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April 13, 2006

Gender, Fiction and Reading Preferences

Yesterday I came across this article (published a week or so ago) in the Guardian UK about gender, fiction and reading preferences. Frankengirl and Mysticgypsy, you'll be pleased to learn that Jane Eyre was the novel most often cited by women as having the greatest influence on them. The novel most men cited as influential was The Stranger by Camus.

The report is fascinating and draws some interesting conclusions: Women's favorite novels were "surprisingly varied" and women found it easy to discuss the influence fiction had on them, "producing a number of key moments in their life at which they unselfconsciously acknowledged that fiction had offered them guidance or solace," while men's preferences were limited to a much smaller cluster of works, and "men were more reluctant than the women to discuss the influence reading might have had on them." As for why that might be,

Jon Elek, lecturer in English at University College London, told us: "I guess that if you admit to having a watershed novel, then you're admitting to having a watershed moment, which is something that a lot of men don't necessarily want to admit to. And to admit to having five [as respondents were asked to do] - oh, come on!"

The researchers summarize some of their findings thus:

Our final top 20 of men's reading clearly shows a majority of books with strong active narrative themes - books that might traditionally be described at quintessential boys' books. No surprise there, perhaps. Except that both our recorded interviews and questionnaire responses show these choices being made on the basis of a conscious commitment to novels that take the reader in a direction of personal development. Men's reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality. Catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance characterise the plots.

Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men's formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 - indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence. Many men admitted that they had read little fiction since, though mature men returned to fiction reading in later life, and expressed increasing enjoyment in reading for "self-reflection".

Between 20 and 40, many men we talked to openly showed an almost complete lack of interest in reading which drew them into personal introspection, or asked them to engage with the family and the domestic sphere. On the other hand, those who had remained avid readers could see distinct patterns emerging in their choices which differed from those selected by women.

A final conclusion is that

men use fiction almost physically as a guide to negotiate a difficult journey (but would rarely admit to this downright being the case). They use fiction almost topographically, as a map. Many of our women respondents last year explained that they used novels metaphorically - the build-up to an emotional crisis and subsequent denouement in a novel such as Jane Eyre might have helped negotiate an emotional progress through a difficult divorce, or provided support during a difficult period at work, or provided solace when things seemed generally dull.

Even if you get bored by the reseachers' commentary on their study, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page and read the summary of both Jane Eyre and The Stranger--very witty!

Posted by Holly at 9:25 AM | Comments (6)

December 10, 2005

Women Lousy at Designing Clothes for Women?

Ugh.

I've been taking a break from dealing with certain issues because well, because I need a break. I've been trying to work on a couple of posts, one on the whole nasty debate about a "man's right to choose" sparked by Dalton Conley's December 1st NY Times editorial on the topic, and another on the sexsomnia defense a guy in Canada used to beat a rape charge, but I don't get very far before I get too upset to continue.

Here's something I would dismiss as silly if it weren't for the fact that I really dig textiles and clothing. But the clothes I own are typically things I made myself or bought on sale, and I am of the opinion that haute couture is overpriced, wasteful and misogynist. This article made me think about WHY high fashion might be something the average woman doesn't want, need or have the money for. It's from the NY Times, about why women don't succeed as fashion designers. Among the arguments for why men, either straight or gay, are better than women at designing clothes for women, are these:

In some quarters, the perception exists that fashion's main consumers, women, are more comfortable taking advice about how they should look from a man. "Men are often better designers for women than other women," said Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, who more than anyone in the past decade built a brand on his own persona, that of a man whose sensual appeal is to both men and women. Whereas Bill Blass, Valentino and Oscar de la Renta founded their empires on the strength of a nonthreatening, nonsexual charisma, Mr. Ford aggressively promoted his sexually charged designs. "Of course there are many more gay male designers," Mr. Ford said. "I think we are more objective. We don't come with the baggage of hating certain parts of our bodies."

Some designers embrace an extreme version of this position. Michael Vollbracht, the current designer of Bill Blass, said he believes that gay men are demonstrably superior at design, their aesthetic formed by a perception of a woman as an idealized fantasy. "I come from a time when gay men dressed women," Mr. Vollbracht said. "We didn't bed them. Or at least I didn't. I am someone who is really pro-homosexual. I am an elitist. I am better than straight people. Women are confused about who they want to be. I believe that male designers have the fantasy level that women do not."

When women design for other women, Mr. Ford said, they proceed from a standpoint of practicality - not fantasy. "Sometimes women are trapped by their own views of themselves, but some have built careers around that," he said. "Donna Karan was obsessed with her hips and used her own idiosyncrasies to define her brand."

The Times' article purports to be an expose on the topic, but it doesn't include many women's voices on the matter. It does, however, let a designer named Dana Buchman respond to these arguments. Ms. Buchman "sees little value in such arguments. If men are more objective, she countered, then women are empathetic, which can be useful in understanding the consumer. 'I wear my own clothes,' she said. 'I have lived the life of my customer.'" Yeah, but that's precisely the problem, as Tom Ford kindly points out: she's too caught up in the practical issues of how clothes fit the real bodies and real lives of real women! And since she never wants to f*ck herself the way a straight man would and never sees clearly the aesthetic ideal women should strive to embody the way a certain type of elitist gay man would, she will never know as well as either class of man how to dress herself, or other women.

Posted by Holly at 11:32 AM | Comments (4)

November 17, 2005

Toolbox

One year in my 30s, when I'd grown tired of keeping my hammer and my screw driver in a drawer in my desk, I asked my dad to give me a toolbox, well stocked with tools, for Christmas. Mom said I couldn't have asked for a better gift, that he hadn't had so much fun preparing for Christmas since my sibs and I were little kids. He spent hours at the hardware store, she said, choosing the best box, then finding a saw that would fit in it ("It's not long but it's all you'll ever need, unless you want to hack down a tree, and in that case, you'd be better off calling a tree service," he told me of the one he bought), picking out a good set of Allen wrenches and Phillips head screwdrivers. He even gave me a spirit level. I've used all the tools in that box, except for the saw, and I'm sure even that will come in handy someday.

He also gave me an cordless power drill. He told me that I should recharge the battery every month, that not only would it mean it would be charged up whenever I might need it, but it would also preserve the life of the drill.

I don't charge it every month, but I charge it pretty often. However, I never use it myself, though the handy man I occasionally hire to do stuff around my house is pretty glad I've got it. I admit I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid I'll drill a hole in my hand. Instead, I save up jobs requiring a power drill and then ask someone who's not afraid of it to do those jobs for me when they come to visit. Next time my parents visit, I'm thinking I'll ask my dad to install a couple of ceiling fans.

Maybe this makes me a wimpy girl, but I'm pretty competent in a lot of ways. There are a lot of things I can fix on my own. I'm just afraid of power drills.

Posted by Holly at 7:43 AM | Comments (1)

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 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 for more information, growing more and more ridiculous and more and more desperate the more it was withheld. Finally I hit upon precisely the right question to ask, and he was honest enough to give me a direct answer. It made all the difference in the world to know exactly what I was dealing with.

Mormon women are stupidly hopeful and will do all kinds of things to achieve a "happy marriage" with a "good man," whatever those things mean. I did not marry a gay Mormon man, but I did become engaged to one, Matthew, in 1988, after we both fell in love at first sight. The story has a reasonably happy ending: he had enough integrity and wisdom that he simply could not permit himself to marry me, knowing that however much he loved me, he would never lose his attraction to men. But it took four years of my wheedling and prodding and begging to extract that confession from him; before that, he kept insisting that his refusal to marry me had nothing to do with sexual orientation, that it was because I wasn't the right woman for him. Given how much I loved him, the whole thing was absolutely torture for me.

But somehow we worked through it. And still Matthew and I love each other deeply and will until we die, if not beyond that, and we remain committed, devoted friends. And I believe that one reason we are still friends is because he would not marry me; he would not permit himself to disrupt my life with what he knew in his heart was essentially a selfish act.

I don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the church victimizes gay men, on whom there is intense pressure to marry and father children. But I also don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the men who uphold and benefit from patriarchy--and as long as men wield the priesthood in the Mormon church they do benefit from patriarchy, even when they're gay--victimize women, not only politically but personally, inside the arena of relationships and sex.

Sex sex sex! That's going to be one of the dominant topics for the next few weeks. The discussions of sex will probably be frequent and full. I just can't promise they'll be the least bit titillating, given that they'll always involve Mormons.

Posted by Holly at 6:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2005

Mormon Social Taboos

Tuesday evening I got home from work and found a load of mail, including two cd's of original (and spectacularly good) music from Wayne, and the Fall 2005 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This is one of the primary publications of liberal Mormonism, and I've subscribed (and published in it) for years. I sat down to my dinner and watched part of a movie, took care of some teaching stuff, had a bath. Then I picked up the issue of Dialogue and checked the table of contents, and found this:

GETTING OUT/STAYING IN: ONE MORMON STRAIGHT/GAY MARRIAGE

Getting Out by Ben Christensen 121

Homosexual Attraction and LDS Marriage Decisions by Ron Schow 133

Thoughts of a Therapist by Marybeth Raynes 143

Staying In by Ben Christensen 148

I gave the section a cursory scan--that was about all I could bear--then went to bed. I fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep for an hour, got up and read Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun for a class I'm teaching on war literature (because after the Dialogue thing, I needed something cheerful and lighthearted), tried to medicate myself into oblivion, eventually succeeded.

Wednesday morning I got up and reread the whole section carefully.

Here is what Ben Christensen, a 24-year-old gay Mormon married to a woman by whom he has fathered a nine-month-old daughter, has to say about the fact that he can't mention to his friends that he "can't stop thinking about this guy in religion class":" "It ticks me off that Mormon social taboos force me to lie about who I am."

Mormon social taboos.

That's what's to blame for the fact that he can't discuss his same sex attraction: Mormon social taboos.

Not Mormon doctrine. Mormon social taboos.

Nothing wrong with the doctrine--which says that homosexual behavior is a sin; no, it's just Mormon social taboos.

If you're not Mormon, you have no idea how big this issue is. Many religions venerate celibacy; many other religions tolerate it. Not Mormonism. Celibacy is unnatural; sex before marriage is, according to some leaders in the church (and one of my friends from college, one of the very few people whom I will never again speak to), a sin akin to MURDER (that's right: sex before marriage is the moral equivalent of killing someone in cold blood); and the entire reason we are sent to earth is to get bodies, have sex, and create children. So there's some room in many other religions for reconciling religious faith and homosexuality by choosing celibacy, but almost none in Mormonism--at least, not if you want to be respectable and happy.

Christensen writes of his engagement to Jessie, who knows about his attraction to men, that

Difficulties arose fairly quickly.... It bothered Jessie that she was usually more interested in kissing than I was. This bothered me too, but I didn't know what to do about it. I definitely loved her, and out of that love an attraction was growing, but to be honest it was nothing compared to the strong desire I had for men. But then it's not accurate to even compare the two feelings. My attraction to Jessie, the drive that made me want to hold her in my arms and feel her body next to mine, came entirely from my heart. On the other hand, the drive that made me want to feel a man's body next to mine was purely a libido thing. I've never allowed a physical attraction to a man to become any more than just that. Apples and oranges.

He marries Jessie for a variety of reasons, one of which is that "God told [him] to." Another is that he feels his only two alternatives are a conventional, monogamous straight Mormon marriage on the one hand and "[running] off to San Francisco and [embracing] a rampant life of unrestrained queerness" on the other.

A year later, at the ripe old age of 25, he is able to critique his earlier essay and the responses to it, by writing

Critiquing my essay, a friend asked, "Can you really separate love and sex so easily? I can't." I discarded his concern, believing I had a deeper understanding of love and sex. After all, he writes novels about missionaries who fornicate and teenaged boys who make out with cow udders. For me, the distinction between love and sex was clear. As I've become more honest with myself, though, I see that Marybeth states my dilemma more accurately when she says that people in my situation choose "between a deep love and erotic attachment plus love." This choice is a good deal more difficult than the over-simplified choice I thought I was making. By choosing heterosexual marriage, I've denied myself the experience of loving someone I am naturally attracted to and my wife the experience of loving someone who is naturally attracted to her.

Glad he figured that out eventually.

Aside from a few lines of dialogue in which Jessie reassures the author that she still wants to marry him despite the fact that he is gay, we never get to hear from her.

Ron Schow and Marybeth Raynes, the two respondents, are very respectful of the deliberate choices Ben Christensen is making at the same time they underscore the challenges and difficulties he is setting himself up for. Perhaps I might respect those choices more myself if I hadn't heard it all before, some of it almost verbatim. I'll never forget being told by the love of my life, "Look, I'm not really gay, and I still want to marry a woman. It's just that I prefer sex with men to sex with women." I could think of no response to that statement.

I'm grateful for my two closest friends on earth, both of whom are gay (formerly Mormon) men, and I'm also grateful that neither of them married me.

I'm not done.

Posted by Holly at 8:08 AM | Comments (2)

August 19, 2005

Out with the Guys

Last night was one of those nights I go hang out with the guys and talk about writing. Sweet Baby Jesus was there (the tattoo on his arm looks so fabulous! I promise I will get around to writing about that soon), as was Tom, as well as a guy I'll call Lemonhead, because he told me that's his nickname, and another guy I'll call the Monk, because he said he is one. The weather was pleasant, so we sat on the patio of a bar where the drink special was "anything Stoli for two bucks," and I had no problem sucking down four cranberry stolis and one stoli & tonic.

We are all writers, so we workshop our stuff. SBJ and Lemonhead had some really great poems up, the Monk gave us a very poetic short story, and I submitted an essay about menstrual problems I had as a fifteen-year-old anorexic recovering from a bizarre and traumatic illness. The piece is actually kind of funny and I like it as well as anything I've written in a while, but I was still worried the guys might be freaked out by the subject matter. I shouldn't have worried. They gave me really smart suggestions for improving the piece, and didn't seem a bit weirded out that they now know all kinds of details about my menstrual cycle. They also claimed to be grateful for a little clarification about what happens in a gynecologist's office.

It was a fun evening, and we even talked about yesterday's blog entry, and my ambivalence about being "one of the guys." They protested that I could hardly be considered that, and pointed out that I don't look anything like a guy. I admit, on these evenings, I make sure I look better than I do when I go to the grocery store, when I'm content to throw on some old skirt and top and put my hair in a pony tail. No, I dress up: partly because I like dressing up, partly because I want to reinforce my own sense of my femaleness. I wear a dress I like, lots of jewelry, do something with my hair. Last night I was able to wear a dress I haven't been able to fit into for the past three years: this strange malaise I've been in since I got home from Sunstone has made it really hard for me to eat, and I've lost ten pounds in two weeks. The dress must have looked OK, because I noticed that I turned a few heads. That's always nice.

Anyway, I feel better about spending so much of my time with men. And if I'm going to be one of the guys, I'm pretty lucky that this is the group of guys I get to be one of.

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

August 18, 2005

One of the Boys

Right now, I'm kind of one of the boys. My two best friends here are Tom, who is married, and SBJ, who is not, but as I said, my affectionate mocking of him is tinged with the fond feelings of a slightly snotty big sister.

By a significant margin, most of my colleagues are male. I do have some fabulous female colleagues, but most of them are married with small children. These are women with PhDs, diverse research interests, cool husbands, and very busy schedules. For various reasons, it is harder for these women to socialize than it is for the guys I work with. Although I manage to meet these women occasionally for lunch or coffee, a more common event in my social life is to find myself the solitary woman at a table with three or four or five guys, drinking a round of Arrogant Bastards (a local brew), talking about poetry and tattoos and bowel disorders and gross medical procedures and how the fact that SBJ likes neither Pink Floyd nor Led Zeppelin is one more thing that makes him odd.

I'm sort of not complaining, and I sort of am. I'm not really used to this "hanging out with the guys" business. I'm the second of five children: four daughters followed by a son everyone expected to be another girl. My mother has a very strong personality; my father clearly loved us very much but was never good at showing affection; my grandfathers were downright distant; plus I had all those sisters and no brother until I was almost nine; so I was very female-identified as a child. Then there was the fact that I grew up Mormon, and saw very early that a lot of men were power-hungry bastards. It's not that I never found good men--I found plenty--but I was always very wary of them, until they demonstrated that they deserved my trust.

I was and am straight, which was complicated by the messages I got from the church, particularly when I went on a mission. Men in the Church, I was told often enough, were in authority over me; I should not try to be on an equal level with them. But exerting the authority of the priesthood seemed to render men not larger and stronger, but stunted and misshapen. Consequently that's how I saw them: distorted, disjointed creatures, some of whom one could be romantically attracted to, some of whom one must try to obey despite their failings; none of whom could demand from me the mutual respect and understanding I felt ought to exist between me and other women, who were my equals. The good relationships I achieved with men occurred when they sought to minimize their authority, not when they sought to enlarge it, as so many of them often did.

It got easier to see men as complex, complete human beings when I left the church, but anyone who thinks the sexes are equal, that men don't have opportunities and freedoms that women lack, just isn't paying attention. Patriarchy is strange. The guys I hang out with are good guys, and I value and enjoy their friendship. But it's still weird to spend so much of my time with a large group of men, none of whom are or ever will be a romantic partner.

I'm going to have more to say about this, about gender roles in general and my own gender performance--actually, I've already started saying things here about my own gender performance--but I'm planning on saying even more. It's something I've been thinking about for a very long time, given the fact that I was a feminist by the time I was twelve and that my boyfriend from kindergarten, my date to the prom, and my ex-fiancé all grew up to be gay Mormon returned missionaries. Then there is my dear friend Wayne, who, according to his myspace.com profile, was "Formerly a bed-wetting, drug-addicted, Mormon Drag Queen."

Yeah. This is a topic where I have something to say.

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

August 15, 2005

Moving Day

In addition to my friend and colleague Tom, I also have a friend and colleague, Sweet Baby Jesus. That's not the name his parents gave him; that's the name he gave himself. It rather fits. Sometimes we call him SBJ, and sometimes we call him Dr. Sweet Baby Jesus, because he has a PhD in one of those silly, useless areas of the humanities.

Sweet Baby Jesus just moved out of a horrid apartment complex full of old ladies who hang wreaths of dried flowers on their doors, changing the wreath to match the season. He never fit in because his door remained unadorned, no matter what the time of year. But now he's living in a cool semi-detached house across from a park.

SBJ does not have a lot of stuff--people who name themselves after wandering mendicant faith healers often don't--but he still has more stuff than he could move on his own. So he asked me, Tom, a new colleague ML, and her husband HC, to help him load up a truck and shlep everything across town. He said that if we did, he would reward us with pizza and beer, and as an added treat, we could watch him eat an entire large pizza on his own.

It took only an hour to get everything in the truck from the old place and out of the truck at the new place.

And then it was time for pizza. Since we are a lively bunch of cynical academics, and since we began drinking around noon, the conversation centered on meaningful concerns, such as when SBJ would host his first party in his new place. "I was thinking I'd have a craft night some time soon," he said. He says things like this all the time, and it always makes me giggle. "We're going to go back to my apartment to make collages," he told me a few weeks ago, when I asked him how he planned to entertain a friend who was visiting from out of town. He would have made such a great Mormon girl. We were always crafts nights: tie-dying t-shirts, stringing beads, practicing embroidery. Don't get me wrong, I dig that stuff--it just seems funny to have someone organizing an evening where a bunch of PhDs sit around a dining room table and decorate t-shirts.

"Collages again at this crafts night?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said.

"Candles?" asked HC.

"Door wreaths?" asked ML.

"Door wreaths would be good," I said.

Then we started talking about lame superpowers. ML had a good lame superpower (very oxymoronic statement, I realize, but hopefully you know what I mean): she is related to so many people through families that have split through divorce, then extended themselves through remarriage, that she can probably manage a way to make YOU related to her. She offered to set me up, for instance, with an uncle of hers--she says he's the right age for me, a die-hard ex-Catholic (which should complement my die-hard post-Mormon status well), has liberal politics and a job that involves helping the under-privileged. He lives a couple of states away from all of us, but still in the same time zone, which is closer than anyone else I'm interested in. So we'll see how powerful this lame superpower of hers is.

Then it was 2 p.m. and any remaining pizza had grown cold (we were all pretty sure SBJ did not manage to eat an entire pizza on his own, but hey, it was his house, so we weren't going to insist) and we all had stuff we ought to go do (I really need to write a couple of syllabi) so we left SBJ to his unpacking.

And that is the thrilling story of my thrilling Monday. Check back for more on SBJ, who gave me permission to write about his very cool new tattoos.

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

August 10, 2005

The Ultimate MF

Yesterday on campus I told my colleague Tom that one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to share with the world my recent insight that the Mormon god is the ultimate motherf***er: he's up there in the celestial kingdom, having sex with all those mothers in heaven.

Tom wanted some elaboration. I said, "According to Mormon doctrine, we are supposedly all the literal spiritual offspring of a father and mother in heaven. Our spirits were conceived by the sexual intercourse of God with one of his wives--according to Joseph Smith, he might have plenty--that's the whole polygamy thing."

"So this is real sex," Tom said. "It's not just some spiritual thing, or is it? Does it involve actual body parts?"

"Absolutely," I said. "God has a body, parts and passions. It's a basic tenet of Mormon doctrine." I told him about being a teenager and being shepherded into the cultural hall with all the other young men and women, where a high councilman told us in no uncertain terms what was at stake in the phrase "families are forever": only in the celestial kingdom, the highest level of Mormon heaven, would people allowed to be sexually active; everywhere else--and this is a quote I remember almost 30 years later--"You'll all be just steers and heifers." In other words, the promise of an eternity of sex in the next life was why we better not have any until we were married in this life.

"Huh," said Tom, who is the son of a Baptist minister. "Heavenly sex."

"But it's all about reproduction, not fun, which means eternal PMS and endless celestial pregnancies for some of us," I cried.

"I like it," he said. "It's a metaphor for something. I just don't know what."

But I, on the rag, heavily drugged by the muscle relaxant ibuprofen and aware throughout the conversation of the blood gushing from my body, doubled over in horror and buried my face in my hands.

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