[Editor’s note: If you’re interested in some sweet, sweet writing, which also happens to be about strippers, read part 1 of Jamie’s essay "After" here. It’s a sequel to "Peep Show," which you can read here.]
Hugo Schwyzer, one of the few other menminists out there in the man-blog-o-sphere, recently offered up a summary of what, to him, “it means to be a male feminist.” I’d like to quote it at length because it’s a pretty good example, I think, of the hyper-rigorous road Jamie and I aren’t taking (Jamie, feel free to disagree). It’s not a bad road—it may even be a good road, one well worth driving, walking, jogging and skipping upon—but it’s one I find unappetizing, for reasons I’ll elucidate in a moment. First, Hugo writes:
Speaking only for myself, the key foundation of what it means to be a male feminist goes beyond an ideological belief that eradicating sexism in the world is a good idea. The sine qua non of pro-feminism ought to be the commitment to match one’s language to one’s life. It’s one thing to give intellectual assent to a series of political positions (”sexism is bad”; “women should be paid the same as men”; “abortion should be legal”.) It’s another thing altogether to examine one’s own attitudes and behavior, ruthlessly determined to overcome one’s own sexist impulses and behaviors. Any man who publicly identifies as a feminist risks scorn from non-feminists, and justifiable suspicion from many women in the movement. A feminist man establishes his bona fides over time, and he establishes them less through his political work than through his commitment to personal transformation.
?I am convinced that our efficacy as “change-makers” is contingent upon our character. Despite what some folks see as a vaguely Puritanical streak in my writing, I’m not suggesting constant self-criticism that would make a Maoist (or an Inquisition confessor) proud. I’m advocating a commitment to exploring ways in which our goals and our practices can converge. I’m advocating a life that sees congruence between private and public acts as among the highest of virtues. I’m advocating tremendous patience with those who still struggle to reconcile their beliefs and their behaviors, and great sympathy for those who fall short of the mark time and again.
So what’s wrong with that? For Hugo, probably nothing. He’s a devout Christian—a youth minister, in fact—and the idea of aiming toward complete “congruence between private and public acts” seems to me a very Christian notion, as does the idea of “ruthlessly” rooting sin out of one’s soul. He’s also been divorced a few times, and one gets the sense from reading his blog that he’s mistreated or exploited a few women in his day, and he now feels regret for doing so. It may make sense, for him, to fight to exterminate the sexist and misogynistic impulses in his soul, and if that’s the path he believes he needs to pursue to be good in the world, then more power to him. There’s more than one way to flense a whale, and if Hugo’s way is to flense himself, then flense away. (fyi, I just discovered that I love the word “flense”)
I’m not a Christian, however, and I don’t have a history of mistreating women. Not that I don’t have misogynistic issues to work through—I do, believe me (more to the point, believe my wife)—but I don’t walk through life feeling sinful in the way that Hugo seems to. And I do detect a puritanical streak in his writing, and I have the same problem with it that I do with puritanical thinking in general. It makes my ass twitch.
Consider this passage from a recent post, for instance, in which Hugo talks about his absolute opposition to medical research on animals in the context of his father’s death from cancer. He writes:
I loved my father so very much. As we head towards Christmas, I can feel the grief at his passing flowering within me. I wanted my Dad to beat his cancer. I wanted him to live and recover, and I am still heartbroken that he didn’t. But I would not — not for a second — have supported animal research that could have saved his life. I hate cancer for what it did to our family; I hate cancer for robbing my future children of a relationship with their grandfather. But my hatred for cancer is trumped by my love for animals, for the rats and the monkeys and the dogs that share equally in the gift of creation and for which we humans are responsible. I will not support cancer research involving animals, and though the breakthroughs that have already come ought not be discarded, I am not willing to cause pain or death to any creature so that other families will not go through what my family went through this spring. I am not heartless or quixotic — I am honoring a commitment to creation, one that has led me to veganism, one that has reshaped how I spend my money, one that has transformed how I think about life itself.
Or there’s this passage, in which he writes about why older men shouldn’t date young women:
Young women need older men in their lives who will respect and care about them, who aren’t their fathers or brothers but who aren’t prospective lovers, either. They need to know that they bring more to the table than their sexuality. They need to be seen as complete human beings. Paradoxically, seeing young women as complete human beings means that in actions, words, and yes, even in thought, older men cannot see them as objects of sexual desire. That doesn’t mean that we (older guys) shouldn’t acknowledge that younger women are sexual creatures. But we must (and the burden is on us alone here, fellas) love them with radical unselfishness,and that requires that we ourselves always refrain from sexualizing them.
And one more example of what I perceive of as his puritanism, in which he writes about his abhorrence of pornography:
I know firsthand how destructive porn can be. I cannot say I have not enjoyed looking at it; I can also say with confidence that exposure to it has invariably left me feeling ashamed, alienated, and sad. That may not be a universal experience, but it is certainly a very common response! Like in so many other areas (abortion, plastic surgery) we frame the debate about pornography in terms of choices. Women should have the choice to work in porn. Men should have the choice to work in porn. Women and men should have the choice to consume porn as well. As long as everyone (performer, producer, marketer, consumer) is over 18, where is the harm?
The harm is in my soul when I view it.
Well, I too have had the experience of feeling empty, ashamed, alienated and sad after, say, staying up until five in the morning at my parents’ house watching porn, jerking off to the point of seriously diminishing returns, because I don’t have Cinemax at my own place and I feel the need to maximize my free porn watching opportunity. I’ve also, however, had the experience of watching porn and then feeling, um, gratified.
Hugo’s right, I assume, that the porn life is a pretty awful, exploited existence for most of the people involved in it, and that for many porn consumers the consumption is a pretty degrading experience. What I object to in Hugo’s construction of pornography is his insistence that the act of watching porn is categorically degrading. “The harm is in my soul when I view it.”
Porn, for him, is bad for the soul. Animal research is bad. Older men dating young women is bad. Sinful.
I don’t totally disagree with Hugo about the effect of porn, the ethics of animal research (though you better believe I’d kill a rat if it would save my father’s life), or the dangers of older men dating younger women. I fear, however, that there can be something destructive in ethical systems, such as his, which set purity as the standard. They create anxiety, and breed hypocrisy, because there’s never really a resting place, an equilibrium, from where you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m not doing so badly right now.” The chasm between the real, imperfect lives that most of us live and these Everest-high standards of moral purity is just too vast, and I don’t think the human psyche is well-equipped to process the cognitive dissonance that bubbles up in the chasm.
Hugo says that he advocates “tremendous patience with those who still struggle to reconcile their beliefs and their behaviors, and great sympathy for those who fall short of the mark time and again,” and I believe him. He’s written a lot about his work with kids and students, and I have little doubt that he’s a wonderful, sympathetic pastor and teacher. My difference with him is philosophical. The struggle, for him, is to be Christ-like. It’s not enough, as an older man, simply to treat the young women in your life respectfully, you have to act with “radical unselfishness, and that requires that we ourselves always refrain from sexualizing them.”
I don’t know precisely what that means in practical terms, but I don’t see what’s wrong with just treating the young women in your life respectfully, and making them feel safe and as if they are more than just the sum of their body parts. You shouldn’t leer at your young, attractive, female co-worker, but why shouldn’t you, discreetly, check out her pert, young ass once in a while? Or at the least, why shouldn’t you imagine her pert, young ass in your mind, or in your dreams, away from the office and away from her?
I don’t want to be like Christ. I have a hard enough time feeling okay about the Dan I happen to be. The struggle for me is be more Dan-like, is to have a holistic vision of myself, of the good and the bad and the in-between, and to like the whole self. The struggle is to understand myself—to understand, for instance, what misogyny there is in my psyche, and to manage it as best I can so that it doesn’t inflict too much damage on my relationships with women and girls. It’s to minimize the harm I do in the world, and try to be conscious of what harm I’m doing (I’ll always do some, since life is harm, as well as love), and to accept myself if I’m doing a decent job.
Ruthless, radical unselfishness isn’t really very appealing to me, and in fact sounds a bit frightening. And I’m a writer (and, dare I say, an artist) so I also have a greedy attitude toward human behavior in all its varieties, including the naughty varieties—it’s all fascinating to me. A world without porn sounds like a world that, though it would be better in most ways, would be impoverished in others. We’d lose the language of porn ("the facial," "the money shot," etc.), and the humor of it; there’d be no Ron “the hedgehog” Jeremy. A world in which there are no older men-younger women romances, too, would surely be better in sum utility, but it would be very hard on the French. We’d be more humane without medical research on animals, but the great adventure of human science would proceed more slowly, and that would be sad.
I don’t really want to to knock Hugo at all. He’s doing yeoman’s work, both as a writer and (I assume) as a teacher and pastor, and he’s in open, thoughtful conversation with the world, and that’s the most important thing. But I think it’s useful to investigate how we differ in our conception of what it means, as a man, to be a good feminist, and to be a good man.
