Archive for the 'Youth' Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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’

HPV and boys: new concerns

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 24, 2010
in Health Care, Science, Sex Education and Youth
. 14 Comments

My sources tell me that today, the immunization committee at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is debating whether to recommend the use of Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, for use with male patients. HPV, or the human papillomavirus, is the most common of sexually-transmitted infections; the CDC estimates that 50% of sexually active adults will acquire HPV at one point over the course of their lives. Some suggest that the percentage is higher still.

HPV has been conclusively linked to cervical cancer. Since 2006, Gardasil has been approved by the FDA for use in inoculating women against HPV. Because the best form of protection is prevention, many health experts recommend vaccinating girls before they become sexually active. Given the grim reality that HPV can be easily transmitted through non-consensual sex, and given the ease with which the virus is spread through oral sex, vaccinating girls before the onset of puberty is encouraged. (This has led, of course, to predictable howls from the religious right, who are less concerned with protecting young women’s health and more concerned that a vaccine against HPV might encourage pre-marital sexual exploration.)

But as an article in the brand-new issue of Ms. Magazine makes clear, HPV poses a greater threat to men and boys than was previously known. The Adina Nack piece is not available online, but here’s a quote from what’s available on your newsstand:

While it is fears of cervical cancer that
have motivated young women to get HPV vaccines,
that’s not the only cancer caused by this virus: It can lead
to oral, anal and penile cancers as well. In fact, the combined
U.S. death rates for these cancers are at least twice
that of cervical cancers… Some researchers, in fact, believe that
HPV may soon cause more oral cancers in the U.S. than
alcohol or tobacco combined.

As a result of this research, the CDC may well soon recommend that boys and young men also be inoculated with Gardasil, as the connection between HPV and oral/anal cancer becomes as apparent as it already is with cervical cancer.

Nack emphasizes that men’s health is a feminist issue:

Women’s health—especially reproductive health—is usually
the focus of sexual-health discussions but men’s health
also deserves women’s attention—and not just because
women care about their sons, male partners and male
friends. It almost goes without saying that women can also
be infected by their intimate partners, and since the great
majority of women primarily have heterosexual relations,
that usually means by men.

In fact, men’s health is an even larger feminist issue.
“Feminists have a vested interest in advocating for policies
and circumstances around the world that shape men’s ability
to develop healthy sex lives, which, by definition, has
to include respect for the rights of those with whom they
partner, regardless of gender,” says Patricia Rieker, Ph.D.,
a sociologist at Boston University and Harvard Medical
School and coauthor of Gender and Health (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).

The truth is, if women don’t prioritize men’s health,
we’re not just losing a chance to foster the overall health
of our communities, we’re actually putting ourselves and
future generations at risk

It is axiomatic that women of all ages are more willing to seek medical treatment than are men. The “sturdy oak” myth of robust masculinity makes it difficult for boys and men to acknowledge vulnerability. Our cultural narrative about heterosexuality tends to suggest that women are emotionally and physiologically more fragile — and more likely to “suffer” from sex. That “expectation of female suffering” (associated with everything from first penetration to pregnancy to increased vulnerability to STIs to the guarantee of heartbreak after a break-up or abortion) is matched with a narrative of male imperviousness to harm. We like to pretend that boys are dense, violent, and comparatively shallow. But boys do cry, and boys do get hurt, and as the latest research shows, boys do get HPV-related cancers too.

Feminists have done much to dispatch the myth of female frailty. They have also been on the frontlines of fighting against this myth of the invulnerable male. It is no surprise then that we find this important clarion call for male sexual health in the pages of Ms. Magazine.

Bonding through revulsion and desire: a note on homosociality and strip clubs

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 01, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Sex work, Sexual harassment and Youth
. 24 Comments

A reader named Sarah recently wrote in about a conversation she had with her husband about strip clubs:

My husband today mentioned the time he took his younger brother to a strip club when the brother turned 21. I laughed a bit, and said, “wow! i never heard that story before!” A few more teasing words were said between the 3 of us, and Imentioned that if he ever took our (still non-existent) son to a strip club i’d be furious. I assumed no more needed to be said, as the whole idea of it was so ludicrous and that my husband wouldn’t do something so creepy and so anti-women with a son of ours.

My husband shocked me by saying that yes, he would take our kid to a strip club and he doesn’t see why it would matter to me if “our son is getting married, and we all go to a titty bar for the bachelor party. it’s not like i’d encourage him to cheat!” I was left sputtering and a little disturbed, and totally unsure on how to proceed with this conversation as my husband is a man who’s always respected women and agreed on these matters. (or I obviously wouldn’t have married him!)

I’m no fan of strip clubs for a host of reasons. But Sarah’s email isn’t really about strip clubs — it’s about the problem of homosociality, a topic I’ve written about many times before. (Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women.) One of the most odious features of homosociality is the way in which it employs women’s bodies as devices for bonding men together. For example, many women are perplexed (as well as infuriated) by the habit young (and not-so-young) men have of cat-calling female pedestrians from passing cars. “Why do they slow down and whistle at me, making those comments?” a young woman asks; “Do they really think I’m going to get in the car with them?” The answer, of course, is that the fellas in the car are far less interested in the woman they’re harassing than in bonding with each other. They demonstrate their heterosexual bona fides to each other, and in the process of humiliating women on the street, forge a closer homosocial relationship. (It’s more than anecdotal to point out that groups of men, having just harassed a woman sexually, will high-five each other; one of the most devastating depictions of this comes in the rape scene from “Boys Don’t Cry”.)

Going to a strip club, of course, isn’t necessarily analogous to participating in a gang rape. But fathers and older brothers have been taking their sons and younger brothers to “titty bars” and brothels for a long time; in parts of Latin America, the practice is particularly common. The stated purpose may be an “initation into manhood” for a teen boy, or a bacchanalian farewell to bachelorhood for a man about to be wed. But there’s invariably more to it than that. Wives and girlfriends, not unreasonably, suspect that the motive is sexual: fathers and brothers may claim to be doing it as a favor for a son or a sibling, but in reality they’re just looking for an opportunity for “justified infidelity” of one kind or another. That may be true, but there’s a deeper and more common reason: a longing for homosocial intimacy.

Going to a baseball game is the paradigmatic “father-son” bonding activity. But for many men, sporting events are less effective than strip clubs as homosocial strategies. Women haven’t been excluded as spectator from ball parks for generations; very few wives and mothers actively disapprove of sports. (They may find watching sports dull, but that’s hardly the same.) Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable. American boys prove their manhood, after all, through their rejection of their mothers’ values; to care too deeply about what mom thinks is to be a sissy, a mama’s boy. And need I point out how many American men have relationships with wives and girlfriends that closely resemble the mother-son dynamic? Mama might not object to taking little brother to the Yankees game — but she’s likely to be less pleased with a sojourn to the titty bar down the block.

The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies. A single man in a strip club, nursing a beer, is seen as a vaguely pathetic — or perhaps threatening — figure; a group of men on a “stag night” in that same club are anything but. What is unacceptable in solitude is admirable and manly when done in solidarity with other males.

For men who, perhaps like Sarah’s husband, who have not yet done the vital work of learning how to establish intimate relationships with other men which do not require the objectification of women as “bonding glue”, the homosocial appeal of the strip club experience is tremendous. But women aren’t cement to hold together that which can’t otherwise be joined. Emotionally competent adult males don’t use either women’s revulsion or women’s bodies in order to establish closeness and cameraderie with each other. And men’s universal capacity to become emotionally competent — at a relatively young age — is very real. The fact that so many choose not to exercise that capacity is not evidence that they lack it.

“The Fountainhead”, Muggledom, and a road to feminism: why I both loathe and appreciate Ayn Rand

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 17, 2009
in Books, Feminist Pedagogy, Teaching and Youth
. 24 Comments

In my reprint of a post about young conservative students, I made a crack about Ayn Rand. Since Rand has been the subject of a pair of recent biographies, and has been much discussed on the right as a kind of ideological mother figure of the so-called Tea Party Insurrection against the Obama Administration, I think it’s time to say a bit more about her work.

I discovered Ayn Rand at 16. A friend of mine finished “The Fountainhead”, and came to me one morning before class: “This book has changed my life, Hugo, and it will change yours. Read it!” I liked and respected Lisa, and accepted the thick and battered paperback she proffered. I took it home, and showed my mother, a philosophy professor. She took one look at the book, grimaced, and then said “Darling, I won’t say anything. Make up your own mind.”

It wasn’t until I read “American Psycho”, many years later, that I had a comparable experience of near-instant loathing of a text, an author, a prose style, and a worldview. I was a young lefty at 16, struggling through John Rawls and Herbert Marcuse. My favorite novel that year was Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” one of the most polemical works that the great local writer (I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula) wrote. Rand was ideologically and stylistically abhorrent to me at 16, and though it’s been years since I’ve picked up any of her work (I finished “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” through sheer acts of will in my youth), my general feeling of disdain on every imaginable ground remains.

But I’ve met many young people, more often women than men, who — like my friend Lisa in high school — find great inspiration in Ayn Rand. Generally, there’s a specific type of teen who falls in love with either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. She’s usually very bright, raised to one degree or another with the “pleasing woman discourse” (what I call “the Martha Complex.“) She often finds her classes dull and her teachers pedestrian. She suspects she’s destined for something extraordinary, that she’s somehow different from everyone else — but unlike the immensely talented dancer or athlete or actor, she doesn’t have one specific skill that stands out as a ticket to stardom. She vacillates between feelings of intense superiority — and feelings of equally intense guilt for the way in which she looks down on so many of those around her.

She picks up Rand, and suddenly it all makes sense. She is superior, one of the elect. She isn’t what a far more interesting and talented writer would call a “Muggle”. She has an exalted destiny, just as she had suspected. Rand inspires her; telling her that it’s time to throw off the chains of obligation and guilt which have left her confined and miserable. In an odd way, Rand — who would be exceedingly difficult to classify as a feminist — is often a gateway into feminism for some young women. It’s through reading Rand that not-insignificant percentages of young women begin to think seriously about what they want for themselves rather than what others want for them. Young women who have the false impression that feminism is about collective victimization find temporary inspiration in “The Fountainhead” — and in due course, when they encounter real sexism in the real world, they reluctantly concede that perhaps those nasty old feminists had a point after all. I’ve met a hell of a lot of strong young progressive feminists in their twenties and early thirties who were enchanted by Randian philosophy in their teens.

So yes, I think an infatuation with Ayn Rand is developmentally appropriate for adolescents. She flatters and inspires the bright and the isolated and the uncertain; she’s useful for helping some young people, girls in particular, break the deadly people-pleasing habit. So if reading “Atlas” or “Fountainhead” is what it takes to inspire the lonely, the introverted, and the insecure — then may the God that she rejected bestow blessings upon that poor unhappy soul that was Ayn Rand.

This post has been altered from the way it originally appeared earlier today, ill-considered references to comic books, Star Trek, and New Kids on the Block were deleted.

Look at me and tell me what you see: a note on youth, Robert Burns, and the longing to be mirrored

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 19, 2009
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries and Youth
. 2 Comments

I was emailing back and forth with a mentee of mine recently. “Lucy”, at twenty, sees herself as bright and talented, but also as insecure and filled with self-doubt. She doesn’t think of herself as particularly attractive or popular; she remembers her adolescent awkwardness vividly. On the other hand, she wrote, her friends of both sexes see her as aloof and mysterious. Her peers (of both sexes) have what she sees as an exasperating tendency to get crushes on her, either coming on to her and forcing her to reject them — or pulling away from her for the sake of self-protection. Lucy frequently feels isolated, and she longs to have more more friends. Her frustration with her inability to form and sustain good relationships with her peers have led her to grow closer to people much older than herself, and she’s struggled with the feeling, not uncommon in women in her situation, to see substantially older men and women as more suitable romantic partners. “Older people aren’t as scared of me”, Lucy says; “they don’t misread me as often.”

I’m not going to revisit the older man/younger woman in this post. Rather, I’m interested in looking at the disconnect so many of us have between the way we are perceived by others and the way we perceive ourselves. This is a problem hardly unique to women, or college students; it’s a nigh-on universal problem for human beings. Recall the famous Robert Burns line: Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursel’s as others see us! For the great Scottish poet, and for a great many others, the ability to see in ourselves what others see is a gift, perhaps divinely given, and certainly not given to most. Many of us spend a great deal of time developing strategies and techniques for getting others to mirror us, showing us ourselves as we truly are. We want, of course, our friends and family to be both honest and filled with praise, even though we suspect that if we get too much (or perhaps even just a little) of the latter, then the former has probably gone missing. Continue reading ‘Look at me and tell me what you see: a note on youth, Robert Burns, and the longing to be mirrored’

“Better-looking when I leave”: a short note on vanity, aging, and Los Angeles

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 02, 2009
in Eating disorders, Traveling, Vanity and Youth
. 21 Comments

After a few days back in Los Angeles following a dozen on the East Coast — and after a few months of living in West Los Angeles again after thirteen years in Pasadena — I’m feeling once again twinges of discomfort about spending so much of my life in a place that, for all its merits, is so famously focused on looks.

Yesterday, I chatted with Meredith, who cuts my hair. Meredith is from Mississippi, and herself recently back from a trip to her hometown on the Gulf Coast. She asked me about my trip to the East, and I remarked “Everytime I leave Los Angeles, I feel as if I get better looking.” Meredith laughed loudly, and agreed; the stylist next to her and her client chimed in with their assents. What started was a four-way conversation among the two stylists and their clients (all non-natives) about the toll that living in L.A., particularly on the Westside, takes on one’s self-image.

I’ve always struggled with vanity and body issues; in previous posts, I’ve talked about my struggle with a serious eating disorder and exercise addiction. I’m much more content and self-accepting in my forties than I was in my twenties, and that is a blessing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t, with disappointing regularity, find myself studying my figure in a mirror or assessing the fit of my clothes, wishing that I were as lean as I was when I was at my thinnest. (Never mind that my thinnest years, though they corresponded with very fast running times, were also in most respects my unhappiest.) Becoming a father has been a huge help; focusing on a child is an excellent distraction and an effective palliative for narcissism. (How awful would it be if it weren’t!) Yet there’s no denying that my desire to be thin has not yet left me. I’ve said it before: I’ve been blessed, thanks to therapy and hard work and grace, with great success in overcoming so many of my addictions. My body dysmorphia and my anxieties about weight, however, remain with me to a far greater degree than I would like to admit.

Here’s the thing: I don’t realize until I leave Los Angeles how much more comfortable in my own skin I feel in other places. In New York, I invariably feel less self-conscious, even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, than I do here in Southern California. And when I’m in Europe — even in fashion-conscious places like Paris or Florence or Mayfair — I don’t feel that sense that I’m too old. To put it another way, I feel more visible virtually everywhere else. I’ve written before, and many other feminists have as well, about the ways in which aging women are made invisible. There’s no question that we erase “older” women from our gaze in a way that we don’t with men; I’m keenly conscious that my authority as a teacher, for example, only grows with age. But though middle-aged men (I am certainly middle-aged now) are far less often rendered invisible than their female peers, I’ve felt — perhaps because of my unfortunate character defect of vanity — the way in which I too am more likely to “disappear” as I grow older. At least, I feel this keenly when I’m in West L.A.

I’m not writing this post to fish for compliments. I’m certainly not writing to complain about how tough it is to be me. I’m a damned lucky man in virtually every imaginable respect. But this character defect that leads me to be unduly concerned with my own appearance, this anxiety about my weight and my attractiveness that, while blessedly diminished lingers with me still, this puerile self-absorption — this , this, this is exacerbated by place. I wouldn’t go back to my younger, presumably “hotter” days for all the tea in China; the anxiety was crippling and the narcissism repellant. But I will say, as I move more deeply into that long and ill-defined period known as mid-life, that there are many other places I would rather live than here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holly dyed her hair: more on myths of female frailty, our fear of women’s anger, and what happens when the truth comes out

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 02, 2009
in Age, All Saints Pasadena, Clothing and Fashion, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls, Youth and Youth ministry
. 24 Comments

I posted earlier this year against the “myth of female frailty” and the lie that “one mistake will ruin your life”. The topic of that myth arose again this week when I met with one of my former All Saints youth group kids, “Holly.”

Holly, whom I’ve known since she was in eighth grade, is now headed into her senior year of high school; she’s 17. When I first met Holly, and indeed for the next several years, Holly “presented” outwardly as the pretty, outgoing, poised and popular blonde whose passage through adolescence seems almost unfairly graceful. Holly was much sought after as a friend (and more) by boys and girls alike; at our Wednesday night youth group meetings, I often saw not-very-subtle attempts by kids of both sexes to sit on “Holly’s couch” and be near her.

Of course, Holly was far more than the walking embodiment of a stock American stereotype. Not only was she exceptionally bright and a particularly talented writer, her childhood had been touched by tragedy and loss to a degree that set her well apart from most of her peers. A few — a very few — of her friends got to know the depth of that loss and its impact on Holly’s life; I was one of the small group of adults to whom she also regularly turned. I watched her struggle with the disconnect between how the rest of the world perceived her and how she felt on the inside, and we talked often about her frustration with the realization that she was the object of desire, admiration, jealousy, and envy when for the most part, she felt out of place and frequently lonely. Holly’s is not an unfamiliar story — at its most extreme, call it the “Richard Cory” phenomenon after that famous Edward Arlington Robinson poem so loved by generations of misperceived adolescents.

This summer, Holly broke up with her first serious boyfriend, got her first lead in a play, and let go of a great many of her old friends. When I met with her earlier this week, her long blonde hair was mahogany brown. Despite the heat, she wasn’t wearing the short skirts that had been her trademark since junior high school. She wore corduroy pants, a t-shirt, and a vest. Not a trace of make-up on her face, but when we met at a local coffee shop, there was a sense of real happiness behind her eyes. Holly’s making changes; the outside shift reflects an inner transformation — and the brunette tresses a greater willingness to expose to the world the darker, more complex aspects of her personality. Continue reading ‘Holly dyed her hair: more on myths of female frailty, our fear of women’s anger, and what happens when the truth comes out’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sixteen hours per week: boys, girls, video games, and expectations

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on August 03, 2009
in The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 23 Comments

Amanda at Pandagon linked last week to this summary of a study from the journal Sex Roles, reporting that college-aged women spent considerably less time playing video games than their male counterparts. No surprise there, but the key explanation for the discrepancy is chilling:

“Our findings suggest that one reason women play fewer games than men is because they are required to fulfill more obligatory activities, leaving them less available leisure time,” said Jillian Winn of MSU’s Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, and one of the co-authors of the study.

To be precise, the study found that college-aged women did sixteen hours “more work” per week (chores, jobs, and so forth). As Amanda pointed out, that finding dwarfs the discussion of video games; it points to further evidence of what Courtney Martin talks about in her marvelous Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and what on this blog is called “The Martha Complex”. Young women today are increasingly likely to be over-worked, anxious, and beset by fears of failure; a growing percentage of their brothers are hooked on pot, porn, and Playstation, prioritizing “chilling out” over virtually any other waking activity. And an extraordinary number of these lads have women in their lives — mothers, sisters, girlfriends — cleaning up after them (a traditional sex role) and providing for them financially (something of an innovation.)

This time discrepancy is rooted in many things, it seems. Of course, some of it is rooted in the contemporary cultural ideal that, as Courtney Martin says, tells girls that they “can be anything” but implies that in order to do so, that they must somehow “do everything.” Over-caffeinated, over-achieving, and over-scheduled, a great many women are beset by anxiety. But it would be wrong to suggest that the problem is primarily in women’s heads. The time gap that forces so many college-aged, childless women to work a “second shift” is indeed frequently a result of direct pressure from parents and the community.

The lower the expectations for male behavior, the higher the expectations for female success and self-control. This is not only obvious and axiomatic, it has real-life repercussions in the lives of a great many young women. Many of my students come from immigrant families in which there are strict household divisions of labor; women cook and clean, men take out trash and fix cars. Given that cooking, cleaning, and laundry are daily and time-consuming activities compared to mowing lawns or emptying garbage cans, many of my female students take the same academic loads as their brothers while doing twice as much work at home. In many families, a young man is encouraged to do his homework so that he can then go out with his friends and play video games; his sister is told to help with the chores, and when everything else is done, she can then turn to her own homework. Continue reading ‘Sixteen hours per week: boys, girls, video games, and expectations’

Can a feminist read Cosmo?

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on July 28, 2009
in Clothing and Fashion, Feminist Pedagogy, Mass media and Youth
. 26 Comments

I’ve been asked the question that titles this post more than once.

Last week I posted this bit about women and the importance of saving money “just for themselves”. It’s one of those tips that I think young women in particular need to hear. Another tip I often give to my women’s studies students regards their consumption of media: if it’s too hard to subtract, add.

To state the obvious, there’s a lot of sexist, misogynistic media out there. Some of it is in the form of crude advertising aimed at men; much of it in the form of “women’s magazines” which focus on beauty and fashion. Television shows like “The Bachelorette” or “America’s Next Top Model”, magazines like “Vogue” or “Cosmopolitan”, movies like “The Ugly Truth” — all send a troubling message about gender, about appearance, and about the capacity of any of us to find enduring happiness outside of narrowly defined roles. It’s not worth reiterating all that’s upsetting and demoralizing about mainstream media’s portrayal of women. But though many of my students find these magazines and television programs and films to be troubling and damaging to their own sense of self-worth, many also find them hard to give up. Over and over again, I’ve heard my women’s studies students describe reading fashion magazines or watching sexist shows (or, increasingly, looking at mainstream pornography) as “guilty pleasures.” And as a feminist, I’m wary of that phrase.

Obviously, we want to work collectively to reshape the ways in which the media portrays women — and men. It’s a given, too, that every dollar we spend is a vote; buying magazines which promote a narrow definition of beauty, for example, rewards and encourages the publishers and the advertisers. To the extent that we exercise choices within our consumer-driven capitalist system, we are at least partly responsible for those choices. The magazines and movie tickets we buy and the websites we visit matter; our behavior is tracked by curious advertisers and marketers eager to know “what works.” They are already rewarded enough for their contempt for women; why give them more of our precious dollars?

On the other hand, the reality is a bit more nuanced. Many women’s magazines which reinforce a narrow and destructive beauty ideal also feature first-rate writing by women on a wide variety of feminist subjects; magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan have run serious pieces in recent years on reproductive rights and pay equity; Seventeen and Teen Vogue have addressed eating disorders and sexual harassment. Those articles get more readers than comparable pieces in the feminist media; indeed, it’s entirely plausible that many women first encounter serious feminist analysis (whether they realize that’s what it is or not) within the pages of magazines like these. Continue reading ‘Can a feminist read Cosmo?’

The form and content of kisses

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 22, 2009
in Movies, Sexual ethics and transformation, Theater, Youth and Youth ministry
. 16 Comments

One of my former youth group kids, “Holly” contacted me last week. Holly’s 17, an aspiring theater actress, and just landed her first lead role in a summer production. She has a boyfriend, Ferdinand — and Ferdinand isn’t happy about the part Holly’s taken. In one scene in the play, Holly’s character needs to kiss her “husband”; it’s an indispensable part of the show. Ferdinand has been in a funk ever since he found out Holly was going to do the show, and until he relented last week, threatened a break-up if she went ahead with her plans to take the role.

Holly and I talked on Friday about her relationship, the problem of ultimata, and what it meant to play a part on stage. This little quarrel raises some important issues about trust and fidelity, of course, but also about the vital distinction between the form and the content of a physical act. (I blogged at length about “form” and “content” in this post about faith and sexuality from July 2008.) To be concerned with form is to be concerned with a particular act, like kissing; to be concerned with content is to be concerned with what that act signifies to the two people involved. These aren’t mutually exclusive concerns, of course, but understanding the distinction is vital, as I explained to Holly.

For example, touching another person’s genital region generally has the form of sexual intimacy. At the same time, there’s a world of difference (one does rather hope) between the way a woman might be touched by her OB/GYN and by her lover. Even if both doctor and boyfriend (or girlfriend) touch her vagina in an act of similar form, the content of the touching is radically different. Even Ferdinand, surely, doesn’t object to Holly seeing a physician. Anyone who’s been to the doctor intuitively grasps the form/content distinction.

Another example lies in art: in a figure drawing course, one is often required to draw a a picture inspired by a live nude model. In our puritanical culture, where the body is so often concealed, steadily gazing at a naked human being has the form of something sexual. But the content of the act (drawing from a nude figure) isn’t sexual; the concern of the student artist is usually something like “How the hell am I going to get that calf muscle right?” and not “Oh my goodness, I’m so turned on right now.” That doesn’t mean sexual arousal can’t happen in a figure drawing class — it may. But sexual arousal can come in any number of unexpected ways and in unexpected places. It would be unreasonable, I think, for a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse to say to their beloved “I don’t want you taking a studio art class where you draw naked people”, just as it would be unreasonable to say “I don’t want your doctor touching your private parts.” Form and content are, in these instances, distinct.

And the same, of course, is true in Holly’s situation. Those who have little experience with acting may marvel at the apparent ease in which movie stars portray passion on the screen; one reason why actresses in particular (Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, etc.) win Oscars after making films in which they did explicit scenes is because we marvel that anyone, particularly a woman, could so expertly separate form and content. (Winslet, whose husband is the director Sam Mendes, has talked often about the inability of some folks to accept her ability — and her spouse’s — to separate the brilliant realism of her “form” from the content of her heart.)

An actor is as much a working professional as a doctor. Each may be called into close proximity with the naked flesh of another human being as part of their professional responsibilities.. Obviously, Holly isn’t a professional actress yet, and she isn’t doing a nude love scene: she’s merely kissing an actor on the lips. Everyone will stay clothed; it will be at most a PG-rated act. But Holly, who is head-over-heels in love with Ferdinand, is quite clear about her own ability to distinguish between the form and the content of what it is that she will do. And it seems as if her beau is slowly coming around to seeing things her way.

Of course, in a romantic relationship one generally wants form and content to go together. When we make love with a partner, for most of us the goal is to have the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts be radically congruent with what we are doing with our bodies. Though that isn’t a universal ideal, it’s certainly a widespread desire. For many of us, monogamy is also an ideal. We don’t want our partners being sexual with other people. But we need to understand what Kate Winslet understands: not everything that has the outer appearance of being sexual really is.

When two actors feign passion, their on-screen or onstage kisses and caresses are no more authentically sexual than a pelvic exam down at the women’s clinic. That doesn’t mean co-stars can’t fall in love with each other; they often do. But when two teenage actors in a summer stock production embark on a romance, it’s usually because the experience of working together on something each believes in so passionately is itself a powerful aphrodisiac. Onstage kisses are hardly the cause.

The New Second Sex, or Architects of their own Adversity? A response to Christina Hoff Sommers

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2009
in Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Youth
. 76 Comments

There is much both to lament and praise about the new women’s site, Double EX, but it does have the virtue of being readable. Yesterday, noted anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, whose public career seems largely based on her willingness to peddle the theory that our society is at war with boys and all things male, offered up Are Men the Second Sex Now? It’s not nearly as reactionary as some of her other pieces, but it still serves Sommers’ larger agenda of delegitimizing the contemporary American women’s movement. Others will find plenty with which to take issue, but I wanted to note these paragraphs of hers:

In (Betty) Friedan’s day, women were clearly the second sex. Not so today. Yes, many women are struggling with the challenge of combining family and work. But men do not have it easy either. They are increasingly less educated than women. They are bearing the brunt of the recession. The New York Times recently reported that “a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men.” Reuters referred to the surging male unemployment rate as a “blood bath.” Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “FastStats” show that men are less likely than women to be insured—and more likely to drink, smoke, and be overweight. They also die six years earlier than women on average.

Why are there no conferences, petitions, workshops, congressional hearings, or presidential councils to help men close the education gap, the health care gap, the insurance gap, the job-loss gap, and the death gap? Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men’s studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.

Few feminists I know dispute that men die earlier, are more likely to commit suicide and engage in risky behaviors, and are increasingly less likely to seek out advanced degrees. This isn’t feminism’s fault, of course, and to her credit, Sommers isn’t saying it is. But she implies that boys and men are suffering because they are being overlooked by feminist thinktanks, and that’s a serious misrepresentation of the crisis. Continue reading ‘The New Second Sex, or Architects of their own Adversity? A response to Christina Hoff Sommers’

More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on May 07, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Youth
. 108 Comments

Two posts responding to Monday’s post about men and feeling desired: Feeling Hot or Not by Lynn Gazis-Sax and Wanted Bodies, by David Schraub. (UPDATE: Here’s Sungold’s post as well.) I’m grateful for all the comments here, which I think have been helpful.

Second Update: A response from Figleaf.

I can’t stress enough that nothing I wrote was intended to suggest that it ought to be women’s job to praise men more frequently for their physical desirability. As several of the commenters pointed out, women have good reason to fear significant negative repercussions for vocalizing desire. I don’t think casually subjecting strangers to a lusful gaze is ever a good idea, of course, but it’s important to remind ourselves that the consequences of doing so are generally much more perilous for women. Our narratives about rape, for example, make it clear that the only women who are “true victims” are those who have no sexual agency, who expressed no desire. A woman who makes clear that she’s turned on, or at least drawn to, some aspect of men’s bodies (rather than, say, men’s wit or wealth or charm or kindness) risks being “slut-shamed” — and worse, she risks the suggestion that she’s “asking” to be assaulted. Bottom line: we have a perverse cultural sense that “a horny woman can’t be raped”.

Both men and women are raised around male narratives of desire. Most of us grow up hearing that all men are turned on by similar things. Where we do allow for variation, we break men down (I remember learning this when I was about eleven) into “boob men”, “butt men” and “leg men.” The depressing implication is that the desire is for body parts, not whole people. A “boob man”, or so I was told by older boys in junior high school, “needed” to be with a woman who had large breasts — and it was rational for such a man to make sexual and relationship decisions accordingly. The discourse taught me that not only was male desire intensely strong, it was also unchangeable; a boob man couldn’t overcome his obsession even with the most heroic efforts. Dating an otherwise perfect woman with an A cup was useless, almost unfair.

When I was still in junior high school, older boys taught me to rank girls on various attributes (”face” = 8, “body” = 5, that sort of sad thing.) Homosociality is powerful; as so many generations of boys discover, the real pleasure of these “ranking” conversations lies in two things: the false sense of power over women that the process seems to give, and the sense of male cameraderie that the shared discussion engenders. Part of my journey to justice as an adult man has been unlearning that training to “rank” women; part of my men’s work has been learning how to create bonds with other men without relying on either sports or the objectification of women as homosocial glue. And of course, a big part of the work is doing what I can to call other men out on the “ranking” when I hear it happening. Continue reading ‘More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts’