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August 31, 2006

Good to Go

Classes start Tuesday. Yesterday I turned in my syllabi to be copied, so as far as clerical preparations for the first day are concerned, I'm good to go. I've also figured what I'm going to discuss the first day (I've been here too long and have too many repeat students to just read the syllabus for the first 75-minute period) and acquired any necessary materials. I have no clue what's going to happen on Thursday, the second day I teach, but at least the first day is accounted for.

Thought you'd want to know.

Posted by Holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (8)

August 28, 2006

As Good as the Replacement

I recently discovered something amazing: It is possible to play solitaire without a computer! Just get a regular old deck of cards--the kind you use to play poker or some such game--and replicate on a table or some other flat surface the layout of your favorite version of computer solitaire. The rules and so forth are the same, except that you must shuffle and move the cards about yourself.

I think part of me always knew this--now that I plumb my memory, I can recall a time in the 1970s, back before VCRs were commonplace; back when there were only three networks, all of which showed reruns in the summer, so that there might be nothing to watch on television, necessitating other ways of amusing oneself after the sun went down (which it does around 8 p.m. in mid June in Arizona, a state that resolutely refuses to observe Daylight Saving Time); back when my mother would try to get my sisters and me to entertain ourselves quietly from time to time and so taught us all to play every version of solitaire she knew of and bought us each our own deck of cards. (Which was kind of a big deal because there was this whole weird to-do in Mormondom in the 1970s and 80s about how "face cards were Satanic." Rook cards were fine; Uno cards were fine; Gin Rummy played with Rook cards was fine and Go Fish! played with Uno cards was fine; but play those same games with a deck of face cards and you were practically ringing the doorbell of hell, because cards bearing stylized representations of European royalty were the devilish creation of Lucifer himself, and the sin in such cards was so potent it would rub off on your fingers if you even picked up a deck.)

But seriously, when I recently came across a deck of cards and thought, "Huh. I so rarely run into anyone who enjoys playing cards any more; what am I ever going to do with these?" it felt like a discovery to realize that I really truly could, all by myself, play a game of cards that wasn't virtual, that the object itself was every bit as good as the electronic replacement.

Posted by Holly at 10:12 AM | Comments (6)

August 26, 2006

Really Long Comment

Posted by Holly at 12:10 AM | Comments (2)

August 25, 2006

SMP

Every so often, people will post lists of the search queries that brought readers to their blogs. I'm finally following suit. I picked this particular list because it contains a few searches I might conduct myself (I've googled the Salt Lake Tribune a time or two, though I know my chances of finding the paper's home site instead of some reference to the paper are increased if I type in its full name) and the others are only sort of upsetting, instead of really, really gross. I'm offering it without comment because really, what is there to say?

pretty russian girls bikinis panties bra
self portraiture
drunken one night stand forgivable?
behold here is my daughter
self photo vagina
literary devices on keeping a notebook by didion
sl tribune
writing really good letter praise
mormon taboos coke coffee
my tits
tattoo in genital organ
men in britain emasculation
stuffed mormon pussy
when the beard is too painful to remove

Posted by Holly at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

Just As God Made Me

Posted by Holly at 9:59 AM | Comments (23)

August 23, 2006

Just As God Made Her

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Season II of Veronica Mars, just as I said I would, and watched about as much as I could stand before my eyeballs started to itch. One thing I'm fascinated by is what a big deal Kristen Bell's small tits are this season.

Not a lot was made of the topic the first season, though one of my very favorite exchanges referenced the subject: Veronica has discovered that someone has let the air out of one of her tires. New guy and love interest "boy toy Troy" (as he is referred to by Logan Echolls) squats beside her as she struggles with lug nuts and asks, "Flat?"

"Just as god made me," she replies.

And the conversation goes on from there.

But in Season II, there are plenty of references to how "not busty" Veronica is. First she's humiliated on some local access TV show because she used (without results, apparently) some breast enlargement cream. Then there are references to how she doesn't need any plastic surgery "except the obvious,"as one creepy dude puts it, the obvious being breast implants. Then some "big-tittied bitch" (a phrase I borrow from Sandra Bernhard, fyi, in case it offends you) tells her she should get a tattoo on her chest "so people will have something to look at there."

And that's only in the first two disks, with four more to go.

Oh. There's also a dream sequence (the dreamer is male) where Bell is wearing some massively padded push-bra underneath some fishnet affair of a top. I don't think I would have noticed how artificially enhanced her boobs were in that scene if I hadn't been reminded over and over that if I saw her "just as god made her," she wouldn't have needed underwire for support.

One of the projects I'm supposedly working on is a book about "embodiment," aspects of which include (for me) life-threatening illness, menstruation, anorexia, getting a tattoo, going gray while I've still got really long hair I refuse to cut (everyone so often someone tells me you're not allowed to have long hair if it's gray), and being flat chested. I'm not so flat chested that if you saw me naked you'd mistake me for a guy, but I am flat enough that even when I'm 80, I will never have to worry about my tits sagging.

At some point (a fairly late point in my life, as a matter of fact), it finally sunk in for me that there a lot of songs by men about how great big asses are ("Fat-Bottomed Girls," "Baby Got Back," "Big Ol' Butt," "Big Bottom" [admittedly, a joke song from from Spinal Tap] to name only a few), but not that many songs about the joys of big tits. (If you know of one, please share the title. Also if you know of an "I Love Big Asses" song I've neglected to mention, please let me know.) Perhaps that's because breasts are so important that they don't need any additional musical praise. Or perhaps it's because... well, actually, as I tried to consider why there might be more odes to asses than to tits I came up with some reasons that distressed me, and I don't really want to go there.

But I do have more to say on this topic, so check back later.

Posted by Holly at 3:52 AM | Comments (5)

August 21, 2006

As They Say about Acid

Yeah, I'm back.

I got home Wednesday night. The journey home was, as they say about acid from time to time, a bad trip. Flight patterns were screwed up at the Salt Lake airport for some reason no one ever bothered explaining to me so although we boarded on time and shut the door on time and pulled away from the gate on time, we then sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes (the captain specified that it was 55 minutes) waiting for our turn to take off, waiting and waiting and then waiting some more as if waiting were a perfectly normal thing to do in an airplane. Fortunately I have a gift, a very fortunate gift indeed, and even a strange one, in light of the fact that in a bed I am prone to insomnia, and my gift is this: I always fall asleep on planes. I am so disposed to falling asleep on planes that I get sleepy just waiting to board one. So I slept while we waited for our plane to take off, even though I had slept a lot the night before and it was only ten a.m., too early really to be sleepy.

My plane and I should have landed before 3 p.m. eastern daylight saving time but we did not land until after 4 p.m. I had not flown in or out of my local airport because it was too expensive; instead I flew out of a bigger spiffier airport two hours away because it was cheap AND a direct flight to SLC, but that meant I had to pay seven bucks a day to park my car at some godforsaken parking lot. And after I picked up my luggage and took a shuttle back to my car in that godforsaken lot I discovered that my battery was dead; it was dead because I had left my lights on for an entire week, a terrible mistake and one I have not made since automakers started including that little bell that goes off when you leave your lights on. I don't know how I missed it but I did somehow last week when the shuttle driver was waiting impatiently for me to get my stuff together and get out of my car and get on the shuttle and go to the airport.

At least the shuttle/parking people had jumper cables and they were able to start my car. But everything had been timed just right to ensure that I hit rush hour traffic and there was a lot of it. And there was also a lot of construction on the highway between the airport two hours away and my house. And when I got home from this bad trip I was so cranky that for the next four days I could scarcely do ANYTHING except think about how much I hated flying, notice that my house really needed cleaning (eventually I talked myself into cleaning it), read Pride and Prejudice for the 18th time (because it is the best book in the whole world), and knit.

Yeah, knit. I have been knitting a lot. I am in love with knitting. I am currently making a green cardigan/jacket thingy and a pair of red fingerless gloves. I will write more about this soon. I sort of even plan to post pictures.

Sunday morning at about 4:30 I finished Pride and Prejudice for the 18th time because I was in my bed and not on a plane and that meant I couldn't sleep even though I had two shots of a vodka and a Benadryl and then that meant that when I went to bed Sunday night I had to read something else, so I picked up The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein because that is what I had chosen as the book to read on the airplane when I wasn't sleeping.

tAoABT was the last of the big important books I had to read to prepare for teaching this semester and I saved it for last because I suspected strongly that I wouldn't like it but lo and behold I was wrong, very wrong. Once after a movie we really liked (though I don't remember what it was) Saviour Onassis and I observed that we could tell when a movie was really good because when we walked out of it, we couldn't help talking like the characters in it. As opposed to a movie that was really bad: then we would choose to talk like the characters but we would do it as mocking, as a deliberate invocation of the accidental artifice we had never ceased to be annoyed by, as in the case of Shakespeare in Love which we saw together and HATED, how we HATED that movie, the script was lame and obvious and contradictory and the characterization lame and obvious and unconvincing and Gwyneth Paltrow just plain sucks.

Using that same reasoning and logic I am attempting to convey how much I to my surprise loved tAoABT because I find myself totally captivated and affected by Gertrude Stein's sentences, they are very moving and effective sentences, and I want to copy them. Trudy (as I prefer to call her, not Gertie; Gertie rhymes with "dirty" but Trudy rhymes with "beauty") has completely captured my thinking heart and despite my fervent loyalty to conventional punctuation I feel a shitload of run-on sentences and comma splices piling up inside me and needing to spill forth. I not only want to write like her, I want to read everything else she has ever written, or at least look all the titles up in the library catalogue and order the books so they can sit on the shelf in my office and make me feel hopeful.

We'll see where this heads.

So you've just read an entry that's not about Mormons or Mormonism or how fucked up and fucked-upping Utah is. Enjoy it while it lasts! I might try to postpone the diatribe against the weirdness that my annual pilgrimage to "Zion" always unleashes in my life, since I wrote about precisely that before I left, but it will occur sooner or later, I can guarantee it.

In the meantime, before posting again, I am going to try to get caught up on YOUR blogs, which I have shamefully neglected. Pardon me. I really was too cranky to leave comments much worth reading, and I knew I wouldn't respond properly to much that I read.

But really, Trudy has cheered me up and I will try to read everything with the same delighted surprise and gossipy happiness (the woman knew everyone! Everyone wanted to know her!) her sentences aroused in me.

Posted by Holly at 12:44 AM | Comments (9)

August 11, 2006

Sunstone and Its Effect on Me

Yesterday I explained why I go to Sunstone; here's something I posted last year about why it's hard to attend, and how I always feel weird in Utah.

Posted by Holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (3)

August 10, 2006

Why I Go to Sunstone

Today is my first day at Sunstone. Several people have asked me recently why I go to Sunstone, especially given my relationship to the church. Since I've already written something that addresses that question, I'm posting it here. This essay was published last year in Sunstone's print journal. It's kind of long, but if you're interested, here it is.

"What are you doing at Sunstone, then?"

It's a question I am asked each year. Sometimes the question is posed with genuine curiosity; sometimes it's an accusation. Why would someone who isn't a practicing or believing Mormon attend a symposium on Mormonism? It's also a question I asked at one point. Although I had read, subscribed to, published in, cited in my own scholarship and learned from the print version of SUNSTONE for years, I never attended a symposium until 2001--and the decision finally to do so wasn't easy. Early in 2001 I submitted an essay for publication; a few months later I got a message from Dan Wotherspoon, letting me know that he'd accepted the essay, and requesting that I read a version of it at the symposium. I told him I'd think about it.

"Why would I want to go to that?" I asked myself. "It's all fine and good in print, where you can read what intrigues you and ignore what doesn't, and nobody interrupts the author in the middle of a point. But this live version...I'm sure it'll just be a bunch of disgruntled inactives arguing about stuff with a bunch of bossy hard-liners"--and I'd seen and participated in enough of that already. But Dan was graciously, persistently insistent that I'd enjoy the symposium, so I queried a few friends who had attended.

"Of course you should go," they told me. "For every panel that doesn't interest you, you'll find one that does. And you'll meet so many incredibly cool people."

So I went. And Dan and my friends were right--so right, in fact, that I've been back every year since, and plan to go again. But what is it that draws me?

The short answer is that Sunstone is a place where I can ignore pronouncements about what I should believe and value and figure out what I do believe and value--about my own history, my own faith, about how to move through this complicated world as a moral, ethical person, all the while employing a vocabulary and frame of reference shared by the people I'm talking to. I certainly can and do spend much of my time pondering questions of ethics and truth with people who have no connection to Mormonism, but sometimes it's nice not to have to explain how the particulars of my Mormon upbringing affect my views on larger questions of spirituality and ethics.

The long answer goes something like this:

I try to accept that Sunstone is everyone else's forum as much as it is mine. I know there will be plenty going on that doesn't matter to me, and that's OK. Chief among the panels or presentations that don't interest me are any that focus on Joseph Smith. He may or may not have been a living prophet once, but he's not a living prophet any more--at least not to me. I find him only marginally more interesting than, say, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; or William Miller, the farmer from Upstate New York and Baptist preacher whose apocalyptic visions help launch the Second Great Awakening of 1820s and 30s. But I accept that to many people, even to people who are no longer or never were faithful Mormons, Joseph Smith and his teachings are of vital interest--after all, he made a lasting impression on US history, and he shaped an institution that affects millions of lives. And I don't discount the possibility that the right presentation could succeed in making Joseph Smith's life compelling to me again.

Nor do I worry much about the daily workings of the Church. At the time I'm writing, Gordon B. Hinckley is still president, but I can't name his councilors. Weeks will go by in which I don't hear a single mention of the church. Unless the Church takes a political stand, I don't see the current institution as having much effect on my life. But these days I don't live in the inter-mountain West where I spent my childhood. If I did, I might feel differently.

What I do care about is how my training as a Mormon has shaped and continues to shape the choices I make and the ideals I espouse.

Primo Levi wrote, "Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this." I would add that changing moral codes rarely involves a complete renunciation of one's old ideology. Often the change comes because a beloved and honored aspect of the ideology (for instance, an emphasis on disciplined religious study and the belief that each person should ask for confirmation that something billed as scripture is indeed a source of spiritual truths) somehow comes into conflict with another aspect of the ideology (such as directives not to probe religious mysteries or question the utterances of leaders). In such a situation, the first belief often is not abandoned; in fact, it is embraced all the more fully.

There are parts of my Mormon past I shed easily enough, parts I struggle to escape, parts I still embrace gladly and parts so inescapably central to who I am that it takes careful, deliberate scrutiny to tease them out in the first place--and even more work to understand them. How I see the world, what I find meaningful in the world, is irrevocably shaped by my Mormon upbringing.

For instance: I have ancestors who joined the Church in 1832. One of my ancestors survived the Haun's Mill Massacre only by pretending to be dead. I had two ancestors in the Mormon Battalion, one on my father's side and one on my mother's. One of my ancestors arrived in Salt Lake with Brigham Young and was named the first bishop of the city--indeed he was the only man to be bishop of the entire city. There are polygamists all over my family tree. Every one of my siblings has been married in the temple. I grew up in a town so Mormon that we held our high school prom in the church's cultural hall. One of the primary, crucial events of my life was my mission in Taiwan and the crisis of faith I suffered there. I even approach my job as an English professor in a way shaped by Mormonism: I love exegesis, or critical exploration of a text, and I know one reason for that is all those exercises I learned to do with scripture: leave it in context and see what it means; take it out of context and use it to explicate something; find something else to explicate it.

So if anyone can claim to be an ethnic Mormon, I think I can. And it is partly by virtue of my religious training and partly due to my temperament that I believe quite strongly Plato's maxim that "an unexamined life is not worth living." Thus, if the church somehow lost all its members tomorrow and existed only as a historical relic, I would still be concerned with scrutinizing and puzzling out how my present life has been shaped by my past, including the 26 years I spent as a devout Mormon, obeying the commandments, participating in the culture and passionately studying the doctrines of the Church.

Chances are slim that the Church will lose all its members tomorrow, and so I am also faced with the challenge of interacting respectfully with my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends who remain in the church. I share with my family the legacy of sacrifice and creation given to us by our Mormon forebears, and I value that legacy. I chose to honor it by imitating my forebears and swapping a belief system I no longer find meaningful for something that offers me greater hope of grace and redemption, just as they did, while many in my family honor that legacy by remaining in the faith our ancestors chose. The challenge for all of us is to love and be happy for one another.

Maturity and generosity aren't always required in order to be happy for someone who behaves exactly as you believe s/he should, and is then rewarded for that behavior. But it can take maturity and generosity to be happy for someone who flourishes in a system that made you miserable, or in a system you don't approve of. How, then, do those who are gladly devout and those who are cheerfully inactive or excommunicated manage to share the cultural legacy of Mormonism and the network of relationships forged through Mormonism? For instance, should I cease to care about or pretend not to know people I loved on my mission, simply because I no longer believe what I preached then, that membership in the Mormon church is necessary to salvation? How do those of us who are no longer among the faithful reconcile a view of the world shaped by Mormonism with the sense that Mormonism is not adequate in helping us navigate the world? How do we avoid conflict with those we love who still rely on Mormonism as a moral and spiritual compass?

These are some of the questions that concern me, and I come to Sunstone because it helps me pose and answer those questions in meaningful, lively and constructive ways.

In March 2004, Karen Armstrong, one of my favorite writers and scholars, published The Spiral Staircase, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Through the Narrow Gate. In The Spiral Staircase, she discusses the difference between orthopraxy (right behavior) and orthodoxy (right thought), and convincingly cites the argument that in many religions, orthodoxy and doctrine are of little significance--what matters is behaving rightly, cultivating behaviors that change us for the better, regardless of what we believe.

This argument was so revolutionary and astonishing to me that I needed to explore it further. Remarkably, once I abandoned the idea that orthodoxy--that troublesome, unswallowable bone in my throat--mattered at all, I felt more at liberty to celebrate and embrace those practices inherited from Mormonism that truly have enriched my spiritual life. Thus I proposed a panel for the 2004 symposium: "Doing Things That Change Us: Mormonism as Praxis" (reprinted in SUNSTONE December 2004). I wanted panelists to consider the special benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely Mormon manner. I hoped the panel would be positive and validating for any audience: active, faithful Mormons could affirm those practices that reinforce their faith, while people who were no longer active or believing Mormons could acknowledge and remember what was valuable about their training as Mormons. The idea was to celebrate the ways in which Mormonism inculcates and encourages behaviors that truly do make us better people, regardless of belief.

That panel was one of the highlights of my five years at Sunstone--and I've been to some stellar presentations. It truly became a celebration, and no one in the audience seemed to think that anyone would need to justify a desire to identify and embrace the elements of our religious training that help us live lives of greater spiritual awareness and maturity, despite the fact that we had also shed elements of that training.

That's what Sunstone offers me: a forum where I can work to identify and embrace the elements of my religious training that help me live with greater spiritual awareness and maturity, which, admittedly, is something you can do at Church. But Sunstone also offers me a forum where I can ask if there have been elements of my training as a Mormon that get in the way of spiritual maturity, which is something you really can't do at Church. For me, it's about deciding, as consciously and deliberately as possible, what I want to keep and what I want to lose--and in order to do that, it helps to be around people who recognize some value in Mormonism to begin with, who don't think religion as a whole and Mormonism in particular are a waste of time. I am sure I will continue to encounter people who find it baffling that I want to discuss any element of Mormonism when I no longer subscribe to its doctrines; but at Sunstone, I also find people who understand where I'm coming from--and who are also willing to help me figure out where I want to go next.

I would differentiate here between community and kinship. I admit, I don't feel much of a sense of community at Sunstone: there are too many different groups devoted to too many different doctrines and too many people who don't fit in to any group for there truly to be a community. But I don't see that as a bad thing. That lack of cohesiveness means there's room to ask your own questions, spend an hour listening to someone else's questions. You may not agree with people or change their minds, but no one even pretends that that needs to happen. And at each symposium I have been lucky enough to meet someone who becomes a genuine friend, who challenges and inspires me not only for one weekend in late summer, but all year long.

A yoga teacher once explained the spiritual quest to me this way: it's as if we're all wandering through some giant maze of a corn field, the stalks too high for us to see who or what is in the next row. But if we're lucky, we find people we can wave to at those moments when we come out of a row, before we forge back down the narrow paths of the field, just so we remember that others are pursuing the same quest, even though ultimately, we must all do it alone. I buy that explanation; it resonates with my experience. Sunstone for me is the end of a row: I come out, take a deep breath, look around; I greet others seekers and hear something about their quests; then I get on a plane and head home, where I plunge once more into the maze.

Posted by Holly at 10:00 AM | Comments (4)

August 9, 2006

Happy Anniversary

As I mentioned yesterday, today is the first anniversary of my blog. Instead of posting some long new entry, I thought I'd suggest you check out my very first entry, which explains why I named my blog Self-Portrait As.

I'm leaving for Sunstone in a few hours, but while I'm gone this time, I'm not turning the comments off, because Jim my host has fixed me up with a nifty new security function to keep spammers at bay. However, a couple of people have had problems posting when they try to preview their comments-- there's a glitch somewhere and once you preview the comment you can't post it. You have to highlight and save your comment, then hit refresh, then paste your comment into the new window, then hit post without hitting preview. Sorry for the problem....

Anyway, you can comment while I'm gone (and I do have some posts lined up to publish with the "scheduled" function) but it might be a while before I approve them. And I won't be around to comment on your blogs for a while, but I'll catch up when I'm back.

Thanks!

Posted by Holly at 8:03 AM | Comments (5)

August 8, 2006

Counting Birthdays

When we were little and would say, on our birthdays, "I'm nine years old today!" or whatever age was appropriate, my father would say, "No, you were nine years old yesterday. Yesterday you finished your ninth year. Today you're nine years and one day."

I started blogging on August 9, 2005, which means that today is the 365th day of my blog's existence, which I guess makes it one year old today. But tomorrow is still its birthday--or rather, the anniversary of its birthday. You really only have one birthday. That's something else my father would say.

He wasn't a killjoy, really--well, OK, he was kind of a killjoy. He just likes fussy distinctions.

And it's not like the Western way is the only way of counting birthdays. In Chinese culture, you're age one the day you're born. On the first anniversary of your birth, you're two. Your age is the cycle of year you're in, whereas in our system, your age is one less than the cycle you're in. In 1986, when I was a missionary, I thought of myself as 22, but if a Chinese person asked my age, I said 23.

Anyway, my blog has a birthday anniversary coming up, and this is our 251st entry. If you get a chance, we'd appreciate some congratulations.

Posted by Holly at 3:26 PM | Comments (13)

August 7, 2006

From the Library

Something I do for fun and self-affirmation is check books out of my university library system, then leave them to languish in my office book case. If I don't start the book within a week of checking it out, I almost never get around to reading it. But as a faculty member, I can keep a book out for, like, the duration of my employment here, as long as no one else wants it, and it comforts me to look at all those books from the library, know that I haven't spent a cent to have access to them, and imagine that I might read them, some day.

I just got an email telling me that I needed to renew my stash of books--I had 34 out. Here are some of the titles:

Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation, by Laqueur, Thomas Walter.

The celluloid closet : homosexuality in the movies, by Russo, Vito.

A history of the breast, by Yalom, Marilyn.

Bachelor girl : the secret history of single women in the twentieth century, by Israel, Betsy

"Shall she famish then?" : female food refusal in early modern England, by Gutierrez, Nancy A.

I leap over the wall : contrasts and impressions after twenty-eight years in a convent, by Baldwin, Monica.

Over her dead body : death, femininity, and the aesthetic, by Bronfen, Elisabeth.

Integral psychology : consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy by Wilber, Ken.

Beyond sexuality, by Dean, Tim

Language and social identity by Gumperz, John Joseph

The female malady : women, madness, and English culture, 1830-1980 by Showalter, Elaine.

Becoming an ex : the process of role exit, by Ebaugh, Helen Rose Fuchs

The palm-wine drinkard ; and, My life in the bush of ghosts, by Tutuola, Amos

Changes of mind : a holonomic theory of the evolution of consciousness, by Wade, Jenny

Femininities, masculinities, sexualities : Freud and beyond, by Chodorow, Nancy

Outercourse : the be-dazzling voyage : containing recollections from my Logbook of a radical feminist philosopher (be-ing an account of my time/space travels and ideas--then, again, now, and how), by Daly, Mary.

Unbearable weight : feminism, Western culture, and the body, by Bordo, Susan

Swimming to Antarctica : tales of a long-distance swimmer, by Cox, Lynne

Spinning straw into gold : what fairy tales reveal about the transformations in a woman's life, by Gould, Joan

Truth : a guide, by Blackburn, Simon.

Posted by Holly at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)

August 6, 2006

The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus

I promise, one of these days, I really will write about something else. But I keep running into more discussions of this topic, which I feel compelled to share.

Perhaps in reply to Thursday's NY Times article about gay men in straight marriages (which I discussed yesterday), Friday the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about "mixed orientation" marriages, with the optimistic headline, "Mixed-orientation LDS couples count on commitment, work and love to beat the odds." The article's basic message is this: gay men, just admit you're gay before you get married, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

Women, just accept that your husband is gay and will never want you the way he wants men, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

The couple interviewed for the article are sure of this because they are in the early 20s and have small children, and by gosh and by golly, they're making it work! What's fifty years of denial compared to getting through the first five years of a marriage?

The article acknowledges that most such marriages fail. Still, it discusses the phenomenon in such admiring tones--aren't these kids brave! Aren't they honest and open to challenges!

Let's hope they convince even more gay men to marry straight women, so that others can engage in the same (probably) doomed struggle!

Posted by Holly at 4:09 PM | Comments (23)

August 5, 2006

It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard

I said we'd abandon this topic for a while, and when I said that, I meant it. But two things--or rather, two comments that need attention called to them--happened on the Brokeback Mountain post: 1) Saviour Onassis offered me a proposal of no marriage--check it out! It was so sweet; and 2) Spike provided a link to a timely article from the NY Times. Entitled "When the Beard Is Too Painful to Remove," it is, as Spike notes, "remarkably sympathetic to the gay men who struggle to figure out how to remain in their marriages and families. But not a word on lesbians who might find themselves in a marriage with a man but needing or craving partnerships with women, and not much comment on how the wives-- ‘beards'--the terms is gendered and sounds so derogatory--are supposed to cope."

The article states that

For gay men in heterosexual marriages, even after the status quo becomes unbearable, the pull of domestic life remains powerful. Many are desperate to preserve their marriages-- to continue reaping the emotional and financial support of wives, (emphasis added) and domestic pleasures like tucking children in at night.

And how do such men hope to retain those benefits? The articles cites Stephen McFadden, a social worker who runs support groups for married gay men in Manhattan, in asserting that "these men want to save their marriages.... either by lying, promising their wives they will not have sex with men or persuading them to accept their double lives."

In fact,

Leaving a marriage and setting up housekeeping with a gay partner is not what most married gay men have in mind when they join a support group, according to Stephen McFadden.... Instead, Mr. McFadden and others in the field say, their clients generally start out committed to the opposite goal.

That's insane to me--about like joining a support group for alcoholics and expecting to be told how keep people off your back or bolster your liver function so you can continue drinking, or joining a support group for compulsive gamblers because you want information on how to borrow more money when your credit is already shot and your house is in foreclosure.

The only woman quoted is "Bonnie Kaye, the former wife of a gay man, who runs the Web site www.gayhusbands.com and conducts ‘How to Come Out to Your Wife' workshops. ‘If they're too selfish to leave, I won't work with them,' Ms. Kaye said. ‘If they love their wives, they need to give them their lives back.'"

I'm glad the article let someone say it.

Thanks again, Spike, for providing the link.

Posted by Holly at 5:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 4, 2006

Old Testament Weirdness

In the comments to yesterday's post on Brokeback Mountain, CL Hanson notes that she learned at BYU that "in [Mormon] culture woman is the disposable person." That's something learned in college myself, albeit in a bible lit class, when I read this gruesome story in Judges 19, which I'm going to tell now, and then we're going to take a break from this topic, since it doesn't seem wildly popular. [OK, I lied: there's a followup here.] Plus, I'm almost done with the paper and will have time to write about something else for a while. But here it is, without further ado, one of the grossest stories from the Old Testament:

In Judges 19, we get the story of a Levite from Mount Ephriam whose concubine leaves him in order to return to her parents' house, an activity labeled "playing the whore against him," or valuing her own desires above his. The Levite eventually goes to fetch his concubine, and on their journey home they stop in Gibeah, where the men are "Benjaminites," meaning both that they are of the tribe of Benjamin and that they have sex with other men. The Levite sets up camp in the street of a city, only to be implored by an old man not to lodge there--instead, the old man offers the couple shelter for the night.

Beginning in verse 22, we read

Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. [Note: in case you don't get it, they're using "know" in the biblical sense, this being the bible and all.]

[23] And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.

[24] Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

[25] But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.

[26] Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light.

[27] And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.

[28] And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place.

[29] And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.

Cutting an ox into twelve parts and sending a piece to each of the twelve tribes was a traditional call to war, but why cut up a perfectly good ox when you've already got a dead--or nearly dead--concubine? Keep in mind, the Levite called the tribes to war over the fact that the Benjaminites had destroyed his property--at stake was the fact that this MAN would have to get a new concubine--rather than over the fact that a woman was raped repeatedly, since he himself threw her out the door to be raped.

The tale is revolting, in its homophobia, its misogyny, its unspeakable violence. It shows that homosexual acts are so abominable that to prevent their occurrence, one should offer one’s virgin daughter to be “humbled,” because in these matters, women’s health and happiness, if not their very lives, are acceptable sacrifices. Gay gang rape is unthinkable, but straight gang rape–hey, if it placates the horny male miscreants outside your door, no problem! The aftermath isn't much better. The other eleven tribes went to war against Benjamin, and killed over 25,000 of its men--only 600 men of Benjamin remained when the battle ended. It looked as though the tribe would die out, because all the men in the other eleven tribes had sworn not to give their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, an oath they could not renounce. But they didn't want to be the eleven Tribes of Israel, so they hatched a plan to provide the Benjaminites with wives: a group of virgins, the daughters of Shiloh, would be celebrating a feast off in a vineyard, and if the Benjaminites rode in, kidnapped the virgins and married them, well, their fathers hadn't broken their oath because they had not "given" their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, only allowed them to be taken.

Marriage and procreation, you see, were both duties and rights of these men, regardless of any sexual conduct they engaged in with other men. The important thing was to keep the tribe going. This is the spiritual and moral legacy we have inherited from the Old Testament, and it still lives on in Mormonism, which is why marriages between straight Mormon women and gay Mormon men still receive such praise.

Posted by Holly at 8:59 AM | Comments (9)

August 2, 2006

Brokeback Mountain

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post, more on what I want to discuss at Sunstone this year. This is a topic I've already explored on my blog, in entries entitled Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, and The Exclusive Terroritory of Straight Men.

It ain't gonna be pretty, that's for sure.

Over Christmas I went to see Brokeback Mountain with Saviour Onassis while we were both in Arizona for the holidays. I was staying with my sister, who is both a dutiful Mormon who avoids R-rated movies, and a devoted and knowledgeable fan of good cinema. She knew she wouldn't be seeing the movie, but she wanted to hear all about it when I got home. "Is it really as good as they say?" she asked.

"It really is," I said. "Heath Ledger is amazing. He deserves an Oscar." (He was robbed, by the way. So was Jake.) "He reminded me of some of our cousins," I told her. "He does a thoroughly convincing job of playing a taciturn western cowboy."

"I hear both characters have wives," she said.

"Yes," I said. "And that's one of the things I liked about the movie: all the characters are treated with respect and sympathy. The wives aren't the focus of the movie but they're not neglected, either. The situation does incredible damage to the women, but they're not treated as acceptable casualties. Anne Hathaway's personality becomes as brittle as her bleached hair, while Michelle Williams--oh, it's just heartbreaking."

"Well," my sister said emphatically, banging pots around as she emptied her dishwasher, "it's great that they portrayed it well, but the situation itself is not OK. These guys have got to stop marrying women."

"You looking for an argument?" I asked. "I was engaged to a gay man, remember? I don't think gay men should marry straight women, either."

"They've got to stop," she repeated. "They've got to stop hiding behind wives. It's not fair to use women like that."

"I couldn't agree more," I said. "And it's a time-honored practice with a name, in case you didn't know: marrying someone of the opposite sex for the purpose of passing for straight is called ‘having a beard,' and I think there should be no more beards. But I also think that if you want gay men to stop marrying straight women, one good way of helping that happen is to let them marry each other." She made no reply to that--as a Mormon Republican, what could she say?--but she at least nodded.

Posted by Holly at 5:10 PM | Comments (6)

August 1, 2006

The Society of Buggers

The entry below is part of my attempt to shape material for a panel I'm moderating/presenting on at Sunstone next week. The title of the panel is "Will, Grace, and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men, and Mormonism." I can already tell I will have too much to say--I always do--and am worrying about how to cover what's most important. I will be grateful for any suggestions on how to deal with this material.

"The society of buggers has many advantages--if you are a woman," declares Virginia Woolf in her memoir "Old Bloomsbury."

It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one's ease. But it has this drawback--with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. It is significant of what I had come to desire that I went straight--on almost the next page of my diary indeed--from the dim and discreet rooms of James Strachey [one of her brother's gay classmates] at Cambridge to dine with Lady Ottoline Morrel at Bedford Square. Her rooms, I noted without drawing any inferences, seemed to me instantly full of "lustre and illusion."

Woolf arrives at this conclusion after trying to puzzle out why certain of her brother Thoby's university classmates, who would visit the home she kept with Thoby and their sister Vanessa, were simultaneously brilliant and boring, gifted and barren, why certain "young men [made] one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously--as you will have guessed--that there was no physical attraction between us."

Although this lack of physical attraction makes certain things impossible, it makes others things possible--the advantages already mentioned, for instance. But learning to accept--not merely tolerate--the sexuality of others allows Woolf to embrace and experience the world more fully. Woolf relates an anecdote involving a visit from Lytton Strachey, who once proposed marriage to Woolf only to withdraw his offer when it occurred to him that if he married her, he might actually have to kiss her, though he had no intention of ever bedding her. Woolf had been arguing with her brother-in-law Clive Bell, while Clive's wife Vanessa sat on the couch doing needle work.

Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa's white dress.

"Semen?" he said.

Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.

Woolf declares that as a result of being able to discuss openly, "the whole aspect of life was changed," adding that

there was now nothing that one could not say, nothing that one could not do, at [the home she shared with her siblings]. It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation. It may be true that the loves of buggers are not--at least if one is of the other persuasion--of enthralling interest or paramount importance. But the fact that they can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practiced privately. Thus many customs and beliefs were revised.

I am grateful to Virginia Woolf, her siblings, and Lytton Strachey et al., for helping to revise so many customs and beliefs. I think there are still more customs and beliefs to be revised. One example is gay marriage. I know the gay community is split on the issue of marriage--many believe that heterosexual marriage is an inherently flawed and repressive institution, one that lesbians and gay men would be better off not emulating or participating in, and what's really desirable is a transformation of all romantic and sexual partnerships into something more respectful and equal. I certainly respect that point of view, but until we achieve that transformation, I feel that if consenting adults of legal age want to marry a same-sex partner, they should have the legal right to do so, regardless of whether or not they take advantage of that right. And I feel as well that there are important reasons why those among the straight community should work to make this change.

to be continued

Posted by Holly at 4:38 PM | Comments (6)