This Saturday, my wife and I will mark our fifth wedding anniversary.

As I’ve written at other times, I do as much as I can on this blog to honor my wife’s privacy. I am, at least in a small way, a public person. I write frequently about myself, not because I am so terribly interesting but because my experiences have played a vital role in shaping my world view. I have also been blessed to experience transformation and redemption; I am in an ongoing conversion process that continues to bring surprise.

My academic interests revolve around faith and feminism, God and sex; the personal and the ideological and the vocational are all intertwined in my work. That makes it more obvious that I would write about the personal — but that doesn’t make me an easy person to whom to be married. Though Eira herself only checks in on my blog on occasion, our friends and her family are among my regular readers. She fields plenty of curious questions, though fewer than she did when I first started blogging.

This fourth and final marriage has now lasted nearly as long as my first three put together. The temptation to draw comparison between this relationship and those that came before recedes steadily; my wife and I are in uncharted territory not just chronologically, but emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. We have had our storms and our stresses, including all the familiar trials that come with parenting. But we’ve navigated through those tempests, motivated as we each are by deep love and a relentless commitment to building something extraordinary.

If you know my wife, you know she’s a force of nature. Eira is tall and strong, a former soccer star and kickboxer, a jock and a businesswoman. She does confrontation better than anyone I’ve ever known; I’ve watched her intimidate prima donna celebrities and their agents into stunned silence during negotiations. One of my many nicknames for my beautiful partner is “Herschel”. It’s for Herschel Walker the former Georgia Bulldog and NFL running back. I remember that when he won the Heisman trophy in 1982, Walker was asked what he wanted to do after football. “I want to join the FBI”, he said. When asked why, Herschel replied “Because in the FBI, you get to go out and meet people — whether they like it or not.” That seems to capture my wife’s unyielding but indisputably charming gregariousness.

Eira is also one of the kindest and gentlest people I’ve ever met, and of course, those qualities shine most (though not only) with our daughter. There are few joys comparable, I think, to watching the person you love most in the world nurture the child you made together. As is common wisdom, becoming a parent changes a relationship dramatically. Heloise’s arrival in our lives 19 months ago turned everything predictably upside down, but it made us a stronger, better team. We’re actually accomplishing more together than we were before the baby came; parenthood has forced us to be ever better stewards of our own and each other’s time.

Intimacy changes. Last night, we both had loads of work to do when we got home. I got Heloise fed and ready for bed, and then Eira put her to sleep (a fairly lengthy process). She had late night conference calls with colleagues abroad; I had writing to do. Before disappearing into separate rooms, each of us clutching a baby monitor, we sat for a moment on the couch. We checked in, held hands, shared our days. Then we leaned in, touching foreheads, recharging together, resting in the certainty of everything we are and everything we’ve built. And with a whispered “see you tomorrow”, we went off to our duties and to our five hours of sleep.

Not everyone’s ideal of marriage is the same (and many, of course, don’t have a marriage ideal, nor do they need one). We have the requisite love and desire. But more importantly, what Eira and I have after five years as spouses and eight years as a couple is a sustained vision for transforming the world around us. For us, marriage is a kind of spiritual docking station to which we each return after running down our batteries in our many wonderful, interesting, occasionally tedious and often exhausting tasks. We are shoulder to shoulder and oar to oar more than eye to eye — but as it turns out, shoulder to shoulder seems to be the best way for us to be heart to heart.

I have been blessed by second, third, fourth, and ninety-seventh chances. I’m blessed by the gift of being able to learn the lessons of a troubled past without being incapacitated by the memory of pain. What was is not the best predictor of what will be, despite the conventional wisdom. I have never been happier or more confident, never felt more certain of what it is I am called to do in the world. My favorite poem these past few years has been Justice’s “Men at Forty”. These final lines are not just about me, but about Eira as well — she too feels what the poet describes here:

Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

We are being filled. Whatever image you prefer, we are climbing the mountain together, rowing across the sea together, pushing, as Lewis so famously said, “further up and further in”. Together, with our breathtaking daughter at our side or in our arms, we’re crossing over, ascending, answering the call we both hear.

My wife, my partner, my best friend, my love,my “Herschel”, my Eira. Thank you for your faith, your passion, your tenderness, your relentless, your stern conviction. Thank you for your forgiveness and your humor and your sweat and your fire.

Thank you for pledging your life to this “lightwork” five years ago. Happy anniversary.

Roz Kaveney, in the August 19 Guardian, offers this helpful, touching take.

For the sickbed of Christopher Hitchens

Boswell went to Hume’s deathbed; let me see,
he smugly thought, if godless men can die
as well as Christians. Heaven is a lie,
Hume told him, confidently, peacefully.

It’s love that prays, and so we show respect
but to our friend alone, not to their sect.

FCM and Dworkin belong broadly to the tradition of radical feminism, and FCM’s community belongs to what is sometimes called women’s nationalism. Radical feminists and liberal feminists famously disagree about many things, and that disagreement tends to be most pointed around issues of sexuality and individual agency. Liberal feminism (the tradition to which I belong) shares common cause with radical feminism on a number of issues, but often breaks with the radical tendency on a host of issues ranging from pornography to transgender identity to the role of men in the feminist movement. Obviously, “liberals” and “radicals” aren’t monolithic; the terms are used differently in different instances, and many feminists feel understandably uncomfortable with being pigeon-holed into one particular tradition. These are useful categories, but need to be employed with caution.

Going back to the early 1980s, liberal feminists have pointed out that many of their radical sisters sometimes seem disturbingly close to the religious right in terms of their views on sexuality. The birth of that criticism may have come in 1981, when Reagan was newly president and the Moral Majority was in its ascendancy. The late Ellen Willis wrote a very influential review of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women in which she made the case that social conservatives and radical feminists were becoming dangerous bedmates:

…in certain respects the arguments of the two groups are uncomfortably similar. If anti-porn feminists see pornography as a brutal exercise of predatory male sexuality, a form of violence against women (and an incitement to such violence), the right also associates pornography with violence and with rampant male lust broken loose from the saving constraints of God and Family. Nor have conservatives hesitated to borrow feminist rhetoric about the exploitation of women’s bodies.

This peculiar confluence raises the question of whether the current feminist preoccupation with pornography is really an attempt to extend the movement’s critique of sexism - or whether, on the contrary, it is evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.

Since at least 1981, that same argument has raged on between the heirs of Willis and Dworkin, and those of us in the liberal tradition have made the same point about the strange similarity between the far right and the radical feminist left. Even arch-conservative Maggie Gallagher (who has done more to fight to ensure a limited and narrow marriage franchise than anyone in America) wrote of her overlap with Dworkin in this touching tribute penned after the latter’s death in 2005:

I received a gift from Andrea, the kind of gift which, intellectually speaking, you can receive only from someone with whom you profoundly disagree. From the opposite ends of the political spectrum, we had each glimpsed a piece of the same truth. Against the backdrop of a pornographic Playboy culture that tried to teach us that sex is just a trivial appetite for pleasure, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that “sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal.”

Then she, the infamous feminist, invited me, the unknown young conservative, to tea. I found her soft-spoken, pale, intellectual, anxious, motherly.

Motherly, perhaps, in more ways than one.

Gallagher suggests that she and Dworkin shared a revulsion at the “Playboy culture” that trivializes sexuality. The problem is, of course, is that both Gallagher and Dworkin assumed that a feminism that was sex-positive, that did see sexual liberation as genuinely freeing for women as well as men, wasn’t really distinguishable from the Hugh Hefner philosophy. Dworkin and Gallagher both assumed that a pleasure-centered ethos ultimately meant pleasure for men and misery for women. Both assumed that sex-positive feminists (what FCM calls “fun fems”) are ignorant, deluded, and naive. They both deny women’s agency. They aren’t alone; commenter MsCitrus, who blogs in the radical feminist tradition, wrote yesterday in the thread: “free will,” aka agency, is a load of western individualistic special-snowflake crap. (She’s challenged on that in comments by Lynn and Glendenb.)

In the end, I am much more optimistic than the Gallaghers and the Dworkins about the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from their acculturation, their programming, their biology itself. I am optimistic (an optimism rooted in experience as much as ideology) about men’s potential to transform, to overcome the “myth of male weakness”; I am equally optimistic about women’s capacity to unlearn the misogynistic toxicity that at times seems to be in the very air we breathe. This doesn’t mean I’m some sort of Ayn Rand disciple who imagines that individuals must do all this work on their own. We do this work in community, with support, with reflection and with a mix of resolve and doubt. But do it we do, and change we do. And we reclaim our sexualities, and we reclaim our relationships, and we remake our world.

One of FCM’s tabs is her Intercourse series, a lengthy set of posts exploring her reactions to Andrea Dworkin’s famous book by the same name. As even a casual reader of her blog will realize, FCM takes Dworkin quite literally in her insistence that heterosexual intercourse (penis-in-vagina sex, or PIV) is abusive to women. Women should generally resist PIV, FCM argues; any man who dares claim the label feminist ally for himself must renounce PIV if he wishes to be taken seriously. Refusing intercourse is the proof of one’s seriousness and credibility.

There’s a lot of debate among Dworkin scholars as to whether her work was meant to be taken literally in all instances, or whether she was often engaged in a complex and dazzling rhetorical performance designed to elicit shock and reflection. (I tend to hold the latter view, and I suspect that FCM leans towards the former.) I certainly think that feminists ought to challenge people’s conventional views about heterosexual intercourse. In my women’s history class, for example, I point out that until relatively recently, one of the leading causes of death for women was complications related to childbirth. (In some places at some times, pregnancy and childbirth have been the leading cause of female death.) The overwhelming majority of pregnancies are the consequence of heterosexual intercourse; therefore, it is logical to conclude that heterosexual intercourse has led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of women over human history, as well as to unimaginable pain and discomfort to those who did not die but were merely injured by everything from miscarriages to fistulas to prolapsed uteruses.

Though maternal death is far rarer today in the industrialized West (though troublingly higher here in the States than in Europe), it is still a very real danger in less developed parts of the world. But pregnancy is not the only consequence of PIV that can lead to death. In Africa the AIDS epidemic is primarily carried on through heterosexual intercourse; the vast majority of women who die of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa contracted the virus by having PIV. When fundamentalists speak of AIDS as God’s punishment for homosexuals, it’s worth replying that God has punished far more women with death for having PIV with their husbands than he has male homosexuals for having anal sex. And God is said to be a fan of PIV in marriage. Feminists do well to point these things out, and I do so in every class I teach.

(Parenthetically, heterosexual intercourse put me in the emergency room once, as I wrote in this post. There’s no comparison, of course, between the physical danger of PIV for women and for men. But PIV can bring everything from frenular tearing to broken hearts to males as well; to suggest otherwise is to be blind to the reality of male vulnerability. And vulnerability isn’t a zero-sum game.)

It’s also important to note that women’s legal right to resist intercourse with their husbands is very recent, and by no means universally accepted. The first successful prosecutions for marital rape in this country only took place in my lifetime; many traditionalists in many places still find the notion of marital rape itself to be an oxymoron. Empowering women legally and socially and psychologically to say “no” to their partners (including their husbands) is an essential part of the global feminist project.

But of course, there is another side to all of this discussion. As Dworkin’s critics have long pointed out, much of her objection to PIV is rooted less in physiological reality than in the language we use to describe it. I wrote about this last fall, describing an exercise familiar to all my women’s studies’ students. An excerpt follows.

One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ‘87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ’surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified. (more…)

Factcheckme wrote a response to my response to her: On Credibility. By her own description a radical feminist (a term she uses to distinguish herself from what she calls “fun fems”), FCM rejects the case I made for responsible male participation in feminist groups. Her post is short, and she and her commenters develop the thesis at greater length in the thread that follows below it.

There’s a lot to unpack about Factcheckme’s views. She’s particularly concerned (some might say obsessed) with the problem of heterosexual intercourse (which she, like so many these days, abbreviates PIV for penis-in-vagina.) She cites Dworkin’s Intercourse a lot, though FCM’s conclusions seem more radical than the late great writer and theorist. (I’d like to address the PIV intercourse issue in another post.) What I wanted to deal with here is this comment she makes in the thread:

it bothers me very much that so-called “feminist men” are teaching womens studies. there is something so fundamentally wrong with that, its creepy, disgusting, its a violation and they fucking well know it. it also takes work away from women, who are going to be infinitely more qualified to teach it. and thats fucking inexcusable, it really is.

That’s a criticism I’ve heard many times over the years, and it’s a serious one that deserves a serious response. There are three parts to FCM’s critique of men teaching women’s studies, and it may be helpful to answer them in turn:

1. It’s a violation of feminist principles
2. It takes work away from women
3. Women are infinitely more qualified to teach women’s studies than are men

The answer to the first charge is, obviously, that it all depends on whose feminism we’re talking about. Feminism is a patchwork quilt, not a seamless garment; we speak rightly of feminisms. As FCM makes clear, the gulf between radical feminism and what she calls “fun fems” (what others might call classically liberal feminists) is a vast one; the gulf is equally vast at times between both groups and the womanist tradition with which so many non-white activists identify. For some feminists, encouraging men to live out feminist principles (not just in lip service, but in action) is an essential part of transforming society along egalitarian lines.

I’ve written before that the number of men in my women’s studies classes continues to rise. The number of men who claim the name of feminist (or pro-feminist, or feminist ally) has gone up as well. I was very isolated when I started taking women’s studies courses a quarter century ago; the young men in my courses today are not nearly so alone. This isn’t just because I’m a male professor; my female colleagues who teach their own sections of the same courses report a similar rise in male interest over the past decade or so. FCM will have her own conclusions as to why this rise is occurring (she might say that academic feminism has lost its bite, and “sold out”); my feeling is that we’re raising a generation of young people more committed than ever to the principle that biology is not identity. To at least one large bloc of feminists, the success of the movement lies in the adoption of uncompromising egalitarian principles by the broadest possible section of society. That “big tent” feminism can mean, of course, the cynical manipulation of feminist rhetoric by the decidedly anti-feminist likes of Sarah Palin. But it can also mean an increasing acceptance of feminist ideals. And one unimportant sign among many more significant ones of the success of those ideals is the willingness to hire men to teach women’s studies courses. (more…)

It’s a cooler-than-seasonably normal day here in the San Gabriel Valley; though summer has three weeks left to run, autumn is in the air. It’s a remarkable change from the first day of classes last year, when we were in (literally) blazing heat as the smoke from the Station Fire saturated our campus. Last year, it looked like hell outside — today, things look genuinely lovely. But fine weather belies the general mood of gloom that is pervasive, perhaps more among faculty and staff than among students. California still doesn’t have a budget, our class offerings are woefully inadequate, and the reality is that a great many students who want courses will be unable to get them. If that has been the case before, it is all the more so now.

My mother tells me that my formal education began forty-one autumns ago, in September 1969. I was two when I first went to Santa Barbara’s long-vanished Humpty Dumpty Nursery School. Since that year of Woodstock and moon landings and the amazing Mets, I’ve been in school every fall without fail. I went from nursery school to graduate school without a break, and began teaching full-time at the community college while still finishing Ph.D. work at UCLA. I’m in my fifth decade in the educational system, which astounds me. And I’m beginning my eighteenth year as a professor at PCC; soon, my youngest students will have been born after I started teaching here.

In August 2004, I wrote about still having butterflies in my stomach the first time I met a class. Six years later, things remain very much the same in my innards. I wrote then of the reasons for my nervousness:

The obvious question is this one: why, after all this time, do I still get so nervous about the first day of school? It’s not stagefright — public speaking has never been a fear of mine. It’s not new material, at least not this year — all four courses I am teaching this fall are courses I have taught in the past. It’s not fear that my students won’t like me — though I do struggle with vanity, it’s not at the root of my jumpiness this morning. All three of these might be small factors at different times, but the core reason for this almost-pleasant state of anxiety is more basic: I still believe that I have the best job in the whole dang world, and I can’t believe they pay me to do it.

I’ve talked about this with my parents and other colleagues who teach. My father (who taught philosophy for forty years at Alberta and UCSB) calls this feeling “the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence”. That phrase seems to sum things up nicely. Whenever I share these feelings, I note that it is often my most talented colleagues, students, and friends who say “Really? That’s how I feel too!” (One of the worst teachers I ever worked with, now thankfully retired, claimed never to feel this way.) I wonder if there isn’t some connection between periodic bouts of self-doubt and the drive to prove one’s self. Actually, that’s silly — I don’t wonder that at all, I know it with total certainty!

My office is a cheerful mess, I’m caffeinated and bepinked and readier than ever to begin the grand journey again.

UPDATE: Both in person in the hallways, and on my Facebook page, former and soon-to-be-current students have wished me “good luck” today. This isn’t new; I’m wished good luck each time a new semester begins. It might seem odd to wish it to the tenured professor; I’m not applying for anything, I’m not being evaluated this semester, and I’m not trying to get into a class. But I’m wished luck nonetheless.

I like to think it’s more than just a pleasantry offered when someone begins something new (or in my case, resumes an old and familiar task.) I like to think that it’s because even the very young recognize that there is an element of chance and mystery in teaching; some classes sizzle with chemistry while others, as we all acknowledge, are duds. Perhaps they are wishing me great students, or wishing me success in avoiding spilling on myself or teaching with my fly unzipped. Or perhaps they know that anything really can happen in the classroom, from the marvelous to the heartbreaking, and they are wishing me luck and grace and strength to cope with whatever comes, and to be as present and effective as I can be for all whom I will call my students.

The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.

Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.

His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.

In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.

Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard. (more…)

Come to the Edge

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
Come to the edge!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.

Quick question: what if a woman is in a truly desperate situation, if she made a few stupid choices, but also caught some really tough breaks. She has figured out where she went wrong and how to stay away from the people who make the tough beaks happen, but it is a hard scrabble back into a decent life when you are doing it alone and without much money. So, a guy comes along who wants to help her. She says yes, even though it makes her feel a little guilty, because she is truly desperate. They have a romantic relationship, and she really likes the guy. But he also gives her what she needs, and she takes advantage of it to make her life begin working, to make changes that will significantly improve her life-chances. She works hard enough, that she can probably make a go of it without him…

The question becomes: did she take advantage of a good guy? Did she prostitute herself for an education and a chance at a good life?

Well, I can guess what the Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) would say.

In thinking about my answer to FWC, I refer back to this post on relationships from October 2008: 100/100, not 50/50: of percentages, insurance companies, men, women, and apportioning responsibility in relationships.
I wrote:

Here’s something three divorces and four marriages have taught me: if I am doing 50% and expecting my spouse to do 50%, then the marriage will (one way or another) founder. It’s not 50/50, it’s 100/100. I need to be 100% responsible for my behavior. My wife cannot, cannot, cannot “drive me to drink”; I cannot “make her depressed” without her active consent. I am completely responsible for myself, and she for herself, and we need to do everything we can to make the relationship work. I say to people “We split everything 100/100″, because though that may not make sense in terms of arithmetic, it captures a basic truth about what it takes to make a relationship not only survive but be vitalized, dynamic, and ever-changing.

What that means in terms of FWC’s question is this: her “good guy” is 100% responsible for his choices, as she is for hers. At first glance, their relationship was founded, as so many seemingly are, on a transactional basis: she gave love in return for stability. Of course, as any therapist will tell you, transactions are almost never that simple. Rescuers and rescuees have the same basic set of motives in these sorts of relationships: a longing to be loved and validated. Many rescuers derive a powerful feeling of self-worth from the act of rescuing; by choosing to be with someone vulnerable, they feel as if they have inoculated themselves against the possibility of being abandoned. (I’ve never met a rescuer who didn’t have massive abandonment issues.) It isn’t just women who buy into the self-flattering “my love is so strong it can change anyone” narrative about which I wrote here. The rescuer looks for someone whose weakness (a history of sexual abuse, drug addiction, anorexia, and so on) provides an opportunity to practice rescuing. Rescuers generally don’t want folks who have their shit together, as it were; aspiring doctors don’t demonstrate their skills by healing the already well. Jesus didn’t improve the sight of those already blessed with 20/20 vision. (more…)

Gosh, I’m now averaging two letters a week from folks who have found this blog by searching for information about “older men, younger women” on the ‘net. Usually, I get letters from young women who are attracted to older men, or older men defending their interest in younger women, but yesterday’s letter from “Charles” was different. Here’s some of it:

The experience I am going through is a difficult one. I was very closely
involved with a (now) 23 year old for four years. We broke up this past
spring, largely because she was going to attend graduate school in another
country for several years and had not been faithful to me in the past. No
trust meant no relationship anymore, despite my great affection toward her
and bond with her. We still remain friends and I look out for her best interests,
which is why I was so distraught to hear that a 35 year old had
asked her out at a bar and she said yes.

I agree with you that, despite exceptions to the rule, younger women
dating older men is not very healthy. She is a beautiful girl who has no
trouble finding dates, so its not like this is the only opportunity she
has. She doesn’t seem to find it to be a big deal and kind of flippantly
says that guys are five years less mature than their age and girls are
five years more mature, so the ages (in her mind) kind of equal out. But
I have to disagree with that. His formative, adult experiences are much
more developed than hers. If you use the age of 18 as a baseline for
‘adulthood,’ than he’s been an adult about four times longer than she has.

She also has had many of the problems that many young women interested in
older men seem to have, as you alluded to. Her father was almost
completely dysfunctional as a human being and was not a substantive part
of her childhood. She was raped at 13 to lose her virginity and she has
had a breathtaking number of sexual partners in an equally breathtaking
variety of ways, all of whom (with the exceptions of a few close
boyfriends) she didn’t like.

Should I not feel concerned for her? Should I not feel angry toward her?,
because I do. I do not have a problem with her dating and I want her to
be happy, but I am convinced this is not the way to achieve that
happiness.

Charles writes an interesting and heartfelt note, and it’s the sort of thing I’ve heard from other young men on this subject.

First off, there’s nothing wrong with being angry at someone who has cheated on you. Anger, particularly when it is expressed in healthy rather than destructive ways, is a normal response to injury. Once that anger festers into enduring resentment (and slut-shaming), however, it’s a good deal more problematic.

I’ve known quite a few men who share with Charles what can only be described as a powerful desire to “rescue” damsels in distress. The tell-tale signs of a man with a “knight in shining armor” complex are clear: he “looks out for her best interests”, and he expresses deep — and perhaps justified — anxiety about her early experiences and their impact on her subsequent sexual choices. I’m sure Charles is a very nice young man, and I wish him well. But ultimately, I think he’s having a difficult time separating genuine love and concern from a desire to control! (more…)