Reading Dan’s Hugo Schwyzer post today, I found myself bothered, even more so now that I just saw that Mr. S. has just posted on his site that “Dan Oppenheimer has a regular blog on men and masculinity . . . .” I’m kidding, of course, but well, if you didn’t notice me then, sir, notice me now! (Please picture me flushed with anger, white gloves in hand, after issuing a duel-challenging slap.)
I can’t say as I’ve ever been so off-put by writing that I, in many ways, agree with (Hugo S’s, not Dan’s, that is.). As Dan, I think, quite fairly, summarizes a couple of Schwyzer’s positions: “Porn, for him, is bad for the soul . . . . Older men dating young women is bad. Sinful.” By way of disclosure on the age issue, I’m a man romantically involved and cohabitating with a woman fifteen years my junior (although I’m not sure if we fit his definition: at 26 and 42 we’re both grown-ups, not quite the same as if we were a mere ten years apart but were 20 and 30, or five years and 16 and 21, er, right? Where does one draw the line? What about 28 and 52? 71 and 34? Is there some graph to consult? Am I disrespecting her with my aged lust? I sure hope so – er, no, wait, that’s not "right" – I hope not.). Of course I see the point that the 50 year-old-man with 22-year-old woman American cinematic archetype (Harrison Ford Syndrome) is more than problematic, Lost in Translation excepted, of course. And that men should be very careful not to take unfair advantage of the father figure power that society so readily affords them. Actually depending on what he whispers in Scarlett Johanson’s ear at the end of that film, Bill Murray may be approaching the Schwyzerian ideal of older man younger woman behavior, but I wouldn’t want to assume.
On the porn side of things, I’m a man who spent years and years and years tormenting himself for private, pornographic, objectifying lusts that didn’t match my public behavior or long-held values. And the way I’ve come to terms with these desires and contradictions is, well, to come to terms with them, part of which has entailed stopping trying to utterly destroy them, which, for the first twenty years or so of my adult life, I’d been guiltily, obsessively, trying in vain to do. Having failed to banish my dirty lust, how do I fare under the Hugo gaze?
As quoted by Dan, Schwyzer (Oppenheimer and Schvyzer, hmmm – tweak the spelling of one of those last names and we’ve got makings of an fascinating if not terribly commercially viable one-act detailing a conversation between major 20th century figures) writes that “I’m advocating a commitment to exploring ways in which our goals and our practices can converge” and that he has “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." Gee, thanks. Not only do I find myself, based on much of what he writes (both a few months ago and after reading Dan’s post I’ve perused hugoschwyzer.net) strongly doubting Schwyzer’s patience, or at least his tolerance, I patently disagree with what he seems to me to be saying: that not just reconciling but precisely matching one’s ethical beliefs and private behaviors should be the goal for most people. I’d go so far as to say that a better goal for many people might be to aim to let go of the need to make private thrills and public behaviors sync-up. Attempting to govern one’s own (let alone other people’s) fantasies is a ludicrous endeavor. What’s taboo is inherently what’s sexy for a huge number of men and women; encouraging the across-the-board denial of desires that are “wrong” (Stephen Elliott is an amazing chronicler such unspeakables) is at least as destructive as it is constructive.
Only when I stopped judging myself quite so harshly for the divergence of my fantasy life from my beliefs (once again, dear new readers, please see “Peep Show” for lurid details) did I find some ease in my sexual life. It’s become the king of cliches, but Whitman really did put it best:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Absolute strictures for men, let alone for male feminists, make less for liberated and nonsexist men than for pent-up bastards. The recent case of Ted Haggard (and soooooo many other recent not-so-recent ones such as Jim Bakker et al and al and al) points out how a person’s inability to come to terms with his (and it always does seem to be a “him,” don’t it?) private sexual desires can lead to terribly hateful and hurtful public behavior.
I will likely comment at greater length and in greater detail and perhaps less polemically on Hugo Schwyzer’s writings, but before I post part two of “After,” I just had to weigh in. It strikes me that much of what Schwyzer posits in the name of battling sexism in ourselves and in the world sounds an awful lot like a bizarro-world inversion of what others promulgate in the name of curing homosexuals of their affliction. At the same time, though, like Schwyzer, I too feel that porn (How odd, every time I try to type the word “porn,” it initially comes out “pron,” which sounds as if it might be some kind of magical Martian grain from a Heinlein novel.) is, in large part, bad for the soul and that in a perfect world, there’d be none; that men who believe that feminism is good should be willing to step up say so – as I’ve more or less written before – in the locker room and the faculty lounge and the 7-11, everywhere. I just get a bad feeling in my stomach from the way Mr. Schwyzer says/preaches it.
Perhaps another way to look at the difference between Schwyzer and, say, me, is that he’s an idealist, a utopian, and I’m, to put it nicely, a realist, or, to put it less nicely, a cynic. Dan put it best, so why do I feel the need to repeat it? Because it bears repeating: “I don’t want to be like Christ. I have a hard enough time feeling okay about the Dan I happen to be.” I too am working hard to feel okay about the Dan I happen to be and I think that’s a big enough task for this lifetime.
On one last note: as the child of a good, old-fashioned woman feminist, I’ve always felt that for a man to call himself one is an act of great presumptuousness. And yet, I’m glad Schwyzer’s doing it. He’s putting an eloquent, if sometimes pedantic voice to a conversation that I’m glad to be able to join in on.
