Not-So-Great Expectations

It's a Catch-22, in my opinion. A vast number of unreflected bigots out there believe that gays and lesbians are immoral simply because they are gay or lesbian. Where does this hugely wrong idea come from? I would argue that it's an inextricable aspect of patriarchy, which we still live in, somewhat diluted though it is.

Patriarchy in its undiluted form, which remains the basis of our social order, insists on rigidly separate gender roles which are meant to underscore its fundamental(ist) concept, male superiority. Everything is set up in neat (and oversimplified) dualisms. Every characteristic a person possesses is labeled "masculine" or "feminine," and these characteristics are traditionally presented as overdetermined "opposites." "Rational" versus "irrational," "strong" versus "gentle," "aggressive" versus "submissive," and so on and so forth ad nauseam. And for every one of this infinite series of dyads, the one labeled "female" or "feminine" is seen as inherently inferior to the one labeled "male" or "masculine," even if the consequences of either "masculine" or "feminine" concepts running amok, unleavened, are quite obviously destructive to the entire society. And even though it's quite obvious to any person with common sense that everybody has traits of both kinds, as well as others that don't fit neatly under either rubric.

Rigid policing of gender roles starts at birth, as many a classic experiment has shown. Boy babies are identified with the color blue (true blue), girl babies with the color pink (soft, gentle, unthreatening). Instead of being dressed in practical, unisex baby clothes, colors for boys and girls remain, on the whole, quite gendered. You'll hardly ever see a boy baby in any item of clothing featuring a floral print, and very few girl babies will be decked out in overalls embroidered with trucks and earth movers. You'll see more of the latter than the former, because for a girl to be a tomboy means she's aspiring to the higher order, while gods forbid a boy embrace anything "girly," be a "sissy"! People play more actively and roughly with boy babies while girls are coddled and cuddled and carefully kept away from harm (and a lot of learning experiences). Boys are stifled emotionally very early on, while girls' emotions are sometimes overdeveloped by constant indulgence. Names, colors, how we're treated -- we're pushed to embody one or the other gender role or gender type from Day One.

I feel for gay and lesbian kids. Even if they're lucky enough to have parents who don't think homosexuality is intrinsically wrong, they're surrounded by a society pervaded by homophobia. Long before we're old enough to be able to critically analyze the ideas with which we're bombarded, we're overwhelmed by a tide of prejudice and stereotypes. Elementary school kids -- sometimes even kindergarten or playschool kids -- already know that if you're called "fag," it isn't a compliment. They know it's a swear-word long before they have any idea what it means.

Children are shaped by what is expected of them. This is basic psychology. And our society, on the whole, tells gay and lesbian kids that they are abnormal, wrong, sick, perverted, pretty much doomed. At its most "positive," it makes them feel that they have to fit into a set of gay and lesbian stereotypes: gay men are all supposed to be sissy, lesbians are all supposed to be butch. In other words, if you're a gay man, you're supposed to tend toward the "female" stereotype, while lesbians are supposed to resemble the "male" one. No room for full development of one's true individual characteristics, whether you happen to be gay or straight. But for homosexual youth, the added, huge burden of being assumed to be morally inferior. And this not-so-great expectation is reinforced by ongoing, massive legal discrimination.

It's so incredibly obvious to me that separate can never be equal. "Allowing" gay or lesbian couples "civil unions" isn't a generous gesture, it's a means for the condescending majority to reinforce the idea that their partnerships are at best less than marriages. What presumption! We in the United States are raised with the notion that our country is the best, in every way. Right. The truth of the matter is that a goodly number of industrialized Western nations, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, are light-years ahead of us in terms of eliminating legalized bigotry against gays and lesbians. In much of Canada, gays and lesbians have been able to marry for years. They can also marry in Spain, home of the Spanish Inquisition! And even Britain, from which we inherited much of our knee-jerk homophobia, has dropped any form of "gay ban" in its armed forces. I had to laugh when I read that an American reporter covering a story about "gay integration" in the Dutch army -- Holland is another nation that's way ahead of us on this score -- asked some Dutch soldiers if they weren't concerned about having to share a tent with their openly gay captain. "Sure," they answered. "He snores!"

Sometimes I get very frustrated with my beloved country. There's so much blinkered religious dogma, unconsidered, self-righteous bigotry, an apparent total unwillingness to stop wasting energy on labeling, segregating and hurting people because of how and whom they love. Just think what we could do if we had all the energy at our disposal that's now being squandered on policing gender boundaries, trying to enact legislation that actually worsens legalized discrimination. Why do people think they should be able to force anyone "different" to live a lie, either depriving them of rights or making what limited rights they do have (or their ability to keep their job, live in their home, etc.) contingent on how well they pretend to be someone they're not? It's exactly as Harry Truman (not a past U.S. president I entirely love, but a man with a lot of good sense) said about racial discrimination: "For every black man you want to keep in the gutter, there'll have to be a white man in the gutter to keep him there." We need to wake up and realize that as long as our society continues to prescribe second-class status for gays and lesbians, and preach hate at them, the whole of the society will remain much less than it could be. Time to stop judging by sexual preference or orientation, and start setting our sights on the goal of making ourselves better individuals and making our country the truly great place it might become.

What Difference Does It Make?

Well, posts will be few and far between, it seems. But the topic of the last one remains very pertinent, since yesterday saw the courts of the state of Iowa OK same-sex marriage. I always thought Iowa had more than its share of common sense, and it's nice to have that confirmed. One of my favorite people in the world grew up in Iowa, though I fear her very fervent Catholicism may put her on the other side of this issue (she may well surprise me though, she has before!).

Anyway, I'm still with Keith Olbermann in his famous Special Comment on the horrific Proposition 8 in California last year (see "What Is It To You?" post, November 2008). What difference does it make to anyone if someone else chooses to be happy in a different way? If two people are responsible and respectful and faithful to each other, who cares if they are of different genders or not? How does the same-sex marriage of two people damage the heterosexual marriage of two others who don't even know them? Why do we need to gin up tons of energy and create tons of bad feeling on this issue?

I've read the whole bible and Jesus said nothing at all about gays (let alone lesbians). The few repudiations or condemnations of homosexual behavior in the Old Testament seem to focus on temple prostitution, which was part of the religions of some of the Jews' pagan neighbors. The men of Sodom who threaten to gang-rape Lot's guests in one incident are out to show their disrespect for and power over the "strangers," and are condemned for violating the laws of hospitality in general. (When Lot offers to send out his virgin daughters to be raped instead, no one seems to think that is out of line, either!) And the quote that all the bigots harp on, about men not being allowed to "lie with" other men as they do with women, is in my opinion the contribution of a writer freaked out about (a) the idea that a man, in patriarchy, is being "used" like women are "supposed to be" used and (b) the very notion of non-procreative sex, i.e. sex that can't result in a baby.

Well, we are, I hope, in a declining patriarchy where sex is no longer exclusively a sphere in which we re-enact patriarchal power relations (i.e., men on top). We are also on a planet which is over-populated to a critical extent, and should be grateful when people of whatever sexual persuasion express their sexuality without abetting the population explosion!

I remain true to my previously stated opinion that sexual preference does not determine character. There is nothing intrinsically immoral or dirty or shameful about feeling attracted to someone of your own gender. It's immoral to cheat someone, anyone, whom you supposedly love, it's immoral to lie to them or put them at risk, it's immoral to treat them irresponsibly, disrespectfully and cruelly. But what's most immoral, plain downright wrong, is discriminating against people on the basis of whom they love, preventing them from enjoying full civil rights and all the legal and financial protections and safeguards of marriage. I will stand by that until I die.

Back At Last: Some Thoughts on the Hiatus

I'm back. It's been a long hiatus, ever since January 19th. What got me all tied up? Life. Taxes (mine, my spouse's, and my mother's: all done now, happily). Dealing with the fall-out from the dramatic break-down of the economy. Trying to gear up for another challenging year despite very low energy. Which remains sub-prime, to make a bad pun.

But I've been doing a lot of thinking. Funny how deadlines on things you don't care for (like taxes) get the mental juices flowing on just about every other topic. You'd rather be (fill in the blank) and you manage long mental "escape routes" even as you slog your way through column after column of (mostly depressing) figures.

Two things caught my eye these past few days. One: the tabloid headlines about singer Rihanna going back to her abusive boyfriend even after he hit her so hard that apparently her injuries require surgical repair. Two: an almost generic article in the local paper about the ongoing problem of deadbeat dads (it's obfuscatory to say deadbeat "parents," fathers (if you can call them that) hugely outnumber mothers in the category of people who refuse to pay anything to support their children).

Well, that got me to thinking. Why do these patterns persist? Why are we still submerged in a wave of wife- and girlfriend-beating, and another of men who refuse to live up to their responsibilities after they collaborate in putting children into the world?

There's a one-word answer to both: patriarchy. Now, it needs to be elaborated a little. We live in what is still an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, where the majority of men, whether they realize it or not, are accustomed to being the primary focus of attention within their intimate circle. Women are, so goes the party line, supposed to be independent entities, to have a career and so forth, but the bottom line remains that if a woman is in a relationship, her environment is still pervaded with subtle and not-so-subtle pressures and expectations to put the relationship first, while men are expected to put their jobs first (with the woman, if there's one in the picture, tagging along behind).

In most relationships involving a man and a woman, the man, consciously or unconsciously, expects the woman to revolve around him. If he's particularly insecure, anxious or controlling, or all of the above, then any sign, real or perceived, that he's not the center of her world, that she's not willing to sacrifice or subordinate her job, best interests, hobbies, friends, family, even her kids so that she's at his constant beck and call, can result in mental or physical abuse meant to re-establish what he considers the "right order" of things. Even the best of men in this society have imbibed the notion that they and their needs should always be primary. Even a woman in an otherwise largely egalitarian relationship finds herself apologizing for behavior the man does not feel driven to apologize for, and praises her partner lavishly for doing things he takes for granted when she does them.

I don't care how ideal your partnership situation is, if there are a man and a woman involved, the woman is almost certainly accommodating the man a lot more than he accommodates her. I married when I was nearly 30, not a pliable young girl, and my spouse is not a patriarch, but nonetheless I'm the one who moves hundreds or thousands of miles when his job changes, not vice versa. I'm the one who had to create a new social circle every time this happened, while he could dedicate himself to his work. Because I was trained to create and manage a home and followed my default mode instead of standing up on my hind legs and hollering, I -- a woman who hates housework and home-tending -- have ended up responsible for a big house, a yard, a pool, and pretty much all the accompanying paraphernalia.

Before my eyes is the object lesson as to what I don't want for my future. My mother, widowed for more than a decade, is in her mid-seventies. She always found home-making rewarding and loves her garden, but now she finds herself stuck using the vast majority of her dwindling energy to maintain a complex much like the one I live in, only bigger! She's unable to face the mammoth job of dissolving this complex and the emotional upheaval of relocation -- I don't blame her a bit, it's a monster -- which means she'll likely stay there until she dies, and leave me to deal with it all. That, I admit, is not something to which I look forward.

So I'm mustering up my energies and laying the groundwork for downsizing and disposing of lots of loved and unloved junk in an orderly and ruthless fashion before I turn 60, which gives me less than ten years. And I'm going to do it. Because I want to be able to lock the door on a condo and hit the road when I so desire. Because I never was much of a gardener and don't want to stay home all winter to make sure the tender plants are covered every time there's a freeze. Because it's a pain to make the arrangements (and pay the bills) for the maintenance of a tiny private pool that hardly anyone ever uses. And so on.

But mostly because, between having to deal with all the responsibilities and distractions loaded on the average hausfrau, plus a lot of the kind of jobs my father did in my parents' marriage (like the taxes and overseeing the investments (not a fun task at present)), and also managing pretty much the entire social context for myself and my spouse (plan events, make sure relatives and friends get birthday presents and cards, and so forth) plus keeping a weather eye on my mother and his parents, "my work" (like this blog! and my book project) shows precious little progress. Which is very frustrating, and not something I intend to tolerate for much longer. Or I'll end up a resentful, boiling, nasty rhymes-with-snitch.

Life is short. In patriarchy, it's hard even for women with the privilege of higher education and some means to make sure it's what they want, as well as what those around them want.

The struggle continues.

Patriarchy and Dualism: Anti-Liberty, Anti-Life

This is an excerpt from a presentation I made a few years ago at a national conference:

Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the fathers,” and its core concept is the idea that all men are born superior to all women. As Shulamith Firestone put it in her classic book, The Dialectic of Sex, this sexual class system, which in its purest form demands the literal enslavement of women and girls [see Nicholas Kristof's editorial in today's (11/30/08) New York Times on the prevalence of throwing acid in women's faces to punish them and keep them down in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., if you think female slavery is over], serves as the model for all other systems of oppression, such as racism and homophobia.

The key mode of patriarchy is domination. Scholar Riane Eisler has named patriarchy “dominator culture.” Dominator culture can conceive of power in only one form, as “Power Over” others. Every imaginable relationship, including that between parent and child, and that between lovers or spouses, is defined in terms of dominance and submission. Someone has to be “on top,” and someone else has to be “on the bottom.”

To make it easier to achieve this, dominator culture is saturated with dualism, a mode of thinking we are taught from the cradle. Dualism insists that everything boils down to an either/or choice – that you can never have your cake and eat it too. There are only two acceptable or possible answers to any given question, and these two answers are literally poles apart: polarized. They’re opposites. One answer is labeled entirely right and good, and the other is seen as entirely wrong and bad. Needless to say, dualism makes for gross over-simplifications and generalizations, and twists and distorts everything it touches. With a little bit of imagination, in most instances one can perceive a much broader spectrum of choices, and often more than a single option could be embraced. But that wouldn’t fit with the system of “tops” and “bottoms,” where one thing must always be “better” than another.

Patriarchal religions are used to justify and preach this system, and to legitimize the persecution and often extermination of those who resist it, both inside and outside a given culture. For the first two thousand years or so of patriarchy, these religions featured both Gods and Goddesses, but the “top god” in patriarchal religion was always male. The Goddesses were defined as wives, sisters, mothers, love interests or daughters of the male gods, to make sure that ordinary women didn’t get any ideas about freeing themselves from being defined as the possessions of men. For some patriarchs this didn’t go far enough, so about three thousand years ago they started to preach that there was only one god: male, of course. Eventually, several different religions of this type: male monotheism: developed. My friend the feminist art historian calls it “mono-male-theism.” However you prefer to arrange the syllables, the term proclaims: “Just For Men.”

Patriarchy has been with us in the West – Europe and North America – for only about 5,000 years, give or take half a millennium or so. Human beings have existed for much longer than that: hundreds of thousands of years. Patriarchy entered a Europe where many other cultures already existed, cultures that operated with a very different kind of mind-set. These were what Riane Eisler calls “partnership societies.” Partnership societies were quite cooperative and evolved, with high levels of creative sophistication. Their social structures were generally matrilineal – that is, children traced their descent through their mother back to her mother and so forth. These cultures were comparatively non-violent: they did not “focus on the power to inflict pain and kill, but the power to give life and pleasure.”[i] Their religions centered around a Goddess. The earliest European and Middle Eastern images of the Divine Female are up to 400,000 years old.

These partnership cultures were not in the dark about how babies are conceived: they were aware of both the male and the female role in reproduction. Partnership spirituality usually thought of “the divine in both female and male form,” but “the male deities were not associated with thunderbolts or weapons (like Jehovah or Zeus)” and they were, at most, equal to the Goddesses. In partnership cultures, “masculinity was not synonymous with domination and conquest.”[ii]

Patriarchy is a recent human invention. Despite what its religions preach, it is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it has never been “the only thing that’s out there.” There are alternatives to it, and all human-made systems can be changed. In the relatively brief span of its existence, patriarchy has already gone just about the whole way toward proving itself unviable. This comes easily to dominator culture because it is fundamentally “anti-life,” so anti-life that it has made uncounted life-forms extinct and now threatens even the survival of the human species.

Dominator religions preach the unlimited exploitation of our planet Earth, proclaiming that the world was created for “man” to use, and use up if he so chooses, since some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise is his “real home.” Their expectation is that “mankind” will end by causing global disaster, that human beings are incapable of self-control and common sense. In my local paper in May 2002, one Mike Hosey, a Christian, confidently stated:

“Christianity, in general, believes the world to be a lost and dying place in need of salvation; a place where people need to put their faith in God, and not in themselves.”[iii]

I totally disagree with this view of the world and of humanity, and I believe there is real reason for hope. As Riane Eisler points out, in the West, over the past 300 years and more, a historical continuum has developed that is moving us away from absolute dominator culture.[iv] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “divinely ordained” rule of kings and emperors over their “subjects” was challenged and largely overthrown. The early feminist movement in the 19th century chipped away at the control of men over women and children, while the abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged the entrenched traditions of the enslavement of one race by another, and the use of force by one nation to control another. In the past 100-plus years, civil rights, organized labor, anti-colonial, women’s liberation, indigenous people’s rights, and gay rights movements have arisen to oppose further aspects of domination. A relatively new and very important movement is now taking a stand against domination and violence in intimate relationships: rape, battering, child abuse and incest. Putting an end to intimate violence is central to moving toward a partnership society.

There is no mistaking that this “shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way.”[v] But if you look at the overall trend, we have moved a long distance away from all-out domination and toward partnership in a relatively short time. We are presently in a backlash phase, what Eisler calls a “periodic regression toward the dominator model.”[vi] Yet the irony of globalization is that the world has become so small that people cannot really avoid the knowledge of our mutual world-wide interdependence. We are being forced out of the denial that is typical of dominator culture by phenomena we cannot ignore, such as global warming. The world’s systems of domination are only able to escalate these problems, and as a result it is becoming inescapably obvious that these systems are counter-productive.

[i] Eisler, The Power of Partnership, p. 189
[ii] Eisler, p. 189
[iii] Mike Hosey, in an editorial on the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, The Gainesville Sun, May 20, 2002.
[iv] Eisler, pp. 94-95.
[v] Eisler, p. 95.
[vi] Eisler, p. 95.

On Marriage

Since marriage is dwelling on my mind since the, to me, incomprehensible passage of Proposition 8 in California -- I still don't get that here in America, a coalition of religious and other bigots managed to write something into a state constitution to take a specific group of people's rights away -- here are some musings. After I say that, if you can amend a constitution to take one group of people's rights away, no-one's rights are safe. Of course, we in the U.S.A. do have a long and not very lovely tradition of founding documents with mythologized reputations that began by limiting rights to a very few (propertied white males), and a constant need on the part of marginalized folks to fight to be included in the category "fully human."

Which leads me to one of my pet peeves: reading the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times on a weekly basis and encountering the widespread phrase "The bride is taking her husband's name." Even women in their 50s and 60s are becoming "Mrs. His Name." Now, I understand this if it's a means of getting rid of a former husband's name, but still! The whole phenomenon is like a retro DEvolution. I've gotten to the point where I cheer whenever the announcement says "The bride is keeping her name" or its equivalent!

It's not a coincidence that there's a convention that all but demands that women who marry (and any children of that marriage) take their husbands' last names. It all harks back to thoroughly patriarchal law, as expressed by a famous 18th-century English jurist (William Blackstone) who said, centuries ago, "In marriage, two become one, and that one is the husband." The idea is that women's only claim to social significance (and still, quite often, to economic survival) is as the "helpmeets" (to use biblical language) of their husbands. Every woman's first duty is to create a nurturing cocoon for "her" man, in other words, to serve as his support system, taking care of pretty much every trivial, repetitive chore so that he can shine, at whatever cost to her own individual career (if she aspires to one) or creative work or simply time and room to breathe and be as herself.

Of course, the women are stuck in a bind. If they keep their "maiden" names (wince), they're almost certainly hanging on to another patronymic (father-derived moniker). If they opt for their mother's "maiden" name, they're pretty sure to be choosing her father's handle. Some like to make fun of the '70s feminists who renamed themselves "Sarachild" or "Mariedaughter," but nearly the only way to claim a female-derived name in the dominant U.S. culture is to create one. Something not true of every culture, by a long chalk. For example, Iceland's citizens generally add a suffix meaning "daughter" or "son" to the first name of one of their parents. It used to be standard practice to use the father's name, but it's not necessarily that any more!
I like to think that if I'd been a more evolved life-form when I got hitched, more than two decades ago, my partner and I might have considered choosing a mutual last name we both identified with and which had nothing to do with our family trees. Instead, each of us just kept our own last name, which works very well in our immediate circle of friends and didn't cause any major ructions among our family members.

But living in the Southland, it's amazing how much energy a woman has to devote to getting people to call her by her own last name rather than her husband's! It's a none-too-subtle attempt at social policing that reminds me of a visit to the Bahamas we made about ten years ago. On our return journey, a U.S. customs agent claimed he couldn't give us the family allowance for duty-free purchases. Since we had two separate last names, how could we prove we were married? In that particular situation, I ripped my wedding ring off my finger to show him my partner's name inside -- since then, I've carried a copy of our marriage license just in case anyone else decides to try to make us cry "uncle!"

And I do mean "uncle." Because human beings are really more than flexible enough to commit more than one name per social unit to memory. No, the idea is that women, once married, are supposed to be subsumed, to disappear as independent beings, while men are not. It's just like being labeled "Mrs." No-one expects men to be defined by whether or not they're married. It's "Mr." whether single, wed, straight, gay -- because men are seen as individuals under any circumstances. This is why "Ms." is so useful, and why we should fight to maintain its use. It serves the same purpose for women. (Although one could argue it might be interesting to find a universal honorific or title that doesn't immediately point to gender at all...)

Why "Mrs." or "Miss"? Actually, "Miss" is something that gets awkward if used for any female above the age of about 12. Let's compare our situation with that in Germany, where the titles are really interesting. Men are referred to as "Herr," which means "Gentleman" ("Mann" would be "man.") Women used to be called "Fraeulein" for "Miss" and "Frau," which just means "woman," for "Mrs." In the last two generations, the use of "Fraeulein" has all but ceased (except for little girls), and all women (above the age of say 14) are usually called "Frau." But isn't it interesting that men are ranked as "gentlemen," while all women are just the generic "female"? But at least, with current usage, women aren't automatically classified as derivatives of their male partners, if they have such. (Although it does give one pause to consider that well into the 20th century, a German woman would only be called "woman" if she was married, while she'd remain a "little woman" (Fraeulein) into her 90s if she stayed single!)

OK, must quit while I'm behind. I have to be somewhere in twenty minutes. But these surely won't be my last ruminations on this subject!