In the Image of God They Were Created

I've struggled with feminism for a long time, and have felt generally schizophrenic about the whole idea since probably junior high.  It's been hard for me mostly because if you say that you're not 100% on board with feminism you tend to get lumped in with the misogynists, and that's certainly not descriptive of me; that being said I am certainly not 100% behind feminism as I have often encountered it. What's stuck in my craw with the majority of the feminist approaches I've found is that they seemed to have sprung up as as a polemic to misogyny and as such they end up turning into righteously indignant misandry masquerading as real change.  I very much believe that gender equality is an essential component of a healthy psyche and society, but as long as the discussion is predicated on a polemic paradigm I don't foresee much progress in the future.  If it were possible, however, to move towards a more dialectic approach to gender relations ... well, then, we might could be getting somewheres.

The upshot of all this thinking about reworking the antagonistic concepts in gender relations has me thinking about the whole idea of pitching women's rights to men.  In my experience, presentations about gender relations have focused on the damage that inequality has wrought on women and I completely agree that gender inequality has visited a host of evils on the women of our culture.  I am not a woman, so I can't fully empathize with the experience, but I fully believe that cultural messages about the feminine have a profound impact on self esteem, efficacy, and perceived vocational options for the females.  This approach no doubt has moral justification, but can easily end in the polemic and antagonistic mess mentioned above.  What gets lost in the shuffle, however, and where the dialectical approach brings some wiggle room is how damaging women's inequality is to men.  Discrimination necessitates dehumanization, and dehumanizing the feminine is a profound tragedy.  Dehumanization of the feminine is devaluing the love of a mother, discounting the exhilaration of erotic connection, and denying the joy of providing nurture.  No wonder so many guys today hide their faces in microbrews and fantasy football stat sheets and interminable rounds of Halo ODST.  Men: Gender relations isn't about being guilted or intimidated into acting in a politically correct manner, it's about recognizing the incalculable value of the feminine in both the women around you as well as in your own self.

I'm still polishing my ideas on the subject, and if you're a guy or a girl or know one of either, I'd love to hear what you have to say about the topic.

Adjustments

I watched The Adjustment Bureau over the weekend; I enjoyed the film, and along the way came to a few conclusions.  1: If Emily Blunt and Matt Damon had a child, they would produce the cleftiest chin known to mankind.  2: Men in fedoras are inherently suspicious.  Yes, this includes hipsters.  3: I was somewhat disturbed by the central premise of the movie.

Talking to his guardian angel (who, 4: Anthony Makie looks a LOT like Will Smith ... long lost brother?), Matt Damon is told that he cannot be with his clefty dream girl because to do so would ruin both of their dreams.  He would never run for President o' the United States; she would never become Dancing Jesus.  The explanation proffered is that to be with one another would blunt their ambition.  To very closely paraphrase the movie, being with one another would 'be enough,' and they would no longer need to be driven to succeed.  SPOILER ALERT: SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU'RE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.  So the movie goes on to have the mystical 'Chairman' rewrite the plan of the world for them to be together and it's all very lovey dovey, but it never goes on to address the question of whether or not them being written back into one another's stories precludes their destined accomplishments.

The message, however, is trouble to me.  Is it really impossible to achieve greatness AND be in a fulfilling relationship?  The picture often portrayed in cultural institutions (films, politics, etc) is that balancing family and work is an impossibility.  Even films which emphasize the importance of family over work often have the protagonist give up their professional ambition in favor of caring for their families.  My daughter is 4 1/2 months old, I have been married to my wife for 6 1/2 years, and I really feel like I am driven to succeed because of them.  Not because I need to prove anything to myself or to them, but because I want to be successful.  This is the difference between wanting to challenge myself and needing to chase a phantom to prop up a sense of self worth.  And most days I believe that.  Some days, though, some days I wonder if Hollywood don't have it right ...

Commitment

My best friend James and I have known each other for about half of our lives so far; everything from this point onwards is going to be us knowing one another longer than we haven't.  Two years ago today I had the profound pleasure to be his best man as he was married to the most amazing and inexplicably perfect woman in the world for him, and below is the text for the toast that I gave that night.

The night before he got engaged, James told me, "I think I could handle not being married," waited a beat while I looked at him with a cocked eyebrow, and finished, " ... but I'd probably end up pretty weird."  And that's part of the genius of language, the flexibility of definitions.  A mutual friend of ours, James Lyons, once showed James and me a giant brass soy bean he had sculpted for his future wife and explained to us that as a person handles brass the oils and moisture from their hands will patina the metal.  The trick being that everyone's touch results in a different patina depending on their diet and nutrition, body chemistry, etc and has its own unique impact on the way the brass ages and changes.  I'm not sure what kind of effect dozens of powdered doughnuts and gallons of mountain dew have on a brass patina, but I do know that as [James] and Patrisha begin to share one another's joys and handle one another's challenges, that you will uniquely impact one another.  In effect, you will be weird.  Not the pale, long goatee wearing, wood-shaving sprinkled weird you would be left to your own devices for the next 80 years, but weird in a glorious way you never could have achieved on your own.  I'm proud to have done my part in making you as weird as you are today, and pleased to have the honor of watching that processes continue to unfold between you and your wife. So here's to growing old and weird with the ones we love.

I have been very happy to be not only a part of their wedding, but a part of their lives for the past two years.  I look forward to the day that they can both look back to Dec 5, 2009 and realize that from this point on they will have been married longer than it took them to find each other.

My Christmas Conundrum

Sometimes a worm ain't the only thing at the bottom of a tequila bottle.  What do you figure the over/under would be on how many drinks you'd have to get into Joseph of Nazareth before he admitted that he was pretty pissed about being God's cuckold?  I mean, as far as being a cuckold goes ... being one to God is pretty much as good as it gets, but he couldn't have been 100% thrilled about the situation, right?  Yeah, the Bible talks about him balking and deciding to divorce her quietly; that is, until he is strong-armed into staying with her by an Angel of the Lord.  I know he gets a lot of credit for being a stand-up guy and all, but it kinda makes me wonder if the Angel said "Don't be afraid to marry her," or if he really said, "Be afraid not to marry her."

Maybe this is all heresy and I'm going to Hell for it ... but these are the things I think about now when I listen to Christmas carols ...

Space Out

Dissociation is augustly defined by Wikipedia as "an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning." While that might not sound like a ton of fun to you at first blush, and in a clinical context can indicate significant trauma, an altered state of consciousness is the place from which most great art is born. Not necessarily chemically induced, in a state of what I like to call 'constructive dissociation,' artists are able to tap into the depths of their own psyche and retrieve material that connects to a wide audience on a deep emotional level. I heard an interview with the guy who plays lead for Springsteen one time, talking about what its like to engage in a dissociative experience playing in front of tens of thousands of people. Paraphrasing, Lofgren said that during a concert he had the experience of looking down at his hands playing a riff and struggled to convince himself that he had to keep playing the guitar because he felt like if he stopped his hands would continue to play all on their own. He was completely clean and sober, and entirely lost in the music in an altered state of consciousness. The host of the interview rightly elaborated that people chase a similar experience taking drugs, having sex, playing sports or any other myriad pursuits; we are looking for the chance to loose ourselves in an experience, to stop thinking and start being.

For me, one of the most important revelations of the past year has been a change in my Myers-Briggs personality type from ESTP to ENTP, meaning I have moved from weighing data and observables to trusting my 'gut feelings.' This is likely somewhat the result of me practicing psychotherapy for the past several years, but is also at least somewhat associated with me re-discovering who I am and moving past what other people have told me I am.¹ One of the ways that I really enjoy getting lost in my intuitive nature and 'constructively dissociating' is fighting. Boxing doesn't leave time for evaluation or weighing alternatives, for me it is a visceral and thoroughly enjoyable dissociative experience in which I am not thinking about anything at all and am simply present. Very Zen. I encourage you to find that thing for you, and do it as often as possible. Hopefully for you, it doesn't involve pugilism.

¹ I realize that's a somewhat loaded statement, just not one I want to unpack in this blog post. Maybe next week ....

The Ugly Truth

Sometimes I get weird ideas, and Saturday was one of those times. Washing dishes, a truth which has been self evident for most of my life revealed itself to me. In the words of Smee ... "I think I just had an apostrophe." As a child of the 80's I've grown up hook-line-and-sinker accepting the Disney story lines. This Saturday, though, while listening to my 'Show Tunes' Pandora station, I realized that maybe there was more to the story or Beauty and the Beast than met the eye.

Belle's own collection of quirks aside (scroll to #4), her two legitimate suitors in the movie are 1: A megalomaniac who excels at myriad pursuits and is universally revered in town and 2: A ... well ... an illiterate reclusive megalomaniac surrounded by traumatized servants quaking in fear of him and who was cursed because of said megalomania into what can best be described as a bipedal feral lhasa apso. With horns.

Now I'm not saying that Gaston wasn't a douche; he clearly was. All I'm saying is, The Beast clearly was as well. When stuck with two terrible choices, why are we being asked by Disney to applaud Belle for choosing either of them? The more I think about it the more the story seems to promulgate the mephitic belief that if you love your abusive significant other long enough and well enough they will eventually melt into a gooey tub of love and you'll live happily ever after. Seriously, wouldn't Le Fou be a better choice for Belle at this juncture? Or a convent? Or literally anything else?

Just saying ...

Back in the Saddle

Probably the worst thing about trying to start writing again is the part where I try to come up with a justification for 1: starting again and 2: quitting in the first place. Over the past couple of months I'd found myself repeating the mantra: "I must return to writing," only to find myself several weeks later reciting the same thing without any movement and now that I'm actually sitting down at the computer to compose a masterpiece I find myself chasing my rhetorical tail trying to come up with a clever and profound way to say, "I got real busy for a while and stopped doing something I really like doing for the sake of watching tv and playing Angry Birds." I even spent about 20 minutes massaging awkward attempts to cram psychosocial theory into an introspective piece about the fear of failure and the difficulty of change, etc etc. Below are some excerpts from those attempts.¹

The reality is, though, that I just kinda stopped writing once I got done with grad school and started working. I got out of the habit, like working out and eating healthy. The only excuse I need to get back into it is: I like it. The only excuse I can think of for why I quit in the first place is: I didn't quit (which to me sounds like an active choice) so much as I just kinda ... stopped? And started doing something else. Writing for me is like one of your favorite recipes that you forget about because you've been too busy to cook for a while and you've just been eating Ramen and pb&j. I don't really need much of an excuse to starting eating the good stuff again, other than "It's good!" I just sometimes forget that it's good because I get all stacked up with other stuff, which is the best excuse I can come up with for why I stopped in the first place. There may indeed be deep-seated and menacing psychological reasons for me stopping (and, conversely, starting again) to write, but seriously. Who wants to read about that on someone's blog?

So if you made it through all of this, the cliff's notes version of the post is this: I'm going to write at least one post/week. Not because I have to but because I like to I just forgot that I like to for a while. So ... GET READY WORLD, IMMA WRITE AGAIN!!!!!

¹Writing (and by writing I just mean communicating) has been one of those things that I've always been doing. Coming back to things is hard; it can be so difficult, in fact, that it can often prevent a return at all. Few things in life are as frustrating than returning to an activity that used to come effortlessly only to find that the skill is not there anymore.Classically, Not just hard because That's why the story of the prodigal son strikes a chord, and that's why the 12 step program makes people do it. It is That's probably not the most profound statement ever made, but cliche as it might be I've found it to be one of the most true statements.