Archive for the 'Youth' Category

On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 8, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Sports, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 13 Comments

The New York Times has a preview up today of a long article coming out on Sunday in their magazine: The Uneven Playing Field. It’s by Michael Sokolove, and based on his forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (I’ve pre-ordered the book, and will review it this summer when it comes out.)

In this lengthy adaptation on the Times website, Sokolove writes about what he sees as the extraordinary number of knee (ACL) injuries that are being sustained by female athletes, soccer players in particular. His thesis:

(the epidemic is) part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

The rate (of ACL injury) for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

At this point, my heart was sinking. Was this going to be anti-feminist ideology dressed up as professed concern for the health of young women? Was Sokolove trying to scare parents into pulling their daughters out of competitive sports? I even wondered if Sokolove was some sort of shill for the anti-Title IX crowd, trying a new tactic in their never-ending crusade to roll back a policy of equal funding for women’s sports. As a passionate sports fan, married to a former club soccer star, I have a deep and abiding commitment to women’s athletics — particularly the “beautiful game” of what the rest of the world calls football.

Happily, reading the article to the end (it is ten pages long) makes it at least fairly apparent that Sokolove is committed to women’s sports. Rather than imploring parents to pull their daughters off soccer teams, he writes sensibly and knowledgeably about the causes of what is undeniably a common problem: catastrophic ACL injuries among young female soccer players. The chief culprits have nothing to do with inherent feminine weakness. Rather, they are two-fold: poor bio-mechanics and the exhausting “club” system in high school and college that leaves many talented girls playing a demanding sport literally year-round. Continue reading ‘On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article’

Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Family and Youth
. 32 Comments

Back in February, the New York Times ran a story that jived well with what I had already begun to notice: Fewer Youths Jump Behind the Wheel at Sixteen. The opening of the article summarizes the reasons:

For generations, driver’s licenses have been tickets to freedom for America’s 16-year-olds, prompting many to line up at motor vehicle offices the day they were eligible to apply. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift from school-run driver education to expensive private driving academies.

To that mix, experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers.

I turned sixteen in 1983. I took the test for my learner’s permit promptly at 15 1/2, took the (free) driver’s ed course in high school, and got my license within weeks of hitting my 16th birthday. As I will turn 41 later this month, I am rapidly approaching a quarter-century of licensed driving. (I tried to calculate last week about how many miles I had driven in those 25 years. These days, I average only 12,000 miles per year, which is low by Southern California standards. In earlier years, when I had a longer commute, I drove easily twice that. I’d guess that I’ve logged somewhere around 400,000 miles so far in the USA and Britain.) When I was in high school, as virtually any American adult over 30 will tell you, a driver’s license was a much-longed for rite of passage, a crucial demarcation line for adulthood. The only people I knew who didn’t have their license by their 17th birthday were those who had either repeatedly failed the test or those whose visual disabilities made it impossible for them to drive.

But it is not so today. The Times notes that rising insurance and gas costs have played a part, and I don’t doubt that economics are a factor. Many states have placed onerous restrictions on teen drivers, limiting when and with whom they can operate a motor vehicle. When I got licensed 25 years ago, there were no such restrictions. In the early ’80s, a teen in California could load up a car with a dozen friends and drive them around at midnight. No mandatory seatbelt law, either. Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents’

“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2008
in Books, Eating disorders, Father and Youth
. 11 Comments

When I was in grad school, I started doing quite a bit of reading about eating disorders. Some of that interest was personal, as I developed (relatively late) a rather serious obsession with food and exercise in college. Some of it was intellectual, as it intersected nicely with my interest in women’s studies. At one point, back in 1992-93, I got involved in an outpatient treatment program for folks with disordered eating at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was a mixed-sex group, and I was one of only two guys in a group of about fifteen students who met weekly with a clinician.

I remember that no topic came up as often as did parents. And the clinician, at least, generally asked questions about mothers. Indeed, I heard her once say something like “The first question I ask most women who have eating disorders is: ‘what is your relationship like with your mother’?” Most of the research done on anorexics and bulimics has been done on women; indeed, it’s only been relatively recently that we see a formal acknowledgement that eating disorders are becoming more prevalent among men. And for over a century, the assumption of therapists and doctors has been that a young woman’s disordered eating is almost always tied up in the invariably complex and entangled relationship she has with her mother. As Joan Brumberg illustrates in her essential monograph, Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa, as early as the 1870s doctors suggested that food refusal in middle-class girls was a form of quiet rebellion against the strictures and limitations for women modelled by their mothers.

There’s a lot to be said for that analysis, but it often has the unfortunate tendency to let dads off the hook. In her wonderful Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin offers a chapter called “The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes”. Some of what she says is new, some of it has been said before, but her analysis of the role of the father-daughter relationship and its role in the development of eating disorders is very good, and it offers a special challenge to those of us eager to help adult men transform the ways in which they relate to young people, particularly their own teenage children. Continue reading ‘“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book’

“I have so much love to give”: young women and self-flattery

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 9, 2008
in Relationships, Teaching and Youth
. 18 Comments

In my women’s history class yesterday, we were making our way through Lynn Phillips’ Flirting With Danger, a text about which I have written before and which I have used in class for the last several years.

Phillips talks a great deal about discourses that impact the lives of contemporary young American women. Among these is what she calls the “Love Conquers All” discourse:

The love conquers all discourse does not limit itself to the notion that long-term heterosexual relationships are necessary for women’s fulfillment in love. Indeed, it suggests that finding the right man will somehow solve all of life’s problems.

Fed by Disney movies and pop songs, magazines and movies, most girls run into the notion that love conquers all early on. Some fiercely resist it, of course. The discourse suggests, however, that those who most fiercely resist making romantic love a priority are fooling themselves; from Jane Austen’s time to our own, we have countless fictional heroines who are initially dismissive of love, but in the end, succumb to its all-consuming power.

My students know all this, of course. It’s not news to any group of college students that they live in a culture that tries to impose a vision of happy heterosexual fulfillment on each and every one of them. But I’ve found another aspect of the “love conquers all” discourse that Phillips largely ignores: a great many young women (usually younger than typical college-age) go through adolescence with a vast over-estimate of just how much love they have to give to the “right person”.

When I first started working with youth group kids, particularly ninth and tenth-graders, I was struck by how often I would hear the same thing from so many of the girls with whom I worked. In group discussions or in writing, many would say something more or less like this:

I have so much love to give. I’ve never been in love, not really, but I just feel like I have this huge amount of passion inside of me. If I could just find someone whom I could really trust, then I could give him (usually, it’s a him) everything I have inside of me. I know it sounds corny, but I really believe love can heal all our problems. I feel like I have enough love inside of me to change the world, if I could just find a way to let it out. Continue reading ‘“I have so much love to give”: young women and self-flattery’

The art of losing, not always a disaster: on the language of virginity

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 8, 2008
in Virginity, Youth and Youth ministry
. 21 Comments

Apologies to Elizabeth Bishop.

My student Hilary blogs, and on Sunday she linked to this interesting Jessica Zaylia piece on The Hymenization of Virginity. Treading on somewhat familiar ground, Zaylia offers all the right critiques of the language of “losing”. What is being lost, anyway?

What Zaylia doesn’t do is propose a counter-language. What else should we encourage folks to say? Those of us who are rightly eager to make the case that penis-in-vagina intercourse is only one form of sexual expression among many may want to downplay what our culture tells us ought to be the earth-shattering significance of a single act. As awkward as it may sound, asking someone how old they were when they first had intercourse — assuming that it’s an appropriate question in the particular context — is vastly preferable to “when did you lose it” or worse, “To whom did you lose it?”

Zaylia’s meditation on “loss” is incomplete. She rights:

Pairing the two word “losing” with “virginity” accomplishes two goals. First, we only lose what we consider valuable (e.g. “I lost the race,” “I lost my notebook,” or “I am lost.”). We also lose things we presume we ought to have kept (e.g. “I lost my temper,” or “I lost your phone number.”) Coupling “losing” with “virginity” implies that virginity is something of value that we ought to have kept.

True enough. But there’s a third sense of “losing” Zaylia misses. People on diets speak of “losing weight”, after all — and they almost never express regret about the “pounds they gave up.” When we talk of “losing fat” or “losing inches”, we talk about it with hope and optimism beforehand and pride afterwards. And of course, for many of us, “losing virgniity” was a loss eagerly anticipated!
Continue reading ‘The art of losing, not always a disaster: on the language of virginity’

“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 2, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Teaching, WAM 2008 and Youth
. 28 Comments

Another issue that came up in Saturday’s WAM session on “breaking the hold of the Old Boys Club” was that of mentoring. Ann Friedman brought up the often-problematic, often-rewarding experience of being mentored by older men. In her field, journalism, the majority of senior writers and editors are male; it simply wouldn’t be possible for her to seek out only women as mentors, as there aren’t enough of them around yet. Though the topic came up only briefly, several of the women on the panel talked about being hit on by “creepy” older men, but also about having had very kind, safe, nurturing older fellows play a welcome and vital role in their professional growth.

One of the things Ann said, before we moved on to other subjects, was something like “It’s difficult for a man, as a mentor, to send the right signal about his willingness to mentor a younger woman. Should he come right out and say ‘I’m not hitting on you, but I am interested in working with you’, or should he leave it alone? That’s a hard one.” Everyone else agreed, and since the topic of the workshop was not “how can older men safely mentor younger women”, we moved on to other things. After all, I was the only man over 25 in the whole auditorium.

I divide my mentoring work into multiple categories. In various church settings, I’ve worked with teens and young adults as a volunteer youth pastor. Here at the college, I’ve mentored students and, increasingly, junior colleagues. The mentoring with students is both academic and personal. Because I teach gender studies, and offer courses on emotionally charged, sensitive subjects like sexuality, GLBTQ history, and “the body”, I have an obligation to be present for students as they work through the various issues that these classes can bring up inside of them. Any given semester, I would guess that I’m actively mentoring around a dozen current students, as well as current and former youth group kids. Some come to my office hours, I meet others — when I can — for coffee and lunch.

Off the top of my head, I’d say two-thirds of the people I mentor are women. Pasadena City College is already 56% female, and my gender studies courses — from whose ranks most of my mentees come — are 70-90% female. Add in the cultural forces that make it more likely for women to ask for help when they need it, and it makes good sense that the majority of my mentees would be female. Most of my mentees are, these days, young enough to be my children. The students I am working closest with this year were born between 1986-89, the years in which I was a college student. Continue reading ‘“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED’

Grieving the best choice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 26, 2008
in Abortion, Youth and Youth ministry
. 24 Comments

Certain sectors of the pro-life blogosphere are spreading this sad story from Cornwall: Artist hanged herself after aborting her twins.

Carol Platt Liebau, a card-carrying member of the “the exposure of thong underwear by teenage girls is a sign of the Apocalypse” wing of the American right, writes:

When pro-choices (sic) discuss how many women die with “back alley abortions,” somehow deaths like these never seem to be counted.

Gosh, possibly because they fall into two separate categories?

With one or two exceptions, virtually every thoughtful voice for reproductive options understands that in some cases, abortion can have a significant emotional impact on the women who choose it. I am well aware from my own experience that the men who helped conceive that which was aborted can, on occasion, feel very real grief. (It is February; had my high-school girlfriend and I not chosen an abortion, I would have a twenty-two year-old celebrating his or her birthday this month. I think of that often). It simply isn’t true that the majority of what Liebau calls “pro-choices” don’t acknowledge that pain, sadness, and depression can follow an abortion. (We also point out that pain, sadness, and depression can follow the birth of a child, too. Post-partum depression in mothers is very real, and the religious right would likely not wish to employ it as an argument against human reproduction.)

We can experience real grief over a choice we’ve made while being immensely grateful to have had that choice in the first place. Divorce is, in this instance, similar to abortion. No one has sex saying “Gosh, I hope I get pregnant so I can find out what an abortion is like!” No one gets married saying, “Oooh, I can’t wait to go through the heartbreak of dividing up the Christmas ornaments and deciding who keeps the dog!” In my all-too-abundant experience, divorce proved to be the least-worst option in my first three marriages. It was not an option exercised with joy, but with a strange mix of deep sadness and immense relief. Continue reading ‘Grieving the best choice’

A few notes on feminism, symbols, and youthful Obamophilia

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 20, 2008
in Feminism, Politics and Youth
. 40 Comments

The powerful attraction that the young have to Barack Obama has been much discussed, and lately, I’ve been trying to tease out some of the thinking that underlies the devotion to the junior senator from Illinois. In the past two weeks, I’ve met with a few students and some of my old youth group kids. In my office and at Starbucks, the conversation has invariably turned to politics; virtually to a man and woman, these young folks are Obama supporters.

I’ve been asking the same single question lately: “From your perspective, whose election — Clinton’s or Obama’s — would be more likely to send the message that anyone really can grow up to be president?”

My survey is not scientific. But virtually all of the young (and by young, I mean under 25) folks I’ve chatted with lately have answered “Obama”. It isn’t just the case that race trumps gender, even though more than half of the people I’ve chatted with are young women. It’s that to those too young to remember the first space shuttle explosion, Obama’s “narrative” seems more emblematic of American possibility than does Clinton’s. On Monday, I met with an eighteen year-old former youth-grouper of mine who just voted for Obama in the primary. This young white female said she had initially liked Ron Paul until she found out he was pro-life; a registered independent with liberal/libertarian leanings, she had become increasingly captivated by Barack. And though she might consider voting for McCain if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, she’s thoroughly in the Obama camp for now. And yes, without prompting, she made the same remark that everyone else seems to be making: “If Obama can be president, then anyone can be president.”

Honestly, these conversations have made me feel old. Perhaps I’m still very much in the mindsight of second-wave feminism, even though I’m too young to remember that movement at its zenith. For me, in the end, nothing could be more revolutionary than electing a woman to the most powerful office in the country (and presumably, on earth). Hillary Clinton’s life narrative may not be as inspiring as Barack Obama’s, but when I look at Hillary (twenty years my senior), I see a familiar sort of figure: a woman who has spent her life working twice as hard to get half the credit she would receive were she a man. And though my affection for her is not rooted in her sex alone, I’m struck — as so many older feminists are struck — by the willingness of the young to see gender as entirely irrelevant.

My mother told me, when I was very young, that someday we would see a woman president. Like many of my generation and hers, I’ve believed that the moment we elect a woman as “leader of the free world” (a wince-inducing phrase, but there it is), we will have at last crossed the Rubicon of progress. In a world where women have, for so very long, been denied their full humanity, no single marker of change could be greater than to choose someone with ovaries and put her in the White House.* The USA is not the UK, or Israel, or India, or Argentina (all countries which have had women as heads of government). To the degree that I still buy into the seductive notion of American exceptionalism, I believe that there would be something uniquely revolutionary about choosing a woman as commander in chief.

As a child of five, I accompanied my mother to rallies for the late Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972. As a young man of 20, I wrote my first-ever political check to Pat Schroeder, the Colorado congresswoman who explored a run for the Democratic nomination in 1988. I’ve been waiting a long time, and others have been waiting much longer.

The young, it seems, are so confident that a woman will “someday” be president that they feel no sense of urgency to help “someday” be now. Whether or not that’s prorgress, I really don’t know.

* This is a feeling, folks, not necessarily a fact.

“I’m not like the others”: Nice Guys, self-flattery, and the myth of uniqueness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 19, 2008
in Men and Masculinity, Relationships, Sexuality and Youth
. 12 Comments

Following up on yesterday’s post on teenage boys and love, Amy comments below my post:

Guys who accepted the “emotional aspects of their identity” also often still accepted the myth that most guys only want sex and nothing else. As a result, they’d believe they were special and uniquely able to be the emotional guy that they were taught every girl wanted. They saw it as their advantage in the dating scene.

Is this where we ask for the show of hands? How many lads have ever said to a woman in whom they were interested, “You know, I’m really not like other guys”? How many women have had that line laid on them a time or ten?

Amy’s on to something important. The SUNY Oswego study makes clear that most adolescent males aren’t nearly as sex-crazed as we popularly imagine. The study provides welcome reinforcement to the notion that boys as well as girls are interested in love, romance, and relationship. But of course, the conclusion is counter to what our culture teaches us about masculinity. And among the many victims of the discourse about what a man is — and isn’t — are boys themselves.

It is axiomatic that in American adolescent culture, it is dangerous for boys to be too open about their feelings and emotions. The fear of being labelled a “faggot” or a “pussy” is as prevalent for today’s young men as it was in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation. (A point ably demonstrated by C.J. Pascoe in her magisterial “Dude, You’re a Fag”.) As a consequence, those boys who don’t feel as if they live up to (or down to) the masculine stereotype may well begin to imagine that they are unique. Continue reading ‘“I’m not like the others”: Nice Guys, self-flattery, and the myth of uniqueness’

Guys in love: celebrating the new SUNY Oswego study on teenage boys and relationships

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2008
in Age, All Saints Pasadena, Men and Masculinity, Relationships, Science, Sexual ethics and transformation, Youth and Youth ministry
. 7 Comments

Reader “English Rosebud” sent me a link this weekend to this story that ran in the New York Times on Friday: Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter. As she mentions in her email, it’s a powerful corrective to the widespread notion that teenage boys have just one thing on their mind.

The stereotype of the 16-year-old boy is that he has sex on the brain. But a fascinating new report suggests that boys are motivated more by love and a desire to form real relationships with the girls they date.

Based on a study that appears in this month’s Journal of Adolescence, the researchers (from SUNY Oswego) concluded:

Among the boys who had been sexually active, physical desire and wanting to know what sex feels like were among the top three reasons they pursued sex. However, the boys were equally likely to say they pursued sex because they loved their partner. Interestingly, only 14 percent said they sought sex because they wanted to lose their virginity, and 9 percent did so to fit in with friends.

The researchers note that there is no way to assess the truthfulness of the boys’ answers, but the rate of sexual activity in the sample is consistent with national trends, suggesting the boys were answering honestly. The survey group was ethnically and economically diverse, and 95 indicated they were heterosexual, while 10 boys didn’t answer the question.

Bold emphasis mine.

The overall findings are contrary to cultural beliefs that boys are interested primarily in sex and not relationships.

“Let’s give boys more credit,’’ said study author Andrew Smiler, an assistant professor of psychology at the university. “Although some of them are just looking for sex, most boys are looking for a relationship. The kids we know mostly aren’t like this horrible stereotype. They are generally interested in dating and getting to know their partners.’’

(I wish Professor Smiler hadn’t used the phrase “horrible stereotype”. I wince at the implication that wanting sex for pleasure is “horrible”. After all, both men and women do sometimes pursue sex outside of the context of an enduring relationship. While dishonesty and manipulation are indeed “horrible”, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake need not be accompanied by deceit or abuse. It’s “slut-shaming” at its most tiresome to suggest otherwise.)

Still, I’m delighted with this study, and not at all surprised. I’ve worked with adolescent boys as a youth minister for many years, and I’ve taught slightly older young men for even longer. One of the most common complaints that I — and anyone else who works with teen boys — hear is “I’m tired of having everyone think all I care about is sex”. Like the boys in the SUNY study, the teens I work with don’t deny that they are sexual creatures; they don’t pretend that sex isn’t frequently on their minds. What they find more frustrating than unsatisfied horniness is the enduring stereotype that they have no real interest in love and romance. When speaking of teens of either sex, it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that they want either sex or a relationship. All the recent research suggests that adolescent girls can have powerful libidos; this study makes clear what youth workers already know: that teenage boys, as horny as they are, have deep and complex emotional desires. Continue reading ‘Guys in love: celebrating the new SUNY Oswego study on teenage boys and relationships’

“Addled, deceived, and confused”: Neuhaus on women who seek abortion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 11, 2007
in Abortion, Feminism and Youth
. 83 Comments

This past summer, both Anna Quindlen and Jill Filipovic posed a question for the pro-life community: assuming that abortion is someday outlawed in this country, how much time in prison should a woman who obtains an abortion receive? (I can find the link to Jill’s piece, but not Quindlen’s.) It’s an important question to ask of those who seek to outlaw abortion; nothing can be banned, after all, without criminalizing those who flout the ban. And it forces those who support making abortion illegal to be honest about their long-term intentions.
Jill wrote:

How much time should doctors do?

Do you support executing doctors who perform abortions?

Do you support jailing them for life? For a few decades?

How do we justify prosecuting doctors for performing abortions, but not the women who pay them to perform the abortion? Are there other situations in which a person can pay another person to commit an illegal act — an illegal act that allegedly takes a human life — and not be held culpable?

What about women who self-induce their own abortions, without the aid of a doctor? Do they qualify as illegal abortionists? Should they be prosecuted?

How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person? Is a fetus’s death less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

I write about this today because Richard John Neuhaus throws out an answer in the January ‘08 issue of First Things (available online only to subscribers). Neuhaus:

Quindlen goes on to contend that, if pro-­lifers were consistent, they would demand that the woman procuring the abortion, along with the abortionist, would be criminally prosecuted. “State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest that the woman was merely some addled bystander who ­happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.” Certainly not a bystander. Addled perhaps, as in confused, conflicted, conscience-stricken—and deceived by the addled arguments advanced by such as Anna Quindlen. The abortionist, on the other hand, knows what he is doing in his chosen line of work. As has been said ten thousand times over, in an abortion there are two victims: the child and the woman.

Bold emphasis mine.

I always enjoy reading Neuhaus, and am often provoked and challenged by how well he makes the case for his deeply reactionary views. But he falls down badly here. First of all, last time I checked, a great many doctors are women — Neuhaus’ use of the male pronoun here is not accidental, as it suits his weltanschauung to imagine that most physicians performing abortions are men. I sense it’s easier to imagine jailing the doctors who perform abortions when our imagination tells us that they are middle-aged white men presumably just “in it for the buck.” Continue reading ‘“Addled, deceived, and confused”: Neuhaus on women who seek abortion’

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

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 5, 2007
in Porn, Sexuality, Teaching and Youth
. 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching, teen moms, and false intimations of tragedy: a response to Will Okun

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 19, 2007
in Class, Having children, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 38 Comments

This short Will Okun piece in the New York Times on teen pregnancy has gotten some strong reactions, here and here and here for starters. Okun teaches English in inner-city Chicago:

It happens too often. A female student approaches my desk, says “Mr. Okun?”, and and whispers the two words no adult wants to hear from a teenager: “I’m pregnant.” I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to shake her with anger. What have you done? Life is not hard enough already? Is it over, have you given up? What about finishing high school? What about college? What about your own dreams? What about enjoying the last of your own childhood? How can you parent a child when you are just a child yourself? How will you support your baby, how will you support yourself? Where is the man, will he be here next year? Will I see you and your baby coldly waiting alone for a city bus that will not come? Please look me in the eye and tell me you know what you have done.

Although her news disappoints me, I try to react without emotion or judgment. “What are you going to do?” I ask. But if she has already told me she is pregnant, we both already know. “I am going to have it,” she replies. I used to argue for abortion, which only enraged us both. At this point, what is done is done. All I can do now is offer her my unconditional support. I will give her a referral to counseling and pre-natal care and keep my personal frustrations and opinions to myself.

Inevitably, a few months later I will be invited to take photographs at the baby shower. I go because I like the student and I want to show that I support her and her family on this joyous occasion. But, in some cases, are we celebrating tragedy?

Well, Will, you get points for no longer “arguing for abortion.” (Just FYI, bud, there’s a rather nasty history of well-meaning whites encouraging poor women of color to have abortions. Glad you’re no longer one of them. Eugenicists are often well-meaning do-gooders.) But man, Will, you really don’t get it.

Let me be clear I don’t think teen pregnancy is a “good idea”. That said, I’ve spent more time than you might imagine with teenage mothers and their extended family. My wife and I have two nieces, both of whom became moms before they were eighteen years old. My wife and I will meet our newest great-nephew this coming weekend. Neither of our nieces are married to the fathers of their children. Both young moms are now living with relatives, both are working. And when it comes to parenting, my nieces are pretty damn good mothers. They are surrounded by a multi-generational community of experienced care-givers. Their children are not being raised in isolation, but with a surprising amount of community support.

I’ve been to baby showers for many a teenage mom in my day. I’ve also quietly helped pay for an abortion for a teenage girl who wanted one and who confided in me. Though I do everything I can as a mentor and a youth leader and a teacher to encourage a culture of informed decision-making (especially around sex), I understand that a very large number of teenagers are going to have unprotected intercourse for a very wide variety of reasons. And when some of them get pregnant, as they invariably will, there are no perfect options. Abortion is one choice (it was the one my girlfriend and I chose when we were teens with college plans). Adoption is another. And having the baby and keeping it is the third. Continue reading ‘Teaching, teen moms, and false intimations of tragedy: a response to Will Okun’

“Boys Adrift”: part two of a review

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 5, 2007
in Books, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Youth
. 11 Comments

Last week I had some very critical things to say about Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift.

But as critical as I am of Sax’s gender essentialism, there is much within his latest work that I think is insightful and encouraging. When it comes to the now-famous “failure to launch” phenomenon (in which young men live at home throughout their twenties, essentially relying on their parents to support them), Sax makes good sense:

I agree that the real world is very rough. What’s the best way to help young people face that reality? If your child is ten or fifteen years old, then by all means, shelter him or her from that harsh reality. But what if your child is twenty-one, or twenty-six, or twenty-nine? How long is a parent expected to shelter a child who is not mentally or physically handicapped?

My own belief… is that if parents continue to shelter their adult child after the age of twenty-one years, the parents may make it less likely that the adult child will ever be willing and able to meet the challenges of the real world.

Tell it, brother Sax. Preach the good word.

Dr. Sax also deserves credit for being willing to reject traditional models of masculinity. Indeed, given how reactionary his views are on single-sex education, it is surprising and refreshing to read the following attack on Harvey Mansfield’s ludicrous Manliness (which was a big hit with a lot of social cons last year).

Right off the bat, Mansfield asserted without any disclaimer that “John Wayne is still every American’s idea of manliness.” He then proceeded with a detailed analysis of what makes John Wayne the epitome of manliness.

When I read that sentence… I was startled. “Speak for yourself” was the first thought that came to my mind.

Anyone who can rip apart Mansfield is okay with me.

But perhaps my strongest and most enthusiastic point of agreement with Sax comes on what is perhaps the one principle which virtually all the disparate voices in the broader men’s movement affirm: the central importance of strong, loving, adult male role models. Most humans, growing up in our gendered culture, are more likely to “identify” with and seek to imitate adults of their same sex. Given that most teenagers go through at least a brief period of rebellion against their parents, it is good to have adult role models who are not family members.

Sax urges parents (and parents are the primary audience for this book) to seek out good adult men to mentor their sons:

Don’t wait for your son to make this choice. If he’s like most of the boys I work with, he may need a push. That’s OK. Just choose an activity in which he can interact with grown men, where he can have opportunities to see how they live, how they relax, how they serve their families and their communities. In most cases, even a not-quite-perfect choice, perhaps even the wrong choice, will be better — will be more likely to engage your son in the real world — than no choice at all.

Dr. Sax has been rightly lambasted by feminist critics for his suggestion that we ask too much of young boys when we insist that they be able to articulate empathy as well as their sisters. But when he calls for safe, strong, loving adult men to be more involved in the lives of young boys, he deserves an enthusiastic “heck, yes!” All children — boys and girls alike — need good, non-familial role models, and they need them from both sexes. But when the majority of adults modeling compassion, competence, courage and emotional availability are female, then our boys often grow up without ever developing their own ability to be reliable, strong, ambitious, and articulate. That’s not women’s fault — it’s men’s.

In my teaching and in my volunteering, I am committed to working with young men. I mentor quite a few of them. Those in the men’s rights community who reject my feminist commitments would be wise to step up and mentor at least as many lads as I do. After all, my MRA friends, do you want me to be the only adult man working with your sons? :-) Put your volunteer time where your mouths are, and raise up a generation of young men with the same capacity for love and boldness as their sisters.

“Boys Adrift”: part one of a lengthy review

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 29, 2007
in Books, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Science, Teaching and Youth
. 18 Comments

Last week, with not inconsiderable trepidation, I picked up a copy of Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. The book is by Dr. Leonard Sax, who wrote the very troubling and numbingly essentialist Why Gender Matters a couple of years ago. I read WGM last year and was disturbed by Sax’s claims, most of which seemed to be largely in service of his pet issue: advancing the spread of single-sex education, which he argues is vitally important for boys.

But a couple of people who disliked WGM told me that they’d read “Boys Adrift” and thought that it was significantly better, if still flawed. It’s a quick and easy read, and I made my way through it during “chinchilla out time” last Saturday.

I’m going to review this book in two parts. The criticism comes today, the praise later this week.

First off, there’s much here that is troubling. Though this may be an instance of the pot calling the kettle black, Sax is still prone to the whopping and unsupportable generalization. In discussing the importance of competition, he opines:

Most girls value friendship above team affiliation…Boys are more likely to understand that friends don’t have to be teammates, and teammates don’t have to be friends. And boys are more likely to be invested in the success of their team regardless of whether any of their friends are on the team.

Dr. Sax, please, come and watch some of the girls I mentor and teach play soccer and softball. If “Megan” is playing catcher, and her best childhood friend “Melissa” is a runner for the other team trying to steal second base, I guarantee you that “Megan” isn’t going to hesitate for an instant in trying to throw out her closest confidante! I’ve worked enough with both male and female athletes to know that team solidarity and competitiveness flourishes just as effectively among girls as among boys. I suspect Dr. Sax spends very little time with young female athletes.

Of course, sometimes the good doctor focuses on the science he is far more qualified to discuss. But like most of those who defiantly cling to the “nature” side of the argument, the evidence doesn’t necessarily support his conclusions. For example, Sax has an interesting section about why boys don’t like reading any more. It’s not, according to him, because video games are inherently more interesting (though he is, I’m relieved to say, no fan of them). It’s because the kind of questions teachers ask about reading assignments don’t address boys’ concerns.

Sax comes up with the following scenario: a junior high-school English teacher has assigned the kids “Lord of the Flies.” An essay question is given for homework:

“Write a short essay in the first person, in Piggy’s voice, describing how you feel about the other boys picking on you. Remember to include lots of detail.”

Sax writes:

This homework assignment boils down to: How would you feel if you were Piggy? When I spoke with the teacher who assigned this homework, she explained that she wanted to teach the children about empathy… I submit that this assignment didn’t teach anything about empathy. Instead, the message reinforced for (boys) is that doing homework is for girls, not for real boys. No self-respecting boy, in this boy’s frame of mind, would do such a homework assignment.

The answer (you knew this was coming) is that boys and girls have different brains:

It’s easy for most middle school and high school girls to answer a question like “How would you feel if you were X?” because the area of the brain where the feeling is happening is closely linked to the area of brain where talking happens. For boys, that’s not the case… it’s not easy (for them) to answer, in a genuine and articulate way, the question “How would you feel if…?” He may attempt to produce the answer he thinks the teacher wants to hear, but it’s a chore. A better question for most boys would be “What would you do if…” That question may sound similar, but it’s actually a different question, and much more boy-friendly — for most boys.

I’m willing to concede that biological differences may explain why some boys have a hard time articulating feeling. I’m not qualified to disprove that possibility. But for heaven’s sake, one of the most vital tasks the schools have is to help young people overcome natural obstacles. If there are differences in the brain that make it more difficult for boys to empathize with fictional characters (or make it more difficult for girls to understand calculus), that’s hardly a case against teaching empathy or higher math! Rather, it’s a signal to teachers and parents that we have to work even harder with certain students (who may be clustered in one sex or another) to help them develop into full and complete human beings.

Dr. Sax complains that for a boy, it might not “be easy to answer, in a genuine and articulate way, the question “How would you feel if…” Fine, I concede his point. But boys do hard things all the time. Getting to level 346 on the latest video game is hard. Getting in shape for football is hard. Building muscle, building reflexes — these aren’t “natural”. Sometimes, getting in shape to be a soldier or a quarterback feels like a chore, but no one suggests that because it’s difficult for the young to do, they ought to be excused from doing it!

I suspect (and hope) that Dr. Sax is genuinely concerned with the well-being of young American men. I share his concern and his commitment. But he draws dangerous conclusions from his own considerable research. His diagnosis may be accurate, but his remedy is wrong. Though for the sake of discussion, I am willing to concede that his findings about brain differences are real, I think he sells boys woefully short by suggesting that these differences are so significant that they serve as obstacles to the development of empathy, tenderness, and an articulate vocabulary for one’s own inner emotional terrain.

Feminists are often accused of suggesting that “there are no differences between boys and girls, between men and women.” We’re accused of ignoring nature and over-emphasizing nurture when it comes to psychological development. Though some feminists may have denied difference, most feminists today accept that brains and hormones may operate differently between the sexes. But we also point out that once you start characterizing boys and girls as fundamentally different, you immediately encounter so many exceptions (sensitive boys, aggressive girls) that the usefulness of the whole damn dichotomy becomes moot.

More importantly, some feminists (I include myself in this bloc) argue that the whole purpose of social institutions (be they churches, schools, or extended families) is to help each individual achieve full human potential despite whatever limitations are imposed by biology. Access to birth control helps address the biological reality that women get pregnant and men don’t. Toilet training socializes children to overcome their own physical impulses. “Nature” might have us all peeing our pants; “nature” might have every woman the mother of ten. Though real biological differences do exist, they ought never be used as an excuse for failing to develop our children into complete, effective, kind, tolerant, well-rounded human beings.

I’m willing to accept the premise that for biological reasons, it may be harder for some boys to articulate empathy — and for some girls to do advanced mathematics. But all that tells me as a teacher and a mentor is that we may need to redouble our efforts to help our sons and daughters reach their full potential. Rather than doing as Dr. Sax suggests, and re-phrasing the questions in order to make things “easier” for boys, we need more commitment from teachers and parents to help our sons “do hard things.” And while “hard things” might include making the football team or playing a fantasy game at a very high level, it also includes learning to identify emotionally with the vulnerable.

In the end, feminists don’t deny nature. But we refuse to be in thrall to it. And we sure as heck refuse to buy the tired excuse that “nature” means that our sons cannot all be kind, gentle, articulate and ambitious.

Part Two soon.