to you, you have become not only an oppressor, but a victimizer who has made a decision to be one.”

This is true in the big things and in the little things. The fact that we don’t raise men to be as in tune with their own emotions, to be as perceptive and intuitive as their sisters, doesn’t mean that men are destined to be shallow and obtuse. It’s appropriate for a grown man to express frustration when his own vocabulary for his feelings isn’t as deep and broad as his female partner’s; it’s not acceptable for him to shrug and say “Well, it’s the way I was raised” or “Well, that’s just the way my brain is wired.” To say those things is to be complicit; to insist on one’s own inability to transform because of one’s biology or one’s childhood is to buy into the seductive lie of our own helplessness.

I’m not big on self-acceptance. Really, I’m not. What I’m big on is self-love. Too much self-acceptance leaves me believing the idea that I’m okay as I am, even when I’m not particularly happy and I’m not making the world a better place. Self-love reminds me I’m a precious child of God. Heck, I’m God’s favorite! (And so are you, you, you, and you.) Self-love reminds me I’m worthy of joy, but that the world doesn’t owe me happiness. Self-love reminds me I am called to share with others, to live in community with others, to work to change and transform and heal the world and myself. My Jewish friends call this mandate tikkun olam. The Christians I worship with call it building the Kingdom.

But we can only heal the world and build the Kingdom when we know we have been given the power to do it. And if we buy into the lie of our helplessness, our oppression, our victim status, the world doesn’t change. We stay miserable, or maybe just vaguely dissatisfied. Our relationships are, at best, just okay. And we settle for so much less than we could have.

This post first appeared in October 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading ‘Reprint: Monogamy, Memory and Desire’

This post first appeared in October 2007.

Donald, a 28 year-old Christian, writes:

The question I have to pose is: Is it reasonable to expect that my girlfriend (23) should let me have more time by myself?

Being an introverted person I need time alone to recharge, and also after having so many years of my time being *my* time, this is a drastic change for me. Is this normal in relationships? I don’t have any experience to gauge it against, so maybe it is. But I need to work out how to arrange more time to ‘retreat to my cave’ or else I think I’m going to fall over from exhaustion physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I chuckled a bit reading this. The clear implication from Donald’s letter is that he and his gal are not sleeping together in either sense of the word; presumably they are waiting until marriage. In an odd way, the commitment the two of them seem to have to chastity exacerbates the problem; if Donald was sleeping over at his girlfriend’s place regularly, that would eliminate the problem of her forlornness every evening when he left. (She might be clingy in the mornings too, but his need to go to work might carry more weight.) But of course, I’m not going to recommend that they begin spending the night together as a a solution to their dilemma.

Donald seems like a nice guy (lower-case, as opposed to the “Nice Guys” whom we regularly excoriate.) And it’s hard for someone who has people-pleasing instincts and little serious relationship experience to avoid feeling guilty when he happens to be the one who wants to spend less time together. It is almost axiomatic that whatever the activity (spending time together, sex, etcetera), whichever person in the relationship has the lower desire also has the greater power. And it’s not a lot of fun to choose, as Donald feels he has to choose, between disappointing someone he cares for and depriving himself of much needed “down time.”

Those of us who come out of Christian backgrounds often have a particularly hard time setting boundaries in relationships. Those who are “cradle Christians” or adolescent converts are often deeply attached to the idea that “true love” is always sacrificial. Donald might know his Scripture well — he’s called to love his wife (or the woman who might someday be his wife) as Christ loved His church, giving himself up for her. I know a lot of young Christians who take that language very seriously indeed. And when your notions of “true love” mix in the desire for romantic fusion with the theological language of endless sacrifice, it’s fairly obvious you’re gonna have a hard time setting limits.

I know lots of young Christians who are “waiting” to have sex. Like Donald, they do date, and often find themselves in intensely emotional relationships. It is possible to be deeply in love and deeply committed without having sex, or at least, without having intercourse. (Lots of young Christians draw the line at “everything but”, something I’ve endorsed. See: Between the Already and the Not-Yet: a Long Post on Pre-marital Sexuality and Doing “Everything But.”) Sometimes, I think that those who are practicing pre-marital chastity often have more unrealistic expectations of what love should be than do their less-restrained counterparts.

It takes a lot of idealism to “wait” — and that idealism often transfers over into some wildly unhealthy ideas about how conflict ought to be negotiated. Those who do have a sexual component to their relationship quickly discover that in any lasting romance, desire fluctuates and is rarely equally present. They learn to compromise (or so one hopes). The “higher-desire” partner learns patience, and learns not to nag or pressure or sulk; the “lower-desire” partner gets to work through his or her own guilt. It’s good, healthy stuff: Love 101. Chaste Christians put off the conflict over unequal libidos, but often run into the very sort of problem that Donald is writing about — apparently incompatible levels of desire for time together. Continue reading ‘Reprint: “Me time”, introversion, and incompatible desire’

This post first appeared in March, 2006.

In a comment below last Friday’s post on student crushes, Ryan writes:

There is, also, a reciprocal phenomenon that few of us talk about: the crush on the student. Let me first explain what I mean by crush, here, because it’s almost explicitly not sexual. Lord knows that my sex life was awkward enough at that age–I certainly wouldn’t want to revisit it with a 15 years older body. But there are students with whom I become temporarily fascinated. Just as students find that there can be something intoxicating about the presence, the experience, the passion of someone at the front of the classroom, there is something similarly invigorating about the potential, the excitement, the newness of a really compelling student. I regularly develop these crushes. They’ve never grown into anything more than an occasional email correspondence after the student has gone, but the crushes do go both ways, and they more we try to divorce them from taboo sexuality (which seems to have little to do with it at all), the more we can address what they are, which is excitement about the very act of teaching and learning, personified in teachers and students who seem to embody those ideals.

An excellent idea for a follow-up post!

Like Ryan, I scrupulously avoid sexualizing my students.  (Frankly, at this point in my life, that’s not difficult to do.)  But like Ryan, I get an occasional crush on a young (or not so young) student.  Not only are these crushes not sexual or romantic, they also aren’t primarily about my ego, either.

I mentioned this topic to a colleague yesterday (I’d sent her the first post on student crushes), and she laughed at me.  "Hugo, you just like the students who soak up your every word.  You get crushes on your proteges as extensions of yourself.  You’re such a narcissist!" I was hurt, and I told her so.  Lord knows, I am relentless in my self-criticism — but after reflecting for some time on what she said, I’m convinced my colleague got it wrong.

What I mean by a crush on a student is this: every once in a while, no more than once or twice a year, I will have a young man or a young woman in one of my classes whose life and ideas and personal growth becoming powerfully interesting to me. I can’t always tell who it’s going to be, mind you!  It’s not automatically the "best and the brightest", and it certainly (I can’t stress this enough these days) has damn all to do with physical attractiveness.  It can happen equally often with men or women.  But suddenly, often out of the blue, I will find myself caring desperately about that one particular student’s development.  I daydream about that student, and look forward eagerly to their office visits and to their emailed questions and the stories they tell about their lives.

I know lots of my students read this blog, so let me be clear about something: you are all precious to me. I rejoice when you do well, I agonize when you don’t (and I wonder what I can do to help you do better.)  I think about you more than you realize, and even though you surely imagine that you are just a sea of faces and names to me, please know that you are far more than that.  I take seriously my obligation to teach all of you, to challenge you, to stimulate you.  And I worry, more often than you know, that I am failing you.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: student crushes, in reverse’

One more reprint before I boogie off to Atlanta. This one comes from November 14, 2006.

A colleague of mine (a poli sci prof) and I were chatting in the hallway yesterday, talking about last week’s election.  She and I are both solid liberals, and we expressed our satisfaction and relief at the national and local results.  And then she said something interesting: "You know, as much as it pains me to admit it, some of my best and brightest students are the most politically conservative.  They often seem more articulate and passionate than the others."  I agreed that all things considered, my experience in recent years had been the same.

No, I’m not going to make the argument that the most intelligent and insightful of students are natural conservatives.  Rather, I’m convinced that most young people are, at heart, naturally rebellious against authority.   Though Pasadena was once a reliably Republican town, it is so no longer.  And I know full well that with a few exceptions, my colleagues on this campus are reliably and nearly uniformly left-wing.   Oh, there’s the odd Libertarian or two, and I have one colleague who still hasn’t outgrown his fascination with Ayn Rand.  (This is a sign, mind you, of developmental disability.  When you’re 19, you are permitted to find the Fountainhead inspiring and brilliant.  If you still find it so when you’re 39, instead of seeing it correctly as turgid, overwrought garbage, then you are experiencing some form of mild intellectual retardation.)  Many of my senior colleagues are veterans of the civil rights or "brown power" movements.   We sit around sometimes and swap stories of various protests we’ve been involved in over the years.  I know of only one tenured member of my department who voted for Bush in ‘04; he was not only outnumbered by the Kerry voters but by the Nader voters as well.

Bottom line: it’s tough to rebel on this campus by moving to the left.  On the other hand, "coming out" as a young conservative allows you the wonderful thrill of tweaking the noses of your elders, a temptation that many of the young find difficult to exist.    In my childhood, lefties drove around with bumper stickers that said "Question Authority."  Well, their children and grandchildren are doing just that — except that in order to do so in a truly satisfying way, they’ve got to challenge their mostly left-wing teachers and professors.  Not for one second will I concede the intellectual superiority of conservative ideas or values; I merely acknowledge that on campuses like my own, it’s "more fun" to be a young Republican thanks to the cachet of counter-cultural rebelliousness that it carries.  Trust me, I’m not going to spoil the fun for these lil’ right-wing whipper-snappers; if they like, I’ll happily play the liberal foil for them.

Continue reading ‘“Bless your lil’ right-wing heart”: loving me some young conservatives (reprinted)’

Reprint of a post from April 2008.

It’s a crazy midterm-y type of day, and I don’t have much time in which to post. Yesterday’s post about having “so much love to give” struck a nerve with some folks. Hilary writes in response:

I’ve been reminiscing about what I could have done better as a girlfriend in my previous relationship, what I would change if I could go back, etc. My list of changes includes more sex, more time/work/reciprocity invested, more communication, less arguments, less jealousy, more love. Shit, that’s a lot of changes. I’ve learned a lot about myself and I feel I’ve vastly matured as a feminist, an independent, single woman, and a girlfriend. But I’m a bit nervous about my feelings of seeking to be the perfect girlfriend. I guess what I’m afraid of is being left, being cheated on, being criticized, because I know what all of that feels like and if only I could be the perfect girlfriend, that wouldn’t happen…right? What also scares me is that I’m not wondering to myself what I’ll get out of the relationship. Rather, I’ve been wondering what I can give to the relationship.

Conventional relationship advice to someone in Hilary’s position would applaud her focus on what she will do differently in her next relationship. After all, it seems mature and commonsensical to focus on self-improvement, on learning from past mistakes, and so forth. I’ve said a time or nine that one of the chief purposes of relationship — particularly an intimate and enduring one –is to serve as a vehicle for our personal growth. Given that we all know the dangerous old axiom “‘Tis better to give than to receive”, Hilary — and those like her — have nothing to worry about, right?

The problem, of course, is that as Hilary herself recognizes, her desire to be the “perfect girlfriend” is rooted in a fantasy that her perfection will ensure she will never be disappointed, betrayed, or left. Many of us, men and women alike, imagine that if we could just do things a little bit better, we could control how everyone else reacts to us. As anyone who has struggled with people-pleasing knows, the great dream of every people-pleaser is to be able to orchestrate everyone else’s emotional responses. “If I say things in just the right way”, the people pleaser imagines, “my boyfriend (girlfriend, spouse, mother, etc.) will follow the script I’ve written for them.” Continue reading ‘“If I were better, he would never leave”: reprinting a post about romantic illusions’