Sick and Twisted
March 12, 2008
Women's Magazine Pays Misogynist A**hole to Insult and Demean Women in Print
Thanks to the media news digest I get every morning, I was able to spend several hours following the links detailing the sordid history of How Glamour Fired Nasty Male Blogger after its readers demanded the magazine do so. Turns out some self-proclaimed narcissistic asshole had a blogging gig at Glamour, which he used as a forum for writing about (among other things) running out on a woman after she made dinner for him because he assumed that some sort of small sore on her lip meant she had herpes, and how he then went to a Foo Fighters concert with her a week later, only to use it as an opportunity to feel up some other chick, and how being SUCH a jerk has been really emotionally HARD on him, especially since he forgot to the get the phone number of the anonymous chick at the concert.
The bile rose in my throat as I read about the events from the perspective of the woman who actually bought this creep a ticket to the concert. I'm glad to say that I've never dated anyone this awful, though I was sickened to realize that some of what the guy said echoed lines I heard from my evil ex Adam.... No. Won't go there. It's in the past. Anyway, after all his asshole-ry, this guy has the nerve to claim he's still the wronged one, that he would sue this crazy bitch, except she's crazy--really crazy, and he's afraid of her and for her--if he took legal action, she might hurt someone--even herself, and that would make him sad, because he's both an asshole and a guy with a big heart! As for the other details, well, Jezebel knows and analyzes the whole situation well enough that I don't feel obligated to attempt it myself.
What I really want to know is this: how did such an obvious douchebag and really crappy writer get this gig in the first place? OK, I discovered that part of it is that he used to screw the woman who started the blog at Glamour--it still has her name in the address. But didn't any of the editors read this guy's stuff? Didn't they pay attention to both the misogynist content and the dreadful prose? He treats women like shit, and then writes shitty little entries detailing it all. And for this he got paid? Like, not just with hair care products or a year's supply of Turtle Wax, but with real money, that stuff you can use to buy toilet paper, dog food, hot dog buns, bleach and a place to live?
It's all further proof that most fashion magazines are written and published by people who hate women and consider them stupid. If you don't believe me, check out Jezebel's wonderful column Cover Lies, which decodes the hyped-up teasers on the covers of magazines into the sorry, pathetic messages they really are.
Posted by holly at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)
January 5, 2008
Sartre Was Right
You know my last entry, the one about my New Year’s Resolution to convince myself that “a stranger’s a friend I just haven’t met yet”? Well, I’ve already revised that resolution, because I’ve already seen the limitations of that attitude. And it all has to do with travel, with the fact that getting back from Chicago was as stressful and difficult as getting there in the first place.
I didn’t go into the whole rigamarole here, because it was painful and not that interesting, but it took 48 extra hours to get to Chicago. Mercifully it was the first leg of my journey that was canceled or delayed each time, so I just ended up leaving two days late, sleeping in my own bed each night. This is what you get when you travel so close to the holidays, I thought, and vowed to avoid it again in the future if I could. I thought about canceling the whole trip, but I’d made my plans and had stuff to do, and anyway, I wanted to go. Given how much fun I had, I’m really glad I did.
But then there was the trip home.... I left on schedule, got to Detroit on time, sat down to wait for my connecting flight which was scheduled to depart at 10:10 p.m., and was informed at 9:30 p.m. that it was canceled.
There was one agent at the gate to rebook flights for every last passenger on a completely full flight; it took her 25 minutes to deal with the first stranded passenger, a young mother with a very unhappy, tired baby. No one begrudged the fact that this woman was taken care of first--that poor baby was really tired--but we all resented the fact that no one else showed up to help the rest of us too. Some of us called the 1-800 number, because spending 20 minutes on hold was still quicker than waiting in that line, and learned that there was not another available seat for the next 48 hours, not on any flight into the airport closest to home, or, for that matter, into any surrounding airports.
So my choices were: spend two days in the Detroit airport, or do something like fly to Atlanta on standby then fly to LaGuardia on standby then fly to Buffalo on standby and rent a car. Yeah. And then a woman in line near me said, “I guess my husband and I will just rent a car here, because we’ve got to be back tomorrow--he’s a doctor and he has to see patients. It’s not that far to drive; just four hours.”
At that point I turned to the woman next to me, who was trying to get home for her grandmother’s funeral. “Want to split the cost of a rental car?” I asked.
She paused. “Sure,” she said. “If you drive.”
Then the woman married to the doctor said, “Maybe we could all go together, if you don’t mind riding with our daughters.”
And that’s how I ended up sharing a minivan with five strangers on a four-and-a-half hour trip through some very bad weather. It beat the alternatives, I admit that. I was glad to get home. And I was also glad I’d thought carefully about how I wanted to interact with strangers.
Everyone, including me, was really nice at first. The husband took care of renting the car and also volunteered to drive. That left me time to chat with the daughters, who, at age 9 and 13, were the same age as two of my nieces and even reminded me of them in some ways. The youngest had a fearless curiosity I found charming, in part because I’m not really bothered by snoopy questions: Where were my children? If I didn’t have children, did I at least have a husband? How old was I? Wow, I was a year older than their mother. What did I do all day, since I didn’t have a family to take care of? The older one was excited to learn that I was an English professor and talked about her plans for college.
The weather was awful, and the younger one had this thing about black ice. She was fine as long as the road was so covered with chunky white snow that the rest of us were gripping our arm rests and wondering when it would be safe to exceed 30 miles an hour, but as soon as the road cleared a little and her father resumed the actual speed limit, she shrieked, “Daddy, slow down! It’s black ice! It’s dangerous! I hate it when you drive too fast, just like I hate it when you drink too much!”
Then the older one took off her shoes and socks. Her feet smelled TERRIBLE, which I know as well as anyone because she kept putting them on the back of my head rest. That was upsetting, but more upsetting was the younger one complaining, “Mommy, Sister took off her socks! Her feet really stink!” Then the farting began, silent, deadly farting.... Yes, the older one had a gas problem, and it was profoundly unpleasant, much worse than the foot odor problem. But equally unpleasant was the younger one yelling, “Mommy, Sister farted on my Nintendo!”
And then there was the Nintendo! Why do these electronic gadgets come with sound events?! Why does there have to be a dreadful repetitive jingle while you play some stupid game? Why can't people who play the stupid game hit the mute button?
And there was an argument about whether Topaz was the birthstone for November or December, and what it even looked like, and the older one was wrong, insisting that Topaz was a blue stone and the birthstone for December, but even though everyone told her that her information was incorrect, she refused to accept the possibility that she might be wrong. And then she insisted Carnegie Mellon was in Cleveland.... it’s in Pittsburgh, but at 1:30 a.m. in the middle of a blizzard, who freakin’ cares, which is one of the reasons I didn’t say a word. And then we got a spelling competition: the older one wanted to show that she was smarter than her younger sister, so they’d spell words like “hydrogen” and “nitrogen” and “dioxide” and the father would say who spelled it right.
I’ve only hit some of the highlights here--the drama was pretty much constant from the moment we got onto the interstate until the girls finally fell asleep about 2 a.m. (Though falling asleep does not tend to interrupt farting--if anything it can make it worse.) Every so often the mother would say, “Girls, no more talking. Only grownups can talk. Go to sleep. You have school tomorrow.” And the older one would say, “I don’t want to be quiet, and I can't sleep in the car.” And only after three hours did either parent say, “OK, that’s it: when we get home, you’ll get a time-out.” Which wasn’t much of a threat since we were going to get home at 3:30 and at that hour, a time-out is the same as going to bed, which is pretty much what you want to do.
And I thought, Sartre was right: hell is other people. To be stuck in that minivan forever could serve very well as a form of eternal torment, perhaps not the worst one ever devised, but still effective. I kept telling myself, It will end; it will end; I will get home, and then I will never have to see these people again as long as I live. They’re not new friends; they’re just strangers who have kindly helped me out; and I’m grateful and I wish them well, but I really want to spend the rest of my life as far away from them as possible.
The whole thing was so traumatic that I hardly left my house the next two days. I am not sorry I got into that minvan, because it beat the alternatives, but still, it sucked. I am only now starting to recover. And I have also remembered something from Fight Club about single-serving friends, people with whom you have brief, unrepeated pleasant encounters. I like that terminology. Some strangers turn out to be life-long friends; some turn out to be single-serving friends, some turn out to be people you interact with as long as you need to and not a second longer; and some turn out to be assholes you avoid at all costs. This family fell into the “interact with as long as you need to” category; they weren’t assholes, just not very good at accommodating outsiders introduced to their family circle. Still, had we met under different circumstances, I might have liked them all very much--or rather, I might have continued to like them all as much as I did when I first met them. But the situation played an significant role, and that’s important to remember too. It’s more fun to meet people at parties than in a long line at the airport, and I hope a long time will pass before I have to do that again.
Posted by holly at 1:14 PM | Comments (3)
February 28, 2006
Personal Ads Worth Reading, If Not Worth Answering
I'm able to share this thanks to Juti, who gave me this link to the London Review of Books personal ads. A sample:
Last Valentine’s Day I sponsored a truck load of mitten crabs on behalf on my girlfriend. She left me not long afterwards, but the mitten crabs are thriving. I learned an important lesson as a result of all this, but I’m really not sure what it was. That’s where you come in, F to 35 with profound love of mitten crabs for evenings spent drinking home-made iron brew and plotting the migratory pattern of mitten crabs with amateur mitten crab enthusiast (M, 35, mercifully low sperm count). Box no. 04/05
I don't know about you, but if I knew or cared what mitten crabs are, was under 35, lived in England and felt like dating, I'd be really tempted to respond.
Posted by holly at 7:58 PM | Comments (3)
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 15, 2005
Venus Pandemos
In 1987, when I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona (at that point I was still primarily a poet), a beloved teacher and friend loaned me a copy of Little Star, Mark Halliday's first book. I loved it. It was one of my major influences. The title poem is about wondering who sang lead on some 1950s pop song. Halliday acknowledges that the poem
is not the first time I've tried to
get a rock-&-roll song into a poem and it won't be
the last; it is my need to call out
This counts too!
After reading Halliday, I began writing all kinds of poems with rock & roll songs in them, or inspired by rock & roll songs; I wrote a poem about the video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" and I wrote a bunch of poems about death by hanging inspired largely by "Gallows Pole" by Zeppelin and I wrote a poem called "1812 Overture" but despite the reference to Tchaikovsky the poem is really about how much I love the song "Close to Me" by the Cure, how sad I always was when the song ended, how it was over far too quickly.
Because I was poor, I never bought Little Star; I just returned my teacher's copy after reading it once, then got a copy from the library and kept it until I finished my master's degree four years later. And then it went out of print and I didn't think much about it, aside from the poem "Why the HG is Holy," which is one of my all-time favorite poems.
But a few months ago, I mentioned to Tom how much I loved that book, and as he had a copy, he loaned it to me. And I got to reread a few of the poems I had rather forgotten about, including the longest poem (seven pages) in the collection, which is called "Venus Pandemos."
When I first read that poem, I thought it was funny, mostly because I didn't have much personal reference for what it was talking about. I was an incredibly naive Mormon virgin who had little experience with dating and had never been in love, and though at that point I quit riding the bus to campus because I found enduring the catcalls and whistles I got while I waited at the bus stop on a busy street too upsetting, I still laughed at this poem, thought he was saying something clever. In fact, I once read much of it aloud to one of my friends who ran the women's center before she stopped me, almost heaving with distress. The poem begins
What am I going to do with my desire
for women?To be more specific, what am I going to do
with my interest in women's bodies?
and continues its exploration of this
energy--
I am a little excited just to describe it--
the quick expert evaluation of
face
breasts
ass
and then the instant summary judgment:
"I crave her"
"I'd take her"
"Maybe if I was a little drunk and she threw herself on me"
or, more often:
"Forget it, honey."
Then he spends a stanza discussing breasts, and another discussing ass, and then wonders "if any intelligent feminists will ever read this poem." Then we get a section with a fairly explicit discussion of sex. He says it's not about conquest; rather,
it's
to do something about
her beauty.To do something about her beauty!
Is it a defining quality of beauty
that it won't leave us alone?
He also states that
of course what I'm talking about
has nothing to do with rape. (Nothing?)
So I'm left to rely on my technique of
covert ogling-in-passing--
I eat them with my eyes.
--Is it like eating? It's a job of
disposing of them, one by one:All right, I see that body,
I have seen it.--Which means, that body is taken care of now,
that body is disarmed, normalized,
brought under control, it is forgivable now:
I have disposed of it through ritual,
the ritual of snapshot glancing, and now
its power is dead.
ah. So is it, then, a kind of murder fantasy?
And ultimately, he acknowledges,
Yes. I guess that's what I'm saying.
--But it's your fault, baby,
for being so GOD DAMN BEAUTIFUL.
As for why he is writing this, it's because
every day
I think about strange women, for quick seconds,
in ways I consider dehumanizing.
Should I be ashamed?
I suspect my sexual fantasies are
among the tamest (most repressed?) anywhere;
and I can claim that my relations with the women I know
are relatively
nonsexist . . .
and he goes on for another page and a half before writing
In 1973 and '74 I worked in a feminist theatre group;
my awareness of the women's anger reached the point where
it seemed a crime for men to whistle at women on the street.
Now I'm not going to say it isn't.
But I'm admitting to an enduring energy in me that says
an attractive woman is not simply one more comrade on earth,
nor is she just another nice thing about life;an ATTRACTIVE WOMAN is a PROBLEM.
And that's the real end of the poem, despite one final throwaway stanza.
Now, I'm not trying to dismiss Halliday or his work. I still admire a lot of the poems in Little Star and I was very inspired by his most recent book, Jab. I like how straight-forward and energetic his voice is. But when I reread "Venus Pandemon" for the first time in a long time a few months ago, I didn't react to it the way I did at 23. Eighteen years after first reading it, after enduring several incidences of sexual violence, after hearing a boyfriend say to me, "Look, I'm sorry I date-raped you" (which isn't really all that comforting), after being sexually demeaned by men who claimed simultaneously to care about my welfare and to be feminists, I don't find that poem funny any more. And I feel entitled to assert that a man who finds an attractive woman a PROBLEM, is something of a PROBLEM himself.
And as I listened to that panel on male Mormon feminists, I thought about the fact that any discussion of feminism needed to include a discussion of this issue.
Posted by holly at 7:14 AM | Comments (3)
September 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 MARRIAGEGetting 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 30, 2005
I Never Meant to Hurt You
Few things piss me off more than the statement, "I never meant to hurt you," since it's usually mustered in defense of some fairly heinous act.
"I never meant to hurt you... by sleeping with your best friend."
"I never meant to hurt you... by failing to explain that my estranged ex isn't always so estranged."
"I never meant to hurt you... by taking your credit cards and running up charges in excess of your student loan debt."
"I never meant to hurt you... by A) having sex with and B) impregnating you in your own bed while you were passed out from a night of heavy drinking and unable A) to give any kind of consent or B) tell me where the condoms were or C) remember a damn thing."
Well what DID you MEAN to do, asshole? What did you think your actions would result in? I hate that phrase because what it usually translates to is, "I was too lazy/selfish/stupid/mean to consider how my actions would affect you, so I just did what I wanted and hoped I wouldn't have to deal with the consequences."
No one HAS to hurt someone, and who CARES whether or not you MEANT to hurt someone if you really, really did? If I realize that I hurt someone, and I regret it, regardless of my intentions, I say something like, "I'm really sorry. I screwed up. What can I do to make it better?" I don't try to erase my responsibility for the consequences of my actions by saying that causing that hurt wasn't my primary objective, and I never say I HAD to hurt someone, though I have occasionally admitted that I hurt someone on purpose–what else can you do but be honest after you've said something really hateful in the heat of the moment and then have to deal with its effects a few days later when the heat is gone and the relationship frigid? I know I have choices, and I show that I value my right to make them by claiming responsibility for them and their consequences.
I'm not done with this topic, but this entry is long enough, so I'll end here and take the topic up again another time.
Posted by holly at 6:38 AM | Comments (1)