Category Archives: Politics and Culture

Losing Our Confidence in Love

The Washington Post today printed a revealing excerpt from Laura Sessions Stepp’s forthcoming book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both. Her research suggests that though many young women are sexually active and empowered, they’ve given up on the idea of true love. Women are separating sex from intimacy for many reasons: fear of rejection, career ambitions that leave no time to work on a relationship, or a concept of feminism as incompatible with emotional vulnerability and dependence on a partner.


A national survey of 18-to-29-year-olds by the Pew Research Center reported that almost 60 percent were not in committed relationships and the majority of those were not interested in being committed. Young women even have phrases for couples, frequently spoken with a touch of derision: They’re “joined at the hip,” or “married.”

Absent old-fashioned dating, which has virtually disappeared, the alternative for these young women is hooking up, which can happen in any semi-private place and includes anything from kissing to intercourse. The beauty of hooking up is that it carries no commitment, and this is huge, for being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most.

To tell a man “I need you” is like saying “I’m incomplete without you.” A young man might say that and sound affectionate. But to an ambitious young woman, who has been taught to define power on her terms and defend it against all comers, need signals weakness.

Stepp contends that the decline of traditional dating will have unintended consequences for women’s ability to find and maintain lasting relationships.


“In traditional boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, you begin to understand how someone else thinks about things,” says Robert Blum, who chairs the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University. “You learn to compromise, and not to say the first thing on your mind. You learn how to say you’re sorry and accept other people’s apologies.”

These things are essential to being happily married and raising children, both of which young women say they want someday. They are best learned within a romantic relationship, in Blum’s view, because the young person is motivated by the romance to learn them.

Lloyd Kolbe, a health education professor at Indiana University-Bloomington, agrees. He still remembers his first love in high school, how he worked at being honest, decent and caring — in short, worthy of her.

“Hooking up is purposely uncaring,” he says. “If they turn off the emotional spigot when they’re young, what will happen to them as older adults?”

Women’s reluctance to invest in romantic partnerships, says Stepp, also has to do with a lack of role models, both in their own lives and in the media. They’re not being shown how intimacy builds and personal growth occurs during a long-term relationship, nor how successful couples learn to interact in a healthy way.


Some have lived through the divorce of their parents. Or they witness disputes between Mom and Dad yet are not privy to the negotiations their parents undertake to resolve these differences. Although Mom and Dad may say they love each other, young women report that they rarely see their parents hug, hold hands, act playfully or do other things that sustain love.

They have the same complaints about the way love is portrayed in the movies or on television. A college junior says, “We never see anything positive about Hollywood relationships. It’s beginning to seem normal to get married on flings and then get divorced and have random babies.” Evie Lalangas wonders, “Have you ever noticed how romantic comedies are all about falling in love or breaking up? I want to say, ‘Show me the rest of your life!’ “

What if, after hesitating, young women enter into a relationship? What does that look like? How do they make it last? Since they haven’t dated much, if at all, it’s difficult for them to know.

Order the book here.    

Prison Poet “Conway” Speaks

Since last fall, I’ve been corresponding with an incarcerated writer at a supermax prison in central California who discovered our Winning Writers website. “Conway” (he’s asked that I not use his real name) is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for receiving stolen property, under California’s three-strikes law that imposes life sentences for a nonviolent crime if the defendant has two or more prior felony convictions. The Supreme Court (wrongly, in my view) ruled in the 2003 case Lockyer v. Andrade that such mandatory sentences do not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

From what I can tell from Conway’s rap sheet, his priors were burglary and grand theft auto. Without access to his case history, it’s not for me to judge whether he ought to be at liberty. Nonetheless, as I read his letters, I was struck by his descriptions of unnecessarily brutal prison conditions and his drive to better himself through literature and art, despite the constant interference of guards confiscating his books and writing supplies.

I’ll be posting his poems and excerpts from his letters on this blog from time to time. I’m not in a position to vouch for the accuracy of everything he writes. Read them for yourself and see what rings true. My goal is simply to provoke further inquiry about how we ignore the humanity of the incarcerated.

Cell Widow
by “Conway”

Black spiders build traps on my window,
Their intricate veins with morning dew glow,
gray butterfly caught in deadly net,
a victim devoured by my bloodthirsty pet;

On lines creeping it approaches and overtakes,
the gift of life so simply forsakes,
captured before destiny can finish its flight,
dread spider consumes with sweet delight;

Bonded to be drained drop by drop alone,
abandoned heart bled dry to the bone,
as I watched the tiny wings crumble away,
I felt life’s loss, as I do every day…

***

Hole

steel teeth, cell doors
concrete tongue tasting
my soul wasting
inside locked corridors
concrete wasting
my soul tongue tasting
cell teeth, steel doors
locked inside corridors
wasting my soul
out of control…

***

Life Seeks Relief

This wise old owl must not
be so wise I fear,
for it has chosen to build
a nest in the most absurd
of spots precarious,
the tall menacing tower
where gunners seek targets
human, on barbed perimeter.
A lair of predators on hunt
perpetual, a death stalk
from above, in chain link
spiderweb’ belligerent
boundary of nettle surrounds;
“The no man’s land”
Yet unperturbed/unbiased
this odd creature, then bizarre
occurs to me, as I stare
out my cell window, I realize
how safe the chosen roost,
for the gun towers that menace
my mind, are no threat to
this nocturnal interloper:
Those large eyes stare back
accusingly, every time
I check to assure myself,
unwise owl is safely rested,
realizing it is I who is
unwisely nested…

Signs of the Apocalypse: Virgin Territory

The weekly entertainment guide LondonNet reported last week that sex-tape celebrities Paris Hilton and Jenna Jameson will be hosting a new reality TV show, “Virgin Territory,” in which they find the last remaining virgins in America and, uh, ameliorate their condition:


The series will feature real life virgins and follow their quest to have sex for the first time. Paris and Jenna will help to educate the uninitiated contestants.

Producer Kevin Blatt said: “Paris and Jenna have been contacted about participating in the show.

“We will be unveiling giant billboards in Time Square and Los Angeles advertising for virgins to take part in the show.

“Finding virgins in New York or Los Angeles is no easy task.”

Blatt is the man who turned Paris’ homemade sex tape with ex-boyfriend Rick Solomon, which was originally leaked onto the internet, into the best selling porn DVD One Night in Paris.

One can only hope the show’s run will be shortened by a lack of candidates. Hat tip to Adam (my better half) at NoPornNorthampton, where you’ll also find a compelling post about the childhood traumas experienced by Jameson and other female porn producers who now inflict similar abuse on their female employees.  

Same-Sex Love and the Bible

Kim Fabricius has a rigorous and (to me) reassuring post up at the Faith and Theology blog, “Twelve Propositions on Same-Sex Relationships and the Church”. Highlights:


I take it that homosexuality – and certainly the homosexuality I am talking about – is a given, not a chosen (a “life-style choice”); a disposition recognised, not adopted; a condition as “normal” as left-handedness – or heterosexuality (whether by nature or nurture is a moot but morally irrelevant point). I also assume an understanding of human sexuality that is not over-genitalised, where friendship, intimacy, and joy are as important as libido, and where sexual acts themselves are symbolic as well as somatic….Fundamentally, homosexuality is about who you are, not what you do, let alone what you get up to in bed. This is a descriptive point. There is also a normative point: I am talking about relationships that are responsible, loving, and faithful, not promiscuous, exploitative, or episodic….

[W]e must certainly examine specific texts – and then (I submit) accept that they are universally condemnatory of homosexual practice. Arguments from silence – “Look at the relationship between David and Jonathan,” or, “Observe that Jesus did not condemn the centurion’s relationship with his servant” – are a sign of exegetical desperation. No, the Bible’s blanket Nein must simply be acknowledged. But Nein to what? For here is a fundamental hermeneutical axiom: “If Biblical texts on any social or moral topic are to be understood as God’s word for us today, two conditions at least must be satisfied. There must be a resemblance between the ancient and modern social situation or institution or practice or attitude sufficient for us to be able to say that in some sense the text is talking about the same thing that we recognise today. And we must be able to demonstrate an underlying principle at work in the text which is consonant with biblical faith taken as a whole, and not contradicted by any subsequent experience or understanding” (Walter Houston)….

The first condition is not satisfied. The Bible knows nothing about homosexual orientation, or about homosexual relationships as defined [above]. In the Old Testament, the stories about Lot and his daughter (Genesis 19) and the Levite and his concubine (Judges 19) are about gang-bangs, while the prohibitions against homosexuality in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13) are about (a) cultic cleanliness and (b) male dominance (i.e. a man should not treat another man like a woman). While purity concerns are not entirely anachronistic, Brueggemann is surely right to say that if push comes to shove, justice trumps purity….

It is at least noteworthy that Paul deploys the language of dishonour and shame, rather than sin, to describe male-male relationships, which, in any case, are but a specific instance of the universal distortion of desire that enters the world as a result of the primal sin of idolatry….There is also the question of the rhetorical function of Romans 1:18ff. – or rather Romans 1:18-2:5. As James Alison observes (rightly ignoring conventional chapter and verse denotation), Paul’s argument works by condemning Gentile sexual practices – why? – so as to set his Jewish-Christian “hearers up for a fall, and then delivering the coup de grace” (Romans 2:1), such that “the one use to which his reference could not be put, without doing serious violence to the text, is a use which legitimates any sort of judging” such behaviour.

More to the point, again, is the question of the nature of the homosexual relationships being condemned. Are they the kind of relationships defined in Proposition 2? Is, therefore, the first condition of the hermeneutical axiom stated in Proposition 3 satisfied? The answer is No to both questions. The Hellenistic homosexual relationships that Paul condemns, if not forms of cultic prostitution, would normally have been both asymmetrical in terms of age, status, and power (the “approved” form was pederasty) and therefore open to exploitation, as well as inherently transitory. And as Rowan Williams reflects on Romans 1: “Is it not a fair question to ask whether conscious rebellion and indiscriminate rapacity could be presented as a plausible account of the essence of ‘homosexual behaviour’, let alone homosexual desire, as it may be observed around us now,” let alone in the church?

Summing up the Old and New Testament texts as they contribute to the contemporary discussion on homosexuality, the late Gareth Moore says: “In so far as we can understand them, they are not all concerned with the same things, they do not all condemn the same things, and they do not all condemn what they do for the same reasons. Most importantly, they do not all condemn same-sex activity, some of them do not condemn same-sex activity, and none of them clearly condemns homosexual relationships or activity of a kind which is pertinent to the modern Christian debate.”

One thing I particularly liked about this post was that it finds Scriptural support for allowing empirical discoveries in science, psychology and history to change our interpretation of the Bible.

Give It Up!

Happy new year, dear readers. I was going to resolve to be more cheerful this year, but stories like this keep happening. Lawrence Downes writes in the New York Times:


The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. …Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.


As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so … one-dimensional.


It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address….

Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.


There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem….


I thought of this article last night when we were making the rounds of First Night events in our New England college town. One of the highlights was a performance featuring children and teens from our local dance schools, all girls except for one boy of about eleven who gave a courtly, athletic performance of “Union Jack”. The young ballerinas were achingly lovely, reminding me that the beauty of youth is its infinite potential, shyly hidden even from itself, tragic because its promises can never be fully realized. (Yes, I know I’m only 34, but I do have gray hairs.)

And then the modern dance groups came onstage, doing the best they could with their graceless, aggressive choreography, to the hump-de-bump strains of Sean Paul’s “Give It Up to Me” (“From you look inna me eye gal I see she you want me/When you gonna give it up to me…So gimme the work yeah cause if you no gimme the work the blue balls a erupt yeah”) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (“Such a dirty mind. Always get it up for the touch of the younger kind”). Children onstage, children in the audience. Of all the pop songs to choose, why these? For a town with a prominent women’s college, we do a good job acting like we never heard of feminism.

That’s MISTER Jesus to You

From the Christian parody website LarkNews:


PASTOR TRIES INAUTHENTICITY

For years pastor Terry Bradley of New Life Community tried to be entirely real with everyone.
That experiment is now over.

“Authenticity is bogus,” he says. “It’s never real. Nobody knows himself well enough to be fully authentic, and trying to self-divulge all the time breeds shallow relationships because it denies the complexity and mystery of human personalities.”…

“I don’t see much benefit in everybody knowing everything about me,” says Bradley. “Jesus’ example is to be guarded and realistic about human nature….”

Read more….
   
Or, as contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton once said, “If sincerity means showing what you really are, it’s good to be sincere only if it’s good to show what you are.”

The Gospel of Johnny

Chris Tessone at Even the Devils Believe has an excellent series of posts up about the theology of the late, great singer Johnny Cash (starts here).  Chris says:



There is no doubt that Johnny Cash believes the Law must be taken seriously. Many of his songs about prisoners and the condemned are conspicuous in the fact that their narrators or main characters take full responsibility for their crimes; some of them even die for those crimes. Sam Hall does so defiantly, while the narrator of “I Hung My Head” is stunned and terrified by the consequences of his actions, but both go to the gallows without protest all the same.


But Cash also espouses what might be called a liberal position on sin as social failure, too, without sensing any contradiction with his more “conservative” ideas about personal responsibility. In “Man in Black”, he expresses sympathy for and solidarity with “the prisoner who has long paid for his crimes, but is there because he’s a victim of the times.” The song that haunts me more than any other in his corpus is “Drive On”, which discusses the social alienation felt by Vietnam veterans returning to the United States — there’s little question that in singing this song, Cash is blaming American society for the reception those men received.


These two themes are woven throughout Cash’s performances. The interplay between these two sources of human evil permit him to feel solidarity not only with the wrongly-imprisoned, but with the voice of his famous “Folsom Prison Blues”, a convict who “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Cash reports in his autobiography that this struck him as one of the most depraved things one human being could do to another. It’s clear he holds this fictional presence responsible to the fullness of the Law and yet still regards him as a human being deserving the care and concern of other people.


As for me, if it were my last day on earth, Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” is the album I’d be playing over and over again.

Co-ed Dorms: Sign of the Apocalypse?

ABC News’ Boston affiliate reported this week that Clark College in Worcester will soon become the 21st nationwide to have co-ed dorm rooms, as if co-ed residence halls hadn’t already done enough to eliminate whatever modesty America’s 19-year-olds possess:


“Having a policy that bans men and women from living together — it’s a double standard because if you think about it, same-sex couples are allowed to live together already,” said [sophomore Jeffrey] Chang.

“I think what it has done instead is to be affirming of different lifestyles and allowing students to have the option to live with someone with whom they will truly be compatible,” said Clark Dean of Students Denise Darrigrand.
Folks, I support same-sex couples as much as anyone, but they’re 10% of the population at most. Is that a good enough reason to impose a culture of cohabitation on everyone else in the dorm who finds it offensive? I hate this kind of phony “neutrality” because this is a situation where there really is no neutral option. Either the school creates an atmosphere that protects the privacy and psychological vulnerability of young people who don’t want to live in the middle of an orgy, or it does not. Just ask the Yale Five how much that august institution respected their lifestyle.

UPDATE (12/19): Gender studies prof Hugo Schwyzer has a more sympathetic assessment on his blog that’s worth a read. Says Hugo:


Part of being a young feminist woman or pro-feminist man is learning to live at odds with cultural expectations for femininity and masculinity. While feminism doesn’t have a mandatory dress code, or a stated policy on hair removal, or a blanket prohibition on loving NASCAR or football, there’s little question that in order to live as a feminist, one has to reject certain aspects of a profoundly sexist culture. To a very great extent, particularly for young collegians, most of whom are just finishing adolescence, embracing feminism or pro-feminism is a dramatic rejection of broader cultural norms. To be a pro-feminist man is to choose to “not be one of the guys”; to be a feminist woman is to choose to be publicly and privately critical of sexist expectations for the “fairer sex.” And that kind of rebelliousness means encountering a lot of hostility from one’s own gender.

Anecdotally, I hear the same thing from young feminists of both genders: “It’s easier to get along with the opposite sex.” Many of the young folks I work with have spent years being ostracized and judged for failing to adequately live up to the standards for their gender; their same-sex peers have humiliated and hurt them deeply. In their woundedness, it’s not surprising that many of them find other-sex friendships (which presumably are less competitive and judgmental) to be much easier to find and maintain. And the students at NSGC seem to be arguing that students like this should be able to live together as opposite-sex roommates — an attractive option to many young feminists/pro-feminists in particular.
I suppose I’m more cynical in assuming that most of the co-ed dorm proponents simply want to make shacking-up easier. Perhaps my impression of modern college life relies too much on I Am Charlotte Simmons. Real-world input, anyone?

Evolution versus Darwinism

Books & Culture: A Christian Review has just posted a thorough and compelling article by Edward T. Oakes tracing the intellectual legacy of social Darwinism – the belief that societies have the right and obligation to weed out their weakest members in order to advance human evolution. Oakes points out that the premises of ethical naturalism are bound to conflict with the Christian belief that every life is equally sacred because made in God’s image:

[S]ome of the most vicious Darwinian apologists [of the Victorian era] were quite willing to declare war on Christianity precisely because of its total incompatibility with Darwinism.

Among the most egregious of these anti-Christians was Alexander Tille, who taught German language and literature at the University of Glasgow until 1900 but regarded his work on evolutionary ethics as his real calling. One must at least credit Tille for seeing the real issue in all its starkness: “From the doctrine that all men are children of God and equal before him,” he said, “the ideal of humanitarianism and socialism has grown, that all humans have the same right to exist, the same value, and this ideal has greatly influenced behavior in the last two centuries. This ideal is irreconcilable with the theory of evolution … [, which] recognizes only fit and unfit, healthy and sick, genius and atavist” (emphasis in the original).


Where Christian critics of Darwinism go astray, I think, is in opposing evolution as a scientific theory, instead of questioning the project of drawing our ethical lessons from biology. According to the Bible, the natural world has been tainted by original sin, so why should we be surprised that the lessons of nature are contrary to the lessons of grace? What Darwinism tells us about physical power is no different from what the stories of ancient Israel tell us about political power. We want to put our trust in obvious displays of material strength instead of trusting the one whose “strength is made perfect in weakness”.