California Unemployment Hits Men Hardest

The bottom has yet to reached in California.  The Los Angeles Times yesterday reported that the unemployment rate for May was 11.5% (”Jobless Rate Sets New State Record,” Los Angeles Times 20 June 2009).  While this increase in joblessness follows patterns, a trend now being noticed is that men are the ones being laid off.  Men and women suffered the same rates of unemployment until December 2007, when three out of every four jobs lost were those of men.  The Times softened the data by graphing the twelve-month average: men averaging 9.6% unemployment versus women’s 8.2%.  In any case, the paper claims, California is in a serious “man-cession.”

Two reasons f0r the trend are suggested.  First, men account for most of the skilled trade labor, largely associated with the housing industry.  Since building has crept to a halt, it’s no surprise that men, who do the bulk of building, plumbing, electric work and repairs, are on the hunt for other work.  The other reason the Times glosses over, but I think is significant: the average female worker earns 78% of what a man gets in a similar occupation.  This wage-gap estimate is exagerrated in my opinion, but even if the number is more like 90%, it makes sense why men could be fired more easily and hired more difficultly.  They just demand too much money.  The male unemployment trend will be one of the long-term trends in white collar sectors during recessions as men catch a nasty side-effect of pay wage privilege.

British Aristocrats on American Women, ca. 1890

A conversation from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, between Lord Henry Wotton and Lord George Fermor: 

“It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle George.”

“I’ll back English women against the world, Harry,” said Lord Fermor, striking the table with his fist.

“The betting is on the Americans.”

“They don’t last, I am told,” muttered his uncle.

“A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase.  They take things flying.  I don’t think Dartmoor has a chance.”

“Who are her people?” grumbled the old gentleman.  “Has she got any?”

Lord Henry shook his head.  “American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past,” he said, rising to go.

“They are pork-packers, I suppose?”

“I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor’s sake.  I am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics.” 

“Is she pretty?”

“She behaves as is she was beautiful.  Most American women do.  It is the secret of their charm.”

“Why can’t these American women stay in their own country?  They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women?”

“It is.  That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it,” said Lord Henry.

Adultery as Religion

The most disturbing religious song I have ever heard comes from the despondent singer-songwriter David Bazan, a.k.a. Pedro the Lion.  Entitled “Rapture,” it describes an adulterous sex scene of the album’s tragic character, a man plummeting into a whirling pool of self-destruction.

     This is how we multiply
     Pity that it’s not my wife
     The friction and skin
     The trembling sigh
     This is how bodies move
     With everything we could lose
     Pushing us deeper still
     The sheets and the sweat
     The seed and the spill
     The bitter pill yet undiscovered

The raunchiness of the scene can’t be stopped, however.  The dissonant chords drive on, paving over any possible voice of conscience along the way.

     Gideon is in the drawer
     Clothes scattered on the floor
     She’s arching her back
     She screams for more

The Bible left by the Gideons remains untouched.  In its place is the illicit affair, raised to the level of religion.  The throes of orgasmic passion are not unlike that of an ancient sex cult:

     Oh, my sweet rapture
     I hear Jesus
     Calling me home

Even after the song rises into a climax and collapses, the whole thing begins again, as if to emphasize the wallowing in depravity. 

A digression: I remember hearing a presenter at the Men & Masculinity Conference from over a decade ago, claiming that men, having been told to restrain emotional expression in so many areas of their lives, turn to sex as the sole outlet for their passion.  Making love – nay, fucking – for men has been baptized as the emotional activity par excellence.  Sigmund Freud came a similar conclusion a century before, that the anxiety of men built up by self-suppression needs a release, and in that release one experiences the (feminine) religious sensation of oneness with the universe.  I wonder if there isn’t an analogue to the male experience in Christianity, that with a subtle prohibition against forms of religious intimacy with God or anyone else, Christian men go looking for release elsewhere.  Whole new bastard religions get born.  Remember how Bishop J.A.T. Robinson testified at the “Lady Chatterley trial” in 1960, claiming that Christians should be able to appreciate the sacredness of sex, even if that erotic awareness is found outside marriage? 

For Pedro the Lion’s adulterer, the voice of Christ is lost in the demonic act.  The thrill of Christian marital fidelity has been supplanted by the idolatrous drama.  Or has it?  Bazan concludes the song with a final, surging refrain:

     Oh, my sweet rapture
     I hear Jesus and the angels singing
     Hallelujah
     Calling me to enter the promised land

The Virtue of Cleverness

This month in Edinburgh, Scotland I spent some time at some friends’ house. A day care meets at their place, and I noticed on several occasions from several carers that the most common positive reinforcement they gave the male children was, “What a clever boy!”

Now, there is a disconnect for Americans on this score, since cleverness is normally associated with guile, pride, or even hypocrisy. Not so on the Isle In fact, just a few days after observing the way that the Brits were intent on instilling creativity and wryness in boys, a friend remarked to me about how the British parliament’s grotesque shaming and massive displays of rhetoric come precisely because they prize wit above all else.  There’s something about the whole tenor of it that sounds like playground politics (remember the ridiculous insults cooked up to embarrass others?). But there is no doubt that the ability to cook up intricate speeches and manipulative maneuvers exercises real social power in a society.

I wonder if this trend will be reflected in the next generation of American children more than the past couple. In the media age words are power, and clever boys turn into clever men.

“I Love You, (Well-adjusted New) Man”

There have always been some uncomfortably close male duos in the past decade: think Turk and J.D. from Scrubs, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Jesse and Chester, even Ren and Stimpy.  But there has seemed to be a proliferation of close male friendships in the last year that have come into the spotlight, all of them examining what it means for two men to be deeply intimate without being sexual.  With the appearance of the show “Bromance” last December, now the term is on everyone’s lips.  I mean, really, what guy doesn’t have a man-crush?

It has been my feeling that Americans are finally coming to grips with the social rewiring we underwent in the 1970s.  Men were increasingly allowed (if not commanded) to be intimate, sensitive, social, emotional, self-aware, even spiritual.  Now, after some initial knee-jerk reactions to it (Rambos and Reagans and Hefners), men are settling into the idea.  Truly, we can be close to our dude-friends, and comfortable with that closeness.  Kind of.

It was with some hope and interest that I went to see the movie “I Love You, Man.”  The basic plot seems predictable - a sensitive guy gets engaged, is disrespected for not having close male friends, tries to meet men, ends up drawing in homosexuals, finally meets a wild hetero friend who initiates him into the wilder side of manhood, triggering a conflict of intimacy between fiance and fiancee, which is then resolved into a happy wedding.  Fair enough.  But I found the quirky conversations between Peter (Paul Rudd) and Sydney (Jason Segel) hilarious and, in their own bizarre way, believable.  The greatest tension happens between male and male, not between male and female.  Peter is utterly civil, but can’t seem to figure out the guy-code (think a self-conscious Michael from The Office); Sydney is the consummate man’s man – but can’t seem to navigate the waters of polite society.  The two men bond over beer, the band Rush, and painful disclosures about emotional and sexual discontent.  All of the sudden, nothing is taboo or occluded.  They can open up about anything, an intimacy which ends up jeopardizing Peter’s engagement.

I was delighted to see the kind of honesty between Peter and Zooey (his fiancee) sparked by a bromance.  Zooey feels threatened by Sydney’s antics, but even more by the kind of emotional energy he is diverting from the couple’s pending marriage.  Isn’t a man supposed to open up to a woman?  Isn’t a man supposed to be emotionally dependent and emotionally fixed on her?  The double-edged sword of bromance appears.   Maybe women like the old man after all.  But it was refreshing to see Peter and Zooey work through their complex tangle of neediness, isolation, and codependence.

What makes the movie work  in the end is Jason Siegel.  His role has to bear single-handedly the full weight of laudable man culture.  He’s strong and sensitive, pointed but disarming, aggressive but apathetic, bigger than life – but just a okay-looking dude with an electric guitar in the end.  He alternates between macho man and soft-hearted bohemian so fast that you can’t help but admire the man, or at least be transfixed by him.  This furious kind of dialectic is what drives the new, well-adjusted man.  I was interested to discover, in an interview with People magazine, Siegel chalks his charm up to being a socialite at heart.  But the anti-social, social edge is what brews up a splendid manly alchemy: “Somehow I was born without a sense of shame.  A lot of things that most normal people would be embarrassed to do, I just have no problem doing whatsoever.”  A man worthy of bromance indeed.

National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality

The first National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality and Anti-violence Groups happens this November 6-7, 2009 at St. John’s University (MN). Various profeminist, egalitarian groups have been meeting at the Men and Masculinities Conference for decades, but this conference marks a fresh attempt to show a unified front of these sub-movements. Key scholars, including the likes of Michael Kaufman, Harry Brod, Jackson Katz and Michael Kimmel are helping to pull together this effort. The conference abstract:

Across the country, groups of male students are making their voices heard! More and more men are finding the courage to say “no” to ideas of manhood and relations between the sexes that aren’t good for women and aren’t good for men as well. They’re speaking out against date rape and violence against women. They support gender equality. Some work through residence life or student activities offices, others through women’s centers and counseling programs. Some are campus branches of national organizations like MVP, White Ribbon, Men Can Stop Rape, 1 in 4, or V-Men. These men face common problems: How to have an impact? How to find positive ways to get their message to other campus men? How to deal with backlash, to work in partnership with women’s groups, to recruit and sustain their groups? For the first time, campus-based pro-feminist men’s groups from across the country are meeting together. To share resources, trade their best ideas, discuss strategies, and simply find out what’s happening on other campuses.

More information can be found at www.michaelkaufman.com/campusmensconference.  They have also issued a call for papers.

This conference strikes me as having some potential to expand the profeminist men’s movement, particularly in its attempt to express positive masculine identifiers.   The movement has had a difficult time rallying too much support in the past, in my opinion, because it has defined masculinity in so many negative terms: against sexism, against rape, against discrimination, against homophobia, etc.  Fighting for equality has been their theme, of course – but how is this a gendered identity?  How do men struggle, how are men struggling for equality in a different way than women?  Perhaps some of the men will be able to engage the nature-arguments and yet say, “Our masculinity is to fight a distinct war within the baser, inherent tendencies among men.”  Perhaps at this conference some truly brave men will be able to say, “Look, guys, we can’t avoid developing some kind of masculinity, even a masculinity vis-a-vis women, so let’s start working towards some healthy concepts of equality-in-distinction.”  Perhaps.

“If You Leave Me, I’ll Die”: Emotional Dependence on Women

I find it strange that our society perpetuates the myth that men aren’t emotionally attached.  It seems to go hand in hand with the way we find it permissible for a girl to be “boy-crazy,” but for boys, only “sex-crazed.” 

In reality, boys and men have intense feelings of emotional dependence on women.  Consider that a recent study (Peggy C. Giordano et al., “Gender and the Meanings of Adolescent Romantic Relationships: A Focus on Boys,” American Sociological Review 71 [Apr 2006]: 260-87) found that male adolescents reported similar levels of commitment to their girlfriends and substantially less confidence in navigating and controlling aspects of the relationship.  I do not know of a study of boy suicides related to this, but I find it frightening that husbands commit suicide ten times more often when their wives die than when the converse occurs (see Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power, 169).  Should we be surprised that widowers and male divorcees remarry at a much faster rate than women?  For all their ascribed independence, men are literally dying to be in a relationship.

The primary reason for this, I believe, is that men have not been given the resources to establish, maintain and express intimacy.  They are taught from a young age that emotional intimacy is inappropriate for a man unless it is directed towards a woman (mothers and wives especially).  Even a man’s “best friend” may only provide a few minutes of deeply emotional conversation – and maybe a hug if they’re both drunk.  Women, in contrast, have practiced their emotions much more openly, and often have an established circle of friends with whom to process their feelings.  But men too often have only one emotional confidant: their wives.  Their wives are the only outlet for emotional release and coitus is the centerpiece of this catharsis. 

A final comment, about wives’/girlfriends’ mixed responses to men’s support groups.  Sometimes women feel threatened by these group affiliations, whether they be AA-style recovery meetings, ManKind Project I-Groups, or church sponsored studies.  The fear is that these groups are being used to foster antipathy toward women, or detracting from personal or family time.  In a few cases this may be the case.  But I would challenge a woman to ask herself if she feels threatened in large part because her man is acquiring emotional resources from a venue outside herself.  More than that, I can say from personal experience that I come home much happier and more in love with my wife after a men’s group meeting.  Breaking the cycle of desperate compulsion for catharsis, a support group can provide skills and generative energy for a man to bring home with him.

Edward Taylor: Becoming a Man Again

[This follows the previous post]

How does Edward Taylor return to the world of men, the world of the masculine, after playing the woman? Taylor never trades places with God, making God feminine, as Clendenning suggests. No, the ultra-masculine God reissues Taylor his masculine identity because of his willingness to undergo feminization/humiliation. Taylor receives his manhood back, restored and amplified.

We find this in a drama related to gynesis – but this time a distinctly masculine drama. Consider the fascinating (and overlooked) metaphors of circumcision and emasculation in the Preparatory Meditations. The first, the ritual of circumcision, Taylor invokes in all its biblical richness (see meditations II.10 and II.70). A man must be separated from his sinful, gentilic identity, symbolized by the foreskin. But this means having a real part of one’s manhood cut off, just as Jesus Christ Himself was cut off from God at the cross:

  The Infant male must lose its Foreskin first,
  Before Gods Spirit Workes as Pulse, therein
  To Sanctify it from the sin in’t nurst,
  And make’t in Graces Covenant to spring.
  To shew that Christ must be cut off most Pure.
  His Covenantall blood must be mans Cure. (25-30)

Male blood – whether in the type represented by infant circumcision, or the reality in Jesus Christ’s crucifixion – needs to be shed in order for God’s glory to be granted to him. The effect of this bloodshed is not just forensic justification but total male restoration. This happens ultimately because of Christ, and at Christ’s hands: with His circumcising power He initiates men. He has authority to reshape (not unman) Taylor.

The more radical measure, of course, would be that of emasculation, the very procedure the Puritan minister cannot bear, and pleads against. Relevant here is the work of maverick theorist Gary Taylor, who has claimed to find in western literature the ubiquitous theme of castration. “This is a specter that has haunted men for centuries,” he says, “the fear that manhood will become, or has already become, obsolete, superfluous, ridiculous, at best quaint, at worst disgusting.” One need not invoke Freud to understand Puritan fears associated with such de-sexing. More than surrendering a certain physical vitality, emasculation would imply a forfeiture of one’s claim to authority in home and church. How is Taylor to head his family, his church, his town, if he comes away from worship without his genitals?

His anxiety materializes most acutely in the image of the purse. Rather than the accessory we today associate with women, the most literal meaning for a Puritan audience would have been the money bag. Thus when Taylor implores, “Yet may I Purse, and thou my Mony bee” (I.2.29), or asks, “Am I thy Gold? Or Purse, Lord, for thy Wealth”? (“Another Meditation at the Same Time,” 1), he presents himself as the empty wallet, and God the financier who provides the gold coinage of grace. The purse, I maintain, has nothing to do with the female personae. It is a male object – truly, the male object to the colonial mind. The English word “purse” derives from the French bourse, also translatable as “testicles.” Accordingly, the Puritan man was generally in charge of the home finances, thereby associating the money bag with his manhood. Jokesters of the era regularly made puns about “coins,” “stones” and “purses” in the seventeenth century, and, most suggestively, Daniel Patterson’s glossary of Taylor’s poetry straightforwardly defines “purse” as “the scrotum of an animal.” So the Westfield minister fears for his manhood, and with good reason! He has met the living, all-masculine God before whom no competitor can stand.

There is no doubt as to Taylor’s need to confess his discredited manhood. In meditation II.18 the beleaguered minister confesses that he is a “Pouch of Sin, a purse / Of naughtiness,” and, by the end of the poem, having exhausted all manner of cultic and sacrificial devices, he comes up with the true offering: Shall I my Sin Pouch lay, on thy Gold Bench My Offering, Lord, to thee? I’ve such alone But have no better . . . . And shall mine Offering by thine Altars fire Refin’d, and sanctifi’d to God aspire? (43-45, 47-48) His wealth, his purse, his very man-self, has been splayed upon the sacrificial table. He voluntarily submits, even humiliates, himself. But he pleads for God to refrain from permanently rejecting (or excising) his manhood. In place of his dilapidated offering he prays, Lord let thy Deity mine Altar bee And make thy Manhood on’t my sacrifice. (55-56) At the last minute, by design, the incarnation is invoked. Jesus Christ’s deity is Taylor’s altar, and, more importantly, Jesus Christ’s “Manhood” is the substitute in lieu of Taylor’s own. Christ’s manhood is acceptable, for, exchanged for the Christic substitute, it harmonizes perfectly with the divine. Taylor is spared. He has kept his purse – but now with Christ as his “Mony” ringing within it. The holy coins, replete with honor and authority, fill the poet’s container.

Again in meditation II.9. This time Taylor compares himself to Moses, who must endure the fiery glory of the Lord.

  I long to see thy sun upon mee shine,
  But feare I’st finde my selfe thereby shown worse
  Yet let his burning beams melt, and refine
  Me from my dross, yet not to singe my purse. (55-58)

The radiance of God fascinates and threatens Taylor. He recognizes that the “burning beams” are for the purification of his wealth, his coins, but still he fears that God will “singe my purse.” The literal meaning simply plays out the metaphor, wanting his money refined in such a way in that everything else is not ablaze in the process. Still, in Taylor’s paradigm, this can only mean the fear of permanent damage and dissolution through psychospiritual emasculation. Exchanging one’s coins for purification’s sake is one thing; having one’s sack burnt off quite another. Submitting to circumcision one thing; facing irreparable de-sexing something quite different. Fortunately, God has not neutered him, or, if he has, has done so temporarily in order to fill his purse with gold. Taylor remains the bag, the container. Christ has become the gold coins, Taylor’s new manhood, Taylor’s new wealth.  He can now return to his home, his church and town with a new, robust, manly authority direct from God Himself.  If gynesis emphasizes Taylor’s renewed authenticity, the divine masculization shows that authenticity to be (for him at least) the ground of earthly male authority.

Edward Taylor: Playing the Woman

Becoming a female is no new thing for male devotional writers in the Christian tradition.  Theologians and mystics have often resorted to feminine alter (”altar”?) egos to speak of their response to a proactive, authoritative God.  American Puritans did the same thing by reading biblical erotica in terms of the believer’s spiritual intimacy with God.  Edward Taylor embraces this tradition through an anagogical reading of the Song of Solomon in his Preparatory Meditations, interlacing it with the New Testament motif of the Church as the bride of Christ.

Consider how Taylor chooses to emphasize metaphors of womb-like receptivity.  He writes, “My Silver Chest a Sparke of Love up locks,” explaining how when the penitent’s chest sees Christ’s beauty, “Her Downy Bosom opes” (I.4.1,5).  More often this receptiveness is construed in terms of a “Cabbinet,” where the body houses the soul, and the soul houses Christ:

     Oh! that my Soul . . .
     Might be thy Cabbinet, of Pearle of Price.
     Oh! let thy Pearle, Lord Cabbinet in mee
     I’st then be rich! nay rich enough for thee. (I.2.13, 16-18) 

This “Cabbinet” is a shoddy home for Christ’s presence, but Christ overlooks its poverty and deems it acceptable.  God is at work in this implantation.  As Michael North puts it, “The pearl, God’s donation, comes sperm-like into the soul; its growth into full glory is implicit in it, promised in the original donation.” Sperm-like indeed: “The Soule’s the Womb,” Taylor says plainly in II.80.31, and “Christ is the spermodote.”  Taylor wishes to bear God’s holy seed (II.4.25-26), pregnant with divine glory.

Albert Gelpi explains how this was an acceptable pattern of Puritan humility for Taylor, who, among the “Christian poets who saw their manhood broken by God’s holy lust,” became women before God.  God reigns in supreme power, righteousness and honor, so if masculinity is characterized by potentia, then one may deduce that God himself is the masculine by which all other things become feminine.  Even male saints must enact a gendered drama and become passive partners to their saving, being wooed by Him.  Ivy Schweitzer calls this process “gynesis,” playing the woman in order to signify “a rhetorical position of subordination and subservience to God.”

Much of Taylor’s poetry presents this marriage to God in frightful, forceful ways.  God drills a new heart in him.  God overcomes him at every turn.  This is for male poets “the logic of spiritual conversion – figured as a rape or ravishment, or, at the very least, a welcomed intrusion – to position themselves in relation to God and Christ as feminized, deauthorized, and self-denying souls.”  A man must be violated for his own good, which, by God’s hand, actually means un-defilement.  The divine rape is not rape after all.  It is regeneration.

Suffice it to say that Taylor recruits his feminine alter-ego for the claiming of authenticity. It enacts the drama of humiliation and glorification by God, Schweitzer’s “model of redeemed subjectivity.”  The bride of Christ archetypally, apart from the inconvenient particulars of real women, permits space for Taylor to empty himself and receive the fullness of grace, all in the form of  “the Other who completes him in the mystical and ecclesiastic sense.”  He comes away from his private piety cleansed and whole, intact as a man – if only because he has not wagered himself as such.  Or has he?

[See next post]

“Saving Edward Taylor’s Purse” in Literature and Theology

Last fall I had an article published in Literature and Theology, a pieced entitled, “Saving Edward Taylor’s Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations.“  Knowing that many of the readers of this blog don’t have access to academic journals, I’m devoting the next two posts to the main thrust of my argument.

Unless you’ve studied American Puritanism or American poetry in some depth, chances are you aren’t familiar with Edward Taylor.  He was a Puritan minister living in the late 1600s in the fledgling frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts.  He is a curious figure for various reasons, not least among them that he opted to write hundreds of esoteric, erotic, strongly gendered poems for private devotion in preparation for administering the Lord’s Supper.  What I bring out in my essay is his struggle not only for spiritual authenticity, but for his very masculinity.  The next two posts will elaborate how Taylor seeks to subject himself to God via a feminine persona, and simultaneously to temper radically his masculine authority by risking his “genitals” with God’s masculine initiation.