Archive for the 'Top Ten in 2007' Category

Top Ten in 2007: the best five

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 17, 2007
in Top Ten in 2007
. 4 Comments

Last week, I offered the posts I’ve ranked 10 to 6 of my top ten in 2007; today I offer my top five. I might well decide on another day that these belong in a different order, or another post belongs instead — but I’m ready to commit this list to posterity, whatever that may mean. The other finalists can be found here.

5. What’s in it for men? (June 21) Key excerpt:

I’m a feminist because I want to create a world where men and women alike can realize their potential; I’m a feminist because I believe that our potential is not directed or confined by our chromosomes or our secondary sex organs. My penis and my Y chromosome do not destine me to be unreliable, predatory, and emotionally inarticulate. My wife’s uterus and her estrogen do not limit the horizons of her professional or athletic ambition. Feminism is, as we’ve all heard, the radical notion that women are people. But it’s also the radical notion that men are people too, complete human beings, with the same range of emotions and the same capacity for empathy and self-control as any woman.

4. “Fat”, “Slut”, “Selfish”: a note on the three great fears (June 7) Key excerpt:

The epithets “fat” and “slut” have great power to wound. They sting young women when another person slaps them on, but they do far greater damage once they worm their way into one’s own internal conversation. But as awful as these words are when they are used to hurt another, or when they are used in relentless, ugly self-deprecation, they aren’t as debilitating as “selfish.” When it comes to what incapacitates (or at the least, handicaps) so many of the girls and women with whom I work, it’s the tremendous fear that by following their own bliss, by carving out space for themselves, by seeing their own happiness as a fundamental good, they are disappointing others and thinking too much about themselves.

3. Not just consent but enthusiasm: some notes on college sex workshops and stoplights (July 19) Key excerpt:

A dangerous line I sometimes use: “The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”. It’s dangerous because it’s shocking, and of course, it’s dangerous because it twists the purely legal meaning of the term “rape.” But from the standpoint of one who cares desperately about the well-being of young people, my goal in offering workshops like these is not merely to prevent sexual assault that meets the legal standard of a criminal act. My goal is to prevent that, of course, but to also offer shy and uncertain young people tools to prevent them from having bad sex characterized by obligation, confusion, and detached resignation. I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober “Hell, yes!” is, in the end, just a “no” in another form.

2. Against predatory evangelism: thinking about Chris Clarke, the life to come, and how we share our faith (February 8) Key excerpt:

Chris and I both love the rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. He hikes them with what seems like reverence; I tend to attack them with hyper tenacity, measuring my fitness on their slopes. We both love animals, and we’ve both lost creatures whom we adored within the past year. And when it comes to the great questions, the ones about life and death and the possibility that our souls endure, sentient and unique, beyond this world — Chris and I have different answers.

And because I know he and I have different answers, I don’t try and comfort him in his vulnerabilty with my answers. Authentic Christian evangelism is not predatory. Authentic Christian evangelism doesn’t see the grief of those who don’t share our faith as a “special opportunity” to do some witnessin’! And far too many of my brothers and sisters in Christ make this obnoxious error.

1. Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary: a retreat report and a long meditation on girls, pressure, parents, and people-pleasing (March 12)

Key excerpt:

Thanks to the remarkable success of several waves of American feminism, the girls I work with today have more opportunities than virtually any generation before them. Though they have to confront a misogynistic backlash that has taken root in many aspects of our dominant culture, they have the chance to achieve more and do more and enjoy more than their mothers and grandmothers. But we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation. We’ve sucked the joy right out of their over-programmed, over-monitored, over-achieving little lives. True feminism and true Christian faith are absolutely congruent in their mutual opposition to the idea that young women ought to live up to an ever-more demanding set of duties and commitments.

Top Ten in 2007: the bottom half

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 14, 2007
in Top Ten in 2007
. 3 Comments

For the fourth consecutive year, I’m following a tradition, started by Bob Carlton, of putting up links to what I’ve chosen as my best (or most significant) posts of the year. Links to the 2004-2006 selections can be found here. I encourage other bloggers, particularly reasonably prolific ones, to pick a Top Ten (or a Top Five, Top Three, etc) of their own posts.

In ascending order, here are posts 10 through 6; the Top Five of 2007 will appear next week.

10. Meat, Dairy, Porn: some preliminary thoughts on women, dieting, veganism, guilt, pleasure, and exploitation (May 7). Key excerpt:

As many others have pointed out, there’s a link between patriarchal exploitation of women and human exploitation of animals. Men have used women to do unpaid work for millenia, and humans have used animals in the same fashion. The bodies of women are seen as “fair game” (a hunting reference) for predatory men, and pornography celebrates the idea that men are entitled to take delight (visual or otherwise) in the flesh of women who have little or no say in the matter. The meat industry teaches us that cows and pigs and fish exist solely to bring delight to our taste buds and satisfaction to our bellies. In patriarchal culture, the bodies of women and the bodies of animals exist to be consumed. Feminist veganism rejects the exploitation and abuse of living things; it counsels radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed…

9. A very long post about Los Angeles, an Eagles song, nationalism, history, self-reinvention and the “club versus country” debate (January 30)

What makes me a Los Angeleno in my mindset is my fascination with self-reinvention. I love that I am surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, who call somewhere else their truest home — but have nonetheless come here, to this basin with its beaches and valleys and hills — in order to start something new. They’ve come here to escape the burdens and obligations of the past, the sort that linger in the old places even after the old people have gone. They’ve come here to escape the “things are the way they are” mindset. They’ve come here to replace the fatalism and superstition of the old places with a relentless optimism about their own potential and the possibility of global transformation. They’ve come here to get away from the ghosts of Holocausts and World Wars and rigid class distinctions. They’ve come here to run on mountain trails upon which their ancestors never set foot.

8. Called to become like Christ: a long post about John Stott, following Jesus, and male transformation (August 8) Key excerpt:

Talking about the Christian duty to pursue Christ-like perfection brings us quickly to a seeming paradox. We’re called to become like Jesus — but a central part of His message is forgiveness for those (surely including ourselves) who regularly and repeatedly fall short of the mark. What we’ve got to do, it seems, is hold two things in simultaneous tension: the knowledge that we are all loved, just as we are, even if we never change — and the knowledge that we are called and required to do the achingly hard work of relentlessly changing ourselves and the world.

Sometimes, I imagine Jesus saying something like this to me: “Hugo, I love you just as you are. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’re doing or thinking or saying, I couldn’t love you any more than I already do. No matter what, no matter what, I adore you. But I long for you to change and grow; I’m calling you to follow me and to feed my lambs.”

7. Restraining the ego and leaving doors unopened: a note about crushes, flirtation, and the “desire to know” (April 10) Excerpt:

I can’t think of a more tempting — and more disastrous — reason to begin any love affair than “curiosity.” When I was younger, I cloaked neediness and compulsiveness in the language of intellectual (or at least romantic) curiosity. Time and again, I pursued someone because I was desperately curious to know certain things: Could I “have” them? Did they “want” me as I “wanted” them? What would it be like to “be” (however briefly) with someone “like that”? Firmly committed to the lie that “experience is always the best teacher”, I attempted to justify some fairly unjustifiable behavior with the explanation that I had “an insatiable desire to know.” (This is a particularly common trait, I know, among academics — many of whom are notorious for petty affairs and infidelities. We exalt the pursuit of knowledge above all other virtues, and periodically find it all too easy to confuse the gratifying of our own ego with the acquisition of genuine understanding.)

6. “A son, not a husband”: some very long thoughts about marriage in a roundabout response to Jill (June 14)

Key excerpt:

A good friend of mine, several years older than Jill, is recently divorced. She pledges never to remarry, saying: “In the end, most men expect women to take care of them once they’re married. I don’t mean financially, I mean enotionally. I’m just tired of thinking about someone else’s needs all the time, particularly an adult’s. I’m prepared to take care of a baby. But I don’t want my first-born to be my second child!”

My friend isn’t describing every American man. But she’s describing all too many. And it’s not just a reference to housework she makes. All of the research shows, of course, that even when both parties in a marriage work an equal number of hours outside the home, the woman tends to spend more time on domestic work. But the problem my friend is really focused on is less about doing the dishes and more about emotional intelligence (what’s often called “EQ”). Far too many men fail to do adequate self-care when they are in relationship with women. Far too many men becoming enormously reliant on their girlfriends or wives to urge them to see a doctor, to be the sole source of professional encouragement, to monitor their alcohol intake or the content of their diets. Far too many men unintentionally turn their girlfriends or wives into mother figures; in a sense, they outsource their emotional maintenance.

The Top Five come next week.