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September 30, 2005

Call It Intimacy

I am suspicious of individuals and institutions who refer to a whole range of sexual activities with the bland, modest, careful euphemism, "intimacy."

Mormons in particular do this. For Sunstone this past year Laura L. Bush and I planned to do a presentation on Mormon sex manuals, and the first thing you notice about them is that pretty much none of them (not a one that we found) mention sex explicitly in the title; instead, they have titles like Sacred Intimacy or Becoming One: Intimacy in Marriage or Purity and Passion: Spiritual Truths about Intimacy That Will Strengthen Your Marriage.

If you don't believe me, go to Deseret Books (a publisher of LDS books) and search Intimacy. Then go to Amazon.com and search books on Intimacy. You'll see how differently the words are used: at Deseret Books, "intimacy" is shorthand referring almost entirely to sexual intimacy; on Amazon, the titles that come up cover a range of topics, and if the focus is sexual intimacy, that's usually made clear in the title. In fact, after doing just some basic research, I've learned that in the non-Mormon world, there are FOUR types of intimacy: intellectual, experiential, emotional and sexual.

Anyway, at first this project aroused in me the restrained but palpable anticipation a bevy of 15-year-old Mormon mall goths would feel pawing with feigned nonchalance through a new shipment of Evanescence t-shirts at Hot Topic. Laura and I both thought it would be a good follow-up to the presentation we did about Mormon women's sexual training, but then Laura sent me one of the books she found in the BYU bookstore. I sat down, flipped through it, read some of the saccharin prose and doctrinaire pronouncements and thought, "Omigod, to write this paper, I will actually have to READ this book and many more like it," and that excited me as much as the prospect of wearing an Evanescence t-shirt myself.

Emotional intimacy can and often should be a part of sexual activity; sexual activity can complement and increase emotional intimacy. But they can also exist separately, and no doubt there are times when they should--for instance, siblings can be very emotionally intimate, but I admit I believe there is good reason for our society's taboo against incest. And I will also admit to engaging in certain mild forms of sexual behavior (i.e., making out) with someone with whom I was not particularly emotionally intimate, and still feeling the experience was pleasurable and worth my time. So when someone or some institution consistently conflates the two, it suggests to me that they Have Issues They Don't Want to Deal With.

Mormons have to change "acceptable sex" into the blanket term "intimacy" because they work so hard to make sex in general dirty and disgusting--and they do a pretty good job in the Bible dictionary and topical guide that accompanies my Mormon scripture. There's no entry on "sex" or "sexuality" in the Bible dictionary. In the topical guide, the only entry found in the S's where "sex" would appear is "sexual immorality," which includes the invitation to "see also Adultery; Excommunication; Fornication; Homosexuality; Lust; Whoredom."

Which is quite a list.

So I looked up Lust; all the scriptures listed for Lust were resolutely negative; the same goes for all the references provided under the heading "sensuality," which was cross-listed with Lust.

So then I looked up Love, and found this invitation: "see also Affection; Benevolence; Brotherhood and Sisterhood; Charity; Family, Love within; Fellowshipping; Friendship; God, Love of; Grace; Kindness; Marriage, Continuing Courtship in; Neighbor."

That "Marriage, Continuing Courtship in" looked as promising as an gold-plated engagement ring with a diamond the size of a dust speck; indeed, when I turned to it, I found references that included Ephesians 5:22: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." Whoo! That's a turn-on.

All in all, the basic message the Church communicates about sex is this: "Sex is Filthy and Disgusting; Save it for Someone You Love." So you save it for someone you love, marry them, and then you call it "Intimacy," which somehow makes everything "healthy" and OK.

For anyone who wants more on this topic, check out the comments John and I posted on Venus Pandemos.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)

September 29, 2005

Making Tea

I'm too tired to write a new entry, so today you get an old poem.

Making Tea

for Jon Anderson

Some things, you know they won't turn out
but still you think, "What the hell,
I'll use it over anyway,"
like tea bags. Throw something away
and you admit defeat; repeat it
and you find meaning in life:
the line "So wonderfully wonderfully
wonderfully wonderfully pretty,"
the way all my boyfriends like zen.

Some things, you know they're just gone: I
asked my mom why she never makes
bread anymore and I know she
likes it, likes the kneading, likes the
rising, likes the smell, likes eating
fresh bread with honey and peaches.

Some things, you know they aren't generous,
aren't nice, and still, they're the kind
of thing you ask yourself when you're
watching water in a saucepan
not boiling, but about to:
could I kill a postman?
Not worrying who'd bring you letters
tomorrow, or after.

Posted by Holly at 7:13 AM | Comments (1)

September 28, 2005

Feminism vs. Mormonism: the Argument after the Panel Part I I

See Part I

As for what I think of the rest of the discussion, well, it's complicated. As I've made clear, I think the church sucks. And I figured out before I was 20 that it sucked, for reasons having to do with gender and bigotry in general (I was 14 when the church finally let black men hold the priesthood, and the generosity in extending it wasn't as striking as the perverseness of withholding it) as well as the wacky doctrine.

But I didn't work up the courage to leave until I was almost 26, and leaving was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life. I did it entirely on my own, without the benefit of a spouse or a friend to go with and support me; I did it in the face of great resistance and sorrow from my family; I did it because I had a been a feminist since I was 17 or 18 (I say in response to Luke's argument that you can't be both a feminist and an active member of the Mormon church). While I respect those who left in solidarity with and mourning for the intellectuals persecuted by the Church in 1993, I left in 1989 because the hierarchy made it clear to me, a desperately unhappy 25-year-old woman with no virtually authority, that it would not allow me to dissent even on the local level--I couldn't even talk about polygamy in my Relief Society lesson!

People leave the church if and when they're ready, and someone like Luke, who was its staunch, unquestioning defender for many years, should know that. I don't see much point in "destroying" the church because until people are ready to live without it, something else will just appear to take its place. This doesn't mean that I don't work to advance the institutions and ideologies I support and believe in. I'd just rather focus my energy on building something rather than tearing something else down. After all, Martin Luther and Galileo Galilei, two men who arguably did more damage to Catholic hegemony than just about anyone else, did not have its destruction as their goal; Luther wanted to heal and save the church from its sins and errors, and Galileo just wanted to figure out how the universe worked.

But even all that doesn't mean that I don't feel the right to express my negative views about the church to anyone who expresses their positive views about it to me, especially given how emotionally and intellectually manipulative Mormons often are when "bearing their testimonies," or asserting their knowledge that "the Mormon church is the only true and living church on the face of the earth." A few weeks ago I went to Kirtland, Ohio, a very important site in church history, with a friend of mine. We toured the Kirtland temple (which, with its removable pews and prominent pulpits, has more in common with a modern-day Mormon cultural hall [read: carpeted dance hall/gym with a stage at one end] than a contemporary temple), which is owned by the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), who don't do much proselytizing; they're mainly interested in promoting intelligent and open discussion.

Which stands in stark opposition to the plain old LDS church, which values proselytizing above all else. My friend wanted to see the sites owned by the Utah branch of Mormonism (as the CoC quite accurately refers to it), including a reconstruction of the saw mill used in construction of the temple and a recreation of a store whose owner, a member of the church, provided lodging and meals for Joseph Smith and his family. When we arrived at the LDS visitor's center, they told us we couldn't go visit those things until we watched their movie; I said, "There's no way I'll watch the freakin' movie," because I've just seen too much church propaganda already in my life. Then I headed off to pee in the pristine bathroom provided by mandate in all Mormon buildings.

While I was in the bathroom, my friend somehow wrangled a private tour led by some affable, wide-eyed young woman named Sister Nelsen, with calves as broad and intonation as flat as a church parking lot. She asked where we were from; we told her; I asked her she was from; she told me; then I asked if much of her mission was devoted to finding investigators and teaching discussions, or if she spent most of her time giving tours. She started to give me a vague answer about missionary work in general, so I said, "You don't have to explain that stuff; we're both returned missionaries, though neither of us is active any more. But we know how missions work." She was as startled as a 14-year-old boy might be upon awaking to find a glowing resurrected prophet standing at the foot of his bed, but she soon recovered her plucky aplomb.

Later, in the store where Joseph Smith received many of the "revelations" in the Doctrine and Covenants, she bore fervent testimony of the truth of Section 88, with its vision of the resurrection of the dead. I sat with my face averted and impassive, as if I were just lying back and thinking of England. She talked about how membership in the church brings us so much joy, as does sharing it with others, then said, "But you guys already know that, because you both served missions."

And that point I felt entitled share some of what made my own bosom burn. "I wouldn't call what the church brings ‘joy,'" I said.

"Holly's mission was very... difficult," my friend said.

"It wasn't just my mission," I said. "It's the whole structure of the church. It is not a benign institution. You think it's this great thing, but I think much of what it does is evil, downright evil. It retards spiritual and human development. It makes people small and afraid."

My friend later told me he thought those were very insulting things to say to a missionary, and I thought, Well, duh. But the enterprise of missionary work is insulting: trying to get people to believe just like you do. And I point out that I didn't try to get all emotional and intense--sometimes called "invoking the spirit"--and "bear testimony" of the "truthfulness" of my beliefs to Sister Nelsen before asking her to accept them as her own, which is what she did to me; I just told her what I believed in no uncertain terms.

So back at Sunstone, when the discussion continued to center so much on why people should or shouldn't leave the church, I started tuning out and started heeding my grumbling stomach. I also kept looking at my watch; it was past 7 p.m., and at 8 p.m. a dear friend of mine was speaking in the "Pillars of our Faith" session. I often skip that particular session in favor of steeping like a weak tea bag in the hotel jacuzzi, but I wanted to hear my friend, and that meant I needed to eat before 8 p.m. "Anybody hungry?" I asked.

No one responded to me. Someone mentioned general politics; most of us have families absolutely lousy with Republicans. Talking about that took a long time.

"Could we continue this over dinner?" I asked, more than once.

More than once, no one responded.

I'd been standing up so that I could see and speak to all the participants clearly, but when it became obvious that no one cared about dinner as much as I did, I sat down. I can leave, I thought, I can leave all by myself and go get dinner by myself, just like I left the church by myself. But once again I am caught up in this group dynamic where we have to act as a group, and in order to do that, everyone must persuade others to do what we want them to do: Luke has to convince everyone else to leave the church; Bob and Aimee and Alan have to convince people to stay in the church and change it from inside; and I have to convince everyone to go get dinner with me.

OK, I admit it: first of all, I'm oversimplifying the situation a bit, and secondly, I didn't really think that. But perhaps I should have thought it, because there's a patient, persistent whisper of truth in the idea. I should have said, "Well, I'm going to dinner now, and anyone who wants to may join me," and left off worrying about what everyone else would do. Above all, I should have forgotten about this man who said he wanted to have dinner with me but wouldn't direct a tenth of his sentences to me when dinnertime arrived! But I didn't. Instead, I thought, M&M's. I bought a package of M&M's earlier today and never got around to eating them. So I rummaged through my backpack, found them, opened them. From across the room Bob pointed intently at the package in my hand, as if it were a philosopher's stone that would turn the base metal of Mormon sexism into golden equality and justice. "Sorry to interrupt," he began, "but I just have to say, you could be having something WAY better than that if we'd all just go eat."

"I've been trying for half an hour to move this conversation to the restaurant," I said, "but so far I haven't managed to get any takers."

And then everyone else agreed they were hungry and several people acknowledged that, "I've got to get some dinner before ‘Pillars of My Faith' starts at 8" and we moved to the restaurant for a hurried meal of pasta--that's about all a decent kitchen (read: one that doesn't rely on microwaves) can knock out in under ten minutes, we were told. I heard my friend speak (I'm tempted to reveal his name, because he really is a lovely, lovely, wonderful, kind, humane, generous, thoughtful, intelligent man, but I guess I'll make you look it up instead), then ditched out on the rest of the session and was immediately waylaid in the hall by someone else who didn't understand my original question about sex.

Which constitutes the end of that particular round of that discussion, but not of that discussion itself. It has continued on blogs and on-line forums, and I'm extending it here, since I'm interested in the even larger discussion of which it is only a part. I invite comments about how feminism and Mormonism oppose each other, and whether or not--and if so, how--they can possibly be made more congenial.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

September 27, 2005

Feminism vs. Mormonism: the Argument after the Panel Part I

The Sunstone panel on "Advancing Feminist Sensibilities among Mormon Men" occupied the final time slot of the afternoon, which meant it ran until 6:15 p.m. I was starving by the time it ended, and would have headed out the door to get dinner, except for two things: One, I'd posed this ambiguous question about sex no one could understand, and people kept asking me for clarification; and two, in attendance at the panel was a man I barely knew who had caught me off guard earlier by telling I was one of his very favorite writers and asking me to have dinner with him, and I kind of wanted to see where things could go. It was only later that I realized I should have learned something from the fact that however great the interest he professed in me, when push came to shove, he would rather stand around arguing about the church than talk specifically with me or fulfill the offers he made me.... But that's another story.

So I ended up as part of this prolonged discussion about the panel and its implications, whether change in the church was possible, and what we should or shouldn't do to encourage change.

There were dozen or so of us: a young couple active in the church, whom I'll call Bob and Aimee; a woman I'll call Debbie who had never been Mormon (she was Episcopalian, as I remember), but was married to a post-Mormon; two members of the panel, one of whom I'll call Alan; a long-time LDS feminist who has done graduate work on the topic of women and religion, and who remains active in her ward (which she loves, as opposed to being active in the church at large, which she does not love), whom I'll call Judith; a guy I'll call Luke, who has avowed a desire to "completely destroy the church;" two or three other people whose names I didn't know or won't reveal; and me.

I do not claim to be absolutely accurate in my summation of various positions; this happened two months ago, and while my memory is usually pretty precise and thorough, I was distracted by constant hunger and occasional frustration, so I wasn't always paying close attention. I invite anyone who was part of the discussion to correct any mischaracterization I might make of their beliefs and opinions.

At one extreme was Luke, who refused to believe that any of the members of the panel were truly feminists, since they still remained active in the church. He argued that because the church systematically discriminates against women, one cannot be both a feminist and an active member of the church. "What's more important than justice?" he kept demanding.

The other extreme, that women in the church are treated just fine, mercifully was not taken up by anyone. Everyone in the discussion recognized that when it comes to dealing with gender, the church sucks.

Bob and Aimee, young and hopeful, seemed to feel that with regards to women in the church, change was not only possible but inevitable, as people became more aware of the cost of the sexism and called for change, and as younger, more enlightened men were called to lead the church.

That was also basically the position of Judith and Alan as well. Judith stressed to me later, however, that change can't happen in the church quickly enough to suit her, so her loyalties to it are limited. Alan is an academic, and retained, in many regards, an academic's detachment on the matter. A very nice guy, he is nonetheless remarkably difficult to pin down, even on questions like, "What is your favorite dessert?" For various reasons he has decided to remain within the church, even though he knows it's a flawed institution, and will work to effect change from the inside.

That last bit, which drove Luke crazy, was also echoed by several other participants in the discussion. But as I'll discuss tomorrow, I'm not convinced it's such a bad approach for those who can manage it, even though I was not one such person.

Debbie had asked a question during the Q&A about economics and feminism--as I understand it, she thinks we need to rethink labor and work in order to achieve equality between genders. In the discussion afterwards, she drew a distinction between paternalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy is "a social system in which the father is the head of the family and men have authority over women and children" while paternalism is "treating or governing people in a fatherly manner, especially by providing for their needs without giving them rights or responsibilities." This distinction supports the argument that the church is not merely a patriarchy but paternalistic, and so infantalizes EVERYONE but those who wield power. (Debbie told me later that her views on such matters are heavily influenced by Richard Sennett, whose book The Hidden Injuries Of Class [co-written with Jonathan Cobb and published in 1972] offers, according to the Guardian UK, a "sensitive and subtle exploration of working-class lives. It dissects the ways in which doctrines of equality may work against most people in the modern world; with inherited social distinctions now apparently erased, ‘social difference can now appear as a question of character, of moral resolve, will and competence.' It is an argument which has as much resonance in the age of so-called depressed affluence as it had 30 years ago.")

For a while those of us in this discussion after the panel talked about the possibility that the church might accept gay marriage before it truly empowered women, because gay marriage was this new thing the church didn't know how to deal with, whereas the subjugation of women was this thoroughly entrenched thing with all this cultural baggage that people felt invested in, in ways both large and small--actually, I might have been the one to bring that up; I don't remember. If I wasn't, I agree with it, for the reason mentioned above as well as the fact that gay men, until they leave the church, are able to enjoy the "blessings" of holding the priesthood and wielding (albeit limited) power in the hierarchy, so they are more likely to affect change. Even at Sunstone, there are more straight men participating in panels on how to make life better and more just for gay members of the church than there are men on panels about how to improve the lives of women. Consider as well the situation in the Catholic church, which has recently decided to bar gay men from becoming priests. Many gay priests and seminarians are expressing pain and outrage at the move to exclude them from the priesthood, but how many of them have worked actively to extend the right to hold the priesthood to women?

(You read more of my opinions on the topic in The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man and Mormon Social Taboos.)

This has gotten quite long, so check back tomorrow for the end of the story, which involves M&M's.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

I Love Netflix

The first movie I ever got from Netflix was Intolerable Cruelty, the romantic comedy from the Coen brothers, the geniuses who also brought us Raising Arizona and Fargo. It was mailed to me on February 10, 2004, and received back February 23, 2004. I know this because I recently had Netflix email me a record of my entire rental history.

As I've already discussed in Going to the Movies, I love movies and used to see two or three on the big screen each week. But as Norma Desmond noted in Sunset Boulevard, at some point the pictures got small, and while part of me feels I should grieve that development, another part of me absolutely LOVES having dvd's delivered to my house on a regular basis.

It's not merely the convenience of having movies (currently up to three at a time, though for a while I was getting five) delivered to my house. It's also the convenience of being able to watch them whenever I want, while I eat dinner or knit (if it's a movie I like) or open my mail (if it's something I don't like so well). It's never running the risk of late fees. (Not that I ever have to pay late fees, because I'm really organized and alert and always return things on time. Seriously. In my whole life I've had, like, a grand total of half a dozen late fees and library fines, and in the past 15 years, I've had a total of none. Still, I like knowing that I couldn't incur a late fee, even if I tried.) It's also the fact that those other elements make me feel there's room to order things I might not enjoy, but am merely curious about: if I don't really like something after all, well, I just put it back in its sleeve, enclose the sleeve in an envelope, drop the whole thing in the mailbox, and something else will be sent to me in a matter of days.

I love the way you can read or hear about a movie, add it to your queue before it's even released (I do that with all the movies nominated for academy awards) and just wait for it to show up at your house. I also love the way Netflix lets you do serial viewing. Want to see every movie starring Paul Newman available on dvd? Just do a search on him, see what comes up, then add it all to your queue. Want to watch every last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Well, in the case of Buffy, you should actually BUY all seven seasons, but if you aren't quite ready to make that commitment, Netflix will send you every last disk, in order.

I myself did the serial thing with Horatio Hornblower. I've always had a thing for 19th century naval history (and old wooden boats in general--I also have this fascination with Vikings), plus Ioan Gruffudd is just so freakin' hot! After I finished HH, I had Netflix send me his other movies (including the horrid King Arthur, which spelled the end of my crush on Mr. Gruffudd).

If I watch anything at all on my television, it's through Netflix. I got rid of cable over a year ago, and my antenna reception is so awful (I get NBC very badly, and that's it) that I can't even watch regular network television. This is OK with me--in general, I find television very easy to live without.

And yet, I watch at least as many television shows as movies through Netflix, because as I discussed, I discovered at some point that no matter how much bad television exists, there's still all kinds of good stuff out there. I never saw an episode of The West Wing during its regular broadcast, but I watched the first four seasons this summer on disk, which was perhaps not the wisest way to approach the series, because I could get sucked into watching two or three episodes at a time. But at some point I just told myself that I had enough discipline to turn the television off after one episode, and then everything was OK.

I have a particular fondness for British television with some historical element: Foyle's War (a crime show set in Hastings, which is right across the channel from France, during World War II); or historical dramas like The Last King (about Charles II, the guy who finally let women act on the British stage, with Rufus Sewell--who was so fabulous as the hunk in Cold Comfort Farm--in the title role) or Henry VIII (you can figure that one out, played by Ray Winstone) or Longitude, starring Michael Gambon (the guy who got killed in Gosford Park), which tells the true story John Harrison's discovery in the early 18th century of a way to calculate longitude and thus usher in the great era of sea exploration--oh, how I loved that!; or BBC/A&E co-productions of adaptations of old novels like Tom Jones and Ivanhoe (actually I own those), or the BBC/PBS co-productions that show up on Masterpiece Theatre, like The Forsyte Saga (featuring Ioan Gruffudd naked!); or the reality shows where they make someone live in the conditions of an earlier time, the first ever being The 1900 House and my favorite being The 1940s House, which attempted to recreate the conditions of the blitz; or plain old documentaries, like Simon Schama's 16-hour History of Britain--I watched some of the episodes twice.

I've rated over 1200 movies/television programs, and I have almost 500 movies in my queue. Currently the three disks I have out are Ulysses S Grant: Warrior/President, A Very Long Engagement, and the first disk of season one of Desperate Housewives.

I think I've said enough here--but I still need to discuss what's involved in making someone your Netflix friend, so check back for an entry on that.

Posted by Holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (4)

September 25, 2005

Women's Bodies Used to Sell...Everything in Czech Republic

An article entitled Czech Exhibit Shows Ads That Degrade Women discusses an exhibit "intended to draw attention to the degradation suffered by everyone--men, women and children--when they must constantly confront advertising that views the human body as a sexual tool for advertisers," said Suzanne Formanek, one of the exhibition's organizers. "These ads are all over Prague, but they are not tolerated in many other developed cities in the world."

Ads displayed include one "for a racy tabloid that showed a woman's bare behind with several cuts in it. 'Everyone likes a good spanking,' read the tagline."

Another depicts a 2001 Nokia ad "promoting a hands-free device to Czechs that featured a cartoon illustration of a man in a car attacking the breasts of a woman with both hands as she screamed. The phone was cradled on the dashboard. 'Free Hands!' read the caption."

You can view some of the photographs here: http://www.inourfaces.cz/photos_en.htm

Posted by Holly at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2005

Die, Women, Die!

For a clear statement on why feminism is SO MUCH MORE than merely a political movement, check out this article in the Washington Post entitled "Female Characters, Made to Suffer for our 'Art.'"

The article makes the point that gruesome shows such CSI--or rather, imitating CSI--almost always feature crimes in which the victims are young white women, who are often not only murdered but tortured and raped. These shows are made to appeal to an audience of 18 to 34-year-old men, who don't watch much television, but the shows they do like are Desperate Housewives and CSI--as the article puts it, "we conclude, young men like their older women in teddies having sex with teenagers who cut their grass (or, in the case of Teri Hatcher, naked and in the bushes), but they like their younger women -- well, dead."

In case you're skeptical about real-life crimes against women, check out this story about hundreds of murders of Mexican women in Juarez and along the border, or this story about the systematic rape of women by the Burmese army as part of a military strategy.

Posted by Holly at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Three Rules for Before You Get Involved with Them, Two Rules for After

Or, Why I Am Not a Swinger

For the introduction to this post, read Bad Coffee in Bed, September 22, 2005

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed that he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed that I liked sex.

But I decided at some point that I'd had enough bad sex to last a lifetime, and that I'd like to limit its occurrence in the future. This has pretty much resulted in celibacy, which I'm fairly OK with. The fact of the matter is, if celibacy is the price I have to pay for not having sex I regret later, I will pay it.

What happened is this: I had one too many one-night stands with someone who A) had no investment in my life and B) was a bad lay to boot. This last guy couldn't muster enough courtesy or decency to call me even ONCE after having two orgasms in my bed while I went thoroughly unfulfilled. There had been a moment, when, in a drunken haze, I thought getting naked with this guy was a FABULOUS idea, but many hours later when he was gone and I was left with my hangover, I realized that all I got out of the experience was some very troubled sleep and a few weeks of wondering if my contraceptives had really worked.

So I figured I needed some rules to have sex by. These are the rules I came up with.

1. I will never sleep with anyone BEFORE the first date. This means I will never again pick someone up at a bar, take him home and f*ck him, though there are things I am willing to do that stop short of that. I think there are circumstances where it is OK to engage in certain forms of sexual behavior with someone with whom I am not (yet?) emotionally intimate; I think it can be both thoroughly fun and perfectly harmless to make out for a while with some unattached (see Rule #2) hottie (whether this hotness comes from a fabulous exterior or a really exciting mind) you just met. But as far as any activity for which a healthcare professional would recommend that you use some type of "protection,"--well, that ain't going to happen ever again in my life (at least not consensually) until AFTER there has been a phone call, dinner and a movie, or some equivalent, pre-arranged activity. I want the guy to demonstrate some investment, you know?

2. I will never sleep with someone who is sleeping with someone else. I have a real problem with infidelity. I've pushed the boundary a time or two: dating, the second he became single, some guy who had made it clear before he broke up with his girlfriend that he was interested in me; dating someone who wasn't the least bit over his ex; kissing someone who still had a girlfriend, though it was pretty obvious the relationship was about to die a miserable painful death. But I have never carried on a full-fledged "affair," and I don't want to start now--in fact, I want to back off even from the boundaries I was willing to push before. It's just weirdly complicated and I prefer unencumbered clarity.

I'm also not interested in swinging, or being involved with anyone who swings. I know it's often done successfully among gay men, who, according to those of my acquaintance who live the lifestyle, tend to know both the playing field and the rules. I have also met straight swingers from time to time, and some have suggested to me that my insistence on monogamy makes me a prude. Of course a prude is the last thing my Mormon mother would EVER call me, but perhaps it's true, since when I went to Amazon and looked up titles on polyamory, or being free to have sex with as many partners as possible, what I found pretty much turned my stomach. If the reviewers (even the enthusiastic ones giving the books five stars) are to be believed, the best books spend lots of time detailing how to avoid jealousy and breaking people's hearts--and, they admit, even with the books' advice, those things are hard to avoid. I once got hurt by a swinger who didn't seem to play by or even understand the rules. He told me simultaneously that A) there were no marriages like his that could serve as models to help him figure out how to deal with other women and B) there was this really great book called The Ethical Slut that he wanted to read but hadn't got around to buying. I wish he had read the goddamn book before pursuing me--apparently there are many marriages like his.

In fact, some of my ancestors had marriages rather like his. Something in the rhetoric about how "it's not infidelity if everyone knows what's going on" smacks too much of the rhetoric in the "revelations" Joseph Smith produced, in which God told him that there was not only nothing wrong but something deeply righteous about having sex with lots of women as long as he was married to all of them, then "commanded" him to go out and start doing just that. It's perhaps a strange condemnation, but it's true: heterosexual swinging is just too close to historical Mormonism to appeal to me.

(For information on Joseph's wives–-at least the ones historians are fairly certain about, go here:
http//www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/)

There is of course a belief in Mormonism that at some point polygamy will be reinstated, when humanity is finally ready to live that "higher" law. Some men say they have no interest in acquiring a second wife, since it's hard enough making one marriage work; some men don't bother to conceal their delight at the prospect of having more than one sanctioned sex partner. When I was still active in the church, more than once some married man paid me what he thought was a fabulous compliment: "Holly, when polygamy is reinstated, you'll make the greatest second wife." Gee! Thanks ever so much, but I'll pass.

3. I will never have another one-night stand. They're just too goddamned depressing! As Liz Phair points out, you wake up from them disoriented, and almost immediately you feel sorry. I don't ever want to feel sorry quite that way again. This means that anyone who wants to sleep with me has to agree to do it on two separate occasions, separated by at least 24 hours. I'm not asking for a HUGE commitment: we're talking a weekend. And then, if the first occasions aren't horrible, there can be future occasions; and if they are horrible, well, sometimes there's no reason to test out the old adage that "third time's a charm."

I began making it a practice to share these rules with any man who made it clear that he was interested in sleeping with me. They never had a problem with Rule #1 and Rule #3, but Rule #2 took many a man by surprise. They sputtered out their disappointment and surprise to me.

"But...but...but I just moved to town and I don't know that many women yet and I'm already sleeping with this other woman I met and I don't know who I like better so far, you or her," one said.

"I think it's clear that you like HER better," I replied. "That's great! I hope things work out really well for the two of you."

There were a couple who said, "But... but... but I'm still sleeping with my ex-girlfriend!"

"Hey, whatever works for you!" I said. "I can completely understand why you would prefer to continue sleeping with someone with whom things didn't work out right the first time instead of investing in a new relationship. It makes things easier, after all."

Recently I have been thinking about the ways in which my evil ex Adam screwed me up and screwed me over. I would not have violated any of those rules in sleeping with him, but what was awful about him was not that he wanted irresponsible sex from me, but that he wanted irresponsible sex with everyone else, and he wanted me to provide an emotionally stable and supportive friendship while he was having that irresponsible sex, even after he dumped me cruelly. In case you've forgotten, this is the guy who said to me, "I can't sleep with anyone who knows me as intimately as you do," and "After a week of sleeping with you, I've begun to feel a commitment not just to you, not just to the relationship, but to being a person I'm not yet ready to be, so I'm going to sleep around with undergrads," then DEMANDED that I remain his best friend while he conducted these shallow sexual relationships. Which resulted in Rule #4:

4. I will not remain emotionally intimate with a man who extends and then withdraws the offer of sexual intimacy.

Even more recently, prompted by the advice of friends who hate to see me fret endlessly over some guy who has treated me badly, I have come up with yet another rule:

5. I will not remain emotionally intimate with--or even continue to speak to--a man who deceives me, either deliberately or through carelessness, about his status or intention with regards to the other rules.

The thing is, although that rule seems emotionally and ethically healthy to me, I'm bad at cutting people off. I always want to give people another chance, and while that has prolonged my misery in some cases, in others it has turned out well. I mean, yeah, there have been plenty of mistakes in my sex life. But even some of the guys who were jerks when I dated them turned out to be decent guys later, and I'm really glad to be friends with them. How many chances do you give someone to turn into a decent person?

So those are the rules for what I won't do. As for what I will do, well, right now it all seems kind of moot, given the dating pool where I live, and the paucity of men who are truly interested in 40-something women with PhDs and bad attitudes. Not that I'm complaining. I've always been fond of solitude, even as a child, which I shall discuss in the future.

And I might also talk about good sex at some point–-I actually have had some, in case you wondered.

Posted by Holly at 7:34 AM | Comments (5)

September 22, 2005

Parody Never Faileth

This website offers very funny song parodies. Some are political, some deal with entertainment, a whole bunch deal with Mormon stuff. My favorite so far (haven't listened to them all) is "Give a Talk at the Fireside," which includes the line, "And the CTR's go 'Do, to do, to do, singing a song is fun to do....'"

http://spaff.com/

Posted by Holly at 1:34 PM | Comments (1)

Bad Coffee in Bed

Monday afternoon I called Wayne, because a conversation with Wayne was what my Monday afternoon needed. At one point he said, without a segue, "So, I've decided I need to be more of a snob." I figured there was a good reason for this pronouncement, so I waited to hear it. "I started drinking tea a while ago," he said, "mostly chais, because they seemed healthier than coffee. Green chais, herbal chais--there was a vanilla chai I really loved and couldn't get enough of for a while. Lately I've been drinking black tea and I really like it, and I realized it's not really that different from coffee. But I just like it better than coffee. And then I realized that part of the problem was that I drank so much bad coffee."

He was on a roll and it was interesting, so I didn't interrupt him.

"You know how for a long time I was all about coffee?" I made some noise of acquiescence. "Well, good coffee is really good. But bad coffee is really bad. And I realized today that I needed to be more of a diva when it comes to coffee. Not once, when I was presented with a cup of really awful coffee, did I taste it, then spit it out and say, ‘How can you expect me to drink this shit?! This is vile! This is beyond vile! I will not pollute my mouth or any other part of me with a substance so thoroughly foul!"

"Does this mean you're going to start drinking coffee again?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "But only good coffee. If I do, I will be a complete coffee snob. I'm ashamed to tell you about all the bad coffee I've had, Holly. I mean, coffee from some awful container that's been on the back of a caterer's truck for hours and hours if not days and days.... We're talking some of the worst coffee in the world. Coffee that even before you sugar and cream it up, you can just tell is going to take the enamel right off your teeth--both the smell and the look of it just tell that it's not OK."

There was a pause, and I imagined him staring at the painting of Gabriel Garko he had just finished, and shaking his head. "But I would drink it, I would drink that bad coffee, because it was coffee and I believed I liked coffee. I would drink the whole cup, thinking at some point, it would get better, but a bad cup of coffee never gets better, though it often gets worse."

"That pretty much sums up my feelings about sex," I said. And then we both laughed--after all, as both Karen Walker and Homer Simpson said, it was funny because it was true.

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed I liked sex. I did say, on more than one occasion, "I'm not willing to have sex right now," but on those occasions when I said OK to sex and it turned out to be bad, I never said, "This sex is really bad! How dare you subject me to such bad sex! Get out of my bed!" That, after all, didn't seem polite. No, I just did what I could to make it end sooner, and hoped it would be better the next time.

Details tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 7:17 AM | Comments (2)

September 21, 2005

The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men

There are lots of posts on this topic. They are, in order of posting, Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, the post you're reading right now, The Society of Buggers, Brokeback Mountain, Old Testament Weirdness, It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard, The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus, Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the introduction), Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the excerpt), Marriage Manifesto, The Ex-Exes from Exodus and the Agency of Gay Men, Sex, Misogyny and My Blog Stats, Narcissism and Misogyny, and Really Long Comment, In Which I Disavow the Cow Part.

Let me quote a paragraph from the essay by Ben Christensen in the most recent Dialogue that upset me so.

I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option. In my mind, this kind of thinking is anti-progressive. The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles. We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered "white" and for women to do what was once considered "male"--get an education, have a career, etc. Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?

God, where do you even start with a paragraph like that.

I guess I'll do this sentence by sentence.

"I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option."

I'm not "threatened" by homosexual reparative therapy, and I would never stop anyone who truly wanted to pursue it, provided that person is over 18 and pursues the endeavor willingly. I would add, however, that while I would never "stop" someone from pursuing reparative therapy, neither would I particularly respect a decision to pursue it. There is considerable evidence that while it may convince people not to have gay sex, it doesn't make them straight. And it seems a sign of such self-loathing and desperation, that I can't help feeling the time, effort and money devoted to reparative therapy could be better spent in other ways.

"The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles."

Actually, no, that was not the whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movement. Both of those movements had and continue to have many goals during their long existences. An important goal of the civil rights movement in the 1960s was to pass and enforce legislation that would remove the threat of violence blacks so often lived under. It was not simply about acquiring the right to go to school or keeping a seat on the bus; it was about living without the fear of lynchings and murders. The same goes the feminist movement: there has been a long struggle to force law makers and law enforcement agencies to treat sexual and domestic violence as they crimes they should be.

"We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered ‘white' and for women to do what was once considered ‘male'--get an education, have a career, etc."

Actually, we live in a world where some people think it's OK for blacks to do what is still considered "white" and for women to do what is still considered "male" (interesting that the only examples Christensen cites are the basic human rights of getting an education, seeking meaningful employment) but the fact that it might be "OK" for racial and sexual minorities to pursue the same goals as white men does not mean they have as many opportunities to do so or receive the same rewards for their efforts.

"Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?"

Wow.

Has this guy REALLY never read about the social structure of ancient Greece, where citizens (who were always and only male) routinely had both wives and male lovers? Has he never read The Symposium? Has he never heard the theory that Shakespeare was gay? Has he never heard anything of Oscar Wilde's biography (Wilde married and fathered two children) or read Blanche Dubois' speech about why her young husband shot himself in A Streetcar Named Desire?

It is not accurate to say that marrying a woman and having a family has usually been considered the exclusive territory of straight men, since "straight" and "gay" are relatively new categories. Before that, there were pretty much just men, and even men who had male lovers routinely married women and conceived children for any number of reasons, including a desire to appear respectable, to be "righteous," to appease parents who wanted grandchildren and heirs, or simply because that's what people did.

It's called "having a beard," Ben, trying to appear butch so you can get on in society, and men who wanted to do so have managed to have both wives and male lovers for millennia.

And of course it must be pointed out that one need not enter into a straight marriage to have children. There is such a thing as artificial insemination. Lesbian couples manage to bear children and gay men manage to adopt or father children. One of my friends fathered a child with a cherished friend who was a lesbian; she and her partner have primary custody of the child, but my friend is an involved and dedicated father, and his partner is an active parent as well.

Christensen's comments reveal his factual ignorance, his emotional and spiritual naivete, and a profound sense of entitlement. He tells us he feels he was dealt a bum hand by being gay, but he also feels he should retain the blessings and privileges of white male domination and patriarchy. He should still be head of his narrow little world, in which the civil rights and women's movement are about "education" and "career" and marriage is a "territory."

Having been involved in the struggle to legalize gay marriage since the early 90s, after a lawsuit on the issue was filed in Hawaii (which brought about an alliance between those two historical enemies, the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church) and believing that couples of consensual adults who desired to have a union of love recognized by the state deserved that right regardless of sexual orientation, I was astonished in the late 1990s to meet gays and lesbians who believed that not only was the right to marry something they did not need, but that if acquired, it would harm the gay community. Marriage was so sexist, so patriarchal, so obviously an economic and political proposition designed to support a diseased status quo, that opting into it would not bring equality to gay people but would instead insure that one partner in all marriages--gay or straight--remained submissive while the other was dominant. The better option, they argued, was to pursue non-traditional, egalitarian partnerships, and wait for the straight world to abandon marriage after it recognized how vastly superior these egalitarian gay relationships were.

Christensen's essay supports that argument. Marriage as he sees and practices it is perhaps socially respectable, but it is not ethically respectable. It is born of ignorance and fear rather than wisdom and courage. It is neither generous nor enlightened but is instead a self-serving attempt to claim as many of the privileges and as much of the power that society can possibly offer him. If that is marriage, it is something we should all shun.

Posted by Holly at 7:32 AM | Comments (2)

September 20, 2005

Mormons, Male Feminists, and Sex

This post continues ideas discussed in three earlier posts: Ripe Peaches and Peach Schnapps, Venus Pandemos, and Male Mormon Feminists-–it's Part II of MMF, actually. For background information on all these topics, see Mormon Links.

When the panelists had finished and the session was opened to questions, I was (I think) the first one out of my seat. I thanked the guys for their comments, complimented them on having the courage and the conviction to declare themselves feminists, and said something like this--or rather, this is a more coherent version of what I wish I'd said:

"I've spent most of my adult life in academia in the humanities, which is someplace where almost everyone, male and female, is a feminist. In a graduate program in English or film studies or philosophy or the likes, it's hard to find a man who doesn't call himself a feminist--probably partly because he knows if he doesn't espouse it, chances are good he won't get laid very often. But despite these guys' declarations that they're feminists, they often treat the women they're involved with very badly."

I have dated enough myself and watched enough episodes of Sex and the City that I feel safe asserting that in conventions of heterosexual courtship, seduction and dating, men still retain most of the power of acting and choosing, while women have the role of waiting, and accepting or refusing. It is generally the man who is supposed to say, after a date or after sex, "I'll call you," and it is the man who is generally supposed to call. Certainly, there are women who are take the initiative in sexual matters. But there was only one Samantha to the other three more traditional, passive women in the cast of S&tC--it is not only Mormon women who are trained to be objects rather than subjects.

Of course there are women who treat the men they date very, very badly. But that does not change the basic facts of how power is generally understood and distributed in our society when it comes to courtship and sex.

There are plenty of men in the world who know it is wrong to disempower women politically and economically, but have little compunction about deceiving and demeaning women when it comes to dating and sex. Their reason for doing so is, according to Greg Behrendt, author of He's Just Not That Into You, that most men are willing to sleep with women they don't really like, but not so willing to call them afterwards.

OK, OK, that's a fairly harsh summary. But I did read the book, and Behrendt does provide a fairly long list of really bad behavior that men engage in and women put up with, because... because they hope the guy will change? Because they hope the mixed messages aren't really so mixed? Behrendt's mantra is, "Don't waste the pretty," or don't expect a guy who treats you badly to stop treating you badly, because even if he's the nicest guy in the world, he won't stop--until he meets the right woman. (And supposedly that causes a huge improvement in his character and behavior.)

Well, maybe. Maybe that's true. But if it's true, it's one of the issues feminism needs to confront. Because if a guy finds it OK to treat women with contempt, discourtesy and unkindness in the most personal of relationships, does he really respect women and have an understanding of their lives?

And as I considered issues like these in that session on male Mormon feminists, it occurred to me that perhaps the average Mormon guy, who was probably much less promiscuous than most of his non-LDS counterparts, who might have been (technically, at least) a virgin when he married a woman who was also a virgin, and who might even be extremely faithful to his wife, might also treat her better than the average 20- or 30-something single guy who served as Greg Behrendt's examples of the guys whom smart, pretty women should kick to the curb.

So I tried to say that, or something to the effect that, "It occurs to me that one way in which Mormon women--at least, the ones lucky enough to be married to decent guys with feminist sensibilities--might be treated better than their secular counterparts is when it comes to courtship and sex. I just started thinking about this, and I don't know if it's true. But I want to think about it some more. And I want to ask all of you about it. John is the only one who mentioned sex, but sex and reproduction are pretty fundamental to feminism. So what about sex? How do you reconcile your ideas of being a male Mormon feminist with how you think women should be treated when it comes to sex?"

And then I sat down, and everyone stared at me, and the room was very silent.

The guys on the panel looked at each other. It was becoming obvious to me that I had not phrased my question very well, since no one knew what to do with it. Finally one man took the microphone, and from his answer it was clear that he had interpreted my question to mean, "Do you as a feminist like sex with women?" And while I was glad to know that he did, it wasn't really what I had asked.

It also became clear to me after the panel that I'd phrased the question badly, since throughout the next few days, people approached me and asked me for clarification. But it also became clear to me that a lot of people just didn't get the issue to begin with. One guy asked me what I could have possibly meant, and I said, "Well, it kind of changes how seriously you take a guy as a feminist if he date-rapes you, or bites your nipples until they bleed and won't stop even when you're screaming in pain and begging him to quit, or stops you in the middle of sex and says, ‘I don't really like it when a woman gets that worked up.'" (And yes, all those things happened to me--the last one more than once, in slight variations. I know other women who have heard something similar as well. By no means did the majority of men I slept with express such a sentiment, but still, it's remarkable how many men prefer passive sex partners.)

And the guy said, "Huh. I can see how that would be true, but I never thought of feminism as anything other than a political movement."

And then a bunch of us stood around after the session and had a long argument about feminism, loyalty to the church, and whose family was most terrifyingly conservative, which I have written about in two posts--click here for Part I and here for Part II.

Posted by Holly at 5:59 AM | Comments (4)

September 19, 2005

Mormon Links

In case you want some background information on Mormonism, including its beliefs about gender and sexuality within the family, here are some links.

First of all, you should check out the Proclamation on the Family, which all good LDS are expected to display prominently in their homes--it's one of the first things you see when you walk in the door of my parents' house. It warns that "the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." That's right--uppity working women and gay marriage, not global warming or rampant capitalism or immoral wars, will bring about the end of the earth.

And here is a bit of snotty satire of that idea I wrote when I was a writer for The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire based on The Onion and another story satirizing "tolerance".

You'll also want to read Boyd K. Packer's Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council, delivered May 18, 1993. It has become infamous for this statement:

The dangers I speak of come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals. Our local leaders must deal with all three of them with ever-increasing frequency.

which is often paraphrased as something to the effect that "the church's three main enemies are feminists, homosexuals and 'so-called' intellectuals."

I offer a critique of how stupid his statement is in an entry entitled Answering My Own Question.

You might also enjoy Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which contains "the revelation on the new and everlasting covenant of marriage," or polygamy. See especially verse 52, where God tells Joseph Smith's first wife, Emma, that she better shape up and learn to like sharing her husband with other women, OR ELSE:

And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.

If you have never been inside a Mormon temple, or if you received your endowments after 1990, you might be interested in this discussion of the temple ceremony and various changes made to it--I'll be discussing this in future posts. The website is good because it manages to avoid being particularly obscene or offensive. Unfortunately, the temple ceremony itself used to be extremely offensive and obscene: among other things, initiates had to swear a blood oath that they would never reveal certain signs and tokens they were taught in the temple. To underscore the point, we had to enact several gruesome ways we could be executed. If you were lucky enough to miss that version, you might want to learn a few details about the penalties, which were discontinued in 1990.

Happy linking!

Posted by Holly at 9:44 PM

September 18, 2005

A Necessary Ingredient for Enjoying Art

I love Grendel by John Gardner so much I wish I'd written it.

It is, of course, a retelling of the Beowulf saga from the point of view of the monster who wrecks Hrothgar's meadhall and feasts on his men.

I love it because it's a fiercely intellectual book, concerned with truth and ultimate meaning. I love it because it has so many fabulous lines. I love it because the dragon Grendel visits is one of the best characters ever created in all of literature.

I love it because plot is never the point: if you've read Beowulf, you know how Grendel ends: Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off, and Grendel goes off to bleed to death in the woods. So you don't read it for what happens, you read it for how it happens, and why what happens matters.

I get annoyed when people refuse to know anything beyond the initial set-up of a book they want to read or a movie they want to watch. "Don't tell me! Don't ruin the end for me!" they shout, covering their ears, as if ignorance is a necessary ingredient for enjoying art. If I feel I'm getting too caught up in wondering what will happen next to appreciate things in a text like musicality of language and construction of scene, I'll read the end so I can just dispense with the suspense and concentrate on enjoying the pages before the end, rather than racing through to the end.

The best books remain compelling and worthwhile even when you know exactly how they end: you enter the world of the book and that world takes over. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least fifteen times, and every time I read it, I am as engrossed, as anxious to read the next scene, as if I didn't know the story at all--because Austen's prose is just so good, her insight into human beings so clear-eyed and astute, her narrative so breathtakingly complex and rewarding. I reread it this summer and had to stay up until 3:30 in the morning to finish it--I just couldn't put it down until I was done.

Grendel is the same way, and I love it for that; I love that its world is so compelling. I also love Grendel for the stark, empty epiphany he has as he confronts his death. He insists even in the final moments of his life that everything is a matter of chance, that nothing is fated, but at the same time, one choice is as good as another. He refuses to believe that Beowulf managed to hurt him through anything but accident, fortunate for Beowulf, unfortunate for Grendel.

I will cling to what is true. "Blind, mindless, mechanical Mere logic of chance." I am weak from loss of blood. No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down part stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowing to my voluntary tumble into death.

In On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner discusses that scene and comments that while writing it, he was thinking "child thoughts of death with undertones of guilt and the ultimate moral ugliness of God." I have always loved both that phrase and that idea. I do think the idea of God, at least in his Christian form, is one of the most morally repugnant ideas humanity has ever invented, in part because God is so capricious--fate is a matter of his choices, in which one choice is as good as another: he can choose to destroy the world by flood, and then choose not to, and it's all pretty much the same as far as morality and ethics go, because he's God and gets to say so. When I still believed in such a creature, I also often felt like I was falling off the world into some endless hideous darkness.

Which maybe is another reason I don't mind knowing how things turn out.

But don't let the fact that I've provided one of the last paragraphs of the book and the idea behind it prevent you from reading Grendel yourself if you haven't already. It's so good! And since you know now (if you didn't already) how it's going to end, take your time and notice how inventive and insightful the book is, and don't worry about the plot.

Posted by Holly at 9:29 PM | Comments (1)

September 17, 2005

Easy Chocolate Cream Pie

Today I went to an English department picnic and I brought along my friend Hugo, who is visiting for the weekend. My contribution to the day's festivities was a chocolate cream pie, which Hugo really liked--he said it was "orgasmic"--and I promised him the recipe. Then I thought I might as well make the recipe available to anyone who wants it, so here it is:

Easy Chocolate Cream Pie

In blender, place

2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs

Heat 1 and 1/2 cups heavy cream over medium heat just until boiling; pour over stuff in blender. Blend on high for one minute. (Note: the cream is hot enough to cook the eggs so you don't have to worry about giving people salmonella.) Pour into one large or two small pie shells and chill over night.

Before serving, whip

1 and 1/2 cups heavy cream
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla

and spread over chocolate. Serve small slices because it's very, very rich.

Posted by Holly at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2005

Ripe Peaches and Peach Schnapps

Posted by Holly at 7:14 AM | Comments (4)

September 15, 2005

Venus Pandemos

In 1987, when I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona (at that point I was still primarily a poet), a beloved teacher and friend loaned me a copy of Little Star, Mark Halliday's first book. I loved it. It was one of my major influences. The title poem is about wondering who sang lead on some 1950s pop song. Halliday acknowledges that the poem

is not the first time I've tried to
get a rock-&-roll song into a poem and it won't be
the last; it is my need to call out
This counts too!

After reading Halliday, I began writing all kinds of poems with rock & roll songs in them, or inspired by rock & roll songs; I wrote a poem about the video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" and I wrote a bunch of poems about death by hanging inspired largely by "Gallows Pole" by Zeppelin and I wrote a poem called "1812 Overture" but despite the reference to Tchaikovsky the poem is really about how much I love the song "Close to Me" by the Cure, how sad I always was when the song ended, how it was over far too quickly.

Because I was poor, I never bought Little Star; I just returned my teacher's copy after reading it once, then got a copy from the library and kept it until I finished my master's degree four years later. And then it went out of print and I didn't think much about it, aside from the poem "Why the HG is Holy," which is one of my all-time favorite poems.

But a few months ago, I mentioned to Tom how much I loved that book, and as he had a copy, he loaned it to me. And I got to reread a few of the poems I had rather forgotten about, including the longest poem (seven pages) in the collection, which is called "Venus Pandemos."

When I first read that poem, I thought it was funny, mostly because I didn't have much personal reference for what it was talking about. I was an incredibly naive Mormon virgin who had little experience with dating and had never been in love, and though at that point I quit riding the bus to campus because I found enduring the catcalls and whistles I got while I waited at the bus stop on a busy street too upsetting, I still laughed at this poem, thought he was saying something clever. In fact, I once read much of it aloud to one of my friends who ran the women's center before she stopped me, almost heaving with distress. The poem begins

What am I going to do with my desire
for women?

To be more specific, what am I going to do
with my interest in women's bodies?

and continues its exploration of this

energy–-
I am a little excited just to describe it–-
the quick expert evaluation of
face
breasts
ass
and then the instant summary judgment:
"I crave her"
"I'd take her"
"Maybe if I was a little drunk and she threw herself on me"
or, more often:
"Forget it, honey."

Then he spends a stanza discussing breasts, and another discussing ass, and then wonders "if any intelligent feminists will ever read this poem." Then we get

"Ass" . . . "Shoving home"–the fantasy here
is of seizing the woman's buttocks, holding them and
entering her vagina from behind;
why from behind? Bestial mastery. I guess.

He says it's not about conquest; rather,

it's
to do something about
her beauty.

To do something about her beauty!

Is it a defining quality of beauty
that it won't leave us alone?

He also states that

of course what I'm talking about
has nothing to do with rape. (Nothing?)
So I'm left to rely on my technique of
covert ogling-in-passing–-
I eat them with my eyes.
–-Is it like eating? It's a job of
disposing of them, one by one:

All right, I see that body,
I have seen it.

–-Which means, that body is taken care of now,
that body is disarmed, normalized,
brought under control, it is forgivable now:
I have disposed of it through ritual,
the ritual of snapshot glancing, and now
its power is dead.
ah. So is it, then, a kind of murder fantasy?

And ultimately, he acknowledges,

Yes. I guess that's what I'm saying.
–-But it's your fault, baby,
for being so GOD DAMN BEAUTIFUL.

As for why he is writing this, it's because

every day
I think about strange women, for quick seconds,
in ways I consider dehumanizing.
Should I be ashamed?
I suspect my sexual fantasies are
among the tamest (most repressed?) anywhere;
and I can claim that my relations with the women I know
are relatively
nonsexist . . .

and he goes on for another page and a half before writing

In 1973 and ‘74 I worked in a feminist theatre group;
my awareness of the women's anger reached the point where
it seemed a crime for men to whistle at women on the street.
Now I'm not going to say it isn't.
But I'm admitting to an enduring energy in me that says
an attractive woman is not simply one more comrade on earth,
nor is she just another nice thing about life;

an ATTRACTIVE WOMAN is a PROBLEM.

And that's the real end of the poem, despite one final throwaway stanza.

Now, I'm not trying to dismiss Halliday or his work. I still admire a lot of the poems in Little Star and I was very inspired by his most recent book, Jab. I like how straight-forward and energetic his voice is. But when I reread "Venus Pandemon" for the first time in a long time a few months ago, I didn't react to it the way I did at 23. Eighteen years after first reading it, after enduring several incidences of sexual violence, after hearing a boyfriend say to me, "Look, I'm sorry I date-raped you" (which isn't really all that comforting), after being sexually demeaned by men who claimed simultaneously to care about my welfare and to be feminists, I don't find that poem funny any more. And I feel entitled to assert that a man who finds an attractive woman a PROBLEM, is something of a PROBLEM himself.

And as I listened to that panel on male Mormon feminists, I thought about the fact that any discussion of feminism needed to include a discussion of this issue.

Posted by Holly at 7:14 AM | Comments (3)

September 14, 2005

Male Mormon Feminists

At Sunstone this year, I attended a panel entitled "Advancing Feminist Sensibilities among Mormon Men." The abstract read

Why aren't there more visible and vocal male feminist voices within the Mormon community? The all-male panel will talk about their journeys toward becoming feminists, the challenges they face in maintaining feminist sensibilities in Mormon culture, and ideas they see for encouraging other Mormon men to take more active feminist stances. Audience discussion will follow.

The panel had four members, and I suspect it was rather hard to fill. One of the panelists was 30-something; one was 40-something; I'm guessing one was 50-something and I'm pretty sure the last was 60-something, so there was a decent range. All four panelists were still active participants in the church, though they might describe themselves as more or less devout.

I couldn't help but be thrilled that someone had wanted to put this panel together. I couldn't help but be thrilled that the topic was being discussed. I couldn't help but be thrilled that there are Mormon men who are willing to call themselves feminists.

All four men said interesting, valuable things. There was a lot of talk about how having a daughter broadened and deepened these men's appreciation of the challenges women face. They talked about a commitment to justice and a willingness to be proactive in their efforts to improve the lives of all women on the planet.

What they didn't talk about was sex.

The closest was a comment by John, the 30-something guy on the panel. He acknowledged that he still had work to do in perfecting his own feminist sensibilities, admitting, "I'm still guilty of lookism. I still objectify women."

John, I should mention, is a good friend of mine, someone I like and respect very much. We first met in 2003 when I chaired a panel called "World Religions 101: What Studying Other Faiths Has Taught Me about My Own." John's mother was a Japanese Buddhist, and John joined the Mormon church in high school. His comments were moving and profound–-among other things, he compared attending his grandfather's Buddhist funeral in Japan to helping with his father-in-law's Mormon funeral in the US.

I talked a little about Buddhism in my comments, mentioned how I was intrigued by the Buddhist concept of detachment. I stated,

The idea is that when we become too attached to people, objects, institutions or ways of doing things–-even the best people, the best objects, the best institutions and the best ways of doing things–-we sacrifice something of ourselves, some of our spiritual freedom, our intellectual clarity and our ability to live appropriately in the world. "What can I let go of?" I now ask myself. "How can I be less invested in things that don't really matter?" I myself am someone who can form emotional attachments to something as grand as the entire planet--and it seems obvious that one would, but I am amazed and outraged when I encounter people who say it doesn't matter that our current environmental practices are rendering the planet uninhabitable, because the world will be destroyed in the Second Coming anyway--and I can likewise become emotionally attached to things most people discard easily, like plastic bags (my current favorite being one from the gift shop of the British Library), so these are important questions for me.

This was one of the things John and I bonded over, because he also has a plastic bag fetish. In an email message he told me that his current favorite plastic bag was one from the Getty museum that he used "to carry books, lunch, exercise gear, and other spillover items that don't fit into his bursting-at-the-seams backpack."

The following summer, he and his family went to Paris. When he got back, he sent me a package, which included some very swanky tea samples from a Parisian tea shop, a poster of Shiva (my favorite deity), an antique postcard of Sacre Couer (which I display on the door of my office on campus) and a whole array of very cool plastic bags! There was one from a French grocery store and one from the UC Irvine bookstore and one really elaborate, fancy bag that once contained some Mac computer product. (I admit I am saving that last bag not out of product loyalty but just because it is so very fancy and cool.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that I really dig John. I've asked him to be on a panel every year since then and he always says such intelligent, insightful things. And when I heard him make that single, solitary, understated comment about the role sex played in Mormon men's relation to feminism, I thought, This is what is missing from this discussion.

Continued in Mormons, Male Feminists, and Sex.

Posted by Holly at 5:43 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Going to the Movies

In the late 1980s, I maintained subscriptions to two film series at the University of Arizona. The first met on Mondays and showed classic American films, and is where I acquired my Gary Cooper festish, after seeing Pride of the Yankees, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Morocco--especially Morocco, where he and Marlene Dietrich are just so freakin' HOT. Friday at 5:30 was the foreign film series, which is where I first saw The Seventh Seal.... I loved Max Von Sydow; I loved the chess game with death; I related to the end, where the girl is just so glad life is over. (It was not a happy time in my life.) The Friday series was also where I first encountered those bizarre movies done by Ealing Studios in the 1950s and 1960s: things like The Knack and I'm All Right Jack–-something about their resolute, eccentric Britishness made them seem more foreign than Bergman.

The art house theater in Tucson was the called the Loft, and was housed in a tiny white building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and.... Fremont, I think.... In any event, it was almost entirely swallowed by the UofA campus and has since been torn down. It had been a porno theater for a while, and well before that it was the first Mormon church in Tucson, attended by my great-grandparents and their children. I went there a lot in its art house days, and I also hit a lot of dollar theaters.

I did this partly because I really liked movies and partly because I was lonely and bored. By 1987 I was in the weird liminal state, preparing to leave the Mormon church but not yet out of it. I was too clearly dissatisfied with the church to be attractive company to many people in it, and I was too clearly obsessed with the church to be attractive company to many people outside it.

Mormons have this stupid thing about movie ratings: they're not supposed to see any R-rated movie. They can watch the most inane, offensive crap as long as it's PG (or even PG-13); furthermore, something that would earn an R rating if it was a movie is OK as long as it's in some other format--Rent, for instance, which is full of profanity and sex, is beloved by a decent number of Mormon women, and that's OK because right now it's merely a play. But its Mormon fans will be expected to relinquish their affection for it when the film version comes out November 11, slapped as it no doubt will be with an R that pushes it beyond the pale.

I never paid any attention to that. Uptight and prissy in many ways, when it came to movies, I figured a good movie was a good movie and if I had to sit through a graphic sex scene or two and hear a few swear words in order to watch a compelling story unfold, well, it was a small price to pay. I saw my first R-rated movie as a junior in high school, with my mother's permission: The Jerk, which I liked well enough. In 1984, again with my mother's approval, I took my 12-year-old brother to his first R-rated movie, The Terminator, which of course we both loved because it's a great movie.

Not only that, but at the end of my freshman year in college, in May 1982, I went to an X-rated movie, by myself. Admittedly, the X-rating has since been changed to an R, and the movie is tame by today's standards. But still, Midnight Cowboy really upset me. I just didn't know human lives could spiral so far out of control. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of Jon Voight's character, but Ratso Rizzo, the character played by Dustin Hoffmann, is not a name you soon forget. That final scene, on the bus, where JV's character realizes Ratso Rizzo is dead, and the bus driver just says, "Yeah, he's dead, but we'll have to wait til we get to Florida to do anything about it...." At least, that's how I remember it (it's been 23 years, so I might be wrong)--but whatever happened, it wasn't a happy ending, I know that much. I went home to an empty apartment--my roommates had all gone out of town--but I didn't dare go to bed, because I had somehow become afraid of the dark again. I left all the lights on and stayed awake until sunrise.

The first movie I went to see as a college freshman (I dragged my unsuspecting roommate along) was A Clockwork Orange. I lasted through the first rape scene before I turned to her and said, "Wanna go?" I later dated a guy whose favorite movie was A Clockwork Orange, and he insisted I watch it, but I think I might write about that later.... In any event, whenever I mention that one of my very favorite movies is Singin' in the Rain, and someone responds by saying something about A Clockwork Orange, I know that person is not someone I want to be close to.

I went to so many movies! I went to them. I saw amazing movies on very big screens: I saw Lawrence of Arabia on the biggest screen in Tucson, and it was a life-changing experience. But I rarely go to movies any more. The only movie I'm dying to see in a theater is the Keira Knightley-Matthew MacFadyen version of Pride and Prejudice, due out November 18. (Though I admit I don't see how it will be very good, since it's only two hours long and since, if the preview I watched online is a good indication, they added a bunch of stupid dialogue that's just not as good as what Austen herself actually wrote.) I haven't been to a movie since I saw The Aviator in Mesa with Wayne over Christmas break. I've seen dozens and dozens of movies since then, but I've watched them on dvd.

Which is another reason I need to talk about Netflix.

Posted by Holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

Watching Football

I guess I'm not so much "one of the boys" as I might have thought, since it turns out some of the boys have been getting together to watch football, and didn't invite me.

I found this out last week when Craig, another colleague, asked if I had been invited to SBJ's house that evening to watch football. I had not. Craig then asked, "Do you watch football?"

"If by ‘watching football' you mean, am I willing to be a in room with a television tuned to a football game, the answer is yes," I said, "as long as there's other stuff to do, like drink beer and eat, and as long as no one expects me to care about the game, and as long as there are other people who also don't care about the game, and who will ignore the game entirely whenever an interesting topic of conversation comes up." I've been to a couple of Super Bowl parties that fit that description, and they were fun. "But," I continued, "if by ‘watching football' you mean that I actually pay attention to the game, then no, I don't watch football."

I have never "watched football" in that proper sense. I have sort of tried. I had to go to all the football games in high school because my mom insisted I be in the marching band. Mom would always talk about how fun marching band was.... and when I informed her that I loathed it, loathed everything about it, from the early morning practices to the stupid formations, from the strange arrangements of pop songs marching band music so often consists of to the horrid, hot, woolen uniforms we had to put on and march around in at parades in various parts of Arizona when it was still early autumn and 90 degrees or so, all topped by the absolute horror that was Band Day at Arizona State University--hours and hours on a school bus, then hours and hours standing around in those uniforms, then more hours and hours on a school bus--well, when I complained about all that, she told me it was good for me and would build character, but I think having to do something I hated so thoroughly just contributed to my recalcitrance and cynicism, and that I would have been a nicer, happier person had I been allowed to opt out of stuff I hated and sucked at (such as playing a musical instrument, whether it was the piano, the clarinet or the bassoon) and allowed instead to devote myself more completely to stuff I liked and was good at, like editing the yearbook and getting good grades. (Yes, I was a first-class academic geek.)

Not only did I have to be in my high school marching band, but I had to watch my big sister in her stupid marching band. For a while she was in the flag corp at the University of Arizona, and a few times my parents dragged our whole family to a college football game so we could see my sister perform along with the rest of the band at half time. I begged and wheedled to get out of it, but no--I had to go. "Just bring a book," Mom said, so I did. And even though I wasn't dependent on the game for amusement, those bleachers were uncomfortable and the bathrooms were always disgusting and the action was too far away and I couldn't understand the rules and there were these long pauses where nothing happened and someone won and someone lost and I was supposed to care?

I loved football games when I lived in the dorm because everyone but me would go to them. For a good three or four hours I'd have the laundry room and then the bathroom all to myself.

There are some sports I can watch with pleasure: I like basketball, especially men's college basketball. If the Wildcats are in the playoffs, I try to watch at least one game. (Oh, the horror that was the Wildcats' loss to Illinois this past spring!) I rather enjoy the Olympics, the way they're staggered so that the winter and summer versions come along every two years; plus they're always this fascinating, strange, concentrated dose of nationalism and overachievement, all heavily edited so that you don't have to watch a lot standing around.

I'm trying to think of something else athletic I like... but I'm not coming up with much.

Friday night I hung out with SBJ and some other friends and the topic of football came up. SBJ said he was committed to spending a good chunk of the fall drinking bad beer, eating bad pizza and watching good football. He recently declared his devoted allegiance to the Patriots, and was heartened that they beat the Raiders.

The next night I ran into Tom and said, "I hear you guys watched football without me."

He said, "It didn't occur to me that you might want to come."

"It didn't occur to me either," I said, "until Craig asked me if I'd been invited, and then I had to devote a good six or seven nano-seconds to wondering if I should be hurt and offended that I wasn't given an opportunity to say no an activity I wouldn't particularly enjoy."

"You're welcome to come next time," he said.

"Thanks," I said, "but I don't think I'd have fun. SBJ told me you guys really watch."

"We really do," he said. "Especially SBJ."

I just visited the official website of the Super Bowl and learned that the New England Patriots have won three of the last four Super Bowls, which I guess makes them an easy team to get excited about. I personally will never forget the fact that on January 26, 1997, the Green Bay Packers beat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. I remember this not because I watched the game, but because while the game was going on, Adam, my evilest of exes, dumped me, brutally and thoroughly. And the next day, when I was suffering from alcohol poisoning brought on by drinking half a liter of Jack Daniels while discussing the breakup on the phone with the friend who introduced me to Adam in the first place (who sympathized strongly because he knew Adam was a schmuck but still refused to say "I told you so" until I said, "Just go ahead and say it"--only then did he say, "Well, I told you so--I mean, I really did try to warn you"), everyone kept talking about the damn football game.

So maybe if the Patriots make it to the Super Bowl this season I'll insist I get invited to the party, and bring a book in case everyone but me is watching the game, because now that I think about it, even the longest, most boring football game in the world is more fun than having my heart broken.

It so often comes back to that particular trauma, doesn't it? I hear someone say. Yeah, well, it so often does.

Posted by Holly at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2005

A Happy Marriage with a Good Man

Here's something from "Confessions of a Mormon Boy: An Autobiographical One-Man Play Written, Created and Performed by Steven Fales" (SUNSTONE December 2003). After serving a mission for the Mormon Church, Mr. Fales told his female best friend he was gay, then proposed. She accepted; they married, and stayed married for six years, until his "same sex attraction," to use the Mormon term, put too great a strain on the marriage.

As the divorce got closer, I got confused and scared. I didn't know how to be alone, and I didn't want to give up "hugging time." Emily and I shared a tradition her parents had started. You know how early kids wake up? Well, we would try to sleep in--trying to put off their needs as long as we could. Then, when we couldn't put it off any longer, we'd yet out, "HUGGING TIME!" In our two children would run and jump on the bed. We would then hug and kiss and snuggle--all warm and safe and happy. How many gay men get to experience that? Let alone watch their children being born. Couldn't I give it all up for the sake of hugging time? I was going to fight for hugging time!

I turned it all on Emily. It was her fault! She never wore lingerie! [Never mind that Mormonism has its own ugly underwear faithful members are required to wear.] She wouldn't watch the better-sex videos I ordered from the back of GQ. Emily knew going into this marriage it might come to this. And now that I've finally cracked, she's going to just throw me out?! How dare she watch Will & Grace and laugh when I was trying to change! She had failed me!

He goes on to acknowledge that of course his wife was not responsible for his homosexuality. But that didn't stop him from blaming her for it in the first place.

In Ron Schow's response to Ben Christensen in the recent Dialogue issue, Schow quotes a Mormon man who spent eight years in a temple marriage:

It was only after I came out to my wife that I realized how much she had suffered and endured over the years in asking questions like why didn't I find her desirable or why our sexual relationship never seemed satisfying. Was it a failure on her part? she wondered. She had sadness about feeling alone, confused and hurt in ways that were nearly impossible to articulate.

Having left the church myself (which is very often a part of coming out of the closet) and having watched a score of Mormon men come out of the closet, I am certain it is excruciatingly traumatic and painful. But COME ON! Let's consider the other side of the equation as well: how self-obsessed and blind do you have to be to live with someone for EIGHT YEARS and not notice that you're making her miserable and isolated?

The essay continues:

This young man emphasized the falsity of a prevalent myth: "I saw my struggle with (and against) homosexuality as my own cross to bear. I felt I was the one who was suffering, struggling, trying to make things right. What I failed to recognize was that my wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information."

My wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information.

I HATE IT when people withhold "basic information" from someone else. Someone recently did that to me. It had nothing to do with his being gay, but it did have to do with the situation he was in--and his sense that he could invite me to be intimately involved in his life without making sure I was clear about all the details of his "struggle." I kept issuing general requests