When Is a Penis Just a Penis? Jesus, Sexuality, and the Incarnation

In the shadow of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuses, Melissa McEwan of Shakesville wonders about the appropriateness of this image of Jesus in an Oklahoma church, while Andrew Sullivan simply comments, “Oh dear”:

(Image via Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish.)

In case it’s not obvious, the controversy is about the holy abdominal muscles, which are strikingly … um … erect.

Oklahoma Catholics appear to be split between oh-so-shocked and oh-so-in-denial. But they shouldn’t be. Nor does it make a whole lot of sense to attribute these massive “muscles” to the notion that Christianity is basically phallocratic, as one commenter does at Shakesville.

Instead, I’d read this picture as part of an artistic tradition that depicts the full humanity of Christ, emphasizing the paradox of his being completely human while also completely divine.

Back in grad school, I read a book by noted art critic Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, which analyzes the depiction of Jesus’ genitals in Renaissance art. Steinberg marshals hundreds of images to show that artists went out of their way to emphasize the holy genitalia, whether by pointing at them, artfully draping them, or conspicuously exposing them. Far from being sacrilegious, these portraits underscored an important element of Christianity then in ascendance: the human side of the Incarnation.

You don’t have to be a believer to be convinced by Steinberg’s argument; at least, it worked for me! But if you are a believer, this artistic tradition should get you thinking about the shame Christians too often attach to the body, nakedness, and sexuality. From this angle, we need not see the sexualization of Jesus as something unholy. If he was perfectly human and perfectly divine, his sexuality must be perfect as well.

And if that’s the case, our sexuality must be at least blessed, if not perfect.

Just to give you a sampling of what Steinberg found, here’s the baby Jesus as portrayed by Veronese in the Holy Family with St. Barbara and the Infant St. John (circa 1560). He’s doing one of the things that babies do when they discover it feels good – even better than playing with their feet!

(Image borrowed from the Uffizi catalogue.)

There are also oodles of portraits in which Mary gestures at baby Jesus’ genitals, as in Perugino’s Mother and Child (circa 1500):

(Image from here.)

(There’s also an artistic tradition of gesturing at the genitals of the dead Christ after he’s taken off the cross, but I had a hard time finding the images Steinberg cites on the Internet.)

These artistic representations of Christ’s sexual nature as proof of the Incarnation are no longer comprehensible to most of us – even (or maybe especially) if we’ve grown up within a Christian church. I remember the sour-faced reaction of the clerk at Cornell’s campus bookstore when I purchased Steinberg’s book: “He should be ashamed of himself!” That was in the mid-1980s in a liberal college town. 

I can’t claim that the crucifix in Oklahoma is necessarily within the tradition Steinberg describes. I do think though, that one can legitmately read it as an expression of the Incarnation. Judging from the reactions it’s gotten, it looks like sexuality is still far from being reclaimed as not just compatible with Christianity but a blessed part of it.

Read Full Post »

Is Sex Fungible?

This is a post about exercise, sex, and pleasure, but I wouldn’t be writing it if I hadn’t once worked on regulatory policy for trucking. In that former life of mine, my trucking project made me intimately acquainted with the concept of fungibility – the idea that certain goods are equivalent enough that they can be easily exchanged or substituted for other goods.

So anyway, this post is about sex, not trucks, and it’s only barely about exercise. Maybe it’s just that I really never understood the appeal of running (and feel okay with that ever since my brother-in-law told me that injured runners keep his physical therapy practice in the black). But I just can’t get on board with the idea that good sex is comparable to a good run, or to anything else either, though figleaf makes as good a case as possible for their comparability:

My big epiphany this evening, by the way, is that sex feels really, really good but it’s not the only activity, not even the only physical one, that feels that way. And now eight or ten hours after running I’m still feeling a warm endorphin rush. Eight hours after even the best sex and I’m… mostly ready for more sex.

Again, that’s not to say sex isn’t pretty darn nice, and I’m actually a little worried that you’re going to read this and say “he’s saying sex isn’t that great.” But it isgreat. It’s just there’s other stuff that’s really, really great too. And I think, or at least I’m considering, that we overweight sex with so much other significance that we (ironically) feel guilty and/or crazy and/or maybe even “kinky” about admitting there could be anything that could compete with it.

(The rest is here – and mildly unsafe for work.)

It’s definitely blissful to be in the flow of making music, writing, even teaching – to inhabit that space where I know and feel that everything is right my whole self engaged in something I love and do well.

Meditation. Very dark chocolate. The aroma of lilacs in my back yard.

But I wonder about the wisdom of comparing any of these things. Yes, they’re all embodied experiences that give us a chance to transcend the everyday. But I see no need to claim (as figleaf did in his post’s title) that “there are some things that feel better than sex.” Why rank them? Is it just that those other things can be done on our own, without a partner, whenever we feel moved? Because the only reason for ranking that I can see is the intense pressure to sublimate our libido into other projects, whether that pressure comes from society or from a reluctant/unavailable/nonexistent partner.

Of course, sublimation isn’t the same as fungibility, either, and it never pretended to be. The whole point of sublimation, after all, is to transform libidinal energy into work or other endeavors that society deems more important than sex. Sublimation isn’t the same as repression, and some of it is absolutely necessary. We can’t all spend every day rutting. Freud was right that civilization depends on it. And yet, I can’t help but think there’s no shortage of sublimation, at least among my friends and acquaintances. If anything, we’re shorting ourselves on pleasure.

As for the overloading of sex, I think it’s helpful to distinguish between generally harmful aspects of this and benign or potentially enriching ones. The harmful freighting of sex usually has very little to do with pleasure; it comes into play when, for instance, a woman’s “purity” or experience or looks determine her worth, or a man’s “conquest” determines his status. It’s toxic, as well, to say that sex must *always* be wedded to love. That assumption undergirds abstinence-only sex “education” and leads too many people (women, especially) to feel emotionally bruised when a hookup doesn’t evolve into a relationship.

And yet. We sell sex short if we insist it has nothing to do with love. The potential for deeply connecting with someone – and not just getting off – is a pretty important one. Otherwise we’d all be perfectly content with solo sex. Otherwise couples in sexless marriages would be as happy as any other; but on average, they’re not. Within a relationship, sex helps us stay connected, be more forgiving, find more delight.

Speaking as a woman, I’m also wary of playing down the importance of sex, which is what we do if we treat it as fungible. Much of my time is spent in ordinary activities that give me deep satisfaction – mothering, reading, writing, teaching, discussing – but their rewards are quite different than the pleasures of sex. We’ve spent over 10,000 years subordinating female sexuality to patriarchal imperatives, and only about the past 40 trying to claim it as valuable and autonomous. (Okay, if you count Victoria Woodhull, that bumps it up to 140 years – still a nanosecond in human history.)  Calling sex just one pleasure among many not only denies the particularity of sexual pleasure. It also neutralizes the radical potential of unfettering women’s sexuality. And yes, here I might be overloading sex a bit, myself, but I also think it’s true that people can’t be truly free if they’re sexually repressed. Still: women’s sexual pleasure is a feminist issue.

As for endorphins that last eight hours? Well, as cool as that sounds, I’m not likely to experience that for myself. I’m going to stick to my trusty bike riding; no running for me. But I’d say being ready again for sex after eight hours isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Read Full Post »

Rush Limbaugh Has Me Sussed

My most recent lapse in blogging comes to you courtesy of the IRS and

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in one of his pensive, sexier moments. (He looks much hotter with less mustache. If hot is a word one can ever connect to Bismarck.)

I’ve finished my taxes. (Yay!) They collided in ways both stressful and funny with my mad rush to prep my Nazi class. (For those not following along at home, that’s a class on the history of Nazi Germany, not a class on how to be a Nazi. Though for those inclined toward the latter, may I suggest the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party – no linky-love for them, nosirree, moving right along! – whom I discovered through yet another unsettling google search.)

Anyway, while awkwardly multitasking between class prep and tax prep, I toted up a list of the books I’ve ordered recently. Then I tacked on the books that are literally underfoot. I didn’t manage to squeeze out a deduction for the IRS, but it was still a revealing exercise:

• Sandra Harding, Standpoint Theory Reader
• Sandra Harding, Whose Science?
• Jaclyn Friedman & Jessica Valenti, Yes Means Yes
• Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive
• Rebecca Kukla, Mass Hysteria
• Eugene Kennedy, Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality
• Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality & the Black Church
• Clayton Sullivan, Rescuing Sex from the Christians
• Christine Gudorf, Body, Sex & Pleasure
• Lisa Duggan, Sex Wars
• Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad
• Laura Kipnis, Against Love
• Mama PhD (anthology)
• Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex
• Simone de Beauvoir, The 2nd Sex
• Judith Walzer Leavitt, Make Room for Daddy
• Carole Vance, Pleasure and Danger
• Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty
• Lisa Jean Moore, Sperm Counts
• Sarah Forth, Eve’s Bible
• Cristina Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions
• Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing
• Margaret Atwood, Flood
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Brightsided
• Julia Serano, Whipping Girls
• Kevin Haworth, The Discontinuity of Small Things (novel of Jewish life under German occupation)
• Michael Kimmel, Guyland
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
• C. J. Pascoe, Dude You’re a Fag
• Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
• Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs
• Joan Sewell, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate
• Deborah Siegel, Sisterhood Interrupted
• Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness
• Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich
• Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis
• Peter Fritzsche: Life and Death in the Third Reich
• Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism
• Laura Augstin, Sex at the Margins
• Kristin Luker, Sex Goes to School
• Jackson Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany
• Jeremy Noakes’ four-volume collection of Nazi primary sources
• Jane Caplan, ed., Nazi Germany
• Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality and German Fascism
• Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
• William Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power
• Maria Hoehn, GIs and Fräuleins
• Nancy Reagin,  Sweeping the German Nation

See any patterns there? Have you guessed how Limbaugh’s got me all figured out?

Please leave your verdict in comments. First commenter to guess correctly gets a free copy of the map quiz I’m giving on Thursday on Europe in the interwar years. (But not before Thursday. It is embargoed! Super top secret!) Equally attractive prizes may be awarded for extra-creative wrong responses. We don’t do Rice-A-Roni here at Kittywampus, but we’ve got a mondo supply of Bunny Mac.

Read Full Post »

What’s in a Decade? (Or, Feminism’s Non-linear History)

Historians are awfully fond of saying “It’s more complicated.” For better or worse, I’m a historian by training and inclination. Consider yourself warned: pedantry ahead!

Even though it’s a decade old, Amy Richards’ and Jennifer Baumgarden’s intro to Manifesta- a quick tour through women’s lives in 1970, the year both were born – is still a great read.  I use that chapter, “A Day without Feminism,” every quarter to kick off discussion in my intro class. Courtney Martin, writing in TAPPED, updates it for the millennial generation:

A tenth anniversary edition of Manifesta, updated and with a new preface added, has just been released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And in many ways, our last decade was also a baptismal moment of sorts for women (though it’s certainly been less covered by the mainstream media). To steal a page from Jen and Amy, consider the state of all things feminist in the year 2000: Birth politics is a niche issue. Gay celebrities are a scandal. Feminism is about women, not gender, and most U.S. feminists have never heard of child trafficking or female genital cutting. The notion of a woman, much less a black, president is still more pipe dream than actual possibility. There are no feminist blogs.

Courtney is wonderful. She spoke at my campus a couple of weeks ago, and the students really connected with her. Her youth is one asset in her ability to build rapport (though far from the only one; she’s just a really effective speaker). And it’s always a good idea to take stock of where we are in the flow of history. But here, I don’t think Courtney quite gives earlier waves of feminism their due. I’m not a partisan of any particular wave; generationally, I fall in the trough between the second and third waves. I just think it’s easier to move forward if we can avoid reinventing wheels.

And also, well, the past really is more complicated.

To start where Courtney ended: Yes, feminist blogs are very new, and they rock. The only blogs I knew of in the late 1990s were a few people’s personal online diaries. That was it. But by 2000, there were lots of online communities. For me, Salon’s Table Talk filled some of the needs that blogs now meet. I’d just become a mother, and I remember (for instance) lengthy discussions of Andrea Yates’ murder of her children that helped me place her act in a larger, political context of untreated postpartum depression and fundamentalist Christianity. Of course there were trolls on Table Talk, too, but it wasn’t the nightmare that Salon’s letter section is today. So, while blogs were the best invention since wine and cheese, they also built on existing forms of online community.

The prospect of a female president seemed pretty remote in 2000, but then again, democracy itself was under siege with Bush v. Gore and the foiled Florida recount. But if you rewind a little further, there was a moment way back in 1984 when we had reason to hope. I don’t know that Geraldine Ferraro would have been the right woman for the job, given her inexperience at the time and her racist comments on Obama in 2008. But her nomination did signal new possibilities. As for a black president, Colin Powell flirted with the idea in the late 1990, back before he disgraced himself by telling the UN we had hard proof of Iraq’s WMD. At the time, he certainly seemed a more plausible candidate than Obama did at the start of the 2008 campaign.

Child trafficking? This is an issue that feminists have taken up periodically for almost as long as feminism has existed. In the 1800s it was called the “white slave trade.” By the mid-1990s, there was lots of talk about sex tourism by men who wanted to exploit very young child prostitutes in Thailand. What’s new is that some of us are realizing that men, women, and children are trafficked for purposes other than sex, and that this is no less reprehensible.

Female genital cutting? In the mid-1980s, there was a huge flurry of attention when Alice Walker publicized the issue – and African feminists informed her that she should butt out. Ever since then, Western feminists have been upset about the practice but often unsure what, if anything, they can and should do to help.

“Gender” was a central part of academic feminism by 1990 at the very latest. Scholars like R.W. Connell and Michael Kimmel were studying masculinity. Historians of women were strongly influenced by Joan W. Scott’s 1986 article, “Gender: A Category of Historical Analysis,” which called for intersectional analysis along lines of race and class as well. Throughout the 1990s, most academic feminists continued to emphasize the study of women but also took a relational view, comparing women to men and examining femininity and masculinity. By the time a lot of us renamed our programs “Women’s and Gender Studies,” we were just formalizing a change that had been underway for many years.

As for the politics of birth, the main difference is that high-achieving women like Courtney who were college students in 2000 are now thirty-ish, with motherhood no longer such a distant possibility for themselves and their friends. But birth has been politicized ever since the Lamaze method was popularized in the early 1960s. When I first started studying the politics and culture of childbirth in the early 1990s, there was already a rich feminist literature. By then, hospitals had introduced birthing suites in an effort to compete with freestanding birth centers and midwives, which had gained strong support from feminist activism. Sure, Ricky Lake gave home birth a famous face, but the issues were already highly visible twenty years ago. With c-section rates skyrocketing past 30% and maternal and infant mortality a national disgrace, we’re arguably losing ground.

So what has really changed in the past decade? Well, homophobia has a much dimmer future than I would’ve imagined ten years ago. While it’s not quite true that “gay celebrities were a scandal” (Ellen had come out and was still loved), famous gay people were much more likely to remain closeted than they are today. But the biggest shift is in young people’s attitudes. Even my most conservative, religious students are apt to take a live-and-let-live approach, or at least they realize that homophobia is incredibly uncool.

Trans issues have also started to get the attention they deserve. Something similar is happening with issues of ability and disability. In both of these areas, blogs are helping render people and experiences visible. They’re still highly marginalized, but the winds of change are starting to shift.

Feminists are also more aware of intersectionality in general. We talked about it in the 1980s already (before the term “intersectionality” was even coined), but change has been slow in coming. Those of us with multiple privilege still fall short. It’s not just unexamined privilege that’s the problem, either. Analysis is a lot more complex when you’re looking at multiple dimension. Political alliances require more effort when you try to bridge and understand differences rather than just ignoring them. The resulting alliances and analyses are a lot richer, though, and I’m hopeful that those of us with relative privilege are increasingly catching onto that.

And yes, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made history. So did Nancy Pelosi. Their victories might have seemed remote in 2000. But 1970 – Baumgardner and Richards’ benchmark year – they were completely unthinkable.

So yes, history is complicated, often more so than we think. It doesn’t neatly repeat itself or develop linearly. Nor is there any guarantee of progress toward peace and justice. (See, for example, most of the twentieth century, with its nuclear weapons and genocides.) Sometimes there’s cause for celebration anyway.

Read Full Post »

Radical Compassion and the HCR Victory

I’m sitting in front of my TV, like so many of you, watching the post-HCR vote speechifying. I’m grinning like a fool, tearfully.

James Clyburn just said that Nancy Pelosi got it done through tenacity and compassion. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I think that this combination – which I’ll call radical compassion – is precisely what we need to move forward, and not just in the healthcare arena.

(And speaking of hope: My miniature iris is up, too.)

Read Full Post »

Disturbing Stuff I Find While Just Doing My Job

This is a post that begins with Godwin’s Law already fulfilled. Hitler is already in the picture and can’t be wished out of it.

But first, a word on how Hitler got here. As regular readers know, I’ve been teaching women’s and gender studies for nearly a decade, and I love doing it. As you know if you regularly follows feminist issues, you don’t have to surf very far through the intertubes before you run into sad, traumatic, or just plain disturbing shit. Whether it’s the seemingly infinite variations on the theme sexual violence or the occasional anti-feminist troll who’s moved to call you a cunt just because he can, there are constant reminders of the need for educating people on how gender is still all messed up with abuse of power and racism and heterosexism and cissexism and classism and ableism. More upsetting for me are my students’ own stories of violence and other trauma. So I’ve become accustomed but never inured to confronting some pretty sick stuff in my work.

This spring, I’m teaching a class on Nazi Germany. As only a few of you know, my grad work was primarily in modern German history, with only a minor field in women’s studies. In theory, I’m returning to my intellectual roots. In fact, I’m a bundle of nerves, because I haven’t taught a history class in ages, and never have I taught a whole class on the Nazis. And yes, I’m aware that disturbing stuff will be on that syllabus, too.

But here’s what I didn’t anticipate. The other day I’m googling for historical maps, and I swear I hadn’t entered “Nazi” or “National Socialism” or “Hitler” or “World War II”; I’m just searching on Germany historical maps. Within seconds, I arrive at a place I refuse to link to, whose name is St*rmfront dot org. (Sorry for messing with the spelling, but I don’t want any visits from these horrid people.) Their slogan: “Wh*te Pride World Wide.” Naturally, they’ve got a forum. One category is titled “Ideology and Philosophy Foundations for Wh*te Nationalism.” Just as a sample, behold the start of a thread with the charming title, “Why Deny the Holocaust?”

Nationalist hatewad #1:

Hey, I’m somewhat new here, not looking to start an argument. But if we really HATE the jews that bad, why wouldn’t we embrace the holocaust as a grand slam for our team?

Nationalist hatewad #2:

There is truth and there is fiction. Some people question the official history.

If the truth is that Hilter’s regime intentionally killed 6 million Jews then there isn’t any great noblility in it, and there is no reason to embrace it.

If the truth is that Hilter’s regime didn’t intentionally kill 6 million Jews the question is why are we told that he did.

Either way, the “Holocaust” is used to distract people from the Jews historic crime, most importantly the Bolshevik Revolution, Purges, Famines and Communist Slave States. Even if we give the Jews 6 million dead to Hitler, thats a drop in the bucket compared to the dead in Ukraine, China, South East Asia, etc. And yet, how many documentaries do you see about it, how many memorials.

Lots more where that came from! (And since I’m wearing my historian hat, I’ll just add that no serious, respected historian denies that the Holocaust happened. They may quibble about numbers, argue about its motivations, and disagree on whether it’s useful to compare one genocide to another. But the deniers are regarded like real biologists view new-earth creationists.)

Of course we all know people like this exist, but it’s jarring to stray into their charming little white supremacist neighboorhood. That’s one of the deeply disconcerting aspects of the internet: rabid anti-semites can slip into your living room while you sip your Almond Sunset tea. And you can’t just send them back to their well-armed cabin hideout in the remote Idaho woods.

I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t study botany. Or music. ‘Course, even there, Godwin’s Law kicks in as soon as Wagner is the topic …

Read Full Post »

Daly’s Misandry: “Idolatry” in Second-Wave Feminism

Shortly after Mary Daly died, I speculated that the notion of “idolatry” might be useful for secular feminists, but I didn’t develop the idea much further. In Beyond God the Father,  Daly suggests that in the past, feminists positioned suffrage as a kind of secular idol, and she warns against the “new wave” of feminism (e.g., the second wave) doing the same. For Daly, idolatry isn’t the worship of a false deity. It’s not making sacrifices to a golden calf. It’s setting up an idea or goal as “ultimate” when it’s actually transitory, like the achievement of suffrage. I’d argue that “choice” has had a similar status in second-wave feminism.

Unfortunately, she fell into precisely this trap by setting up “women” as a kind of idol in her later work, beginning with Gyn/Ecology, with the result being an “ethics” that demonized both transsexuals and men.

The shift in Daly’s thinking between Beyond God the Father (1973) and Gyn/Ecology (1978) is massive. She moves from examining social constructions and stereotypes to making universal pronouncements about the essence of men and women. Consider this passage from Beyond God the Father:

The roles and structures of patriarchy have been developed and sustained in accordance with an artificial polarization of human qualities into the traditional sexual stereotypes. The image of the person in authority and the accepted rationale of “his” role has corresponded to the eternal masculine stereotype, which implies hyper-rationality (in reality, frequently reducible to pseudo-rationality), “objectivity,” aggressivity, the possession of dominating and manipulative attitudes toward persons and the environment, and the tendency to construct boundaries between the self (and those identified with the self) and “the Other.” The caricature of human being which is represented by this stereotype depends for its existence upon the opposite caricature – the eternal feminine. This implies hyper-emotionalism, passivity, self-abnegation, etc.

(From Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 15)

Daly goes on to say that both women and men have begun (as of the early 1970s) to free themselves from these stereotypes. I’d quibble with the idea that those stereotypes have been eternal. Historians have shown them to be just a couple of hundred years old and limited to white women and men in the West. However, in light of her later work, it’s remarkable how much distance Daly places here between these “caricature[s] of human being” and actual men and women.

Compare this to how she view men, women, and stereotypes five years later:

Thus women continue to be intimidated by the label anti-male. Some feel a false need to draw distinctions, for example: “I am anti-patriarchal but not anti-male.” The courage to be logical – the courage to name – would require that we admit to ourselves that males and males only are the originators, planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents. …

Despite all the evidence that women are attacked as projections of The Enemy, the accusers ask sardonically: “Do you really think that men are the enemy?” This deception/reversal is so deep that women – even feminists – are intimidated into Self-deception, becoming the only Self-described oppressed who are unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague “forces,” “roles,” “stereotypes,” “constraints,” “attitudes,” “influences.” This list could go on. The point is that no agent is named – only abstractions. …

As a creative crystallization of the movement beyond the State of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.

(Gyn/Ecology, 28-9)

No longer does Daly see a chance for men to liberate themselves. Instead, humanity is divided into two opposing camps, men and women, and all men are tainted by their sex. In her concluding chapter, Daly describes an exorcism through which Hags and Crones purge their gathering of the male (or male-identified) Demons that have “infiltrated” them. She literally “Demon-izes” men.

Daly’s idolization of women forms the basis for a friend/enemy distinction that suggests women need to destroy their enemies as a matter of self-defense. As I’ve already discussed here, Daly accused MTF transsexuals of being the necrophilic pawns of patriarchy who sought the destruction of women. She postulated that they were the agents of a “Final Solution” that would violate women’s boundaries and render them “‘living’ dead women.” By appropriating the language of genocide, Daly implies (though never says explicitly) that MTF transsexuals have no right to live. She never says bluntly that they should be “exterminated.” Instead, she says they should be “eliminated.” However, I don’t think one can read “elimination” in a post-Holocaust world without understanding it as a potential euphemism for “extermination.”

Daly’s friend/enemy distinction is similarly virulent when it comes to men. In a 1999 interview with What Is Enlightenment? magazine, Daly made concrete the fantasy of purging men that she outlined in the closing chapter of Gyn/Ecology.

WIE: In Quintessence, your idyllic continent is inhabited by women only, but the rest of the world is inhabited by women and men.

MD: I didn’t say how many men were there.

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article “The Future—If There Is One—Is Female” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

WIE: Yes. I find myself now thinking that’s a bit shocking.

MD: Well, it’s shocking that it would be shocking.

A bit shocking? The language of “decontamination,” too, harks back to the Holocaust. She reduces men to un-persons, mere objects to be destroyed due to their toxicity, a contaminant that threatens womankind. This is the sort of objectification that any feminist – indeed, any decent person – should denounce as hateful and dangerous.

How, exactly, is the population of men to be “reduced and maintained”? Note the euphemism, again – it’s not Daly’s, but she accepts it enthusiastically. What would be done with the present generations of men? Would they be allowed to die a natural death, or would she want to hasten the process along? As for future generations, would she favor prenatal selection, which would require universal usage of IVF – surely a “technophallic” solution, in her own terms? Selective abortion? Male infanticide? Who would decide which men were allowed to live? Daly sidesteps these questions by suggesting an “evolutionary process” will do the trick, but that’s scientifically untenable and patently absurd.

Reverse all the genders in the above, and you’ve got a dystopia to rival Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And we shouldn’t be shocked, just because the vision entails the elimination of men instead of women?

Of course, Daly’s us/them thinking went even further. As Daisy Deadhead points out, Daly excluded many women from the category of “women”! – or at least the women who count:

As a Catholic, I believe she did irreparable harm to Catholic women who sought to reform the Church; she advised radical women to withdraw from it, leaving the liberal women who preferred to stay, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. (I notice she didn’t advise them to withdraw from other patriarchal structures such as, um, academia.) In her later books like Pure Lust, she was positively hateful to any feminists who did not follow her out of the Church, but instead chose to stay and fight. Her way or the highway.

Daisy also mentions a point that my previous posts didn’t address (on the assumption that most feminists already knew about this): Daly never gave an adequate public response to Audre Lorde’s contention that Gyn/Ecology was racist and colonialist. If this is news to you after all, you can read Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” here.

This is the problem with idolizing one category of people. The resultant us/them thinking draws the circle ever more tightly around “us.”

None of this would matter if Daly’s most venomous ideas had died with her, but they didn’t. At Questioning Transphobia, Queen Emily has laid out the legacy of excluding trans people from feminism, which has been deadly in some instances. The consequences for men have been less dire simply because they’re not a marginalized group like transgender people.

However, Daly’s idolatry lives on among a subset of self-identified feminists who embrace her defense of male-hating. (See also here, and don’t miss the comment thread.) They are relatively few in number, but it’s incumbent on the rest of us feminists who love men, who love humans, to categorically reject a feminism that leaves any space for eliminationist thinking. It’s up to us to reject what Daly originally called “a caricature of human being.” In fact, that’s the best way I can imagine to honor Daly’s better legacy.

Read Full Post »

Beyond the “Faux Hos” – What about the Faux Academics?

So there’s another possible case of a blogger creating a false persona on the web – and this time, not just gender but sex is in play. At Carnal Nation, Monica Shores alleges that Alexa Di Carlo, who chronicles her career as a paid escort at the Real Princess Diaries, is not a sex worker. According to some of the allegations, she may not even be a woman. Quite a few sex workers are outraged at this apparent fakery (for instance Tasty Trixie, Jenny DeMilo, a dancer named Kat, and lots of others, I’m sure – be forewarned that their sites are generally not safe for work, as is Real Princess Diaries). They have at least two main grievances that seem pretty righteous to me: If Alexa is indeed a fake, she is creating fake expectations, too, that at their worst could put sex workers at greater risk. And Alexa uses oodles of erotic photos that aren’t of her, without any attribution.

Now, having never sold any service sexier than food, I’m totally unqualified to judge whether Alexa is credible as a sex worker. However, I’m totally fascinated by how people can play with and fake identities on the Web, and so I started rummaging around in her archives when I first heard about this story (via figleaf) a few days before Christmas.

The first thing I read was a post titled “The History of Sexuality,” since that’s my own turf. Guess what? Alexa also claims to be a graduate student in human sexuality studies at San Francisco State University, aspiring to an academic career. Now that’s an area where I’ve got a clue.

And guess what else? I’m dead sure her academic credentials are fake. I have no interest in outing anyone – I expect people to honor pseudonymity and anonymity – so even if I knew who the “real” real princess was (which I don’t), I wouldn’t be inclined to reveal her name. But as an academic, I feel pretty strongly disinclined to tolerate fraud in my corner of the world.

When I went back after Christmas to look for that “History of Sexuality” post, it had disappeared from her archives. Since then, her whole blog has gone dark, including a very long post in which she defended her authenticity. She has also deleted her MySpace profile (though it – like her blog posts – is still in Google’s cache) and protected her tweets on Twitter.

The very fact that her “History of Sexuality” post disappeared early is suggestive because it contained a lot of detail that can be mapped onto real world correlates. For instance, SFSU really did offer a grad-level History of Sexuality course in fall 2009, which was taught by Prof. Amy Sueyoshi, and its syllabus (freely available online) really did include an assignment matching Alexa’s description of it:

For one of my classes this semester I have to develop my own syllabus for a History of Sexuality class for undergraduate college level students.  This has to include a description of the topics and suggested readings (along with justification for those readings) for each.

With that in mind, I’d like your input.  Read through this proposed two-semester outline and see if there’s anything else you think should be covered in a History of Sexuality course.  I don’t mind you delving a bit into each topic, but don’t get into minutiae about specific thoughts or points of specific discussion within each.  Other than that, though, feel free to make any comments you wish about this.

(This and subsequent quotations are from the cached version, so I can’t provide a permanent link, but you can access my pdf of the cached version of History of Sexuality for verification. For as long as it lasts, Google’s cached version is here. Just in case the site ever goes back online, the original URL for the “History of Sexuality” post is here.)

She then includes this list of textbooks:

• Sexualities in History
• The Mythology of Sex
• Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices
• Passion and Power Sexuality in History
• Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others
• Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work
• The Ethical Slut

One of her commenters proposed an obvious addition:

I can’t imagine a course titled History of Sexuality that doesn’t list in its readings The History of Sexuality: An Introduction by Michel Foucault. Of course, this isn’t a history in the traditional sense, but an examination of the construction of Sexuality as a concept, the categorization of sexual behavior, and the proliferation of sexual discourse (primarily as a control/power structure). Having a course with that title will immediately set up expectations for reading Foucault.

Okay, so Foucault is a tough read, and you wouldn’t necessarily want to assign it in an undergrad class unless it was aimed at especially advanced students. But that’s not how Alexa responded:

And you’ve explained why it would not be a central reading assignment in the course itself. Certainly, it’d be discussed, but, as you say, it’s not a historical text in and of itself.

Oops. Anyone who’s actually read Foucault’s History of Sexuality would never dismiss it on these grounds. No, it’s not a traditional history, but it’s conceptually crucial to understanding the history of sexuality. For instance, it was Foucault who first argued that homosexuality is a socially constructed and thoroughly modern category (though other historians have since fleshed out this insight).

In an earlier post, where Alexa listed her recommended books on sexuality, she did include Foucault – but in a way that only undermines her academic credibility:

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Michel Foucault.  Foucault is difficult to read, so I am only recommending the first of his three books on sexuality.  If you can get through this and want to continue reading, feel free to buy the other two.  His philosophy is constructed around the assertion that regulation of sexuality is the work of power elites who are seeking to garner and protect their position of social dominance.

(A cached version of this post, “Recommended Reading,” is here. My pdf of Recommended Reading is here. The original URL is here.)

Again, no! If a student submitted this précis to me as part of an annotated bibliography, or if she described Foucault’s thesis in this way, I’d have to assume she hadn’t read him. At a minimum, I’d question whether she understood him. The whole point of Foucault’s History of Sexuality is to describe power as decentralized and local in its workings. He does not conceptualize power as exercised in a top-down fashion. Instead, we’re all implicated in the workings of power/knowledge, which are not simply “the work of power elites.” I first read this book the summer before graduate school, and I understood that much. So should anyone who’s already logged a year as a grad student in sexuality – if she’s actually read the book.

But she does at least indicate here that she knows Foucault is difficult. How does she know this? And one thing weighed against my supposition that she hadn’t done the reading: she also picked up on the term “regulation,” which is pretty central to Foucault.

Well, I’m unfortuantely familiar with what students may do when they haven’t done the reading but are desperate to keep up appearances. The worst response? Plagiarize from someone who has read it. I say “worst” because it’s not only unethical, it’s stupid. Professors know how to use the Google, too, you know.

And that’s precisely what Alexa did here. She plagiarized. Here’s Alexa:

His philosophy is constructed around the assertion that regulation of sexuality is the work of power elites who are seeking to garner and protect their position of social dominance.

And here’s its original source, in a New York Times article from June 23, 2001, by Peter Steinfels on books that religious leaders have criticized as harmful:

Ellen Charry, another professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, chose ”The History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault.

”The effect of this book is to endorse the notion that the regulation of sexuality is the work of power elites who are seeking to garner and protect their position of social dominance,” Professor Charry wrote.

By the way, with all due respect to Professor Charry, I still think it’s a crappy precis for the reasons I described above. Professor Charry doesn’t like Foucault’s embrace of kink, which may explain why she’s not inclined to tease out any of the nuances of his argument.

Now, only after I’d combed through Alexa’s post without any inside information from people at SFSU did I learn through Tasty Trixie’s comment section that one of the other SFSU grad students has a blog, The Sexademic. It’s a smart and interesting blog. Its author, Jessi, confirms both that Foucault is a standard part of the curriculum, and that Alexa is not a student there:

She claimed in her posts to be studying in my graduate program (Sexuality Studies at SF State) and seems to have lifted information from the department profile of a fellow male graduate student.

For the record: there is no way this person is affiliated with my department. She knows a fair amount about sexuality studies but she constructed a syllabus of the History of Sexuality without including writings from Michel Foucault [Thanks Zoey for the cache link to Alexa's syllabus post]. History of Sexuality: An Introduction is one of the first sexual theory texts first year students read. No-one would leave Michel Foucault out of a basic sexuality reading list. This is tantamount to discussing the history of social labor movements without reading Karl Marx. Fail lady, fail.

I don’t know who this person is and the only thing I care about is that she is falsely claiming intellectual territory in Sexuality Studies at my university. Back off. Go fake yourself a life somewhere else.

(Read the rest here.)

The Marx comparison is spot on (and wonderfully phrased!). The sexuality studies grad program at SFSU is pretty small, and having been in a similarly sized program, I know how hard it would be to hide a secret this big. Jessi’s own identity is borne out by its website, as is the male student’s. Elsewhere, Jessi makes a persuasive case that her fellow student is essentially being libeled (see the comments in Trixie’s post) with details that again ring very true to an academic reader (“He would rather talk about Judith Butler and structural violence than write about deep-throating.)

Jessi’s post not only provides further confirmation of Alexa’s fakery; it also shows how a fake persona can have real world consequences. Alexa’s charade put a completely innocent male grad student under suspicion. She has also used countless erotic photos on her blog without any attribution – which is one of the things that rightly infuriates other sex workers, because she’s stealing their work. I guess a little academic plagiarism hardly registers when you’re routinely swiping people’s erotic photos to promote yourself.

The plagiarism really seals the deal, but other aspects of Alexa’s proposed syllabus raised my eyebrows, too. Her statement, “I don’t mind you delving a bit into each topic, but don’t get into minutiae about specific thoughts or points of specific discussion within each,” might have just been an attempt to keep comments focused on the big picture. But given that she’s faked at least some of her academic background, it more likely indicates a fear of being caught out.

Her reading list is a curious mix, too. She has three academic titles (Ruth Karras’ Sexuality in Medieval Europe, plus two essay collections, Passion And Power: Sexuality in History and Sexualities in History. The Mythology of Sex is an illustrated history – basically a coffee-table book. The two encyclopedias are completely unsuitable as textbooks, both because they consist of many short entries (duh!) and because the one on prostitution is super-expensive: $164 at Amazon, $225 list price. Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices is affordable but it’s not academic. These are books that might well be in the collection of someone who’s fascinated with sexuality and sex work, but they’re not the kinds of works that an instructor would steer a student toward, and certainly a second-year grad student ought to recognize their unsuitability.

Then there’s the incredibly broad scope of the course itself. In the first week, she proposes covering:

Ancient and Early Cultures
Sex from the beginning of recorded time through ancient civilizations, including Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the Roman Empire, Greece, and Egypt.  Discussion of gods and goddesses of sex and related subjects.  Discussion of Aztecs & polygamy, Mayan and Incan civilizations and incestuous practices.

(This and the following comments all come from the History of Sexuality post again.)

Another commenter, Charlie, notes that this kind of breadth is pedagogically self-defeating, even in a survey class:

It’s not quite clear to me from your description of the assignment- is this supposed to be an examination of all of human sexual history? Can it be a course on some slice or portion of the topic? I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to cover this much material in this much detail. The amount of information that you propose to include, even in a two semester course, is more than most people can absorb, process, or integrate, at least in my experience. While others have said similar things in the comments, I would add that when you’re asking students to explore sexual philosophies that are different from their own, you need to create the room for resistance, debate and exploration. This syllabus is so large and dense that I would expect there to be insufficient time for that. I think you’d do better to narrow the range and have more depth, in order to create room for people to challenge their ideas about what sex is and engage with ways of thinking about sex that are different from what they know.

Although it’s evident that Charlie has a lot more experience with teaching than Alexa does, her response brushes off his very reasonable concern that the course is overly broad:

I think it depends on how in-depth the subject matter is covered. It is, obviously, not intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the totality of human sexual history.

I think the first semester is easily doable, without constraints.

If you’re a graduate student really looking to refine a class assignment, you might want to seriously weigh advice from someone who’s been there, rather than dismissing it.

After I’d already formed this impression, I found that “Charlie” appears to be Dr. Charlie Glickman, who writes at the Good Vibrations blog and works as a sex educator. In a post titled “Who Is Alexa di Carlo?” he says that he took her at face value and provided help on the syllabus assignment, including some email exchanges. But based on her alleged theft of images from a camgirl, he now very much doubts that Alexa is who she says she is. He strikes me as smart, credible, and generous with his time. He also knows Jessi through Good Vibrations, which gives her a few bonus credibility points, too.

So why would someone pretend to be a sex worker? Well, the consensus seems to be that one might do it for the attention or in hopes of a book deal down the road. Certainly Alexa doesn’t seem to have earned any money directly through the blog (I saw no ads). She claimed to have attacted all of her clients through the blog, but that motivation collapses if she wasn’t really a sex worker.

Even more puzzling: Why, oh why, would anyone pretend to be a grad student? Sure, it might give your wanna-be “educational” posts a little more cachet. But for most of us, graduate school is a time of penury. I’m perfectly aware that some grad students choose sex work. I’d say it beats living out of your vehicles – and a recent vehicle-dweller just moved into the rental three doors down from me. Let’s face it – academic credentials don’t give you much of a boost in the blogosphere, especially if your claim to fame is that you host unprotected gang bangs for fun in your spare time. Academic credentials are also tough to fake.

Alexa di Carlo is a plagiarist. I’m be willing to bet my own credibility that she’s not a grad student in human sexuality studies at SFSU, either. As for her motives, your guess is as good as mine. Theories are welcome in comments!

And by the way, if anyone has a problem with my pseudonymity in this context, please drop me a comment. I’m pseudonymous so that my blogging doesn’t show up first when someone Googles me, not because I’m afraid to stand behind my writing. In this case, I realize I’ve made serious allegations and I don’t want them to be undermined by any suspicion about my own bona fides.

Added 12/29/09, 12:20 p.m.: Since this post is getting a bunch of hits from people who obviously aren’t my regular readers, here’s a short run-down on my academic credentials: I hold a Ph.D. in history from Cornell with women’s studies as a minor field, wrote a dissertation on the history of pregnancy and childbirth in early 20th-century Germany, and now teach women’s and gender studies at a public university in southeast Ohio. My graduate work, teaching, and research have all dealt with the history of sexuality.

Read Full Post »

A Little Post-Christmas Revisionism on Original Sin

If I were still in Germany, yesterday would have still be Christmas – they celebrate a second Christmas Day, without even renaming it “Boxing Day” – and so I’m going to declare Christmas still in season. Or maybe I mean, it’s still open season on Christmas? Really, I just want an excuse to write down a few thoughts about the Christmas Eve service I attended before New Year’s festivities begin.

The first Bible reading at the service was the story of the Fall of Man from Genesis. While it’s a rather gloomy place to begin, it’s also entirely logical. If Jesus had to come and redeem the world, there’s gotta be some reason why we needed redeeming in the first place.

¹ Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

⁴ “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. …

¹⁷ To Adam he [God] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:1-8, 17-19, New International Version

Oddly, the selection read from the pulpit left out Genesis 3:16, the part where Eve and all mothers are cursed forevermore: “To the woman he said, ”I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

I appreciate that this edit may have intended to play down the misogyny, but let’s face it: the story tells of Eve screwing up. She was the weak link. It’s her role that allowed church fathers such as St. Augustine to insist that original sin was sexual. Indeed, Augustine believed that it was transmitted from one generation to the next via semen! Another church father, Clement of Alexandria, advanced what we today might call a more sex-positive interpretation. Clement held that Adam and Eve’s sin was disobedience, and thus wasn’t sexual at all.

While I’m all for inclusive language in Christian churches, there’s something dishonest in trying to minimize the misogyny of Genesis 3, given the history of its interpretation. The Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Man – why isn’t is called the Fall of Humanity, dang it?! – is remarkably harsh on women compared to the other origin stories that I’m familiar with.

Like Genesis in the Bible, the Qur’an also links humanity’s fall from grace to Adam and Eve eating from a forbidden tree. However, the Qur’an does not single Eve out for any particular blame. On the contrary, it’s Adam who’s approached by Satan (not a serpent) in the Garden and led to disobey Allah:

But Satan whispered evil to him: he said, “O Adam! shall I lead thee to the Tree of Eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?”

In the result, they both ate of the tree, and so their nakedness appeared to them: they began to sew together, for their covering, leaves from the Garden: thus did Adam disobey his Lord, and allow himself to be seduced.

Surah 20:120-121

Here, too, their nakedness becomes an issue, but it’s Adam who disobeyed. It’s Adam who was seduced by Satan. I’m not claiming that the Qur’an is perfectly enlightened on gender issues, but on the events in the Garden, it doesn’t share the misogyny of Genesis.

The Gnostics who lived in the first couple of centuries after Christ’s death took yet a different perspective. Some of them considered themselves Christians, while others rejected the label. (In the end, that distinction didn’t matter much, as they were all relentlessly persecuted as heretics.) For Gnostics, the original sin of humanity had nothing to do with either sex or disobedience. It was a willful rejection of knowledge in favor of ignorance. I really like this interpretation. Especially after Bush II, it’s easy to see how much evil can be wreaked when a leader and his people choose ignorance.

The Buddhist origin story as told in the Agganna Sutta identifies greed and craving as the source of human suffering. The story is actually not technically one of origins but of a cycle in which the world passes into formlessless, then re-evolves:

There comes a time … when, sooner or later, after the lapse of a long, long period, this world passed away. And when this happens, beings have mostly been reborn in the World of Radiance; and there they dwell, made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory; and thus they remain for a long, long period of time. There comes also a time … when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance, usually come to life as humans. And they become made of mind, feeding on rapture, selfluminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory, and remain thus for a long, long period of time.

Aganna-Sutta (pdf alert!)

And those humans would remain pure mind and light, were it not for their apparently inevitable fall into suffering:

[S]ome being of greedy disposition, said: Lo now! What will this be? And tasted the savoury earth with his finger. He thus, tasting, became suffused with the savour, and craving entered into him. And other beings, following his example, tasted the savoury earth with their finger. They thus, tasting became suffused with the savour, and craving entered into them. Then those beings began to feast on the savoury earth, breaking off lumps of it with their hands. And from the doing thereof the self-luminance of those beings faded away.

Note that craving ushers humans back into a state of suffering and sets them on the path to other sins that will incur further suffering. One of the later sins is, indeed, lust, but it can’t appear until quite late in the game, once humans have differentiated into male and female:

And in measure as they, thus feeding, went on existing, so did the bodies of those beings become even more solid, and the divergence in their comeliness more pronounced. In the female appeared the distinctive features of the female, in the male those of the male. Then truly did woman contemplate man too closely, and man, woman. In them contemplating over much the one the other, passion arose and burning entered their body. They in consequence thereof followed their lusts.

Make no mistake, lust is identified as a sin. But the Agganna-Sutta doesn’t blame the woman any more than the man.

Does this mean that the Christian tradition must stay forever mired in Augustinian notions of women and sex as the source of original sin? Well, no. Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas (whose views on the Incarnation I’ve previously discussed) reconceives original sin as racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Catholic feminist theologian Christine Gudorf takes a similar tack:

Original sin, sometimes called social sin, or the sin of the world, is socialized into us as we learn our world, as we learn to speak a language, to interact with different persons and groups, to accept a specific role in society. Born into a society permeated with racism, sexism, poverty, and violence, we learn varying degrees of complacency toward, and come to accept these realities:; that acceptance, once socialized into us, forms the groundwork for our committing overt acts of sin. In sexuality, too, original sin is present in our world. Patriarchy, misogyny, the related evils of homophobia and heterosexism, and alienation from and disdain for the body and sexuality are forms which original sin takes in the sexual context.

Christine Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics, p. 17

And this is the conception of sin that I chose to keep in mind as I sat through the rest of the Christmas Eve service. Which was just heartbreakingly beautiful. I have to say, the Presbyterians know how to do it right in this town. They included all the best joyful carols: O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Joy to the World. The choir was beefed up by a few out-of-towners and even a visiting opera singer (as my friend who sings in it happily admitted), and they were so good, they managed to make even Away in the Manger touching, not cloying. We sang Silent Night by candlelight. I’m not a practicing Christian these days, but I still tear up at the music, when it’s done right; it’s some of the best evidence I know that there’s something divine at work in our lives, at least potentially.

As for redemption – our world needs more of it. I felt that the service, which ended with a prayer for peace and an end to imperialism, was on the right track regarding original sin, after all.

***********

This post was informed by the following books (though any errors are, of course, my own):

Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective

Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective

Christine Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics

Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

Read Full Post »

Ten and Twenty Years Ago: The Confluence of Personal and Public History

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached. Günter Schabowski, an East German Politburo member, announced that East Germans were free to travel. Now an old man, Schabowski claimed on the BBC this morning that he didn’t make a basic mistake, that he just jumped the gun by a few hours, but the record is more ambiguous on that. Anyway, the people of East Berlin seized the moment, drove their cute but stinky Trabants into West Berlin, and shredded the Iron Curtain forevermore. As a young grad student in German history, I watched the Wall fall on my 13-inch TV in my little apartment in Ithaca, New York,

Ten years ago today, I was living in Berlin. Fireworks were exploding. Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush were speechifying. I was begging my midwife to top off my epidural, which was only working on one side, and running through my little arsenal of breathing techniques. Shortly after three in the afternoon, my first child, the Bear, was born. I was dimly aware that the rest of the city was celebrating. My own world had radically contracted, both literally and figuratively. The small part of me that was still sentient thought it was cool that my child arrived on an auspicious day. I liked to think the fireworks were exploding for him. The rest of me, the greatest part of me, was only animal. I’d lost a lot of blood. I could hardly walk. Truth told, by the end of the day the Bear was far more alert than I.

Hardly anyone predicted that the end of the Cold War would usher in a new era of terror, instability, and fundamentalist hatred. On November 9, 1989, people danced on the Wall. A decade later, the fissures in the new, united Germany were apparent: high unemployment in the East, increased xenophobia throughout Germany, and mutual resentments and recriminations. Two years later, the Twin Towers fell. Those of us who’d comfortably embraced that creature called the “New World Order” realized it had fangs. Nothing in history is as simple as it initially seems.

So, too, in our personal histories, in our transitions to parenting, we can’t imagine what will come next. I think much of this is true for involved fathers, too; I’d love to hear from some of you, since I can only speak for myself as a mother. In all the propaganda about the joys of motherhood, no one ever mentions how sleep deprivation can render a person virtually psychotic. No one explains that you may feel, for awhile, as if your former self is not so much transformed as dead. Hardly anyone offers a road map for finding your way back to full personhood. Pundits expound on “work-life balance,” but the process of redefining one’s self runs immeasurably deeper than questions of career and time management. Nothing in mothering is as simple as it initially seems.

Then again, no one would have predicted that the Bear would grow into the deeply empathetic, intelligent, charming person that he is today. Well, okay, my mother saw it coming, even when he was throwing hour-long tantrums as a preschooler. (He never did stop being intense and alert.) He still has lots of moments where he’s bossy and ornery. But our Bear is a pretty wonderful kid.

I still don’t know what will come next, but this I do know. Freedom is better than oppression. Loving is better than refusing to risk one’s heart. Commitments to principles and people trump opportunism any day. And if we don’t embrace change and vulnerability, we might as well give ourselves up for dead. We might just as well erect our own, personal Walls.

Read Full Post »

The Perfect Modularity of East German Housing

The German Democratic Republic built a lot of apartments from prefab material in an effort to alleviate their perennial housing shortage. They had a great name for it, Plattenbauweise, which is only a long word when you consider the technique is called “Large Panel System building” in English. Basically, the builders took a bunch of concrete slabs and tacked them onto a frame. If you were really lucky, you lived behind a slab equipped with a balcony. I saw a lot of them in Berlin when I lived there, but I was lucky enough to never live in one myself. The apartments tended to be efficient (read: cramped and utterly lacking in character). And they were almost infinitely modular – so interchangeable, in fact, that you can play Tetris with them:

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Read Full Post »

Baby, It’s Judgmental Outside

Figleaf is asking what folks think are the creepiest old song lyrics, as viewed from our (now hopefully enlightened) present-day perspectives on gender and power. I have to agree with him on Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.” (Virgin child indeed! How can you think that line these days without picturing Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson’s hot tub, and a vat of Quaaludes?) Ditto on Paul Anka’s “Having My Baby.” Eww. Whose baby?? But it’s easy for me to despise the ideology in those songs, because I’ve always thought both of them were sappy, treacly, and musically insipid.

Other songs are easy pickins, too, even if I like and respect the musicians: “Under My Thumb” from the Rolling Stones romanticizes abuse. I can no longer hear “Wicked Uncle Ernie” from my beloved Who without wondering exactly what Pete Townsend was searching for on those child porn sites he visited (ostensibly for research). And then there’s the Gershwin oeuvre. “Someone to Watch Over Me,” indeed! I love Gershwin, I enjoy playing the songs on my piano, but some of the lyrics are just retrograde.

But back to figleaf’s list. I’m not ready to call “Baby It’s Cold Outside” a straightforward date-rape story, as he does. Let’s look at the lyrics. In case you don’t know the tune, it’s sung by alternating female and male voices, with the woman starting off first:

I really can’t stay – Baby it’s cold outside
I’ve got to go away – Baby it’s cold outside
This evening has been – Been hoping that you’d drop in
So very nice – I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice
My mother will start to worry – Beautiful, what’s your hurry
My father will be pacing the floor – Listen to the fireplace roar
So really I’d better scurry – Beautiful, please don’t hurry
Well maybe just a half a drink more – Put some music on while I pour

The neighbors might think – Baby, it’s bad out there
Say, what’s in this drink – No cabs to be had out there
I wish I knew how – Your eyes are like starlight
To break the spell – I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell
I ought to say no, no, no, sir – Mind if I move closer
At least I’m gonna say that I tried – What’s the sense in hurting my pride?
I really can’t stay – Baby don’t hold out
Ahh, but it’s cold outside

C’mon baby

I simply must go – Baby, it’s cold outside
The answer is no – Ooh darling, it’s cold outside
This welcome has been – I’m lucky that you dropped in
So nice and warm – Look out the window at that storm
My sister will be suspicious – Man, your lips look delicious
My brother will be there at the door – Waves upon a tropical shore
My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious – Gosh your lips are delicious
Well maybe just a half a drink more – Never such a blizzard before

I’ve got to go home – Oh, baby, you’ll freeze out there
Say, lend me your coat – It’s up to your knees out there
You’ve really been grand – I thrill when you touch my hand
But don’t you see – How can you do this thing to me?
There’s bound to be talk tomorrow – Think of my life long sorrow
At least there will be plenty implied – If you caught pneumonia and died
I really can’t stay – Get over that hold out
Ahh, but it’s cold outside

Baby it’s cold outside

Brr its cold.
It’s cold out there
Cant you stay awhile longer baby
Well…I really shouldn’t…alright

Make it worth your while baby
Ahh, do that again.

(You can read the lyrics and hear them sung here.)

So let’s start with a couple of lines that I do find creepy, sung by the man:

What’s the sense in hurting my pride?
Baby don’t hold out

This is definitely manipulative. The “hold out” prase is repeated later, too. It’s also icky because pride has no business in a make-out session. If his pride is that fragile, then he needs to get over himself. If pride is the only reason he wants her, then she has every reason to want to run back out into the cold. I don’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the line about “no cabs to be had out there,” either. While it’s probably factually true in a blizzard or ice storm, the man’s using it as an argument, conveying the possibility that the woman may be trapped against her will.

More ambiguous is this line:

How can you do this thing to me?

Is the male singer lamenting the woman’s possible departure? If that’s how you read it, the line is manipulative. But might he also be marveling at how much she turns him on? If so, that’s not necessarily pernicious at all.

I’m sure some people will read the cocktails as evidence of date rape. That’s only the case, though, if you assume that a couple of “half drinks” are going to render the woman incapable of consent. I’m not willing to read that much into the scenario; if you count every sexual encounter where alcohol is present as “rape,” then you’ve criminalized upwards of 90% of the sex that occurs on my university campus. (Whether that much drinking is desirable is another question.)

But along with the couple of definitely manipulative lines, the male singer also says some things that are solicitous and just plain warm:

Been hoping that you’d drop in
I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice
Beautiful, what’s your hurry
Listen to the fireplace roar

There’s a sweetness in those lines, as well as in the various compliments he gives her. (Quick! Somebody please tell me my hair looks swell!) But the really unexpected line comes right before the really objectionable one about his pride:

Mind if I move closer

Wow. He’s asking for explicit verbal consent! How often do you see that in a song – of any era? How often does that happen in real life, even today? This doesn’t neutralize the icky line about his pride, but it certainly complicates the potential date-rape narrative.

Turning to the woman’s lines, you see a lovely example of what figleaf likes to refer to as the first of his Two Rules of Desire: The woman is presumed not to have autonomous desires, and she comports herself accordingly.

But!! Look at why she’s resisting. It’s not because she’s not interested. She’s just playing the gatekeeper role. And she’s doing it for the same reason many of my students still do it, 60 years later: because she doesn’t want to be slut-shamed:

I ought to say no, no, no, sir
At least I’m gonna say that I tried …

My sister will be suspicious
My brother will be there at the door
My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious …

There’s bound to be talk tomorrow
At least there will be plenty implied

That’s the voice of a woman who knows darn well what she wants – she wants him! – but she’s hemmed in by the double standard. She ought to say no, no, no. She’s gonna say she tried – because she knows that otherwise she’ll be seen as easy.

And look at the social control! Her whole family has got her under surveillance. The reference to the maiden aunt is partly just reinforcing a stereotype of the shriveled up, sexless old maid, but it’s also describing one of the real ways that women have historically policed other women’s sexuality. In doing so, they may have thought they had the young woman’s interest in mind, but they ultimately, collectively helped enforce the patriarchal control of women’s bodies and sexuality. And the singer sounds as though she’s perfectly aware that this is more about family honor and community standards than her own well-being.

Maybe I’m a little soft on this song because I like it. There’s no question that the two singers are pressed into roles that undergird a rape culture. She means yes, and yet she says no no no – under duress. This is obviously some seriously fucked-up communication, and it’s just as obviously a way of navigating repressive social norms.

And yet – the song is more complex that the date-rape scenario suggests. I’m not nominating it to become the new third-wave feminist anthem of sex positivity, but there is that one shining moment where he asks permission. And there are those flying sparks of her fiery, authentic, and potentially autonomous desire, if only she didn’t have to fear slut-shaming. For the young woman, it’s cold outside, but it’s not the weather she fears; it’s the icy, judgmental reaction to girls who say yes. That raging blizzard? It’s the storm of shame she can expect the next morning.

Update 10-20-09, 10:45 p.m., better-late-than-never edition: Right after I wrote this, I checked out a bunch of different versions of it, and it’s amazing how different musical interpretations can slant the sexual politics of the song. Here’s Doris Day and Bing Crosby:

Poor Doris Day. I don’t think she was actually the prude that her reputation made her out to be, but she sure did play a lot of characters whose job it was to “hold out” while the male lead tried to whittle down her resistance. You can hardly hear her sing without those good-girl characters resonating in every note.

But when it comes to vocal mannerisms, I think Cerys Matthews (here with Tom Jones!) works harder than Doris Day to play the passive coquette. There’s also a clip where Jessica Simpson outdoes Matthews with the breathy girlishness of her voice, but it’s too insipid even for the standards of this lowly blog. Matthews sounds like she’s about eleven years old and Tom Jones is what he is, but they’re backed by a snazzy big band, which is really the saving grace of this arrangement:

Now, Dolly Parton brings a tartness to the song that makes you believe she really does want him. That is, until you realize what she wants is Rod Stewart. Given the choice between Tom Jones and Rod Stewart … well, I’d take Bing Crosby.

It’s striking what a difference the tempo makes. Just slowing it down can take it from chirpy coquettish to sultry. I like it slow. (Read that as you will.)

And then there’s the sole clip I found where the “male” singer acts rawly aggressive instead of suave – except that here, a woman (Selma Blair) takes on the “male” part and practically ravishes her partner.

It’s silly in its own way, in the tradition of “let’s destroy the patriarchy and replace it with a matriarchy!” But it’s worth noting that if Gap had made the same ad, with the same choreography, without reversing the sexes, we’d much more likely see it as a straight-up rape scene.

Read Full Post »

About that “Tree of Liberty” …

One of the favorite slogans of the town hall protesters has been “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants,” a statement from Thomas Jefferson. I’d like to propose that the tree of liberty has many branches, and that the teabaggers, freepers, birthers, and deathers are fixated on just the lower ones.

We’ve been discussing liberal feminism in my feminist theory class, and so we’ve looked at competing conceptions of liberty. Early on, until the years following World War I, a liberal was someone who believed that humans were naturally endowed with liberty and that any restrictions on liberty needed to be justified. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “the burden of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition…. The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom…” For early liberals from John Locke forward, the purpose of government was to protect liberty, and to restrict it no more than that goal required.

The teabaggers subscribe to this, which is basically a negative conception of liberty: freedom from interference.

(via Cogitamus)

In the twentieth century, though, a concept of positive liberty has emerged. “Positive liberty” can refer to the capacity for autonomous, self-directed action; young children and alcoholics thus can’t be said to enjoy liberty, because they are subject to internal compulsions and lack the capacity for critical reflection. “Positive liberty” can also refer to having the means to act and exercise one’s liberties; this may require economic, social, and political resources.

For proponents of health care reform, such as myself, the second definition of positive liberty is crucial. If you don’t have decent health, your liberty may be starkly constrained. If you’re tied to an employer just to keep your insurance, your liberty is likewise highly restricted.

I’d love it if the opponents of reform could see that we’re all in favor of liberty, we just subscribe to different understandings of it. I don’t suppose this is gonna happen, but it should would take some of the venom – and potential blood – out of the debate.

(Anyone interested in reading more about the various notions of liberty might check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on “liberalism,” which I drew on for this post, and which gives the citation for the quotation from J.S. Mill.)

Read Full Post »

As the Tanks Rolled into Poland, 70 Years Ago Today

If you haven’t been hiding under a rock, you may have heard that today marked the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland, which touched off World War II.

I’m not going to pretend that history neatly repeats itself, because it just doesn’t. Human evil – and sometimes, human goodness – is more protean than that. Contingency always plays a role. Present events rest ineluctably on the sediment of the past.

The causes of WWII were complex, a nasty brew that’s unlikely to be fully replicated again:

• irredentism following Germany’s loss of the previous world war
• the fallout of the worldwide economic crisis
• the international rise of fascism and its battle against the left
• Hitler’s personal charisma (which continues to baffle me)
• and the toxic marriage of traditional religious anti-Semitism with newfangled “scientific” race theory and eugenics.

The parallels to today are messy, at best. But they do hold a couple of lessons. Protracted unemployment and despair make people desperate and malleable. Despair gives demagogues easy pickins’. Any attempt to “export” a country’s domestic political ills via war is apt to end in catastrophe for all involved.

But the most important lessons aren’t all pessimistic. The experience of total defeat can produce countries in which pacifism is a bedrock conviction. German friends of mine are just befuddled by Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Germany and Japan are so reluctant to commit troops to international efforts that the U.S. periodically upbraids them for not doing their share. Once upon a time, they did more than their share, and we Americans taught them a lesson: “never again.” Might we Americans learn from their experiences before we too suffer deep humiliation and defeat? Or is there no shortcut to “never again”?

Read Full Post »

Feminism and Maternal Pleasure: Getting the History Right

Katie Roiphe isn’t wrong when she says feminist thought is underdeveloped when it comes to the pleasures of mothering an infant. I personally would extend this critique to the pleasures of parenting an infant, and the pleasures of parenting children at different ages, too. Of course it’s not just feminist writing that has failed to do justice to the pleasures of parenting; it’s hard to write about it from any perspective without resorting to clichés and cloying sentimentality.

But the phrases in Roiphe’s piece at Double X that have raised feminists’ hackles really do deserve a barrage of rotten tomatoes for being ahistorical. (Sadly, I’ve got too many rotten tomatoes of my own in the garden, but I throw like the stereotypical girl; no way can I lob them all the way to New York.)

Roiphe’s first problem is her subtitle – “Why won’t feminists admit the pleasure of infants?” – which I’m not sure she chose. It’s likely an editor’s headline, and so we can’t hold her fully culpable. But Roiphe herself writes:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment.

Hanna Rosin defends her at the Daily Dish on the grounds that she doesn’t demonize feminists:

Katie did not say that feminists hate their babies, or that baby-less women are useless, or anything else she’s being accused of saying.

But this surely misses the point. Roiphe seems to be indulging in something less sensational but no less pernicious: willful ignorance of recent feminist history. And I really mean: willful! Roiphe is the daughter of noted second-wave feminist Anne Roiphe, who wrote her own memoir of mothering, which most certainly wallows in its irrational elements.

Maybe ignorance is the wrong term, though. While Kate Harding sees Edith Wharton as Katie Roiphe’s foil, it’s easier to imagine that Roiphe’s imaginary interlocutor is her own mother. Read throgh this lens, Katie’s piece, which beautifully captures the blurriness of early motherhood, is yet another salvo in breaking free of her famous mother’s shadow; never mind that by now, Katie is probably better-known of the two. Perhaps Katie is trying to cast her own anchor in the wild sea of contradictions her mother bequeathed her. If so, I couldn’t blame her; the waters are mighty choppy.

Here’s how Anne Roiphe describes her transmutation through motherhood in Fruitful: Living the Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood:

When I became a mother to my first child I stopped believing in art as the only good in the world. I thoguht my baby was good. I thought my responsibility to my baby was good. In the early hours of the morning as I held the baby and watched out the window for the return of his taxi, I knew what mattered. I didn’t believe that motherhood would lead me to freedom or wisdom, but I knew that the urgency of my life was my child. This was the beginning of my feminism and I don’t care that that was an odd way to find it, a weird way to express it. ( Fruitful, 11)

Compare this to Katie’s take on the transition to early motherhood:

There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave. The high of a love that obliterates everything. A need so consuming that it is threatening to everything you are and care about. Where did your day go? Did you stare blankly at the baby for hours? And was that staring blankly more fiercely pleasurable, more compelling than nearly anything you have ever done?

But at this juncture, mother and daughter chart a different course. Here’s Anne’s take on how her self-as-mother and self-as-person hardened into matter and anti-matter, even in the midst of billowing love – oh, because of billowing love!

Ah, ah, I said when I saw the baby eighteen hours later, and those early moments as I counted the fingers and the toes, and looked at the lashes and felt the soft indentation on the scalp, touched the black wisps of hair, were my first and possibly last moments of wordless joy, of lifting up like the Eatern religions a promise of transcendence and peace. Temporarily I was blissed. So blissed I hardly noticed that I had lost my place on Juck’s raft, would soon lose my indifferent husband, my time for myself, my ambition, my freedom to go wherever the mood took me and stay as long as I liked. I was no longer the subject of my own days. Now I was the soil, damp, dank, wormy, from which someone else might grow. If I did badly I would never forgive myself. Judgment hung in the closet where the dark creatures of my childhood had once lurked. I had given up my boundary, the wall of self, and in return had received obligation and love, a love mingled with its opposite, a love that grabbed me by the throat and has still not let me go. (Fruitful, 4)

Anne published this in 1996, when Katie was all grown up and capable of grasping her own mother’s ambivalence about motherhood. (Katie surely absorbed it in her childhood, too.) By contrast, Katie the mother revels in her loss of self and the dissolution of personal boundaries. While only Katie knows her own heart, it’s hard not to think that she’s reacting against Anne’s ambivalence:

But then part of the allure of maternity leave is precisely this: You give up everything you are and care about. The books on your shelves are not your books; the clothes hanging in the closet are not your clothes. You are the vague, slow, exhausted animal nursing its young. Anything graceful, original, sharp, intelligent about you is gone. And it is that sacrifice of self, that total denial of the outside world, that uncompromising violence done to your everyday life, that is this period’s appeal. You are transported in a way you will never be transported again; this is the vacation to end all vacations.

Of course, in my drugged baby haze I do occasionally recognize that the baby will not always be six weeks old, that I will one day sleep more than two hours at a stretch. I also recognize that if you had a newborn every day of your life you would die. But for now, I feel like closing the shades and staying in the opium den. I know somewhere out there is a great world where people talk and think and write, but I am not interested in going there yet.

One serious difference? Katie has a map and a few talismans to help lead her out of her opium cave. Anne did not. Katie saw her mother reclaim a self who writes and thinks and moves through the world. Anne had no such role model:

My own mother read mystery stories, romance novels, and smoked three packs of Camels a day. She had no work in life other than the beauty parlor, the shopping lists, the decorating of the house. She played a high-stakes game of canasta, two, three afternoons a week. She blew smoke rings across the card table. She lay for hours soaking in the bathtub, a glass of scotch balanced on the rim. She had servants for the real work of the home. She cried herself to sleep most nights. She yearned and did not know what she yearned for. She wanted me to be different and the same. (Fruitful, 5)

Is it any wonder that Anne and Katie see early motherhood differently? Katie’s palette of possibilities, including that teaching job at NYU to which she can return, are the fruits of her mother’s generation. Those options are the legacy of Anne and other second-wave feminists not having set up house in the opium den, no matter how seductively it was furnished in Harvest Gold.

But these understandable generational differences still don’t excuse Katie Roiphe’s deliberate effacement of second-wave history. As Anne’s daughter, Katie surely grew up aware of Adrienne Rich. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution, Rich distinguishes between the social pressures and norms that often do make motherhood oppressive, and the deep-seated, often embodied joys of mothering one’s beloved children. Just as her subtitle promises, she tries to separate the patriarchal institution of motherhood from the lived experience of mothering. While we might fault Rich for being essentialist – after all, many of those pleasures and joys are available to fathers, too, if they chase them – we can’t claim she focused merely on the ways society oppresses women through motherhood. She also celebrated the joys.

When I first started studying motherhood, the historical and theoretical literature was a lot thinner. In the past ten years, there’s been an avalanche of new books analyzing the problems with the institution of motherhood. There have also been efforts – fewer in number, but still important – to recast the lived experience of mothering in feminist terms. They range from Sara Ruddick’s work on maternal practice to Daphne de Marneffe’s Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life.

The point of criticizing the institution of motherhood wasn’t merely to help new mothers grope their way out of the opium den when they felt a need or desire for the ordinary light of day. It was to free the experience of mothering from its alienating elements. Katie Roiphe has benefited from this. So have I. That doesn’t mean lived experience has broken free of the institution, only that before we start making broad generalization about the feminists who came before us, we’d better examine the history. We’d also be wise to take stock of our own generational and familial baggage and privileges.

Oh, and the world “vacation” to describe early mothering? That works for me if you consider a visit to a Baghdad “adventure tourism.” Early mothering can be hallucinatory, all right, thanks to extreme sleep deprivation. But I, for one, like to catch up on sleep on vacation, and I’m grateful that my now school-age children kindly allow me to do it.

Read Full Post »

To All the Folks Equating Obama and Hitler

Stop scrambling German history.

It was Bismarck, not Hitler, who introduced universal health care in Germany. Bismarck established public, non-profit insurance agencies funded by worker and employer contributions. He didn’t do it because he was a bleeding-heart liberal; his intent was to co-opt an issue that drew support to socialism.

Please get your mustaches straight.

Photo from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) via Wikipedia.

Read Full Post »

Man-Midwifery and the Romanticization of Labor Pain

A few days ago, a friend of mine who’s expecting her first baby emailed me, wondering if she should plan for a “natural” birth or give in to the “temptation” of an epidural. I don’t know what she’ll decide (and honestly, both are reasonable choices, in my view), but I pointed out that she was using the language of moralistic judgment. She’s a very smart and reflective person, and yet the words she used already condemned one choice as illicit. It’s telling, I think, that these words are the available ones, particularly for educated women concerned about doing everything right.

Hard on the heels of our conversation comes this British professor of midwifery, Denis Walsh, who’s been getting lots of attention for claiming that experiencing labor pain makes you a better mother. Here’s how the Guardian laid out his position:

More women should endure the agony of labour because pain-relieving drugs, including epidural injections, carry serious medical risks, diminish childbirth as a rite of passage and undermine the mother’s bond with her child.

These claims from Dr Denis Walsh, one of the country’s most influential midwives, have prompted a furious reaction, with other experts saying he has exaggerated the risks of having an epidural. Official figures show that the number of mothers-to-be who receive an epidural, general or spinal anaesthetic has soared in recent years to 36.5%. [Note that these are British statistics; U.S. figures are likely higher.]

Walsh, a senior midwife and associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University, argues that many women avoid experiencing the discomfort of childbirth because hospital maternity staff are too quick to offer an epidural or agree to a woman in labour’s request for a pain-killing injection in her back to ease her suffering.

“A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don’t fancy the pain [of childbirth]. More women should be prepared to withstand pain,” he told the Observer. “Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.” …

“Over recent decades there has been a loss of ‘rites of passage’ meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively,” said Walsh. Patients should be told that labour pain is a timeless component of the “rites of passage” transition to motherhood, he added.

While Walsh has found some support among feminist bloggers for challenging the medicalization of birth, he’s also been roundly criticized: Anna N. at Jezebel says he’s setting new mothers up for a lifetime of being judged. The bloggers at Broadsheet, to a woman, chose epidurals and have no regrets; the reject the idea that those who don’t suffer birth pangs (like, say, fathers!) will be better parents, and Amy Benfer suggests that Walsh’s position “smacks of sadism.” Figleaf points out that the curse of Genesis applied to Adam, too, yet men aren’t considered morally superior if they avoid “painful toil.” Dr. Amy Tuteur at The Skeptical OB notes that “the claim about endorphins and bonding is entirely fabricated; it was made up by Michel Odent.”

Yep. That’s all true. Tuteur’s reference to Odent is particularly telling, because he’s one of the fathers of  “natural” childbirth, along with Grantly Dick-Read and Fernand Lamaze. While female midwives picked up the idea of natural childbirth and ran with it, and many mothers enthusiastically embraced it, it was originally the brainchild of male physicians.

But the original promise of natural childbirth was not to create better mothers through suffering. Quite the contrary; it was to greatly reduce or eliminate pain. Dick-Read believed that labor pain was largely due to fear and tension. His theory relied heavily on what we’d now see as racist distinctions between “primitive”African women, who allegedly gave birth painlessly because of their closeness to nature, and “civilized” European women. The original Lamaze technique used Pavlovian conditioning to train women to relax and ideally eliminate pain. Ina Mae Gaskin, who’s probably America’s most famous midwife, redefined contractions as rushes and contended that women could learn to transmute the pain into productive effort. (I don’t know if she still makes the claim that women can achieve a pain-free birth through the power of their minds, but that’s what she originally contended in her book, Spiritual Midwifery.)

So Walsh’s position is actually much closer to Odent’s and quite far from Dick-Read and Lamaze. What changed between the early 1960s, when natural childbirth was first popularized, and today? Well, women no longer need to choose between consciousness and pain relief. Epidurals offer both, unlike Twilight Sleep or other opiate-based techniques. Culturally, motherhood has optional. We’ve mostly left Freudian mother-blaming behind us, but in its place has arisen a standard of intensive mothering that no woman can ever perfectly meet.

It’s ironic that the attempt to sell natural childbirth by equating pain with better mothering is occurring in Anglo-American discourse. Originally, it was American women who most vocally demanded better obstetric pain relief in the early 1900s, following the invention of Twilight Sleep. They were far more organized and vociferous than their counterparts in Germany, where the technique originated. Although strong religious objections against relieving labor pain persisted into the late 1800s in the United States, ether and chloroform had been commonly used since early in the post-Civil War era. British, women, too, embraced pain relief fairly zealously after Queen Victoria quelled the controversy over chloroform by choosing for her eight delivery in 1853, though working-class women remained more skeptical into the twentieth century.

The historical adoption of pain relief in labor both reflected and helped to constitute new ideals of motherhood as less about suffering and more about love. Motherhood became less identified with complete self-sacrifice and more compatible with legal and social personhood. Where backlash against this trend occurred – such as in Germany – it was often tangled up with militarism and bellicose nationalism. One German obstetrician who opposed pain relief in labor wrote in 1932 that “humanity must become tougher and more manly again. Learn to suffer without complaining.” He was one of many physicians who worried that women were becoming soft, sentimental, and degenerate, with dire consequences for national health and military fitness. The apparent contradiction of calling for laboring women to become “more manly” is a little less nonsensical in light of the demand for a virile military, which required virile mothers.

I’m not suggesting that women who reject pain relief are complicit with militarism. Not at all. But arguments equating suffering with good motherhood have a very regressive history. Those who would shame women for relieving their pain are part of that tradition.

Which brings me back to my friend, who’s expecting at the end of the summer. I don’t know what choices she’ll finally make. It would be equally bad if she felt pressured to choose an epidural; that happens, too, thanks to medicalization and our idolization of technology. I just hope that whatever she does, she’ll feel free of judgment.

(This post ought to have about 20 footnotes. Anyone who’s really curious can email me: sungold85 [at] gmail [dot] com, or start with Judith Walzer Leavitt’s groundbreaking study, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. On Grantly Dick-Read and the genesis of natural childbirth, see Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood.)

Read Full Post »

What Intersectionality Is and Isn’t

Hint: One thing intersectionality is not? Silly.**

Here’s what intersectionality is good for. It reminds us that the same person can be both an oppressed person and an oppressor, depending on how you turn the prism. I might be oppressed as a woman, but if I refuse to pay my housecleaner a decent wage? I’m an oppressor. If I fail to teach my kids that same-sex love is just as groovy as hetero pairings? I’m an oppressor. If I reject the term “cisgendered” because I’d rather just see myself as the norm? I’m an oppressor.

So that’s the first area where intersectionality is useful: It reminds us that we aren’t the only people to face some sort of systematic disadvantage. I might not be on the front lines of other people’s struggles, but I can educate myself, try to be an ally, and at the very least try not to undermine them. I’ll surely fail, because we’re all caught in complicated webs of power/knowledge, we’re all shaped by our upbringing, and we often can’t see our own blind spots. But I’ll fail less egregiously than if I hadn’t tried.

Also, intersectionality points out how different oppressions don’t fit neatly into in separate little boxes. Apostate writes:

If and when my race and gender do “intersect” and I’m jointly oppressed under BOTH headers, I still look at them as separate offenses. He was both a racist AND a sexist to me. The two oppressions don’t somehow meld together to give a unique picture of oppression. There is simply more than one thing going on.

I’m sure this is true of her own experience, but I’m equally certain that it doesn’t describe everyone’s position. Often when two oppressions intersect, each changes the qualitative experience of the other. For example, a statement like “all women are harmed by rape” might seem unproblematic to a white woman. A black woman, however, might be leery of what the statement doesn’t mention – the racialized history of rape, which includes the lynchings of black men on threadbare suspicions of raping white women, and the myth of the black rapist – and how that history has harmed men she loves. Women of color have been directly victimized by rape, to be sure, but they’ve also been indirectly by the cynical use of “rape” as a pretext for harming the men of their community.

Apostate and the post she cites (by Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes) mention two substantitve reasons for doubting the usefulness of intersectionality. They are: the existence of individual circumstances, and the complexity of understanding multiple variables (or axes of oppression). These are legitimate and important concerns, but neither is fatal to intersectionality as concept or method.

First, Apostate and Suzie note that each individual experiences the intersection of oppressions in potentially unique ways. Patricia Hill Collins’ work on intersectionality actually addresses this point. Collins maps oppression onto three dimensions (which she borrows from Sandra Harding): 1) institutional (which includes government agencies, corporations, schools, churches, etc.), 2) symbolic (which is basically the realm of culture and language), and 3) individual (which asks how deeply each person internalizes oppressive ideas). Any of these dimensions can be sites of resistance as well as of oppression. At the individual level, a strong family member, teacher, or mentor can do a lot to mitigate the internalization of oppression.

But recognizing individual variation needn’t obscure the big patterns. Suzie worries that intersectionality, applied like a cookie cutter, can rob women of being seen as individuals living in very particular circumstances, with bad results for the delivery of essential services:

I agree that DV [domestic violence] counselors need to understand why some women don’t want to call the police. But if they assume all WOC [women of color] will be hesitant, they may deny them options or support. Also, some poor whites have little use for the police, and some poor white women don’t want to report abusers either. Ditto for some white immigrant women. Other variables include women of any race whose abusers work for, or have connections to, law enforcement, and WOC who live in areas where the police share their ethnicity. All in all, it seems like the best DV programs consider different options for different clients, without assuming one model works for white women and another for WOC.

(More from Suzie here.)

However, it’s quite possible to be aware of a general pattern of mistrust – or several general patterns, as Suzie outlines – without assuming blindly that the pattern holds true in every individual case. There will always be individual variations as well as stark outliers. Any social worker (or theorist!) worth her salt will be sensitive to those variations. The broad patterns that intersectional analysis identifies are only a starting point for further analysis or action; they’re not meant to be the end of the line.

The second objection is that analysis becomes impossible when you try to include multiple variables. It’s absolutely true that analysis becomes substantially more complex with the addition of each variable. The trick is to try to identify which dimensions are most relevant in a given set of circumstances. For sexual assault, race is definitely important, as I just noted; social class and/or sexual orientation might also be relevant. For instance, when I teach the introduction to women’s and gender studies, I make sure that race was highlighted (we’ve got a largely white student body, so they won’t always come up with this on their own) and then I let them raise other concerns. How does a poor versus affluent neighborhood affect one’s fear of rape? Who is “one” in that scenario – a resident of a poor area, or a well-heeled person passing through? How do heterosexual assumptions affect rape myths? Usually, their questions eventually explore enough different axes that they add up to an intersectional analysis. It will be imperfect, but it’ll be better-rounded than if we’d only stuck to their own personal perspective of whether to walk home alone from the library after midnight. The process is also iterative for me, as a teacher; in the months ahead, I’m hoping to do a more thorough job of drawing out (dis)ability and the special vulnerabilities of transpeople to sexualized violence.

Intersectionality is also important in my research. In my dissertation, race wasn’t a very important axis, because Germany was racially (though not ethnically) homogeneous in the 1920s, and race didn’t affect women’s experiences of childbirth. Religion and migratory status (usually, from countryside to city) mattered very crucially. The category of religion captured differences between Jewish women and others, though in many ways Jewish and Protestant women had more in common with each other than with Catholics. Exploring these different axes wasn’t just an expression of my commitment to feminist methodology. It was also the only way to write a social and cultural history of pregnancy that didn’t grossly overgeneralize or erase the experience of the most disadvantaged women. (That prismatic view also resulted in the monstrosity that no advisor encourages: a two-volume thesis. Gulp.)

So while I think that the concerns Apostate and Suzie raised about intersectionality are reasonable, they don’t invalidate intersectionality as a useful way to look at the world. Intersectionality certainly doesn’t render feminism powerless and infinitely splintered. Rather, it gives us a way to forge real alliances with other women; bonds that don’t depend on effacing our differences.

Really, the need to grapple with differences goes back to Audre Lorde’s classic formulation:

The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all people to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation and suspicion….these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

(Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” – no link, but if you google a phrase, you can find more in various Google Books.)

You might add: a single lens will never let you view the master’s house in its entirety. And so intersectionality offers a prism, which is dizzying and bewildering at times, but promises we can edge closer to truths, which will always be partial in all senses of the word.

** And Apostate, I absolutely don’t think you’re silly, but this is one time I disagreed with the more flippant part of your analysis, even while I appreciated your more considered points.

Update 7/15/09: While I was finishing up thie post, C.L. Minou posted some reflections on kyriarchy, oppression, and Bastille Day, which, um, intersects interestingly with my post. Plus she’s got a very cool animated image of a tesseract, which you don’t want to miss.

Read Full Post »

Rockin’ the Declaration of Sentiments

Here’s the preamble to the Declaration of Sentiments that early American feminists presented in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, under the kick-ass leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The parallels to the Declaration of Independence give me great bumpity chills:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Thereafter follow the good ladies’ specific grievances.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, architect of the Declaration of Sentiments, showing her mettle. (If the image is subject to copyright – I took it from here – I assert fair use for educational purposes.)

Here’s how the much better-known Declaration of Independence stacks up:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Wow. What a difference a woman makes.

The Declaration of Sentiments still lives, every bit as vibrant as the Declaration of Independence. Let us be brave, and free, and not cowed by the ancient history of tyranny.

Happy Fourth, everyone. I may be far from home, but I’m still a silly idealist. Down with despotism; up with freedom for the long-suffering. And most definitely, up with my wine glass. Cheap Riesling is blessedly good around these parts. Now, if I just had some fireworks …

Read Full Post »

A Colleague of Mine Goes on Colbert

A colleague of mine, Kevin Mattson, appeared on Stephen Colbert last night. He’s one of those people who proves what a small town we live in: He works in the history department, so I know him through professional channels. He lives just two blocks away from me. I worked with his wife on the Obama campaign. She was our neighborhood captain, which meant she would call me up and persuade me that Obama’s election depended entirely on us, and I really didn’t need to grade those papers after all. Not least, they hosted multiple parties, pre- and post-election, which were loads of fun.

Anyway, Kevin has written a book about Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, in which he argues that we should have heeded Carter’s call to rethink our energy use and consumerist values. And he went on Colbert to hawk it. I’ve always thought it would be hard to go head-to-head with Colbert, because as the guest you’ve got an idea to sell, while his mission is to insert loony Republican ideas for their comic effect. Kevin’s topic, the Carter administration, made a perfect foil for Colbert. Kevin is actually a very funny person in real life, but here his job was to play the straight man. Still, I thought he did a great job of holding his own.

posted with vodpod

Read Full Post »