Love as an Act of Inference

My bedtime reading these days is a novel by Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface. I'm only a few chapters into it so far, but it's making me wonder how well we can ever really know the people we love. The book's premise is that the husband of the protagonist, Sarah, disappears without a trace at a moment when they are estranged from each other and on a fast track to divorce.

While she's trying to digest the initial, nauseating news of her husband Todd's disappearance, Sarah reflects on something that resonated with me even though I'm pretty confident I'll never go through a comparable experience. (Listfield apparently based the book on her own real-life experience - a fact I'm trying hard to repress because it so horrifies me.)

People offer up fragments of themselves to friends, spouses, lovers, leaving each person to create the remaining whole according to what they have in hand, forensic scientists all. But no two pieces are precisely alike, some barely have any resemblance at all. Love, it seems, and understanding, are largely acts of inference.

(Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface, p. 37)

Since I don't watch CSI but I did spend enough time in archives to warp my personality, the only metaphor that doesn't work for me in this passage is the "forensic scientist" bit. I'm picturing instead the archaeologist, holding shards of a life. Or even more pertinently, the historian, skimming through reams of documents that time's ravages have rendered fragile and frustratingly incomplete. The history of emotions is especially hard to reconstruct; in my dissertation research, for instance, I typically had to rely on doctors' accounts of how women reacted to giving birth, sometimes reading the doctors' descriptions against the grain.

We assume that the people we know are a whole lot transparent than that. Yes, people lie. But that's not what Sarah/Listfield is saying. She's insisting that it's in the very nature of relationships that we cannot fathom the other in his or her fullness.

In this novel, this unknowability and ambiguity lays the ground for (apparent) tragedy. Even in the absence of high drama, however, I think that our fragmentary understanding helps explain how a partner can demand a divorce, or have an affair, or suddenly declare themselves unhappy with the couple's division of labor - or maybe all of the above - and their partner may be blindsided.

Yet I suspect that recognizing love as an act of inference explains more than just the death of love. It may also hold the promise of greater happiness? Might it also be a call for humility toward our partners, which could liberate us (by, for instance, erasing the expectation that we'll always automatically be on the same page)? Might it open the possibility of continually discovering new and wonderful aspects in them? Might it suggest that terminal boredom in a marriage or other long-term relationship just means we've closed our eyes to how our partners are fundamentally unknowable?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but they remind me of Esther Perel's prescriptions for keeping a marriage erotically alive in her book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. Much of her message is to cultivate a healthy distance and mystery. What Listfield suggests is that this mystery is always there, always present. Our task is to recognize it and celebrate it.

Perfect crocuses (which have withered since I took this picture behind my house). Relate this to the post as you will.

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.

On Medicine and Objectification

Usually when we women's studies types worry about objectification, we mean sexualized objectification: a (usually male) gaze that sees the other as a means to an end, where the end is sexual pleasure. I think sexualized objectification is actually more complex and ambivalent, but for now I'd like to set that aside. Sex is by no means the only area where objectification occurs, and insofar as means-to-an-end logic is always part of it, those other areas ought to draw our concern, too. And so I've been thinking about the relationship between medicine and objectification - partly in honor of today being Rare Disease Day (h/t Shakesville) but mostly in light of my recent experiences.

Modern, scientific medicine has historically objectified people as patients. Indeed, the "modern" and "scientific" elements of it rely on objectification. Modern medicine is founded upon objectification: People become case studies. Their complicated life stories are aggregated into statistics. They're assigned to control or experimental groups, and their individuality melts away.

Medical research as we understand it would be unthinkable without objectification. The techniques I just mentioned are necessary to doing science right, following professional standards. The alternative - drifting in a sea of anecdata - would yield few useful results.

Actually, the alternative might look a lot like the journal articles written a century ago by long-dead German gynecologists. (For my dissertation research, I happily squandered months of my life leafing page-by-page through all the major German medical and gynecological journals and some of the minor ones, spanning about 1905 to 1935.) Typical articles included:

• An outline of a new (and by our lights, scarily unsuccessful and brutal) technique for cesarean section or symphysiotomy.
• Case reports of a needle left behind during surgery.
• Descriptions of rare deformities of the pelvic organs.
• Pictures of pickled uteri.

In other words, the journals reflect a fair amount of objectification but with very little systematization or, well, science. This started to change after 1900. By the 1920s there were more statistical analyses and fewer appeals to the author's "experience." Patients were still objectified, but there's an occasional glimmer of scientific method. We'd still consider most of these studies piss-poor science, but the trend, at least, was toward research beginning to yield benefits for patients, as opposed to mostly boosting the author's career.

(And yes, I joined the objectification party while I was working on these journals. I got so I could distance myself from even the photos of disembodied organs, which were mercifully in black and white. I could down a Snickers bar while looking at this stuff. So I experienced from the inside how medical training can create a distance from the suffering person and at least temporarily suspend empathy.)

Singling out medical research would distort the picture, because patients also came to be treated as objects in ordinary practice. This was especially true in teaching hospitals. I've written about how pregnant women in early-twentieth-century Germany were forced to undergo repeated exams by clumsy medical students, and how they were paraded naked in front of a whole auditorium full of observers while in labor. American obstetrics was no better: Women were strapped down while in labor and knocked out, whether they wanted it or not.

Over the past 40 years, under pressure from consumer advocates, feminists, and medical ethicists, medical researchers and practicing doctors have become a lot more sensitive to problems of objectifying patients. Patients with cancer are no longer kept ignorant of their diagnosis and prognosis. These days, expectant mothers are often encouraged to write birth plans - and yes, I realize those plans aren't always heeded, but that doesn't negate the sea change.

One index of objectification is condescension. They're not the same thing, but condescension generally grows out of the practitioner's conviction that he's in a hierarchical relation to the patient; that he's the subject and the patient is the object. And personally, I've seen a major decline in patronizing attitudes among medical practitioners. In the late 1980s, as a young graduate student, I went to my family doctor with complaints of fatigue, nausea, and dizziness. He told me, dismissively, that I was neurotic and overambitious and just needed to chill. (Another doctor diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome, and after roughly 18 months I felt substantially better.) He projected the person of a folksy old-time GP, but I was just a case to him, and as such, he felt free to load me up with stereotypes about smart, ambitious young women. This doctor ultimately got in trouble for inappropriately touching young female patients - demonstrating that medical objectification and sexual objectification can occasionally overlap. He's now long retired, thank goodness.

My recent experiences at the Cleveland Clinic and the OSU MS clinic were the polar opposite. The doctors listened to me and took my complaints seriously. No one implied that I was hysterical or tense or simply a head case. Overall, I'd describe my relationship with my family doctor, ob/gyn, endocrinologist, and the kids' pediatricians as a partnership. We talk to each other frankly, and they listen to me just as much as I listen to them. The kids' doctors are also wonderful about addressing the kids directly and asking them about their preferences. (A penicillin shot or liquid antibiotics? Gee, that's a tough choice for a four year old!)

I realize I'm likely to get better care than average because I'm white, educated, medically literate, fully covered by insurance, and (heaven help me) sometimes a little pushy. But that's not the whole story. For instance, there's one doctor in our pediatricians' group practice who's still completely old-school. He was on duty in the hospital the day the Tiger was born, and he would not shut up about circumcision. In the end he had to respect my refusal to snip. I know he's very condescending toward people who he assumed are less educated. But this fellow is the exception that proves the rule. He's slouching toward retirement, and all the parents I know avoid him whenever possible. He's a relic of the medical past. Patronizing doctors like him are on a gradual path toward extinction.

One notable exception to this general trend away from objectification is medicine's ambivalence toward sexuality. As I've argued before, too many doctors are embarrassed to discuss sexual problems with their patients. This weekend's Well feature in the New York Times offers a fresh example: a prominent ED specialist reports that one in four of his patients who've had a prostatectomy was not aware until after the surgery that he'd never ejaculate again! This embarrassed silence also interferes with patients getting the full scoop on the sexual side effects of antidepressants. The failure of medicine to deal with sexuality is an effect of shame, embarrassment, and ignorance, as these examples show, but it's also a legacy of medical objectification. Seeing someone as merely as a "case" makes it very difficult to view a patient as a whole person with complex needs and desires. The result is condescension, fragmentation, and silence.

While pressure from our culture as a whole are pushing medicine away from condescension and objectification, there are countervailing structural forces. The most obvious of these is pressure to contain costs, which comes from all directions: insurers and HMOs, employers, and the state. Spending time really listening to the patient - as my doctors have done for me recently - doesn't come for free. The specialists will be better able to recoup this; the MS neurologist I saw, for instance, routinely budgets an hour and a half for new patients, and I assume he's got a billing mechanism that will cover his time. I'm pretty sure my family doctor, by contrast, will not be able to bill for all of the time he's given me. Adding insult to injury, just yesterday my university (the only big employer in town) announced they won't consider his clinic in-network anymore as of July 1. While this is likely a gambit to negotiate new rates, the net effect will be to place even more pressure on local primary-care doctors to curtail the time they spend with patients. Rushed appointments are not conducive to seeing the whole "case," much less the whole person.

Another structural counterweight to more enlightened, anti-objectifying medical attitudes is the march of medical technology. Again, the history of obstetrics provides lots of examples. Chief among them is the fetal monitor. Quite apart from the large body of evidence that suggests routine fetal monitoring increases interventions without improving outcomes, fetal monitors also objectify the laboring woman. Her experience - and the well-being of her child - are reduced to lines and squiggles. I'm not a Luddite about this, because I know that fetal monitoring has legitimate uses, even though it's vastly overused. Yet I know it's not just doctors and nurses who sometimes fixate on a mere artifact - the monitor's output - rather than on the whole person. Laboring women and their partners sometimes do the same.

The MRI is a further example of medical technology that can supplant the person, substituting a series of images that risks turning the person into an object. One example of this, ironically enough, is that study of sexual objectification that made a splash in the media earlier this month. While I'm fascinated with functional MRI, I also know that fMRI just shows brain activity in certain areas. What that means is still up to interpretation. And if the researchers are reducing their volunteers to mere images and not conducting lengthy interviews with them (only a questionnaire was mentioned in the media reports), then we can confidently saw that the research subjects are being rendered objects.

Does all of this mean medicine is evil and we should reject medical objectification whenever and wherever it occurs? Not at all. I'm in favor of medicine being more evidence-based. As I mentioned at the start, today is Rare Disease Day, and all of those orphan diseases cry out for more research. (My dad has had Crohn's for 50 years; my husband had an encounter with an obscure but devastating autoimmune neurological disease called MADSAM. My recent brush with the possibility of MS taught me that the unknowns still vastly outweight the knowns, even for such a relatively common disease. So I hope for more research, not less, and I recognize that scientific approaches to medical research will always tilt toward objectification.

But I also favor acknowledging the legacy of unexamined objectification in medicine. We can look at how it operates in specific contexts and weigh whether its costs are worth its benefits. We can analyze the potential of new technologies to fragment and objectify the patient. Simply bringing objectification out of the shadows tends to mitigate its effects: talking about it can make both doctors and patients more aware of it, and this will tend to promote more equal partnerships. And finally, we can hope and lobby for meaningful health-care reform that would limit the power of insurers to dictate that doctors practice medicine in five-minute increments guaranteed to obscure, fragment, and objectify the whole person.

Modern-Day Sodomites?

Yeah, I know "sodomite" is a loaded term. I'm not entirely sure it can be applied meaningfully in the twenty-first century. And yet, sodomite is the word that keeps popping into my head with all the new revelations of Ted Haggard's sexual adventures. Let me explain.

Up until the late 1800s, the category of "homosexual" didn't exist. Michel Foucault explores the genealogy of "homosexuality" in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, showing quite conclusively that "the homosexual" is a product of modern sexual science. (Brief crib notes can be found here, if you've always intended to read Foucault but never quite got around to it.) Only in the nineteenth-century did practitioners of the emerging discipline of sexology declare homosexuality to be a stable, life-long orientation that defined a person's entire sexuality. The most influential of them was Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in his Psychopathia Sexualis that homosexuality had its roots in congenital pathology. He regarded it as inborn and thus impossible to change.

Sexologists haven't always promoted a binary scheme in which people are either heterosexual or homosexual. Alfred Kinsey's famous 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, placed men along a 0 to 6 scale, with 0 exclusively heterosexual and 6 exclusively homosexual. All five intermediary scores represented various flavors of bisexuality. But by and large, ever since sexology invented "the homosexual," the popular imagination has categorized people dichotomously as either straight or gay.

Before the birth of the modern homosexual, however, we had "the sodomite." While it's certainly the case that some people repeatedly gravitated toward same-sex liaisons, the early modern Western world didn't pigeonhole them as having an exclusive orientation toward their own sex. It just declared sodomy a sin, and the state also made it a crime.

In early modern Europe, many same-sex-inclined people married and had a family. Some were never outed as sodomites, and so they "passed" their whole lives long.

Some of these folks did get busted for sodomy. They were then labeled as sodomites, but that didn't destroy their other identities as wives, husbands, etc. Even then, their sexuality didn't define their whole being, nor did homosexual acts define their sexuality.

However, sodomy - like rape - was typically a capital crime in early modern Europe. So, while the convicted sodomite wasn't labeled a homosexual, he or she was put to death like a murderer or a witch. (The law typically did not distinguish between male and female sodomites, though practically speaking, only penetrative acts counted as sex, and so men were far more likely to actually be charged with sodomy.)

We actually don't know much about the prevalence of same-sex erotic contacts in the early modern period. Nor were states necessarily very vigorous about prosecuting them - which accounts for the paucity of our knowledge, since historians rely heavily on court records for such information. For instance, during the 18th century the Southern German states were far more concerned with regulating heterosexuality, since pregnancy due to fornication or adultery was socially and fiscally disruptive. (For the preceding, I'm relying on Isabel Hull's Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815.)

None of this is intended to romanticize the sodomite. People died as a result of sodomy laws. Sodomy laws (minus the capital penalties) remained in force in over a quarter of U.S. states until Lawrence v. Texas invalidated them in 2003.

What does this all have to do with Ted Haggard? Well, I think viewing him as a sodomite provides a possible framework for understanding how his wife Gayle can claim that "99 percent of Ted's sexual experiences" were with her:

1. Ted Haggard has been married for most of his adult life and evidently functioned well enough heterosexually to father four children; his wife's claim suggests that they did it more than those four times.

2. According to Grant Haas, the man allegedly paid hush money by Haggard's former church, Haggard engaged in a wide variety of sexual practices, some of it decidedly non-vanilla - and some of it was with his wife.

3. Haggard and his ex-church regard same-sex eroticism as a sin.

Sure sounds like a sodomite to me! Even though nearly all of the reporting has (I think wrongly) suggested that Haggard is a closeted homosexual, all the available evidence suggests that "homosexual" is far too one-dimensional to describe Haggard's variegated and guilt-ridden sexuality. Okay, we could call Haggard a bisexual, or polymorphously perverse (if you want to go all Freudian), but that doesn't quite capture the self-imposed judgment of SIN.

None of this negates what I consider Haggard's only true and massive failing: his hypocrisy. But just possibly, seeing him as a sodomite helps illuminate his sexuality better than any of our usual modern frames. (Anyone want to re-think the Larry Craig scandal through this lens?)

Queering Masculinity, '70s Style

A few days ago, while I was having coffee with a colleague and friend of mine, we somehow got onto the subject of "Match Game." I spent hundreds of hours watching that show during those long, lazy summers when I was in late grade school and junior high, circa 1975. The fact that everyone's parents disapproved of the show's sexual innuendo, which was as wall-to-wall as our shag carpets, only added to the allure.

My friend said, "Well, there's a theory that Charles Nelson Reilly queered the game show!" Not her original thesis - I think it may come from Elana Levine's Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television- but looking back, I knew immediately what she meant. Back then, however, I had no clue that Charles Nelson Reilly was gay; I just thought he was funny. (Judging from this comment thread on Pam Spaulding's obit for him from 1997, I wasn't the only kid who didn't get it.)

Not that anyone used the term queer back then in the mid-1970s. It was still an insult, years away from being reappropriated. At least in North Dakota, all things homosexual were still very hush-hush, which helps explain my cluelessness.

But there was so much change in the media around that time. While people weren't yet regularly labeled as "gay," depictions of non-straight people were beginning to proliferate, even if Ellen DeGeneres was still unimaginable in my corner of the Upper Midwest. I grew up listening to Elton John and David Bowie. I just didn't have a handy label for what made them different from, say, Billy Joel.

In some ways, though, the more remarkable thing was the portrayals of "straight" masculinity that really don't look quite so straight nowadays. I mean, the hero of Saturday Night Fever was a dancer. The soundtrack was provided by the oh-so-fey Bee Gees. Luke Skywalker looks downright girly by today's standards. So do all the teen heartthrobs of the time: David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Parker Stevenson. (Of course, that layered-look, blow-dried haircut can't help but be anti-macho. You have to wonder if they all had the same stylist as Farrah Fawcett.)

And then there was this commercial, which I hadn't thought about for thirty years until I stumbled upon it a few hours after my game-show nostalgia session: "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper ..." Imagine, if you can, a soda commercial today featuring a man singing and dancing like a leprechaun. (The head Pepper was, as it turns out, David Naughton, he of "American Werewolf in London.")

I'm not saying that those singing and dancing Peppers were gay. But man oh man, did they queer masculinity!

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.)

The Thing with Feathers

I know that we're all still supposed to be jubilant over the election. This is supposedly our honeymoon, these days between Obama's victory and his inauguration, before he's had a chance to start disappointing us in earnest. But elation hasn't been my mood; not at all. Maybe I'm just too tired from the endless campaign, but I've felt cautious, depleted, reflective, even a little melancholy. The November days are short and bleak, and the thing with feathers threatens to fly south for the winter.

Photo by Flickr user tanakawho, used under a Creative Commons license. No birds were harmed in its making.

And so I find myself mulling over this business of "hope" and what it's good for - what the "thing with feathers" might animate, beyond the sloganeering.

For one thing, I think hope is an effective antidote to fear. As such, it's crucial to real democracy. Of all the laws and policies born of fear during the past eight years - the Patriot Act, the Abu Ghraib interrogations, the Guantanamo Bay internments, the rampant wiretapping - I can't think of one that was wise (and many were plain unconstitutional). Fear turns off people's critical faculties and turns citizens into subjects.

Uncritical hope can be exploited by demagogues, too, but not so easily. Hope is not self-sustaining: Reality has a way of intruding on hope while tending to reinforce people's fears. Historically, dictatorships have rested far more on fear than on hope, and idealistic revolutions-gone-bad have always shifted from hope toward fear before spawning such atrocities as Stalinism or the Terror. Hope can move people to take to the streets, but fear is a far more potent motivator if you're out for blood.

But even in times of threat and crisis - especially then - hope can lead us back to our core values. Hope can guide us toward a foreign policy aimed at strength through alliances rather than intimidation and militarism. Hope can inspire an economic rescue plan aimed at restructuring our economy - moving our automotive industry away from gas guzzlers and our energy infrastructure toward renewables - instead of just panicking and giving AIG and Citibank whatever they want.

Hope itself is a renewable energy source. We're going to need that in the months and years ahead.

Hope is also a gift to our children. It's an example of how to live, a precondition for making the world better for them, a source of joy. It can help them cope with their nascent awareness of injustice and violence; it can nurture their empathy and protect them against cynicism. It's part of the very air I want them to imbibe. I just loved how Tim Wise captured this in a recent essay on Alternet:

[M]aybe it's just that being a father, I have to temper my contempt for this system and its managers with hope. After all, as a dad (for me at least), it's hard to look at my children every day and think, "Gee, it sucks that the world is so screwed up, and will probably end in a few years from resource exploitation...Oh well, I sure hope my daughters have a great day at school!"

Fatherhood hasn't made me any less radical in my analysis or desire to see change. In fact, if anything, it has made me more so. I am as angry now as I've ever been about injustice, because I can see how it affects these children I helped to create, and for whom I am now responsible. But anger and cynicism do not make good dance partners. Anger without hope, without a certain faith in the capacity of we the people to change our world is a sickness unto death.

(Read the whole essay, "Enough of 'Barbiturate' Left Cynicism," here.)

Paired with a sense of responsibility, hope is also a lot of work. (Maybe that, too, is why I feel so darn tired?) That's where Emily Dickinson got it wrong. She wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I actually think hope demands our all. It's voracious. It will swallow us whole. And so technically, I guess, it won't "ask a crumb of me" since it doesn't settle for crumbs.

Hope is much like bell hooks' notion of love as she describes it in her essay, "Romance: Sweet Love." Unlike romance (which she equates with infatuation and putting up a false front), love requires a choice, hooks writes. Love demands that we commit to it over and over and over again, every day, for as long as we want it to endure. I think hope is like that too; anything easier isn't hope, it's mere romance and self-delusion.

In other words, hope is a whole lot like a longstanding marriage. It's not always easy to sustain. It requires a body-and-soul commitment. It demands our energy.

But like love and marriage, hope can give energy, too. And when that alchemy of hope occurs, that's when the thing with feathers takes wing. That's when its chirps meld into full-fledged song. That's when it keeps us warm.

Photo of a lovely befeathered kitty named Lynksys by Flickr user SuziJane, used under a Creative Commons license.

Parenting in the Shadows of Atrocity

Pictures from a few hours ago:

We're in the mountains. The sky is preternaturally blue. Maybe I'm in Colorado.

An airplane approaches, too low. It breaks into two pieces. There's no fire, smoke, or explosion. The fuselage just snaps in two, breaking right behind the wings. It goes down instantly, silently.

In the dream, everyone knows it's September 12. Oddly, I'm the only one who immediately realizes that this isn't just a technical malfunction.

I wake up. Sometimes, commemoration doesn't involve flag pins or pious moments of silence. Sometimes, it's neurotic and lonely and feels as real as the rubble of history.

********

We haven't yet told our kids about the 9/11 attacks. Each year, we keep the news off the TV and radio so that the Bear won't pick up on the story. I realize he needs to hear about it from us before he hears about it from other kids; I know that time is running out on our policy of avoidance. He was not quite two in 2001. It was easy to shield him, then, and he was too young to ask why my eyes were so red-rimmed.

Now, as he approaches his ninth birthday, he's a very sensitive kid - so much so that he asks me to turn off NPR if a report about the Iraq War comes on. He understands that war is not a game, that it's about death and destruction. I've never discouraged him from gun-play because it's never really come up; he's scared of guns, plain and simple.

He's familiar with the word "terrorist." He knows about the shoe bomber. We fly regularly and he hates taking off his shoes for security. I explained that a bad guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoes, and that it won't happen now because the TSA is watching for it. I believe this is true. Something else will happen, but it won't be a shoe bomb.

It's much easier to provide reassurances about those attacks that never happened.

How do I explain falling buildings? How do I make sense of the kind of zealotry that guides a plane into a skyscraper? How do I assure him that we can still get on a plane without fear?

I'm not looking for advice. Legions of child psychologists dished out tips on managing our children's fears after 9/11. None of it struck me as very helpful. These are questions without an answer, and I know it.

Maybe I'm overprotective. I think it's more complicated than that.

********

I'm a historian. I don't understand how people can be "history buffs." History is not a hobby. History is a chronicle of atrocity, disaster, and horror. Every once in a while the archives give you a glimpse of love or heroism or honor. Mostly, it's war, plague, oppression, and one child in five dying as an infant.

I am as thin-skinned as my Bear. I cried the first time I saw Night and Fog - not discreet, dignified tears, but big gulping sobs. My doctoral adviser was sitting right next to me. I was afraid she'd conclude that if I lost it while watching a documentary on the Holocaust, I wasn't tough enough to study German history professionally. Instead, she kindly told me: There would be something wrong with you if this left you untouched. Once I'd calmed down, I realized she was right.

It's possible to be that thin-skinned and still stare down history without blinking. I want that for my children. I don't want them to become impervious.

Given that my kids are half German, they'll have to live with the legacy of the Holocaust. From me, their American mother, they inherit the legacy of slavery and the persecution of American Indians. We've talked about this things in age-appropriate ways. The Bear knows about slavery, Martin Luther King, and Huckleberry Finn. He knows Germany had a very bad ruler who was mean to the Jews and started a huge war when his Oma was a little girl. There's time enough for the harsh details when he's old enough put them into context: A great-grandfather who made his peace with the Nazis. A great-grandmother who was killed in an air raid while his Oma was buried alive. The deportations and the death camps.

Is it ever possible, really, to put such stories into context? Or do we just learn to hold ourselves at an ostensibly safe distance?

********

I also don't want my children to be ruled by fear, which is surely what will happen if they're exposed young to all the world's dangers. We have become a nation of cowards that specializes in saber-rattling. We are "governed" by chickenhawks who think invading Iraq worked out so well, we might as well take on Iran and Russia next. I don't want to raise my sons with the sort of false bravado that becomes a defense against otherwise unmanageable fears.

The same people who peddle fear promise to deliver us from it. Vote for them, and they'll snuff out the evildoers all around the globe. Give them power, and we'll be freed of the stuff of our nightmares.

I don't want that freedom, bought with the blood of innocents. I want a leader who will say yes, there is evil in the world, and I can't make all your bad dreams go away. I want to hear that even when the world bristles with real threats, we can be brave without being belligerent.

I want to be told that it's our job to be the grown-ups.

Palinofeminism

So much for my foray into reporting gossip. I stand by my judgments of the past few days, but my usual mode is analytical, not judgmental. And if I weren't still so frozen with fear that Sarah Palin could actually become our president if McCain wins and dies, I'd write on something warm and fuzzy. Instead, I'm gusting uneasily alongside the Angelus Novus.

And so you get one more post on Palin while I await her speech at the convention.

It's occurred to me that Palin's ill-advised plane flight is - in a curious way - a stepchild of feminism. In her own way, Palin is a feminist. Seen through this prism, Palin's membership in Feminists for Life is actually a pretty accurate description of her politics. She believes women can work and wield power while raising a family. So do I. Her nomination illustrates the breadth of the consensus on women rising to the highest ranks of politics.

Exhibit A for this consensus: Rudy Giuliani just asked his convention - to thundering applause: "How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to be with her children and be vice president? How dare thay do that? When do they ever ask a man this question?" Not only Phyllis Schlafly but a host of evangelical women see no problem with Palin combining motherhood and presidential campaigning.

But because Palinofeminism is so superficial, it falls immediately into the hoary trap of equality versus difference that has plagued feminism ever since the Woman Question emerged. Historically, European feminists have tended to emphasize differences between men and women while agitating for a society in which those differences - especially childbearing - would not relegate women to second-class status. Anglo-American feminists, by contrast, have put more stress on the equality of men and women.

This historical divergence is schematic, of course, and you can find individual figures who departed from the main current of feminism in their countries. Still, the distinction is real enough that it helps explain why Germany and France and Sweden accommodate motherhood with generous legally-mandated paid maternity leave - and the United States does not.

Now, present-day American feminists are no longer so naive as to believe that a little suffrage and a pinch of formal legal equality will produce actual equality in society. The work of Joan Williams, for instance, shows how further progress toward gender equality will be blocked as long as the American economy demands "ideal workers" with no domestic responsibilities. As long as we deny that care-giving and mothering are profoundly gendered in both idea and fact, women will be systematically disadvantaged in the workplace and public life.

But the many, many American women who pursue a career despite otherwise conservative ideals aren't much aware of these more nuanced approaches. They're usually ignorant of the history of the equality versus difference debates. And so they're condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. They compete with men on men's terms. If the job calls for them to be manly, they'll be downright macho - no matter how feminine their face or figure.

They don't see that women can never win on men's terms. They don't realize that we have to change the standards and definitions to reflect the importance of reproduction and care-work - or we'll never succeed in the public sphere. This is more than a little ironic because the same folks often trumpet the sanctity of the traditional family and male headship of the family, never mind that the economy (far more than feminism) has totally undermined both.

Of course, we can't know exactly why Sarah Palin chose to fly home after her water broke. We do know she was determined to give her speech regardless, come hell or broken water. We know she revealed her pregnancy only in the seventh month. We know she announced her return to work when baby Trig was just three days old. Through this arc of events, Palin showed she wouldn't let maternity interfere with her public duties for more than 48 hours.

Former Massuchusetts Governor Jane Swift, the first governor to give birth in office and the only one before Palin, followed a similar trajectory during her pregnancy with twins. She too worked during their infancy - and got in trouble for misusing government workers as her personal babysitters. She decided against running for reelection because of the subsequent bad publicity. Her career foundered on maternity - in part because she felt obliged to carry on as if nothing had changed.

The press has bandied about the Thomas Eagleton comparison in the past few days - and who knows, perhaps Palin too will be forced to withdraw (although the way the Republicans are rallying tonight, I doubt it). But I think the stronger analogy is to Swift's story. Swift herself sees the parallels between Palin's situation and her own.

Seen through the lens of Palinofeminism, both these women's choices make a lot of sense. I'm not snarking here; I'm sincerely trying to understand. If you feel you must compete on men's turf and on masculine terms, then you don't acknowledge the changes a pregnancy brings. Yes, most women can do their usual work throughout pregnancy. (I finished grading exams about five days before the Tiger was born.) Yes, many of us balance full-time work with an infant, though it's often a psychotically sleep-deprived time.

But most women make some some compromises with our schedules, demand some concessions from our bosses, and make space in our lives for that small but needy new human. If you're a hard-driving ambition woman, your compromises will likely be smaller. If you're a high-powered Republican woman - much less one in the macho state of Alaska! - there's precious little latitude for even imagining compromise. Things aren't a whole lot easier for high-powered Democratic women; but it's probably significant that women like Hillary Clinton deferred their political ambitions until their children were no longer little.

The people who pay most for Palinofeminism are the women themselves who try to do it all. Sure, it helps set an impossible standard for the rest of us, and so it harms women as a class, too. But really, it's those unreconstructed 1980s-style superwomen - and their families - who pay the price.

And yes - when men try to do it all at once - they, too, pay by not ever really knowing their children. But feminists have been saying that for a couple generations now.

The Rubble of History

Watching the Republican National Convention, the image that keeps haunting me is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. This is the figure that Walter Benjamin called the angel of history - blown ever forward by the winds of time, face turned perpetually toward the past, watching the rubble of human "progress" pile up behind him:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," cited in Wikipedia - yeah, I'm that lazy. Wikipedia claims fair use of this reproduction of Klee's Angelus Novus, and so do I.)

Of course, it's not the convention itself that calls forth the angel of history. It's the repeated references to danger and terror and 9/11. It's the memory of the avoidable human wreckage piled upon the ruins of the Twin Towers in the seven years since. And it's the very real fear that we as a country might not be wise enough to recognize the rubble for which we're culpable, nor strong enough to turn and face forward into the wind.

Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

Let's face it: Eighty-eight is a weird number, unless you're a piano player. And so the only reason we're all hearing about today being the eighty-eighth anniversary of American women winning the vote is because the Democratic convention is shining a spotlight on it. And that's only happening because Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be a serious, serious contender for the presidency.

But precisely because eighty-eight is such an artificial number to celebrate, it's got me doing the math. I realized that my grandma - the one who fancied herself the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota - was already thirty when American women achieved suffrage. I was just shy of thirty when she died in 1993.

When you run the calculation that way, eighty-eight years sounds like nanoseconds on a geological scale. It's a lot harder to take for granted our right to vote. And yeah, non-white men got the vote earlier, but if they lived in the South, Jim Crow kept them from actually exercising their vote even when I was a little girl.

And so it's especially frustrating when CNN picks out a teary Hillary delegate from the crowd at the convention in Denver and gives her about five uninterrupted minutes to state that she won't vote for McCain, but Obama has two months to convince her that she shouldn't just stay home. This particular delegate was black, female, and about my age. I don't begrudge her tearing up; heaven knows I got all wet-eyed watching Michelle Obama's speech yesterday, and I did it again today at the thought that McCain could maybe possibly actually win.

But staying home to make a point? You might as well vote for Ralph Nader.

The Chinese Century

I know that other feminist bloggers are bemoaning the sexism of Olympic uniforms or the sexist neurosis of gymnastics. And I agree with them pretty well across the board - even though I still adore watching the gymnasts.

It's just that I think there's an even bigger issue encapsulated in these Olympics, and it too has feminist ramifications:

Future historians are likely to look back and see the 2008 Beijing Olympics as the start of the Chinese century.

That conclusion comes not from the careful historian in me who included thousands of footnotes in her dissertation, but the ready-for-prime-time bloviator who pronounced the American century dead a few months ago. Okay, I can't see the future any more than you can, dear reader, but my goodness, the future is here.

Demographically, China is the world's largest nation.

Economically, China is arguably the world's most dynamic nation. Oh, and it owns so much of America's debt, it could squish us like an insect any time it chose. It won't choose to do that just yet, because if it were to destroy the dollar and our economy, China would be left holding lots of worthless debt.

Politically, China is about as authoritarian as it's ever been.

Athletically, it's kicking the rest of the world's ass. Now, I don't get passionate about the Olympics, and I haven't even seen much of the gymnastics (I've been buried in work), but even I know that China's haul of gold medals is making history. When I checked just now, China had 39 gold medals to the United States' 22. If you click that link, their total will no doubt have edged higher.

Why should this matter even to those of us who are tuned out to the Olympics?

Well, the ability to mount a first-class team of Olympic athletes isn't magical. It's not genetic. It's not even a matter of national character or optimism. Apart from those sports (like running) where little equipment is required, Olympic success depends crucially on a country's wealth and - failing that - its ability to marshal resources.

China's gold medals show just how well it's able to extract and mobilize resources, even under conditions of fairly modest wealth. This is why future historians are likely to look back and say: The 2008 Olympics proved that China had arrived - that this century, the twenty-first, would belong to China.

Why is this a feminist issue? Well, as China becomes the dominant world power, other nations will come under tremendous pressure to play the game on its terms. Much as American military and economic prowess pushed other countries to adopt democracy in the twentieth century, China's growing might will create similar pressures to pursue its model of authoritarian capitalism in the twenty-first.

And if I'm right about this, we'll not just be importing Chinese surveillance technologies, as Naomi Klein argues in Alternet this week. We'll be flirting with a more authoritarian form of government that will be far more comprehensive than the cameras and biometric ID cards Klein describes. The mounting energy and environmental crises are going to severely test the American capitalist model, as well as our commitment to democracy and human rights, flawed as they've been. China's ascent will make its model look increasingly attractive if the American economy collapses and the rule of law begins to break down.

But feminism, and indeed all movements to increase equality and freedom, depend on democracy. Feminism can't thrive under an authoritarian regime.

And this is why the Chinese century - like peak oil, like global warming - needs to be viewed as a feminist issue. All of these things are already upon us. All of them threaten American freedoms far more than al-Qaeda will ever do.

The question is merely, how will we respond?

Swedish Kitties in the Lap of History

Yesterday we went to see a children's play featuring two beloved German characters, a curmudgeonly Swedish recluse named Petterson and his cheeky cat, Findus. Here's the plush version of Findus, which my little Tiger persuaded his dad to buy for him:


Though Petterson and Findus are originally Swedish characters, I suspect they're at least as big here in Germany as in their home country. Like Janosch's Little Bear and Little Tiger, they haven't yet found a translator who could capture the quirky humor of the original in English. And so the only video clips I could find online are in German (like this one) or Swedish (which I'll spare you).

In the film clip, Petterson's well-meaning neighbor, Frau Anderson, is trying to convince him he's getting too eccentric and lonely, and needs to adopt a kitten. Findus arrives in a box of "Findus" brand green peas. Whereupon Petterson offers him a cup of coffee.



The "only in Berlin" part of our experience at the Petterson and Findus stage play was the venue: an outdoor theater right next to the Spandau Citadel. No, that's not Spandau Prison where Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for 40 years after World War II as a Nazi war criminal, and which was then demolished so it wouldn't attract neo-Nazi pilgrims. The Spandau Citadel is a historic building in its own right, though - a well-preserved fortress dating back to the Renaissance, now a museum.


It's set in a lush park and surrounded by a moat. Which even has a drawbridge. As you might imagine, the kids loved that - almost as much as the play.

Photos of the Spandau Zitadelle and its drawbridge by Flickr user Gertrud B., used under a Creative Commons license.

Photo of Findus by me, Sungold.

Dickens Meets the Drug Industry

Guinea pig photo by Flickr user Johan Larsson, used under a Creative Commons license.

In keeping with my policy of never scooping any real journalists, I want to say a few words about a commentary that appeared several weeks ago in the New England Journal of Medicine. Carl Elliott and Roberto Abadie reported in the NEJM that participants in Phase I clinical trials – the earliest tests of drugs in human subjects – amount to an exploited research underclass.

Over roughly the past decade, Elliott and Abadie write, pharmaceutical companies have begun routinely outsourcing these riskiest of trials. Private entities pay subjects to take part in trials, outside of the traditional university setting where oversight was less likely to be tainted by conflicts of interests:

Payment to subjects has escalated, creating "shadow economies" in cities throughout North America and elsewhere. In 2005, Bloomberg Markets reported that SFBC International, a contract research organization, was paying immigrants to participate in drug trials under ethically questionable conditions in a dilapidated Miami motel. A few months later, nine apparently previously healthy subjects at an SFBC subsidiary in Montreal contracted latent tuberculosis during a trial of an immunosuppressant. In 2006, six healthy subjects required intensive care in a phase 1 trial of a monoclonal antibody at a London facility run by the contract research organization Parexel.

(Source: NEJM)

Elliott and Abadie ask whether it’s ever ethical to pay research subjects to assume incalculable but potentially life-threatening risks. They argues it’s not, because the subjects will be drawn disproportionately from the very poor, who can earn more as perpetual guinea pigs. And this has three ramifications that make such payment unethical, in their accounting, which I think is spot on:

First, poor people are less likely than wealthier ones to get access to the drugs in question, if and when they are approved. Volunteers are unlikely to have full-time employment or, therefore, to have health insurance. ...

Second, the U.S. oversight system is not well equipped to monitor a highly competitive, market-based, multinational research industry. The Office for Human Research Protections has no jurisdiction over privately sponsored studies, and the Food and Drug Administration inspects only about 1% of clinical trials. ...

Third, even though the purpose of phase 1 trials is to test whether new drugs are safe, most sponsors apparently do not provide free care or treatment for subjects who are injured in these trials. In fact, no agency is even tracking injuries in phase 1 trials, much less the long-term health of people who volunteer for many trials over a period of years. A recent study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that only 16% of academic health centers provide injured subjects with free care. None compensate injured subjects for pain and suffering or lost wages. Although no comparable data are available for private research sponsors, there is little reason to believe that private sponsors are much more generous; indeed, many include disclaimers in their consent forms indicating that subjects retain responsibility for their own medical care. ...

Sponsors call subjects' payments "compensation" to suggest that they are merely reimbursing participants for expenses and inconvenience, even as they fill studies with unemployed people who depend on trial income to make ends meet. They refer to paid subjects as "volunteers," implying that participation is a freely chosen act of altruism, whereas most subjects indicate that they take part in trials for the money. Regulators allow sponsors to use money to attract subjects but do not require them to provide the kinds of benefits that subjects would demand if they had more power. The result is what one Philadelphia trial subject describes as "a mild torture economy." "You are not being paid to do something," he explains. "You are being paid to endure."

(Source: NEJM)

I’m not especially shocked that this happens, only that it continues today and appears to be getting worse, not better. My own research on women’s experiences of childbirth is largely a story of poor women trading their most basic freedoms to get the most basic care.

An unmarried woman pregnant woman typically lost her job and often her lodgings as well. Her only option, before the advent of maternity homes, was often to seek shelter in a hospital. As obstetrics became more scientific and professionalized, guess who was used as research and teaching subjects?

These were the women who first tested new forms of anesthesia for labor. They were exposed to an auditorium full of male med students while in labor. They had to suffer multiple repeat pelvic exams conducted by the same bumbling students – an experience that must have been akin to rape, for they had signed away their right to say no upon admission.

The full story of these women is too long to tell here. Still, the similarities to today’s research “volunteers” are striking. These women had a choice, too. They could have given birth on a street corner or homeless shelter, and a few did. They could have maintained their independence as prostitutes, and some did. They could have tried to abort the pregnancy, and countless millions did.

So yes, there’s always a “choice.” It’s just that if you’re poor, all your choices may be horrible. And as the economy continues to sour, we can expect the number of “volunteers” to swell. More people will see no better alternative to “being paid to endure.”

A Glimpse at a Post-Roe World

When discussing abortion in the classroom, I often ask my students what it would take for Roe to be overturned (answer: one more anti-Roe justice on the Supreme Court) and what a post-Roe world would look like. They often assume that we'd just revert to the pre-Roe situation: Women who could afford it would travel to states where abortion remained legal. Those who couldn't would reach for a coat hanger or knitting needle.

Only the first half of this scenario is plausible. The second half doesn't even accurately reflect history. Most abortions performed before abortion's legalization involved a doctor, midwife, or other black-market provider. Many of these abortionists were medically competent, and some were even caring. Only a minority of illegal abortions were self-induced, and by no means did they all involve sharp instruments. Other common techniques included poisoning oneself just enough to expel the fetus (eating match heads was one way to do it), inflicting blows to the abdomen, or trying to overheat/overcool one's body. Obviously, the more effective of these methods carried their own risks: The line between poisoning the fetus and fatally poisoning oneself was thin and treacherous.

In a world without Roe, women would not simply revert to the old methods. Most of them would turn to the Internet for help. Just as many senior citizens now import their Lipitor from Canada and ED patients order those little blue pills from India, unwillingly pregnant women would get their RU-486 online.

This is already happening in countries where abortion is harshly restricted, as Kate Harding reports on Salon's Broadsheet, relying on a BBC story. Among the more reliable services providing medical abortions is one called Women on Web:

Women on Web will send abortifacient drugs to women less than nine weeks pregnant in countries "where abortion is heavily restricted" -- also providing proper instructions, paperwork signed by a doctor and e-mail support. Audrey Simpson, director of the Family Planning Association of Northern Ireland, calls the site "very helpful and reputable" -- while being careful to add that her organization doesn't encourage breaking Irish law.

Unfortunately, at-home abortions are not without risks, even when they don't involve the proverbial rusty coat hanger. Besides Women on Web, there are rogue sites out there, sending "unmarked bottles with no instructions or paperwork," according to one woman who eventually used WoW. ... And the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology recently published a survey that found even among Women on Web clients, almost 11 percent had required a surgical follow-up.

This shows a real parallel to women's historical experiences in those countries that now have relatively liberal abortion laws. Incomplete abortions were a fairly common event in the illegal era. But once an abortion was in progress, a doctor would be obligated to help the woman, even if he knew or suspected that she wasn't just suffering a spontaneous miscarriage.

I'm not entirely sanguine about any of this. Liberal abortion laws save women's lives. Period. But I think that we proponents of reproductive justice serve our cause poorly if we don't recognize how a post-Roe world would differ from the pre-Roe situation. These differences - and not just historical amnesia - may help explain why the coat-hanger symbol is losing its resonance among young women. And I think we also need to recognize how resourceful women can be when faced with sharp restrictions on abortion rights.

Sex in the (Industrializing) City

Figleaf is asking how the heck people managed to have sex in the past in one-room abodes, and how they do it today.

So I'm starting to wonder how much of modern Western sexual progress has coincided with modern Western "bourgeoise" trends in housing.

Historically, many people just had no choice about where and when to do it. In premodern times, people's sensibilities were quite frank, and sex was not nearly as private. The whole notion of "privacy," for that matter, is quite modern. People did try to be somewhat secretive about their activities, which meant that sex would often be rather furtive and fast, but no one expected sex to be wholly hidden.

This changed with the advent of the bourgeoisie and the birth of modern notions of privacy. The more prosperous classes promoted an idea of sexual discretion, and they had enough space to conform to it. Parents and children slept in separate rooms, and the idea of shielding kids from their parents' sex lives became prevalent enough that Freud could write of a child viewing the "primal scene" as a traumatic event.

But space remained at a premium for the poor, and their housing actually grew worse as industrialization advanced and poor people flocked to the cities in hope of work. The urban working class often suffered much worse crowding than rural people did. In 1918, half of the apartments in Berlin, Germany, had just one room. The situation was worse in some other European cities. Poor women commonly rented out (part of) a bed to unrelated tenants, which meant that the family's young daughters might share a bed with a young, unmarried man. About a third of 5000 poor housewives surveyed in Berlin in the early 1930s had sublet arrangements with boarders.

I know a little about this issue from my research on the history of childbirth. As you might imagine, the lack of space and privacy also became an issue at the other end of the pipe, so to speak. A one-room apartment doesn't allow for a hygienic home birth by modern standards. Nor does it facilitate the sort of privacy that doctors and midwives increasingly saw as morally necessary in childbirth. This was a big factor driving women's choice to give birth in hospitals.

The key term here is "bourgeois," both morally and materially. In the 1920s, middle-class housing reformers pushed for better apartments for the poor - not necessarily larger but chopped into fewer rooms - partly because they saw morality endangered by the lack of privacy. This seems to have been a much bigger deal for the middle-class do-gooders than for the working classes, which continued to embrace bawdier morals. (Poor people did want better housing, just not necessarily for the same reasons that reformers saw it as desirable.)

But it's a nice little irony that the birth of privacy, which initially cast sex as something to hide from the world, actually created a space where sex could ultimately become less furtive. Sexual variety needs time and space to flourish, and those buttoned-down reformers inadvertently created just that.

The consequences of privacy for female pleasure are particularly profound, since "fast and furtive" just doesn’t cut it for most of us women, most of the time. In addition, young women had more sexual autonomy when they didn't have to fend off the advances of a tenant; the reformers were right that such tenants could pose a threat to women's bodily integrity. So even if the reformers were interested in protecting women's purity, in the end they did much more to facilitate women's sexual self-determination.

I'm still left wondering how people cope in Tokyo or Moscow, as figleaf asks. Many of them still live in conditions similar to early-twentieth-century crowding, with whole families in a single room, but they're subject to modern ideas about privacy and sexual propriety. I'd be very curious to know how they manage the resulting clash.

More Berks: Reflections on Writing Body History

Along with learning heaps from other people at the Berks, I also had a chance to talk about my own work in a conference seminar called “What is the history of the body?” We pre-circulated the papers and then used the conference time to explore their overlapping themes, which allowed discussion to go both wider and deeper than at an ordinary conference panel. The papers ranged from Heather Munro Prescott’s research on students fighting for birth control and other health services in the 1960s to Jessica Luther’s explication of alchemists’ attempts to quite literally incarnate themselves as men with wombs: hermaphrodites who embodied both “male” creativity and “female” generativity.

My own paper, which I mentioned here when it was still a bundle of semi-formed ideas, was a theoretical piece on the relationship between discourses that shape bodies and actual lived, embodied experiences. I won’t try to rehash it all here, because it’s an adventure in scary theory; anyone who wants to know more about it should email me. Instead, I’d like to muse on the themes I addressed in my oral presentation for the seminar.

Writing my seminar paper pushed me to reflect on why I was drawn to the history of the body in the first place. And as I thought about this, I realized that even as historians or other scholars write the stories of others’ embodied experiences, our own experiences remain at an Olympic height. Yet clearly those experiences are bound to affect our ideas and interpretations. So it makes sense to turn a critical gaze back upon our own experiential motivations for studying the history of the body and ask how they may reveal some systematic biases and blind spots. My guinea pig for this was the test case I know best - myself - but with the idea that my own experiences and agendas may point to some broader themes and concerns. (And yes, this is more navel-gazing than I’ve ever done in an academic venue.)

I first got interested in the history of the body in the late 1980s when I realized that it offered fresh insights into areas that were already long-standing interests of mine: sexuality, motherhood, medicine, and power. When I embarked on researching experiences of pregnancy and childbirth for my dissertation, I was very excited about two books that had just come out: Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction and Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin. I was fascinated by the broad range of embodied experiences that their work depicted. While they both focused almost entirely on women’s bodies and experiences, they also illuminated broader themes in the human condition, which are often though not always gendered – particularly, how power relations within a society are reflected and contested in experiences that result from the interaction of culture and biology. This basically anthropological lens was exhilarating to me both intellectually and politically; it seemed to mesh well with Foucault and feminism, which were the two main avenues for my thinking about power. To this day, I think that the project of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange (to echo anthropologist Roy Grinker’s phrasing in Unstrange Minds) remains a powerful tool for historians of the body. (Jessica’s paper for the seminar did just that impressively.)

But looking back, I can see that it wasn’t just intellectual excitement. I had other, more personal agendas in play, which I think also have a shared, generational basis. One reason the history of the body resonated with me is that it meshed with my post-hippie youth. My friends and I were ferociously hungry for all sorts of experience, much of which engaged the body. I was younger than the students Heather studied, but in the early 1980s I knew a guy who took acid every Thursday and went wandering in California’s coastal hills; he called it his tripping day. I wasn’t anywhere near that dedicated or foolhardy about pushing the limits of embodied experience, but I did go to a lot of Grateful Dead shows and some of what transpired there might be difficult to explain when I run for President someday.

Boiling it down to “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” might oversimplify it, and yet that not-so-holy trinity absolutely foregrounded embodied experience. Unlike earlier generations of young people, who surely took their own risks, we thought specifically about “experience” as something that was desirable, that we hungered for. This was a motivator for the students Heather studied. It was also an influence on some of us future historians of the body. I realize not everyone who came of age from the late 1960s through the early ‘80s had equivalent experiences, yet it was part of the Zeitgeist. Whether you embraced and pursued experience for its own sake or consciously rejected it, you could hardly avoid taking a position.

So the first question that this examination of my own “experience of experience” raises is how these sorts of experiences have shaped our research agendas in ways that we haven’t necessarily examined. Namely: Have they created a presumption that the body is somehow a privileged site for the workings of liberation and repression, freedom and social control, and can this presumption be sustained? (One influence on my thinking about this - along with a slew of academic stuff - was a discussion along these lines involving figleaf, Kochanie, and others.)

My paper for the seminar argued that this is indeed the case, that the often-unexamined character of embodied experience makes such experience particularly potent. I’m generally convinced that this is true, and yet I’ll also readily admit that it’s very hard to ground this assumption. That’s why I think in the end it should be regarded as a hypothesis – one that has to be proven and re-proven empirically to fit with the available evidence, in an iterative process. (My seminar paper went into this iterative idea in more depth. Jessica’s paper actually did this, quite beautifully, and I tried to do it as well in my dissertation.) Sometimes, though, the evidence may show that in a given set of circumstances, the presumption doesn’t hold much water or obscures more than it explains.

A second area where I see my embodied experience affecting the history I write – often in ways that may remain preconscious or only dimly perceived – is through the interaction of the writing process with my own embodiment. Here, too, I don’t think I’m alone, but I’ll speak for myself and you can let me know if it makes sense. Most often, this takes form as a process of effacement of the body while writing. A relatively trivial example, one I’m sure most of you have shared, is when we try to ignore a headache or backache while in order to focus on the work. Many people deal with chronic pain and their work would come to a halt if they didn’t tune out their discomfort.

But when I do this - when I tune out my body while writing - I re-enact Cartesian dualism. Ironically, my seminar paper was in part an argument against splitting our selves into body and mind. So a second set of questions would be: How does this act of bracketing out my own body affect the kind of body history I write? Does this habit of effacement create blind spots, and if so, how do I rout them out?

But simple effacement is not the only possibility here. An example of embodied experience more specific to my own work was my changing relation to childbirth between starting and completing my dissertation. When I embarked on my project, a number of women scholars – mothers, one and all – told me I really couldn’t write about pregnancy and childbirth without having experienced them myself. Mindful of Barbara Duden’s warning against using our bodies as a bridge to the past (and just plain ornery), I was determined to prove them wrong.

As it turned out, I had my first baby while in the midst of writing chapters on hospital birth and the emotional import of pregnancy. In my panic at the thought that I might never focus properly again, I became the queen of effacing my body. Someone might be kicking up a storm in my belly, but I tried my darnedest to ignore everything below my neck. Or so I thought.

My perspective on this changed radically when I began revising the manuscript and I realized how my own childbearing experience hadn’t necessarily created a bridge to the past but it had thrown into question some of the present-day dogma that I’d absorbed about childbearing. For instance, the now-current notion that pregnancy is basically healthy and not pathological had blunted my empathy and understanding of the physical challenges women have faced in performing their jobs and housework while pregnant. I had to experience morning sickness and deep exhaustion for myself before I recognized my own blind spot.

My third and final question would thus be: How can we use our own embodiment to write better, more perceptive, more empathetic histories without falling prey to the assumption that our body can serve as a simple bridge? Quite possibly, this question can only be answered in specific contexts, looking at our own experiences and how they may overlap – or not – with the kinds of experiences we’re studying.

I’ve used my own experiences as a starting point here, because I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I can’t speak directly for other writers’ and scholars’ experiences. And yet, judging from audience reaction at the seminar, I don’t think either my experiences or their implications are limited to me.

Similarly, I’ve laid out these thoughts from a historian’s perspective, but I think they may apply to at least some aspects of blogging. Most of us who don’t write strictly political blogs deal with personal experiences in one form or another. Sometimes those experiences are our own; sometimes they belong to other people; sometimes they’re shared property, so to speak. What sorts of assumptions about experience are lurking in the background as we blog about experiential stuff?

If you’ve stuck with me through all of this, I’d love to hear if any of these thoughts resonated with you.