Godless Professors and the Subversion of American Youth

Did you know that universities are subverting the minds of America's young people by turning them into godless socialists? Dr. Mike S. Adams, a professor at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is dispensing advice at Townhall to a father who is distraught about his daughter coming home with scary new leftist ideas. Jeff Fecke (h/t) has already taken down Dr. Mike bit-by-wingnutty-bit - including his coinage of the oh-so-clever acronym STD for "Socialist Teaching Disorder." I just want to zoom in on one little piece of Dr. Mike's take on university life:

First of all, I want you to understand that many of the crazy ideas you hear your daughter espousing are commonplace on college campuses. Nonetheless, it must have been shocking for you to hear that she supported Barack Obama in the last election principally because of his ideas about “the redistribution of wealth.” I know you were also disappointed to hear of her sudden opposition to the War on Terror and her sudden embrace of the United Nations. Most of all, I know you are disappointed that she has stopped going to church altogether.

Now that your daughter is not going to church it will be easier to get her to accept other policies based on economic and cultural Marxism. Socialist professors like the fact that average church attendance drops dramatically after just one year of college. God and socialism are simply incompatible. One cannot worship both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.

(If you must, you can read the rest here.)

Although I'm not a real socialist - just a fan of redistribution, thanks to my pastor when I was 14! - I am one of those freethinking university professors. Scandalously, I think it's a good thing when my students start to examine their beliefs and preconceptions.

I just finished teaching a class on religion, gender, and sexuality that might well enrage Dr. Mike. I framed patriarchy in materialist terms and lectured on how poverty multiplies the odds that a woman will terminate a pregnancy. (Socialism!) We discussed the Gnostic Gospels and the struggle between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in Christianity. (Heresy!) We delved into the roots of the Christian valorization of virginity. (Sluttishness!)

At the end of the quarter, students were asked to write a short essay in which they discussed how their views had changed over the past ten weeks. Many of them said that the class upset their certainties. Some of them questioned their faith. How, after all, can you trust the Bible's authority if a politicized Church hierarchy - not divine revelation - determined which books became canonical?

So yeah. Dr. Mike would hate this class. So did one student (out of 85), judging from the final exam. She objected to the feminist framing of the material. She would have preferred ten weeks of Catholic dogma. She transparently didn't bother to engage with the material in any serious way.

The rest of the students - including many current and former Catholics - realized that they didn't have to follow any party line. Not mine; not any religion's. One young Catholic woman had a real crisis of faith mid-quarter. By the end of the quarter, she felt stronger in her beliefs than before. Another young woman who's planning to become a minister wrote of her past and present struggles with her faith.

Did I turn those students godless? Not by any stretch. And that was never my intent. If a person is going to embrace faith as an adult, they're going to have to find it themselves. They can't just continue believing a Sunday School version of it with colorful, sanitized pictures of Daniel in the lion's den and Jesus surrounded by fluffy lambs. They'll have to navigate their way from dogma to actual faith. That's exactly how some of my religious students used the class. They started questions and haven't stopped. And they have matured in their beliefs. (Interestingly, a number of them declare some affinity for Buddhist ideas, even as they remain in their own faith tradition.)

A substantially minority of my students wrote that they consider themselves agnostics or atheists. So did I convert them to godlessness? A few of them did begin to call themselves agnostics during the class, but most of them came into it already rejecting or questioning religion. Many of them felt liberated at being able to "come out" about their unbelief in their discussion groups - something they often had felt unable to do, until now.

These students took my class for one of two reasons. Some had grown up without any religion and felt they needed to close a gap in their education. Others were questioning their religious upbringing or had rejected it altogether, often in the wake of a loved one's death. (It's ironic and sad that religion seems so often to fail people at the very moment when it's supposed to provide the most comfort.) Disproportionately, the students in this second group had been raised Catholic. For most of them, the Church's condemnation of homosexuality was a serious dealbreaker, with its position on abortion and contraception coming in a close second.

This is why the Pope's statement on gender last Christmas made me crazy. There was some controversy at the time about what the English word "gender" connotes when used in Italian (as in the Pope's address), and I can't speak to that as an expert. I know about a dozen words of Italian and I wasn't raised Catholic. But the context - as well as some of the smarter commentary on this - convinced me that he was affirming the church's teachings on the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and traditional gender roles.

More importantly, the Pope was trying to shut down all discussion of all gender issues within the Catholic Church. This is exactly what's driving young people out of the Church. They see the condemnation of homosexuality and the hierarchy's refusal to even discuss it as contemptuous and inhumane.

Dr. Mike, his letter-writer, and (I'm betting) a lot of conservative parents want to short-circuit that discussion too. It's a terrible loss, because their kids want to have it. They need to have it. That goes for everyone from the young fundamentalist to the hard-core nihilist. (And yes, the range in my class was that wide.)

If Dr. Mike were paying attention to his students, he'd realize that whatever their professors do or say, they are at an age where they're bound to question their upbringing. A good university education should help them learn to think for themselves in a more thorough, systematic, and deeper way. It should prod them to question received wisdom and authority. It should expose them to a variety of viewpoints. (Yes, even Dr. Mike's.)

If that's subverting young people, then I'm blessed to be a part of it. One student sent me an email at the end of the quarter saying the class had changed her life; another said the same as she turned in her exam. I don't personally take too much credit, because the potentially life-changing work happened in the discussion groups, not in my lectures. But even so, staying on the job full-time this quarter through weeks of illness and fear was probably the hardest thing I've ever done, and I'd worried that my students got cheated. I blubbed in gratitude when I read that email.

Oh, and as far as I know, I didn't convert a single student to Marxism. Nary a Trotskyist. Not even a mild-mannered socialist-feminist. I guess I'd better try harder.

Shaking the Sausage

My penis spam junk mail box has had some marvelous subject lines this week:

Your sausage will be reputable

Women will beg you to walk naked and shake it

Combine those two images and you get a visual that ... well, maybe you'd better not go there. I sort of wish I hadn't.

I'll try to get back to more substantive posting tomorrow; I am completely fried from a long day spent driving to Columbus and chasing our kids around COSI, the science museum. Until then, dear readers, I'll leave you to ponder how exactly a hunk of quivering meat can be "reputable." Better than disreputable, I guess.

Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and "Getting the Milk for Free"

Are men really from Mars after all? I kinda doubt it, but last night I got a comment that seemed to come straight from outer space. It appeared on a post I wrote last month on a study that suggests kissing alleviates stress for men and women. Amy wrote:

Sunglold, I don't know what rock you have been hidding under... but there is a massive difference in the way men and women think and feel about sex (and kissing).

In my experience, men and women are worlds appart when it comes to sex!

Men have at least 10 times more testosterone than women, and testosterone inhibits bonding and increases interest in casual sex and sex with a variety of partners. ...

Women strive for attatchment, bonding, love and commitment. Women can't understand why men don't have more feelings for them. But put simply, men just don't have as many feelings as women. [my emphasis]

I'll agree that in most Western societies, men are socialized to be less expressive with their feelings. That's not the same thing as not having feelings, however. Most of the men I've been close to have stories - sometimes over a decade old - about being painfully, painfully dumped by an earlier girlfriend. Most of them now have children and love them just as fiercely as any mother.

Denying that men can feel deeply amounts to denying men their full humanity. And they say feminists despise men?!

Women can get hurt in casual sex. So can men. Women can get their hearts broken by a lover. So can men. It happens to virtually all of us who aren't celibate. It even happens to celibate people, too! (Some of my worst heartbreaks came during my virginal teen years.)

Where Amy and other anti-feminists blame feminism for bringing on the sexual revolution and leading directly to the shattering of young female psyches, the history is much more complicated, and most of it has little to do with feminism. Heartbreak goes back at least as far as Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The sexual revolution on the 1960s had its roots in youth culture, drugs, and rock and roll. The advent of the birth control pill in 1961 enabled young women to try out sex - whether in hippie communes, bars or with a committed boyfriend - without fear of pregnancy paralyzing their pleasure.

Second-wave feminism was generally chilly toward the sexual revolution, at least as most young heterosexuals were experiencing it in the 1960s and 1970s. Nowhere in The Feminist Mystique did Betty Friedan suggest that the path to women's liberation required shagging anything that moves. By 1970, Anne Koedt was assailing men's sexual incompetence in "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm." The Redstockings saw men as well-nigh irredeemable; why would you want to sleep with the enemy? While the Redstockings Manifesto (1969) didn't go so far as to repudiate all relations with men, within a few years political lesbianism and separatism became a major current within feminism. Needless to say, none of these women were advocating casual sex with men, either. Third-wave feminism has generally repudiated separatism and criticized slut-shaming, but that's not the same as positively advocating hookups and casual sex for all women.

Where feminism made a difference was, of course, in opening up historically new educational and economic opportunities for women. These made it possible for women to defer marriage and to enjoy sex without bartering it for economic security. This, to my mind, was the real sexual revolution. It's just not the one people mean when they blame feminism for the failings of the hookup scene.

So yes, in a materialist sense, feminism enabled casual sex. But more importantly in the long run, feminism has opened the possibility of for us (men and women alike) to have sex only when we want to, not under duress, and not for economic security or survival. In a perfectly feminist world, no one would stay married against their will, for example, or submit to a spouse's unwanted advances. We don't live in that world yet. Plenty of people stay married for economic reasons. (Some of them are men.)

For those of us who aren't trapped by economics, feminism allows us to say no to the sex we don't want, and an enthusiastic, lusty, happy yes to the sex we do want. That's revolutionary, all right. It's just not identical with "the sexual revolution." It's also antithetical to the idea that anyone needs to participate in hooking up.

Contrast this with the bleak view of sex and men that Amy expresses at her blog:

Casual sex makes men LESS likely to commit, he’s not going to buy the cow when he can get the milk for free. At least the whores are setting the price for sex! Casual sex means no flowers, jewellery or chocolates. Engagement rings, marriage and kids will be even further out of your reach. Always wait as long as possible before sleeping with a guy; because once they get you, they don’t want you anymore.

(More here, including advice to flatter a man, then knock his ego back.)

Viewing sex as a commodity is almost certain to lead to heartbreak. I can buy my own chocolate. I can't buy love at any price.

And then there's a pesky little Kantian ethical issue with regarding sex, and by extension one's partner, as a mere means to an end. I don't much care whether the end is "getting some pussy" or "getting married." Either way, it dehumanizes and disrespects one's partner.

Amy expresses a lot of frustration with men who are users and losers and just general douchebags (my word, not hers). She has apparently had a run of bad luck, and I'm sincerely sorry to hear about that. She's also young and has a lot of time to meet someone who's kind and warm and interested in a real relationship. I hope she'll find her heart's desire.

My advice (not that she asked)? Stay away from the bars and the hookup scene if what you want is a relationship, because it's true that among college-aged people, more men than women will want to keep it casual (see Kathleen Bogle's Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.) Don't play games; any guy worth loving is one who won't be impressed by manipulation and scheming. Avoid casual sex unless it appeals to you. If you do have casual sex, remember that you don't need to justify it by immediately deciding you're in love (thus preordaining later heartbreak). Be true to your own desires and respectful of your partners'; you might still get your heart broken, but you won't end up embittered.

And have patience. I was 28 when I met my husband, 30 when I married him. He was more keen on having children than I was. Fifteen years later, he may be getting the milk for free (or maybe it's the other way 'round?) but he's absolutely not a user or a loser. He feels as deeply as I do; he loves as deeply as I do. This isn't a fairy tale (and lord knows we've had our share of bumps and woes). It's just one example of how we don't have to be trapped by ideas that denigrate one gender or the other. For that, we can thank feminism's real sexual revolution.

When Slut-Shaming Is Not Enough ...

... then it's time for a legal crackdown!

According to the Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio legislator has proposed a bill that would define "sexting" by teenagers as a first-degree misdemeanor:

Rep. Ronald Maag, R-Lebanon, said he will soon introduce a bill making the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors – commonly known as “sexting,” – a first-degree misdemeanor.

“Local prosecutors have brought to my attention that under current Ohio law these teens could be charged with a felony and classified as sex offenders,” Maag said. “There is concern that this may not be appropriate for these minors.”

Now, in Maag's defense, it's an obviously good idea to ensure that teenagers don't get charged as felony sex offenders! But why criminalize this behavior at all? Adults can send legally naughty photos of themselves via cell or post them to the Internet. Obviously, nude photos of minors bump up against child porn laws, so there's good reason to restrict them on the Internet.

But as long as sexting remains an activity between two consenting teenagers, I see no reason for them to run afoul of the law. Why not use this chance to decriminalize it altogether?

Of course, teens shouldn't have sex until they're mature enough to handle it. Sexting is likely to magnify their vulnerability. I wouldn't want my kids involved in it when they're 13 or 16. There's too much scope for harming themselves and others. So this is an area that sex education ought to be addressing. I don't mean just sex education in the schools; I mean parents, the media, churches - anyone who cares about kids.

But it's a sign of moral bankruptcy, on the social level, if we think the criminal justice system should take over a role that properly belongs to education.

By contrast, it should definitely be illegal to disseminate a person's photos without permission, because it violates his or her consent. The sad story that spurred Maag's bill involved a girl in Cincinnati, Jessica Logan. She killed herself after her photos were circulated throughout her whole school. What drove her to despair wasn't her initial act of sending pictures to her boyfriend; it was the subsequent deception and breach of trust. While this isn't identical to rape, her consent was violated all the same, and in analogy to sexual assault laws, that violation deserves to be punished under the law.

The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term "beaver" comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early 1980s, just like I did, at a time when there was lots of discussion (feminist and otherwise) about "beaver shots" in porn. And so I thought, "Duh! It's because beavers are furry. Everybody knows that."

But then I started wondering. Why a beaver, anyway? Why not some other mammal with a thick pelt? (I'm pretty sure this is what Euchalon was actually asking, and I just didn't get it.) Why not a raccoon, or a skunk, or a lemur? I suppose there's a stripe issue with those critters. Then again, the patterning of kitty fur is infinitely variable, yet the term "pussy" persists even though few of us sport calico or tabby markings. (I wouldn't rule out tortoiseshell, however, especially as we get older.)

Why "beaver," indeed? When I showed the beaver ad to the students in my women's studies capstone class, some of them were totally perplexed. They didn't get the ad, because to them a beaver is merely a furry woodland creature. They'd never heard the term applied to women. And so an ad with a beaver representing a pussy was just incoherent to them.

The reason for this came out in class discussion: The norm for pussies is now hairless, as anyone who's flipped through Cosmo in the past decade ought to know. If you don't take it all off, no guy will want to put his package anywhere near your vajajay (in Cosmo's anatomical lexicon). So our kitties are all supposed to be sphinx cats, and the beaver is on the verge of extinction.

Posted by Flickr user *n3wjack's world in pictures, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a seriously generational phenomenon. It's not really possible for me to fathom it from my perch here on the far side of 40. I know young women, self-declared feminists, who believe that pubic hair is disgusting - that it makes them disgusting unless they're always smoothly waxed or shaven.

Maybe the closest parallel in my generation is that when I hit puberty in the 1970s, people took it equally for granted that girls would shave their legs and armpits. I've lived in hippy co-op houses, I spent years in Europe, I've considered myself a feminist since sixth grade. And guess what? I shave my legs. Inconsistently, irregularly, and often plain incompetently. (Being blind in the shower really doesn't help!) Ditto for my armpits, though more regularly and with less blood.

I choose to do this. But I don't claim that I do it without reference to social norms. That's where I part ways with my friend figleaf, who basically argues that any hairstyle is cool (so far so good) because it's a matter of personal style and choice (um, not entirely).

One of the college-aged women I know told me that a boyfriend pressured her to shave her pubic hair because she didn't look like the women in porn. She, too, made her choices. She shaved it. She hated the ingrown hairs and itching. She grew it out again. She ditched the douchey boyfriend.

She's not the only woman to discover that grooming pubic hair, even just the bikini line, is different from legs or armpits in some crucial ways. It's harder to achieve a smooth result by shaving. Waxing produces a smooth finish for a few days, but it can't be repeated until the regrowth is well past the stubble stage. (There's also some risk of infection, especially with Brazilians.) Laser treatments are expensive and don't work for all types of hair. Whatever the method, it's likely to result in red bumps and ingrown hairs. I'm not a dude, but I assume that red bumps are the very opposite of sexy.

In fairness, men, too, are subject to social pressures to shave. While we women can camoflage stubble under our clothes, they can't so easily hide their chins. Sure, a guy can get away with a ZZ Top beard if he's a lumberjack. For most white-collar jobs, he'd better make sure it looks distinguished and professorial - or just shear it off altogether.

I'm all for choice - but what exactly does choice mean when all the social pressure tilts in a single direction? Where is the pro-growth movement (as figleaf memorably calls it)? What magazine is extolling the glories of the unpruned bush? Organic Gardening, maybe?

I'm not saying women are anti-feminist dupes if they shave, and I sure don't want to shame anyone for doing it. I'm not opposed to grooming. Like I said, I do some of it myself. (And no, I'm not going to overshare on my more personal topiary choices.) But until there's actually a pro-growth faction, our choices will be tightly bounded and subject to pressure and penalties. That's not much of a choice at all. Especially when the pressures are greatest on young women who are still finding themselves and discovering their own bodies and sexuality.

Sex, Schools, and the Politics of Distraction

The superintendent of Westfall School District in south-central Ohio is being pilloried for accessing racy websites from work, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Okay, he shouldn't have done that. But is he really all that different from millions of other American employees who've done the same while at work? Don't millions more use work computers for personal stuff? This guy's biggest offense, I think, was forgetting how teachers and other school employees are held to higher standards than the rest of society. In other words, his main offense was stupidity.

And what did he actually look at? Well, he did check out one hardcore free porn site - exactly once. The rest appears to have been no spicier that what you see on the average newsstand. (Cosmo covers, anyone?)

At 6 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2007, [Superintendent] Cotner's computer was used to visit an Internet site that today features free online hard-core pornography videos, the newspaper [the Dispatch] found.

The computer assigned to the leader of the Pickaway County district also was used three times during the fall of 2006 to visit a site that sells sex aids and toys.

The majority of the site visits being examined by the Westfall school board involved Google image searches for pictures of swimsuit models, actresses and celebrities.

Some of those sites included Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and "almost-nude photos-wet-and-wild" of a female former American Idol contestant.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

Oooh, women in swimsuits! Wet women in swimsuits! I'm no big fan of the SI swimsuit editions (they give kids the idea that women's main role in sports is as eye candy), but does even the most prudish fundamentalist consider this to be porn? And is ordering a sex toy from a work computer any less ethical than shopping at Amazon while at work? Actually, if the superintendent had browsed the sex toy section of Amazon, no one would have been the wiser!

If I lived in this district, I'd be steamed, all right. But not about the superintendent's computer usage. The district's former treasurer is sitting in prison after pilfering tens of thousands of dollars. And its school board meeting drew a crowd of 300 last night. They came not to accuse the superintendent (though some attendees did call for his resignation), but to protest proposed budget cuts.

The politics of distraction is so handy in tough economic times.

The Politics of Attraction

Bouncing off a hysterically funny post by Aunt B about the penis of one of Tennessee's douchiest state legislators, I've been thinking about how political convictions serve as a filter for who and what we find attractive. The legislator in question, Stacey Campfield, definitely fails to pass Aunt B's filter - and mine, too, now that I've seen his smarmy blog photo. The dude is not ugly - he's got the smooth, glossy looks of a former fraternity president - but geez, does he look self-satisfied. Smug is so not sexy. Especially coming from a sexist Republican.

Aunt B went on a rant inspired by Campfield's telling another legislator that if he had sex with her, he wouldn't want to pay for her children. The bottom line is that Aunt B doesn't want to think about this tool's tool:

So, here we are, forced to think about Campfield having sex. And I’m going to be honest, my first thought was that no conservative Christian woman are going to have sex with Campfield because they don’t have sex with men they aren’t married to and no libertarians are going to have sex with Campfield without him using a condom and them being on some form of birth control and no liberal woman who knows him is going to be able to have sex with him since his antics cause arid tightening in Democrats, so Campfield talking about potential kids he might or might not have is a little beside the point.

(Read the rest here.)

I just love that phrase "arid tightening."

I suppose political anti-sexiness feels different for guys - neither arid nor tight - but a similar phenomenon definitely exists for men, too. One day after last fall's election, possibly courting trouble, I asked my husband if he thought Sarah Palin was sexy. He said, well, she was pretty enough on the surface, but as soon as she opened her mouth? Both her politics and her (lack of) intelligence totally undid her looks. (My husband is clever, as you can see, but he was also perfectly sincere.)

Obviously not everyone feels that way. Lots of guys were ready to vote for Palin based solely on her sex appeal. Most of them appeared to be fellas in their 60s and 70s who'd never have a prayer with her - or at least, those were the ones willing to admit it on the Daily Show.

So here's my true confession: I once dated a guy who wasn't just a Republican, he was a minor player in California's College Republicans. Hey, I was a college freshman when I met him - not even old enough to vote - and he was a senior, so I figured he knew what he was doing. This was back in the early 1980s when moderate Republicans still existed. He was one of that dying breed, His politics tilted leftward of many present-day Democrats, even if he was also kind of an asshole. The assholery was mostly independent of his politics. In my defense I can only say that he was a pretty good kisser.

Maybe that experience also cured me of dating Republicans (and I use the term "dating" very euphemistically, since my friends and I didn't really date). As far as I know, I never got involved with another Republican again.

Oh, I know there are lots of long-term relationships - apparently happy ones - that cross party lines. During my adventures in canvassing last fall, I marveled at those households where husband and wife planned to cancel out each others' votes. In one case, they'd been doing it for 50 years. This couple was so warm and welcoming, they would have fed me cookies and iced tea if I'd been allowed to accept goodies. They were equally warm toward each other. Their political convictions seemed like a thing completely apart from their marriage.

But here's the thing. For me, my politics are my values. My values are my politics. There's no firewall between them. I'm not talking about rigid political correctness, just a deep basic commitment to the equal worth of all humans and the notion that "justice is what love looks like in public" (to quote Cornel West yet again). I can't imagine dating, much less building a life, with someone who didn't share those principles and all their ramifications. Anything else strikes me as, well, aridly tight.

Round and Round: Virtuous and Vicious Circles in Relationships

Image from Flicker use POSITiv, used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier today, figleaf got me thinking about what it takes to keep a long-term relationship happy and not just bumbling along on life support. He wrote:

Relationship Tip #1: Caring *deeply* isn't the same as caring *perfectly.*

Much relationship [stress?] derives from confusing the two. One can wind up feeling more love, and feeling loved, when one understands the difference.

This can be a huge source of either conflict or generosity in a relationship. (And not just romantic ones.)

(The rest of his post is here.)

This made me reflect on the dynamics that kick in when people stop feeling the love. While I may sound like I'm being an old curmudgeon, taking a basically upbeat piece of advice and twisting it into its unhappy negative, what I really want to think about is how a moribund relationship can be turned around again. I’ll apologize in advance for being awfully abstract; it’s because I’m thinking about other people’s relationships, not just my own, and also because even when it comes to my own concrete experiences, they aren’t mine alone. Either way, I don't want to suggest I'm referring to anyone in particular, living or dead, human or feline, since this post isn’t about airing dirty laundry. (Though I’m sure it would be more juicy that way: I could create a bunch of fake people and give them pseudonyms, pretending that I'm writing for Cosmo instead of Kittywampus, and then we could proceed to discuss erotic uses for hair scrunchies).

I completely agree that in a basically happy, sound relationship, partners give each other the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think many grownups expect perfection. When one person goofs up – as will inevitably happen from time to time – the other partner cuts them some slack. Patience and good will beget more of the same in a kind of virtuous circle. I’d go so far as to say that this virtuous circle is a hallmark of a good relationship.

But this spirit of generous forbearance sometimes goes missing even though both people care deeply about each other. When that happens – in my experience, anyway – a lot of the gap between the depth (or even the fact) of one person’s caring, and what the other person actually perceives, comes down to communication. When a person repeatedly sends mixed signals over a sustained period of time, or just assumes that their partner knows they’re loved, it tends to obscure the caring, no matter how real or deep. Mixed messages can communicate indifference, coldness, lack of appreciation, or put-downs – even though affection isn’t dead. Sometimes both parties are equally involved in the communication breakdown; sometimes it's mainly one partner who checks out, leaving the other to wonder what happened. Either way, over the long run a recipient of mixed messages will likely stop defaulting to the assumption that their partner really does care.

At that point, the benefit of the doubt is hard to maintain, and if one partner feels that the other has withdrawn, they may reflexively do the same to protect themselves from further hurt. And this sets in motion the vicious cousin of the virtuous circle. In place of generosity come hurt, anger, alienation, and quarreling about seeming trivialities, often simmering at a low level and only occasionally boiling over. Can’t we all think of couples who’ve been frozen into this zombie-like state for years upon years – people who are actually pretty well matched and could be happy again if only they could find ways to recapture that basic sense of good will?

I’m not suggesting that generosity must be earned, or that it’s a tentative gift that can and should be withdrawn capriciously. I’m saying it can erode over time when communication is cavalier or downright hurtful, or when partners feel taken for granted.

Turning a vicious circle back to a virtuous one does usually require confrontation in order to get back to that place of generosity. And that may involve outright conflict, especially when one partner sees a problem and the other is satisfied with the status quo (or dissatisfied but unable to imagine anything better). I’ve seen that it can be turned around, but it’s hard and it only works if both people, eventually, are willing to talk about what went awry in the first place and work toward avoiding the problem in the future.

Without a willingness to confront those mixed signals – not with conflict as an end in itself, but as the first step toward reclaiming a spirit of generosity – I wonder if my own marriage might have ended up in the ranks of the undead. Instead, it’s in a mostly happy place. Given my druthers, I’d live a life free of conflict, because nothing stresses me more; nothing makes me unhappier, in the short run. Maybe that’s why it took me 40 years to figure out that avoiding conflict would make me even unhappier in the long run. But having finally begun to understand that picking one’s battles doesn’t mean avoiding them entirely, I’m now skeptical of the idea that there’s a disconnect or dichotomy between “conflict” and “generosity.”

But if confrontation stops at the conflict stage, that too is a vicious circle. I think that sometimes, the simple act of both partners clarifying their intentions, stating their intentions out loud instead of assuming that they’re evident to the other – simply saying “yes, I still love you and can’t imagine life without you” – can be the next step in the process. Somehow, one has to move through conflict and toward a real rapprochement. Substituting careful for casual communication is a pretty good start. Maybe that’s screamingly obvious, but if so, it’s much easier to say it than to live it.

And then eventually, there has to be the sort of forgiveness and mutual understanding that lets history become history. That, too, is hard, but it's not impossible, and if you can actually get there, it's so, so worth it. The thing is, forgiveness can't be rushed or short-circuited. Dwelling on the past isn't especially helpful. However - and maybe it's just my bias as a historian - I think that learning from past mistakes in hopes of not repeating them is the only way to keep the virtuous circle spiraling happily skyward.

Foolishness about Smart People and Dating

Smart kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Are smart people romantically impaired? If you believe Alex Benzer's new HuffPost piece, "Why the Smartest People Have the Toughest Time Dating," you'd think that anyone who went to an Ivy League or equivalent college was doomed to watch their genes go extinct. His basic argument is that smart people invest too much time and energy into achievement with the result that their dating and mating skills are at best vestigial, at worst nonexistent.**

I think he's full of crap. I went to two of the schools he mentions. I'll leave grad school out of this, because that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish; the demands of an academic career skew the picture. But going back to my undergrad years at Stanford, virtually everyone I know is partnered. Very, very few people I know from my college years are divorced. (I can actually only think of two examples - a couple from band who were young, neurotic, and doomed from the start, and who filed upon returning from their honeymoon - and a former housemate who was always a free spirit.) I'm willing to use my college friends' low divorce rate as a proxy for happiness in love; it's at least as scientific as Benzer's method, which is to provide no real evidence at all, only assertions about what "smart people" are like.

Now, it's possible that my friends and I killed enough brain cells to collectively reduce our IQs by 30 points, opening the way to luck in love. Maybe being in California for my undergrad years, in the mid-1980s when admissions weren't yet so cutthroat, made my experience radically different from Benzer's time at Harvard. I'm willing to grant that Harvard may be more dysfunctional than my alma maters just by virtue of its mystique, so possibly Benzer's points apply to that much smaller pool. But funny thing: I know a few Harvard grads, too, and they're no more likely than my college friends to be single or unhappily partnered. Besides, someone has to be spawning all of those legacy admissions!

So I think Benzer is just plain wrong. But parts of his argument hold just enough truth to get under my skin, and so I can't resist dissecting it piece by piece, even though it might be, uh, smarter to just ignore, ignore. (His main points are in bold and taken verbatim from his own list.)

1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

This is one argument that resonated with me. I wasn't achievement-oriented, per se, and I was totally clueless about the college admissions game. But I didn't spend my whole adolescence pining after boys. Most of my energy went into music because I loved it and it often gave me an excuse to skip boring, slow-paced academic classes. And so I spent most of my teenage years with my lips attached to a French horn or my fingers glued to a piano keyboard. Although that didn't stop me from being interested in boys, it did keep some crucial body parts happily busy. Sublimation is not a bad thing when you're a 15-year-old girl; it can keep you from diving deep into sex before you're emotionally ready.

But here's the thing. Just because I wasn't cultivating intense romances doesn't mean I was neglecting relationships. I had plenty of friends, boys and girls alike. Most of them were not precocious daters, either; they played in band and/or they were part of what a high school friend dubbed the "smart and chaste crowd." (That sounds more prissy than it really was; we'd had a few drinks when she said it.) While many of us weren't world-class flirts, we definitely did learn social skills. Who says sex has to be thrown into the mix at a young age in order to learn to relate to a future partner?

It's true that there wasn't much of a dating scene in college. As one friend of mine said, "No one dates at Stanford. We just sleep together." We pioneered the "hookup culture," I suppose, for good or ill. People were busy (as Benzer rightly observes), the campus was isolated from the town by large swaths of land, and most of us didn't have cars. Oddly enough, people did find romantic partners, even without much formal dating and without the elaborate bar culture that dominates social life at the university where I now teach.

2. Smart people feel that they're entitled to love because of their achievements.

This is rank bullshit. I saw plenty of entitlement during my undergrad years. I'd say 99% of it was economic. I knew a handful of rich kids who thought they were above the rules (and a few of them got busted - unsurprisingly - for plagiarism). Maybe a few of them felt entitled to love, since they already believed that Daddy's money could buy anything. More prevalent were kids who weren't rich but figured their cleverness and work ethic predestined them for wealth. It was the height of the Reagan era, after all.

But entitled to love? My college friends were just as unsure about that as any other group of people I've known. If anything, because the dating scene was so rudimentary, most of us wondered how we'd ever find love. We spent many late nights eating ramen and commiserating about our lack of prospects. Almost no one ended up single in the long run, but my friends and I couldn't envision that back in 1983.

3. You don't feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don't act like one.

Here's where Benzer gets downright retrograde. Just see what it takes to be sexual!

Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you're both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me -- call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don't pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.

Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity. Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south. Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you're not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.

Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin. By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being. Deal with it. Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already. Use what mama amoeba gave you.

For starters, if you're not 100% heterosexual, you're apparently SOL and Benzer can't help you. Sorry, kthx bai.

If you're straight, then you're just not trying hard enough to live up to gender stereotypes. Smart girls let themselves go! A boy will never notice you if you wear sweats to class! And smart boys aren't aggressive enough! (How this squares with a sense of sexual entitlement remains a mystery.)

In other words, smart girls had better look hot. Smart boys had better act butch.

We just need to retreat into rigid, clichéd gender roles, in Benzer's scheme, and romantic fulfillment will be ours. There's no place for female sexual initiative in this vision. Nor does he imagine men can be sensual. Heaven forbid you've got any yang mixed with your yin - or vice versa.

I can't help but think that Benzer's ideas have some kinship to that silly pseudo-survey last spring that claimed smart girls have lousy sex. On the surface, he appears to be an equal-opportunity critic of men and women, since he says men need to adjust their habits, too. Dig a little deeper, though, and his views on sexuality are equally sexist. There's nothing new at all about telling women to act more feminine and men to be more aggressive.

4. You're exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

Sure. Smart people routinely overthink things. That's not limited to love.

But Benzer claims we overthink love and lust to such an extreme that we've tuned out the most basic biological wisdom:

To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce. Now quit thinking you're smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution. Actually, just stop thinking altogether. Let the program do its work.

Evidence, please?

Or is this just a backdoor way of invoking the most cartoonish principles ev psych - man hunter, woman hunted? (Nostalgia for yin/yang gender stereotypes) + (vague appeals to evolution) = (pop ev psych)!

I'm always skeptical when someone tells me to stop thinking.

5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect.

Benzer exhorts us to "loosen up" - to stop expecting to pair off with a partner who's comparably smart. The penalty for not doing so? Celibacy - or exile to Germany's fashion capital!

Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf.

I didn't actually move to Duesseldorf. Berlin was more fun (especially for a frump: Duesseldorf is way too stylish). It's also where I conveniently met my husband while using a truly revolutionary technique for man-hunting: doing the things that already made me happy. (I met him while standing in line for symphony tickets, but that's another story.)

Benzer has a legitimate point: If you're smart and want intelligence in a partner, you do narrow your potential pool. Sometimes dramatically. It's important to be aware of the trade-offs entailed by high expectations.

What Benzer doesn't mention: Yes, holding out for someone who's a kindred spirit may mean many youthful Saturday nights spent hanging out platonically with pals. In the long run, though, being picky and knowing what you want just might increase the chances of finding a happy match. My Saturday nights are usually still just spent hanging out, now with my husband. Seventeen years after chatting him up in the ticket line, I'm nowhere close to bored with our conversation. Of course that's not due to his intelligence alone - he's kind and funny and a bunch of other good stuff - but I can't imagine being nearly as beguiled if he weren't bright enough to still surprise and challenge and delight me.

**Benzer conflates "smart" with "people who attend 'elite' schools" and I recognize how problematic this is. I had two real dates while at Stanford, and one of them was with a guy who was so dull it hurt. Conversely, oodles of brilliant people go to less fancy-pants schools or drop out altogether. (I married a high-school dropout who eventually earned a Ph.D.) Obviously, there are lots of other forms of intelligence that don't depend on being bookish, as well. So even though this post discusses academically bright high achievers who went to Ivy-ish schools, I don't for a minute think that Benzer is right when it comes to that much larger universe of smart folks, either.

Ohio's Baffling Sexual Politics

Ohio politics mystify me. I've lived here for over eight years now, and the contradictions still leave me spinning. We may be known as a swing state, but don't be fooled. Ohio is often immoderate, a patchwork of extremes. My own little town is a progressive island in the midst of Appalachia, surrounded by the tattered traditions of trade unionism, Bible-thumping fundamentalism, and plain disenfranchisement and despair.

Ohio's sexual politics are just as contradictory. On the one hand my adopted state made the news a few days ago with an abstinence-only sex ed curriculum that promotes rape culture. My county isn't quite within this particular program's scope, but the curriculum does cover the large Columbus market - and public schools along with private ones. Jill at Feministe has all the gory details, including "in the end they all get STDs," which sounds about right. One of my former students told me about a sex ed program at his high school that warned kids if they had sex, they'd likely wind up addicted to drugs, passed out in a New York train station, and possibly missing a kidney to boot.

Ohio is also the home of Derek the Abstinence Clown, another fabulously wise use of your federal tax dollars. 'Nuff said.

On the other hand, Ohio's Presbyterian Church just took a strong progressive position by voting to open the clergy to persons in same-sex relationships. According to this morning's Columbus Dispatch:

The Presbytery of Scioto Valley of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted 115 to 88 to delete language from the church constitution that says clergy must be in a faithful marriage between a man and a woman or be chaste.

In order for policy to change, a majority of presbyteries nationwide would have to vote to remove the old language, and so far the the results don't look promising. If the new policy fails, unmarried but sexually active heterosexual clergy stand to lose, too. The policy change promotes sexual freedom - and removes the incentives to hypocrisy - for everyone, irrespective of sexual orientation.

Whatever happens, I'm glad that in a state where the Reverend Rod Parsley often seems to dominate the religious landscape, Presbyterians have taken a step toward the equality that any just or merciful God would demand.

Hard-Wired to Dehumanize?

There's a bit of a kerfuffle about a new study by Susan Fiske of Princeton that, according to the Guardian, shows men are hard-wired to objectify women. Young male volunteers were shown images of women in bikinis and their brains were scanned with MRI to measure their responses. Their scans showed activity in regions of the brain normally activated when using tools.

As Vanessa at Feministing points out, while the study corroborates a long-standing feminist contention - that ubiquitous images of scantily-clad female bodies encourage the objectification of women - arguments for the hard-wiring of men's responses can hurt women more than help them:

[S]uggesting that men are hardwired to objectify women is really dangerous, and for obvious reasons. Simply taking naked women out of the picture (figuratively and literally) is not going to resolve the problem, and implying that "men can't help it" will just be used to contribute to the same sexist customs and rape culture that we're fighting against.

However, even the Guardian's exceedingly shallow reporting reveals that the studies' findings are more complicated than that. Only men who scored high on a questionnaire measuring basic sexist attitudes had MRI scans indicating a lack of empathy toward the women whose images they viewed:

In the final part of the study, Fiske asked the men to fill in a questionnaire that was used to assess how sexist they were. The brain scans showed that men who scored highest had very little activity in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions that are involved with understanding another person's feelings and intentions. "They're reacting to these women as if they're not fully human," Fiske said.

(Source: The Guardian)

Hmmm. In other words, the MRI revealed what parts of the brain remain dormant when a man fails to perceive another person as a human. But does that prove hard-wiring? Perhaps, but only after years of socialization. The research subjects are college students. Their brains are the product of two decades' worth of learning about how the world works. The brain is an amazingly plastic organ, and its functions are not all inborn; they are shaped in response to environmental stimuli. The fact that not all men responded the same - and that objectification correlated with sexist attitudes - undermines the interpretation that all baby boys will inevitably grow up to regard women as objects. Upbringing and society must play a role.

How solid is this research? Figleaf frets that there's no original study available online to back this up, and he's right: the study has only been presented at a conference (the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago), and it's not yet published in any journal. So we can't dissect it properly.

On the basis of a report in the National Geographic, however, we can pinpoint some of the study's limitations: It was small, with only 21 experimental subjects. It only looked at hetersexual men (no women were tested at all). And all of the subjects were college students, which means that the sample would not measure responses of men at various stages of learning over their life course.

In one respect, the study is actually more disturbing than either Vanessa or figleaf notes (again, because the Guardian article was so flimsy). The sexist subjects didn't just regard women as tools to their pleasure; they went beyond mere objectification in to a much scarier realm. This comes out in how The Independent described the study's findings:

The study focused on a region of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex, just above the eyes, which, when activated seems to damp a man's tendency to express hostile sexist thoughts about women, Professor Fiske said. Men who express the strongest sexist tendencies tend to have a less active medial cortex. It becomes decactivated in men who are the most hostile to women, but only for women in bikinis, she said.

"So basically they are particularly likely to treat these women as objects, at least that is the interpretation of the data we have so far. It is a preliminary study but it is consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they were responding to objects rather than people."

It was "shocking" to find that the pictures of scantily clad women deactivates the medial pre-frontal cortex, Professor Fiske went on. "The only other time we've observed the deactivation of this region is when people look at pictures of homeless people and drug addicts who they really don't want to think about what's in their minds because they are put off by them."

In other words, subjects prone to sexism didn't just objectify women; they dehumanized them.

That's a crucial distinction. We all objectify people we don't know well but find attractive. Women do this too: We look at someone and think to ourselves, "Yummy!" That's not a response to someone's stellar character or personality. But there's a big difference between one-dimensional appreciation of sexiness and reducing the object of your lust to less than human. It's only the dehumanizing response that nurtures rape culture and other potential violence.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss? Men, Women, and Oxytocin

Kissing kittehs from I Can Has Cheezburger?

One of the hallowed traditions of Valentine's Day is polishing up all the old chestnuts about men, women, and romance. So when I saw a headline in yesterday's Columbus Dispatch proclaim "Kissing a stress-buster for both men, women," I was pleasantly surprised not to get a rehash of the usual stereotype - that girls and kissing go together like, well, love and marriage, while boys view kissing as a necessary step toward getting what they really want. Which of course nice girls like me wouldn't want. Right?

The study behind the article - led by Wendy Hill, a professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College - didn't stop at busting just that one stereotype:

Kissing, it turns out, unleashes chemical changes that ease stress in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women. ...

In an experiment, Hill explained, pairs of college students who kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music experienced significant changes in their levels of oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kissing.

Both men and women had a decline in cortisol after smooching, an indication their stress levels declined.

For men, oxytocin levels increased, indicating more interest in bonding, while oxytocin levels went down in women. "This was a surprise," Hill said.

But what a cool surprise! For the past few years, conservative hand-wringers have told us that young women are screwing around like bonobos, and that oxytocin - the bonding chemical - sets them up for heartbreak. Women produce more oxytocin than men, and therefore our biochemistry programs us to be devastated emotionally by casual sex. Or so worry scolds like Laura Sessions Stepp. (In lieu of a direct link to her, here's a critical overview of her argument at Campus Progress.)

While I don't share Stepp's concerns that young women are permanently messing up their lives through casually hooking up with guys, I do think that brain chemistry matters. Oxytocin provides a pretty compelling explanation for the instability of friends-with-benefits relationships. And it's true that women produce more of it.

I've just never been convinced that only women are vulnerable to our hormones and biochemistry. After all, most men eventually want a committed relationship. I've wondered if men's pair-bonding impulses might be more sensitive to low amounts of oxytocin, much like women's libidos are more sensitive to low amounts of testosterone. I'm not a biochemist, so all I can do is speculate, but I'd love to see a study on this.

Conservative fretting about women's unique vulnerability to the emotional hazards of sex doesn't hold up well to scientific evidence suggesting that men, too, might be wired to feel that sometimes, a kiss is not just a kiss. (No word on whether a sigh is always just a sigh. The experiment was conducted in a student health center, so frankly, I'm amazed that any love chemicals were measurable.)

Like a Virgin

No, I'm not talking about me. (I can hear some of my readers laughing all the way from California.)

Nor am I referring to my husband's crush on Madonna, who ranks with Sandra Bullock and me in his pantheon of hot women.

I mean this cool blog I discovered recently: The American Virgin. Did you know the Virgin Mary was recently sighted on a doggie door? Yes, really! Along with seriously amusing weirdness, they've also got serious analysis of sexuality and religion, abstinence crusaders, and all things virginal in American culture.

So pop on over and visit Trixie and her co-bloggers. You've nothing to lose but a smidgen of innocence.

In Love and Romance, Sickness and Health

All right, I'll admit it: I like getting flowers every once in a while. I don't believe they should be mandatory for a particular day, and I think the commercialization of Valentine's Day is about as sexy as the commercialization of Christmas. It's just capitalism revving its internal motor.

But still. I got flowers today and I adore them. Their backstory is pretty cool. My husband bought a raffle ticket from one of the administrative assistants in his department. He just figured he was donating $5 to one of the poorly-funded schools that borders our own relatively fortunate district. Instead, he won a dozen roses in a vase.


These are the lucky roses. (The keen eye will note the Ants in the Pants game in the background, which tells a whole 'nother story about my life.)

I love the idea of winning anything. It makes me feel lucky in general. I am totally reading this as a good omen for my whole life.

And yet, these roses pale next to to the real gift I got this Valentine's Day. My husband was supposed to spend most of the week at a conference in Germany. He didn't go. He stayed home with me instead. When he could have been reconnecting with old friends and basking in scholarly acclaim, he drove me up to Cleveland and held my hand and promised we'd get me healthy again. He didn't think twice about his decision.

That line about "in sickness and in health"? This is part of what bell hooks is getting at, I think, when she writes that romance is a fickle and a shaky foundation for a life, while love is solid but demands that we consciously choose it over and again. (I realize I keep harping on this idea of hers, maybe because its ramifications are more complicated than they first appear.)

I've been on both sides now, the sickness and the health. Both exact a higher cost than most of us imagine when we utter a vow in the flush of youth. If we're wise - or at least lucky - we keep choosing love anyway.

I see no reason to swear off romance: the butterflies, the flirtation, the vase full of red roses. Love ought to be fun, too, after all. But when the petals shrivel and fall, it's love that remains - with its constant demand to choose - challenging and sustaining us.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Sad State of Sexual Medicine

Not long ago, I discussed the discomfort physicians too often feel while discussing sexual issues with their patients. This discomfort is rooted in broader anti-sex attitudes in America - and no, the ubiquity of sex in the media does not mean that America celebrates sex, only that we commodify it. The result is that patients often don't get even very basic medical advice that could help them ameliorate sexual dysfunction.

But I totally overlooked a second problem: plain old ignorance! I just read an insider's perspective from Dr. John P. Mulhall, MD, director of the Male Sexual and Reproductive Medicine Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and author of Saving Your Sex Life: A Guide for Men with Prostate Cancer (Hilton Publishing Company, Chicago, 2008). In an interview published last week in Renal and Urology News, Dr. Mulhall said:

There's a famous slide I often use during talks—it shows a patient on a bed beside the doctor and both have “thought bubbles” that say, “I hope he brings up the topic of erection problems.” So it's usually on people's minds but rarely discussed. In addition, we only get one or two hours of sex medicine information in medical school. There's more time spent on tropical medicine.

So I was half right in blaming doctor's comfort level - or lack thereof. But only half.

I'm shocked, honestly, that doctors get only an hour or two of formal training in sexual medicine. Then again ... if they know more about malaria than about sexual dysfunction, it explains a whole lot.

• No wonder people are often prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient information on their sexual side effects.
• No wonder prostatectomies are frequently performed without full discussion of what the patient should expect (some men are not informed that they won't ejaculate afterward, for instance!) and without followup aimed at restoring sexual function.
• No wonder doctors often don't screen women for sexual problems after childbirth and menopause, waiting instead for women to bring mention them.

Shame and ignorance make a perfect couple, don't they? Each reinforces the other. It's as if medicine were cousin to the abstinence-only movement, where shame and ignorance are wedded for life in one of those really lousy marriages that makes everyone miserable.

God O Thunder Falls to Earth

Lego version of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder; image by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, Columbus police arrested a guy who'd been an active member of an Internet discussion board for johns, where he reviewed prostitutes and issued advice on not getting busted. The Columbus Dispatch reports he posted under such charming screen names as "God O Thunder." Among the allegations is that he promoted online the prostitution services of a 17-year-old.

The real name of this Thor wannabe: Robert Eric McFadden.

Previous government position: director of Ohio's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Before that, he was field director for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Current employer: Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

So (assuming the charges are true), he's managed to come pretty close to maxing out the hypocrisy angle, and he's making good headway on the irony angle, too. Does his current job mean he might be able to oversee his own prison sentence?

It gets even more sordid (again from The Dispatch):

Police said they have seized a computer and two vehicles. One was his wife's car, which detectives said was the setting for photos of the 17-year-old girl that McFadden then posted online.

Eeeew. This man sounds like he's got some serious boundary issues. Not that I think it'd be perfectly kosher if he'd used his own car. Still, using his wife's vehicle speaks to a level of hubris and/or passive aggressiveness that too-neatly matches his pseudo-Norse-god alias.

There's also a nice irony in his being busted through one of these john forums. I'm pretty grossed out even at the idea of such forums. The little I've seen of them looks to me like they're more about reviewing a product than a service. They confirm my sense that too many johns view women's bodies as commodities. They underscore my suspicion that for too many of them, paying for sex is both an exercise in and confirmation of masculine sexual entitlement.

Professional escort Peridot Ash, who obviously knows a heck of a lot more about sex work than I do, seems to concur. She recently had a smart post on the demeaning terms johns use in these "reviews." She concludes that their disparagement of prostitutes' bodies is just an extension of contempt in which they hold all women's "saggy, fat, and ugly" bodies. She writes:

This list says to me: women are THINGS. And we only like certain kinds of these things. And the consumer has a right to prefer these things. Because in business, the market decides. Female bodies are consumable and the market has decided that fat, black, old, or flat-chested ones are not as economically valuable as nubile, white, young, big-boobied ones. BUYER BEWARE.

(Read the whole thing.)

And that's why - even though I'm sorry for McFadden's wife and others who'll have to deal with the fallout, and even though I'm convinced that criminalizing prostitution only multiplies its ills - I can't feel sorry that this particular God O Thunder is apparently hoist on his own lightning bolt.

From the Department of Too-Perfect Names ...

... comes this:

Warner Chilcott Limited today [1-7-2009] announced that it has signed an agreement with Dong-A PharmTech Co. Ltd., based in Korea, to develop and market their orally-administered udenafil product, a phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) inhibitor for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED) in the United States. Dong-A has successfully completed Phase 2 studies of the product in the United States.

Got that? Vi*agra is about to get a new competitor, developed by a company named Dong-A.

I can only assume it means something different in Korean.

Mind you, I'm not mocking the product at all. It's reportedly effective but may have fewer side effects than Vi*agra. That could be a real boon to the substantial number of men who give up PDE5 inhibitors because they get spooky vision changes, severe headaches, or other untoward symptoms.

In the meantime, I bet some enterprising pharma company is working its way up toward Willie-Z.

Consent, Sexual Assault, and How We Buy Cars

At Abyss 2 Hope, Marcella has come down pretty hard on my recent post on seduction and consent. I think she distorts it pretty dramatically. Disagreement is fine; misrepresentation, not so much.

Marcella basically accuses me of promoting a rape culture. Here's the paragraph of mine that she seems to find most objectionable:

I'm not arguing that force or violence is present in every rape. Not at all. I'm just saying that to call an act rape, there has to be a clear absence of consent, whether because one person has said or signaled no, or because they're incapable of consenting due to drunkenness or unconsciousness.

Here's the core of Marcella's response:

This is a very dangerous position which I see most often from those claiming most of those who disclose having been raped are liars. This view sets up people (mostly boys and men) to commit rape which if it is rightfully reported will be claimed to have been a false report.

For sex to be consensual and legal there needs to be a clear presence of freely and legally given consent. This is a far different standard than Kittywampus has defined for "real" rape.

If you go to a car dealership and test drive a car, say wonderful things about that car, you have not consented to buy that car simply because you didn't say, "No, I'm not buying this car." It would be absurd to demand that all car shoppers' absence of consent must be clear.

Nobody who goes to a car dealership needs to be empowered to always say no in order to avoid unwanted car ownership or car ownership which comes at too high of a price.

I'm positive that Marcella and I agree that in a good society, not just consent but enthusiastic consent ought to be the precondition to any sexual contact. I'm pretty sure, too, that she'd agree with my statements in that post condemning coercion as unethical and arguing that far too much sex falls short of the gold standard of enthusiastic consent. Here's what I wrote:

I think it's absolutely true that there's a continuum of coercion when it comes to sex. In fact, a dismaying amount of sex takes place between the polar extremes of rape and enthusiastic consent.

I'm flummoxed at Marcella's decision to ignore that statement. I respect the work she's done, and my impression of her is that she's both bright and fair-minded. I'm not sure why she picked a couple of statements out of context and then proceeded as though I don't insist on the importance of consent (and not reluctant consent!), and as though I don't condemn sexual coercion as ethically wrong.

The tone of her post implies I'm a cheerleader for date rape and rape culture. I don't think either this particular post, or the rest of my work, supports that implication. (A while back, she linked to a post of mine in which I condemned the sexual harassment and assault that occurred in Ohio's ex-AG Marc Dann's office.) In my recent post, I also didn't distort the law on rape in my state, Ohio, which specifies that a woman need not physically resist, but clearly expects that she make her lack of consent known (unless she's impaired in any of the ways that make consent impossible). I don't think it's fair to attack me or my argument because my state's law does not call for affirmative expressions of consent.

Perhaps this all has something to do with Marcella thinking I attacked Maggie Hays personally (as she mentions in comments on her post). I was pretty outraged by Ms. Hays' initial statement that politeness = seduction = coercion = rape, enough so that I wrote a more polemical post than is my norm. It wasn't meant as a personal attack on Ms. Hays, and I apologize if she felt it was. I do stand by my position that when we erase important distinctions and paint all men as the enemy, we do feminism a grave disservice. I also didn't misrepresent her argument, though Ms. Hays herself has gone back and edited that original post to remove the equation that leads from politeness to rape. I commend her for rethinking it, though given the amount of argument her formulation inspired, it would've been better to revise the post without erasing that key passage. Otherwise, it looks as though Natalia and I were misrepresenting her argument.

Let me return to the paragraph Marcella found objectionable - the one where I say a woman has a responsibility to convey a clear no (verbally or otherwise) if she's on the receiving end of unwanted sexual overtures. Obviously, any situation where two people are strangers and one person touches the other sexually constitutes sexual assault. The same goes for any sexual contact between two people that's not preceded by a date or flirtation. Sexual touching out of the blue is also a form of sexual assault, even if two people know each other. And in any situation where a person's ability to consent is impaired, any sexual contact is a form of assault.

The paragraph in question, however, follows one in which I briefly sketched out dating scenarios of the sort where coercion might be in play. That's the particular case I'll deal with below - the situation where date rape can occur.

In an ideal world, when two people go on a date or begin flirting, both partners would continually check in with each other. Maybe you remember the Antioch Sexual Assault Policy, which attempted to ensure that partners did just that, explicitly, repeatedly, and verbally. It got roundly mocked at the time for being infeasible (and I still think it's unworkable, for reasons I'll explain in a moment), but its intent was good. Its most controversial provision was that the initiating partner had to verbally ask for consent at every escalation of intimacy, and the partner had to verbally provide it. It further specified:

Body movements and non-verbal responses such as moans are not consent.

Now, in world where people weren't so repressed about sex, we might be more capable of verbalizing our desires and responses. We might be better able to say, "mmm, I'd really like to ..." and our partner could respond with an equally happy yes. Even then - in a utopia absent repression - not everyone could state their desires out loud without breaking their mood. Some people just go nonverbal once they get really turned on.

Also, very few of us - women and men alike - would want sex to entail the kinds of bureaucratic checklist that the Antioch policy would mandate.

What most of us do, instead, is to use precisely those body movements and moans to check in continually with our partners. Here, too, people vary greatly; some individuals have much more sensitive communicative barometers than others. That's true for women as well, but a clueless woman is obviously less problematic, given the relative infrequency of woman-on-man rape.

How is this different from buying a car? Well, most people aren't afraid that a car salesman (or the car?!) will reject them. Our egos aren't invested in car buying. We don't buy cars in a cultural climate that makes meaningful discussion of them taboo; car ads don't distort our view on driving anywhere near as much as advertising in general warps our ideas about sex! Vulnerability and emotions aren't much in play when we buy a car (except perhaps for the sort of folks who buy Porsches?). Thus, the communicative situation is much more clear-cut.

Consider a first kiss. It's not a business transaction. It's a fragile moment where the initiator makes himself (or herself!) vulnerable. Now, if non-verbal communication is working reasonably well, a potential initiator will refrain from doing anything if the other person doesn't appear interested. He or she will stop, or ask if everything is okay, if they don't get an enthusiastic response.

Some people, however, are knuckleheads. The clods who don't get that there's a problem when you stop responding enthusiastically? They are going to need to hear a clear verbal no or an unambiguous non-verbal signal (such as a push). If they don't stop at that point, they've committed sexual assault.

But I'm not willing to criminalize failure to read relatively subtle signals (those moans and movements, again) in a situation where it's reasonable to assume sexual interest and where hormones are in flux. For instance, even a sensitive person might interpret a partner's sudden lack of moans not as withdrawal of consent but as a signal to try a different sort of touch.

To repeat: Outside a dating/flirting scenario, no sexual touching should take place. Period. Within it, possibilities for honest miscommunication abound. Both parties have a responsibility to make it clear if they don't want sexual contact to begin or escalate.

Going back to that first kiss: Say a guy kisses me while on a date. If I pull away immediately, that's a clear no. He hasn't gotten my verbal permission first (who does?) and he just misread the signals. That might make him an oaf, but calling it an assault strains credulity.

Taking this a step further, lets say I respond to his kiss, and things escalate. I respond enthusiastically until we're about to have intercourse. At that moment I decide I don't want to go quite that far. I pull away, which constitutes a clear signal that he'd better put on the brakes. (Remember, my definition didn't require a verbal no, but rather, when "one person has said or signaled no.") That's the point where - if he continues anyway - he becomes a rapist.

I'm trying to see where that differs substantially from Minnesota's legal definition of rape, which Marcella quotes in the comments on her post:

"Consent" means words or overt actions by a person indicating a freely given present agreement to perform a particular sexual act with the actor. Consent does not mean the existence of a prior or current social relationship between the actor and the complainant or that the complainant failed to resist a particular sexual act.

I am in no way contradicting that. I'm not requiring a woman to physically resist. As I mentioned before, in my state, Ohio, the law is more restrictive and does not require affirmative consent, as Minnesota does, so it's disingenous of Marcella to say that my original definition was at odds with the law.

I'm only saying that in situations such as the one I just described - where the initiator can reasonably think the other person might be attracted, where the intensity is escalating, and where there's room for misunderstanding - both parties have a responsibility to clarify their boundaries. The law requires that, as does good sense. And I stand by my point that it's not infantilizing to expect women to communicate their boundaries to partners and potential partners.

If you accept a date with someone, that doesn't entitle them to kiss you, but it does give them reason to think you might be interested. If they try it and you don't want it, they've initially committed a blunder, not a criminal transgression. If they persist after you make your lack of interest clear - verbally or nonverbally - then that's sexual imposition, a form of sexual assault. The law in Ohio is very clear on the definition of sexual imposition: unless the perpetrator is a mental health practitioner or the recipient of the touch is a minor, the potential perp has to be aware that the touch was unwanted, or that its recipient could not meaningfully consent (see the text of the law for details).

In other words, the law does not expect the initiator of the conduct to be a mind reader.

Unless we want to criminalize all clumsiness within a sexual encounter, the same has to hold true as sexual contact escalates. As soon as one party says no, it has to be respected, and lack of respect for that no has to be subject to criminal penalty. But unless we want to write the Antioch code into criminal law, we have to account for the fact that where one party can reasonably understand the other party's conduct as consent, the second party needs to make it clear (verbally or not) if they withdraw their consent.

Instead, Marcella writes:

This view is what allows rapists to justify raping a girl after she agrees to kiss him or agrees to sexual touching. She didn't say no (because she wasn't asked since that would give her a chance to say no) so her lack of consent wasn't clear. Therefore, he can't be a "real" rapist.

Women have to wait to be asked before saying no? I know a lot of people who've been raped, mostly students of mine, all by acquaintances, friends, or dates. I've hugged them and cried with them and listened to their stories. None of them were asked if they wanted to proceed. In all but one case, they did convey a clear no. The guy went ahead anyway. (The one exception? The woman was drugged. That too is clearly rape, and I would never say otherwise.)

The examples I gave in my previous post were situations where coercion might be present in a dating/flirting scenario - where, for instance, a man might pressure a woman for sex because he paid for her meal. If she feels obligated to sleep with him because he treated, and goes along with his advances without ever making her lack of interest clear - kissing him politely, touching him back, but doing it all out of a sense of obligation - that's seriously messed up. It reveals all kinds of ugliness in gender socialization for both men and women. And it shows a real problem with consent. She didn't give it freely and enthusiastically, but how could the man have known that?

I don't think we can criminalize this sort of flawed consent. Instead, we need to continue educating women and men about the importance of enthusiastic consent; without it, too much bad sex will occur on that continuum where emotional manipulation damages people's ability to consent freely. Women need to be in touch with their desires. They need to realize they can express them - and say no, or yes - and that their desires must be respected. Men need to realize that a "no" isn't a signal to apply more leverage.

On that, I don't think Marcella and I are really all that far apart after all - except on the question of whether I've got a career ahead of me as the next Katie Roiphe.

On Seduction, Agency, and Entitlement

In my last post, I didn't really tackle the question of what seduction is, anyway, and how it differs from rape. I thought Natalia had addressed that very ably. In comments, though, and then in a post of his own, figleaf challenged me to think about how male socialization might blur that line for some men:

I think it's more complicated than that. Inside my theory of the "no-sex" class paradigm, where men are indoctrinated believe normal, compromised women never just *naturally* want sex and, therefore, that sex must be obtained through some sort of leverage, the difference between from rape to exploitation of economic disadvantage to aphrodisiacs to dinner with roses are only a matter of degree and legitimacy**. That's the way Hays appears to look at it: from inside that dominant paradigm.

(More from figleaf here.)

I think it's absolutely true that there's a continuum of coercion when it comes to sex. In fact, a dismaying amount of sex takes place between the polar extremes of rape and enthusiastic consent. I would have generally agreed with Maggie Hays' post that set off this discussion, had she simply categorized as "exploitative" or "coercive" many of the phenomena that she's decrying: For instance, "duty sex" and "sexual payments" (i.e., some men's expectation that if they pay for a date, the woman owes them sex) both involve an element of coercion.

She didn't do that. Coercion is ethically wrong. But I react allergically against such coercive situations being classified as rape, which is a crime, after all, and not just a breach of ethics. If a guy buys me dinner and I choose to end the evening with a handshake or less, he might call me a pricktease. That's not rape, that's mere assholery. If I drink so much that I can no longer say no, then it's rape, all right. Ditto for any situation where we start to make out and he then ignores a clear no.

I'm not arguing that force or violence is present in every rape. Not at all. I'm just saying that to call an act rape, there has to be a clear absence of consent, whether because one person has said or signaled no, or because they're incapable of consenting due to drunkenness or unconsciousness.

I'm troubled by this inflationary expansion of "rape" because Maggie Hays is not the only person who's trying to broaden the definition. I once heard something similar from a sexual assault educator. For instance, this educator said that if a woman has had anything to drink at all, she's presumptively incapable of consent. Moreover, she claimed something similar for women over age 55! Now, I haven't been able to confirm that anyone else is using this same criterion. I did press her on this point, and she clarified that she wasn't claiming that all sex with women over 55 is rape or abuse; rather, she was saying that mental competency has to be demonstrated rather than presumed.

Besides trivializing actual rape, the inflationary labeling of all coercion as "rape" drains women of agency. We remain free to say no - even when we're afraid of being called a prude or a tease, even when our partner is a manipulative bastard, even when a guy has footed the bill for haute cuisine and roses. As Natalia said, we are not children.

The losses are incalculable if we start presuming that women are incapable of saying no. In fact, that presumption plays right into male sexual entitlement. The notion that women lack agency is a precondition for masculine sexual entitlement. Those pickup artists and just regular Nice Guys(TM) that figleaf rightly criticizes for thinking they need to apply leverage? They're driven by entitlement. They're motivated by the notion that a woman's no only means that their leverage needs to be stronger, subtler, cleverer, more expensive - or just possibly, more forceful. Most such men won't actually rape a woman. But this mindset does make date rape more likely to occur.

What might masculine sexual entitlement look like in a less virulent - but still troubling - form? In a follow-up post, Maggie Hays describes her experiences with an ex-boyfriend that spurred her to regard seduction as a form of sexual exploitation (and/or rape - it's no longer quite so clear, in this post, whether she's continuing to conflate the two terms). I'm not going to quote from her description of that relationship because I don't want to oversimplify or take anything out of context; better to read it yourself. At one point, though, she adds some nuance to her original statement that seduction equals rape:

To elaborate, I meant seduction as: 'When a man persuades a woman to have sex with him, often subtly, through being kind, polite, chivalrous, while playing on her feelings, possible vulnerability, or sometimes getting her consent by deceiving her, distracting her, and sometimes intoxicating her (with alcohol or drugs) so that he can use her for his own sexual gratification and purpose.'

This is, of course, much more coercive than simply being kind or polite, as she suggested in her initial post. On top of that, it sounds like her ex was a liar. I do empathize; most of us who've lived for a while have experiences with exes where we felt lied-to and manipulated. I'm sorry she was treated like crap.

Based on how she describes her ex, my guess is she sums him up fairly when she calls him an "asshole." In fact, it's sort of libelous to the actual anatomical part to apply its name to truly vile human beings. This guy comes across as a major-league manipulator. But a rapist he's not.

Plenty of embittered men tell tales of lying, scheming, manipulative women, too. I've never heard a man complain that an ex lied to get him into bed. While I'm sure it happens, there aren't many men who'd admit it, since it goes against the assumption that men are horny little everready rabbits. Men do complain about women manipulating them for love and money, just for instance. Neither gender holds a monopoly on rotten manipulative behavior.

I absolutely do think it's fair to say that the kind of seduction Maggie Hays describes with her ex is unethical. That doesn't mean it ought to be illegal, but it ought to be socially sanctioned, not celebrated as studly.

Historically, Hays' definition of seduction was the most prevalent one. Seduction was often assumed to an expression of class privilege. In my research, I've come across innumerable tales of a servant girl seduced by older, richer men - often her employer or his son - then abandoned once they fell pregnant. Even back then, circa 1910, the German feminists I've studied were split on how to respond to these stories. Some publicized them in sensationalized form in order to gain public sympathy for the plight of unmarried mothers; portraying them as victims was one way to counter slut-shaming (which was pretty nasty back then, too). Other feminists objected to the distortion of truth and to the idea that women had no agency (though they would've used different terminology).

The raw data I've seen indicate pretty clearly that the rich man and poor servant girl narrative wasn't fictionalized; such cases occurred regularly in early twentieth-century Germany. The far more common scenario, though, for one servant to pair up with another. If pregnancy did occur, the two servants would often marry (this was less true in the countryside). Cross-class liaisons rarely resulted in marriage, and so they were more visible in both statistics and public perceptions.

No, sexual coercion hasn't disappeared from women's lives, but most American women are no longer as constrained as a poor servant girl a hundred years ago. It's time, as figleaf says, to redefine seduction:

[W]hereas for most anti-feminists, "Pick-up Artists" in the "seduction community," possibly Scott Adams, and a subset of feminists that include Hays' school of thought, seduction is a unilateral act undertaken by men to extract sex from women who would otherwise "know better," for people who *aren't* into that mindset seduction can be something entirely different. Like the persuasive interaction between individuals who are sexually interested but haven't finalized a decision... or who *have* decided and are mutually enjoying a form of extended arousal.

That second definition is what I've always considered seduction to be. Of course, that delicious sort of seduction relies on the knowledge that one can say no at any point - that both parties have agency, and that neither is entitled. It rests on the mutual recognition that enthusiastic consent is essential not just to law and ethics but to good sex.

I've always felt free to say no, even in situations where the guy acted entitled. Maybe that's because I called myself a feminist before I even hit puberty. Or maybe because I always balked at trading sex for prime rib - but then again, I only consider one of those things delicious. (Hint: I did try moose meat a couple years back, but I've been a near-vegetarian for decades.)