Love Is A Many Splendored Thing Department: This Week's Sexual News In Review

Happier Days?  Photo credit.

I want to start out by saying that there are more men than Arnold Schwarzenegger who have children that they know about but did not acknowledge to their wives and the children they live with until much, much later in the game.  I have met four in my lifetime, quite ordinary men who were not governor of anything, so it's not really that rare.  But I have the same question about all of them, large and small:  how do you hide a second family?  And more important, how many people have to be paid off not to reveal that you have a second family when you are governor of California?

Personal responsibility is definitely taking a hit this week, since it turns out that pedophile priests are not responsible for their actions, and the church was not responsible for supervising them.  No,  it's what you suspected all along: the collective power of queers and fornicators to ruin innocent lives is too powerful, even for God!  According to a five year study commissioned by the Catholic Church, the sexual abuse of children and teens by priests rose dramatically in the 1960's "because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s."  The report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and executed by a "research team" from John Jay College to the tune of $1.3 million, must be a great relief to the Universal Church.  "The bishops," so reporteth the New York Times, "have said they hope the report will advance the understanding and prevention of child sexual abuse in society at large." Probably not.  It probably won't advance the understanding of sexual abuse in the church either.

If it is true that it never occurred to priests to abuse children until they were put under such intense psychological pressure by other people having sex, that would mean it could never happen again.  How do I know this?  I'm a historian, of course.  My analysis of the data (done for free, just this morning, and I offer it to the Pope out of shame for how queer people hurt these poor priests) has revealed the 1960s are not only over, but will probably never happen again.  Only the law of circular time, which governed Aztec history prior to their conquest (and conversion to the One True Faith) by Spain in the early 16th century, would suggest otherwise, and everyone knows that in the United States we live in linear time. 

And the Church wants to know why people don't take it seriously anymore?  Mary, please.

In other news, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as head of the IMF following charges that he tried to rape a chambermaid.  Strauss-Kahn, whose nickname is "Hot Rabbit," according to the New York Daily News, is in Riker's Island, asserting his innocence.  57% of French citizens also think he has been set up by his political enemies.

I would take this even possibility even semi-seriously except for two things:  one is that French people think Americans are too hysterical for words about sex, which is true, but I doubt that the NYPD would have walked into this $hit $torm unless they believed the woman (and why would an immigrant woman and a single mother call attention to herself in this way unnecessarily? I ask you.)  More important in my calculus is the number of powerful American men who have firmly asserted their innocence and/or threatened to bury people for spreading rumors about them that turned out not only to be true, but part of a pattern of out of control and/or criminal sexual behavior.  For example, Ah-nohld and his campaign staff responded viciously to charges of sexual harassment:  in 2003, one woman sued then-governor Schwarzenegger, charging that he and his staff had spread false rumors that she was a convicted felon.  And do you recall that president who did not have sexual relations with that woman -- except that, actually, it turned out that he did?  And John Edwards, who first lied about, and then finally admitted, having had an affair with videographer Rielle Hunter, but denied being the father of her child -- except that it turns out he is?

There seems to be a certain kind of man -- and not surprisingly, he is usually a rich and powerful one (The Council of Bishops, The Leader of the Free World or Aspiring LOTFW, The Governor, The Banker Of The Planet) -- who thinks that if he just asserts something is so the rest of us are bound, by some strange compact, to believe him.  Surely this is a much more interesting topic for historical analysis than the strange theory that priests crumbled under the weight of birth control, gay liberation and abortion, and were forced to calm their nerves by diddling children.

Sunday Radical Roundup: (Don't) Ask, (Don't) Tell Memorial Day Edition

Congressional Dems Reach Down And Locate Their 'Nads: Will long-standing legal discrimination against gay and lesbian service people be struck down this summer? We at Tenured Radical certainly hope so. Although we are more than ambivalent about armed conflict, we are not in the least ambivalent about the right to serve in the military without discrimination because of race, gender or sexual orientation. As Janet Halley argued years ago in Don't: A Reader's Guide To The Military's Anti-Gay Policy (Duke, 1999), this has not been an overwhelmingly popular item for queer activism. The fight for marriage -- by which overwhelmingly white, well-to-do queers confer rights and wealth on each other just like straight people -- has been far more popular than the right to military service, which is often the path to citizenship, education and income for people who are working-class, immigrant and of color. And of course, many of these people who want to work hard and earn a decent living via the military are queer.

The marriage campaign has also been able to capitalize on lots of cute kids saying on camera how bad they feel because their moms can't marry like other kids' parents, possibly the yuckiest but most effective tactic among the bourgeois queers who have made this a top priority and kicked other more substantial economic and political issues aside. Indeed, queers in the military pose quite the problem for activists, because dollars to doughnuts, gay and lesbian soldiers are conservative queers. Maybe, if gay and lesbian activists talked to military people, the movement would even have to stop acting as though Andrew Sullivan is the only conservative queer around.

There are many things that have distressed me about DADT, aside from the fact that every generation of my family has served honorably (two cousins of the Radical as recently as Gulf I), acquiring careers and benefits as a result of their service that they would not otherwise have had access to. Ergo, I object in a very personal way to seeing this form of national service and citizenship barred to people who find it meaningful and useful. But what has distressed me most is that, as the argument has dissipated that queers are unsuited by "nature" for national security roles of all kinds, the argument against queer military service has boiled down to the most despicable dynamic that discrimination relies on: that it is the object of discrimination who causes the problem, not those who discriminate or tolerate discrimination. Thus, the gay man or lesbian becomes the thing to be eliminated if good order is to be maintained, not the intolerance and prejudice of those around hir. This is the implication of this story (in case you needed clarity on this issue) in which queer soldiers raise concerns about whether they will be harmed by other soldiers if DADT is repealed. One noncom explains that it would be fine with him if men and women under his command were queer, as long as he didn't know about and -- what? Get grossed out?

This is why numerous GLBT students are being told by public school districts to stay home and complete their high school diplomas via distance learning: because if a queer kid is being bullied and tortured in school, the best thing to do is remove the kid, right? No matter that it is the school principal's job to ensure that no child is bullied or harmed -- just as it is the officer and NCO's job to ensure good order in any given unit.

Any officer or NCO who cannot lead when DADT is repealed should be relieved of command. It's that simple. S/he should be relieved of command because s/he cannot obey orders, and because s/he cannot lead others to obey orders effectively either. And you know what? I think this Radical may have greater faith in the officer and non-commissioned officer corps than the politicians do. Ours is the best trained military in the world, and our military personnel will do their job.

The United States military will have to undo generations of official homophobia to make this work, and they have no one to blame but themselves. I believe they can; I believe that the officer corps understands that it is their job to lead; and that they will make it happen. While there is no lack of racial discrimination in the military, there may well be less than there is in the society at large, since the principles of unit cohesion mandate resisting social forces and beliefs that undermine it (not the reverse, as conservative ideologues would have it.) But as the story I linked above points out, it is the ways in which the repeal of DADT opens the door to full citizenship and zero-tolerance for all kinds of discrimination against queers that has been the endgame all along. Much more than marriage, military recognition of gay rights will unravel structural discrimination against queers because military employment and production dominates our society -- particularly in those places, such as the south and California, where anti-gay initiatives have been used so cynically by the Republicans.

Just In Time To Repeal DADT: And by the way? If Zenith students aren't doin' it for themselves, their relatives are. Recent grad Peter Lubershane tells me that his cousin Josh Howard has made a documentary film from David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government called -- The Lavender Scare. And happy 85th birthday to gay activist Frank Kameny (pictured above, courtesy of Howard's website) -- you are as sexy as ever, and you outlived J. Edgar Hoover!

Summer History Blogging Fun: Here's a terrific new history blog written by a former Zenith honors student named Molly Rosner. It's called Brooklyn In Love and War. As Rosner describes it, the blog is "about the nation’s history filtered through the well-documented relationship between my grandparents. I never knew Sylvia, but she and my grandfather, Alex, wrote hundreds of letters during the years that Alex was stationed abroad during WWII. Most posts will look at a letter that helps the story of these two people – who are both typical and unique – unfold." After leaving Zenith, Rosner went on to do a master's degree in the oral history program at Columbia University. She's a wonderful and imaginative writer, and you might want to put it on your favorites list. If you are a literary agent, you might want to get in touch with her: the blog would be a terrific platform for a book.

Ova There! Ova There! Send The Word, Send The Word, Ova There!

After reading a critical piece in the New York Times about the booming market in Ivy League ova earlier in the week, Radical Correspondent Oklahoma Annie writes that she was "incensed" by it:

What’s going on, in summary, is this: Agencies who traffic in human ova are seeking the highest achieving young women from top universities as donors, and are offering them upwards of $10,000 to donate their eggs.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which set the $10,000 cap on payments in its guidelines, is now “concerned” that young women may be lured by excessively high payments to become donors “against their own best interests.”

Now, excuse me, but we’re talking about the top percentile, crème de la crème of American elite universities, and we’re afraid they won’t be able to make informed decisions about their own health and finances?

Well, OK, so we’re also talking about 22 year olds, so there may be something to that. But hey, this is the first time I’ve heard it argued that women are being exploited by being paid too much.

I think it’s a load of paternalistic crap. (I want to see the gender and age distribution of the members of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.)

What really aggravates me is, here is one thing in which women are uniquely positioned to make more money than men, fair and square, and we don’t want to let them fully exploit their advantage “for their own protection."

Couldn't agree more, Annie. Go to this this California sperm bank and you will see that inseminations start at under $500, which means that the donors can't be getting more than a hundred dollars a squirt. Methinks you are onto something, so let's investigate further.

When you read the whole article, you will see that Annie's outrage is well founded on several levels. Egg donation, as it turns out, is not to be undertaken lightly, since the primary damage cited for women is psychological -- only several paragraphs lower does the author mention that the procedure itself, which includes stimulating the ovaries with massive amounts of hormones as well as surgery -- has medical risks. In other words, an egg is not an egg: it's a pre-baby! And for the rest of their lives, these poor women will be haunted by the specter of "their" babies out there in the world.

Not inconsequentially, the notion that every egg is a complete soul would be the position held by the Catholic Church, the LDS Church and numerous evangelical Christians, as they wrap numerous forms of contraception into their jihad against abortion. Furthermore, Annie's point about how threatening it is to the cult of true motherhood when women game the market in white designer babies has a longer history. Remember when Mary Beth Whitehead refused to hand over Baby M to William and Elizabeth Stern in 1986, and the papers kept referring to her as the "surrogate mother" -- when, in fact, she was the actual mother? And do you recall that when working-class Whitehead demonstrated true grief at giving up the baby, she was reminded repeatedly that she had no right to her feelings because the baby had been bought and paid for? That it was upper-class Elizabeth Stern who really had the right to grieve?

Clearly there are big stakes here. As Annie observes, even a liberal newspaper seems committed to constantly instructing women as to what they should think and feel. I can't help but notice that in its handling of this issue the New York Times also invokes the specious claims among anti-choicers that abortion, at any stage of gestation, inflicts lasting psychological damage on women. "Temporary feelings of relief are frequently followed by a period psychiatrists identify as emotional 'paralysis,' or post-abortion 'numbness,'" reports the conservative Elliot Institute (as if paralysis and numbness are technical terms requiring scare quotes.) "Like shell-shocked soldiers, these aborted women are unable to express or even feel their own emotions. Their focus is primarily on having survived the ordeal, and they are at least temporarily out of touch with their feelings."

Note the use of the phrase "aborted women," which cleverly conveys that these failed mothers are grieving for the privileged access to womanhood only childbirth provides, a maturing process that can never be complete once they have terminated a pregnancy. If a woman believes that she is not distressed following an abortion, it is simply proof that she is "out of touch." On the other hand, this anti-abortion website goes out of its way to urge women that they can trust their feelings and maternal instincts during the process of bringing a pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption; and that they will always feel good about themselves for making this decision to give a close relative to complete strangers.

I would add a final comment: if the egg donation procedure has risks for women (and all surgical procedures do, including egg implantation), then why aren't we concerned about the routine use of these hormones and surgeries on women who are trying to use their own, or other people's, ova to grow babies in their uteruses that they cannot conceive without technology? The women who, if they are successful, often end up carrying high-risk multiple pregnancies? Because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, that's why, in which all of the money goes into the pockets of fertility docs, for-profit labs and Big Pharma! Ever wondered whether Elizabeth Edwards' battle with cancer has anything to do with the "miracle" of giving birth to twins at an age when most women are completely infertile? When was the last time you saw a front page article about the long-term risks associated with thirty-something and forty-something women juicing up their ovaries with dangerous chemicals over a period of anywhere from one to five years?

But that's cool because they become mothers, as opposed to becoming unnatural, selfish women whose only goal is to pay for college and graduate school.

Adultery Carnival: John Updike's Couples and the Sexual Revolution

John Updike, Couples (New York: Fawcett Books, 1996). Originally published 1968. 458 pp. $14.95

I don't know whether I meant to bring two books about adultery on vacation but I did, and the contrast between Jed Mercurio's American Adulterer and John Updike's Couples provoked many thoughts about the shift in our sexual culture as seen through this knotty, diverse practice. One important similarity in the two books is what has not changed: adultery generates its own complex rules so that adulterers can evade and break other rules. In other words, the adulterer, although perhaps motivated by a desire to be free, is never truly free.

But the differences are also interesting, particularly since both novels describe the same historical moment, the early 1960s. While Updike's adulterers operate as a community and literally as couples who protect each other, Mercurio's adulterer in chief, JFK, operates absolutely privately, his privacy protected (however imperfectly) by his command of the nation's political machinery. Both books highlight corruption, but differently. In American Adulterer, the body of the president literally rots under the weight of his corruption, even as Kennedy tries to alleviate it by public acts (desegregation, nuclear treaties) and a snowballing sex life that he believes will alleviate these same infirmities. In Couples, however, it is ultimately the community that rots under the weight of accumulated fornication: wives go to therapy to understand their unhappiness (aka, "frigidity") and one ultimately work up the courage to leave her husband. A farewell fuck turns into disaster and two marriages explode, something all the couples have believed impossible because it is against their complex, unspoken code of rules. And in a final act of fate, the Congregational Church in the town's center is struck by lightning and burns to the ground as the whole town watches.

The hand of God, in an act of judgement that expresses her disgust with the lot of them? I think so.

Couples is delightfully dated and a little corny now, as that last example suggests. Like American Adulterer, it evokes the New Frontier of the early 1960s, when anything seemed possible but wasn't, because it was tied to such complex, political deal-making and old ideas that refused to give way. The sexual culture it depicts is a kind of middle-class "loosening" that predated a more popular realization that something dramatic was shifting in a Cold War suburban social structure that had theoretically contained American sexuality forever.

Ha. For those of us who grew up then, Couples offers rich, believable descriptions of the informal backyard parties that came together on long summer days in suburban cul-de-sacs, cook outs where the children stayed up just late enough for the ice cream truck and were put to bed Popsicle-stained while the drunken adults were just catching their second wind. One of the characters, Foxy, drinks and smokes her way through a pregnancy, making me wonder again why everyone is so freaked out about what gestating mothers put in their bodies. (I would like to point out, for example, that the catalogue of learning disabilities that we now recognize only appeared in the generation of children born after caffeine, nicotine and booze were stricken from the expectant mother's diet. Is a little pickling good for a fetus?)

Some of Couples' dated quality is not so delightful. The reader sometimes stumbles across a casual, non-ironic liberal racism that both takes her breath away and, I would have to say, is historically pretty accurate, even though I suspect they wouldn't let people write such things today. There is also a nasty, misogynistic quality to the book that is sometimes self-conscious and sometimes not. For example, two of the women who go into therapy -- one who is pressured into a "swinging" relationship by her husband and the other couple, and the other of whom doesn't cheat at all on her philandering husband -- punish their spouses, but passive-aggressively and appropriately within the system of gender-power. The first wife has an affair she doesn't really want to have and then, after capitulating to the swinging, forces all three of the others into talking about her all the time. The latter wife mostly refuses to have intercourse with her husband (hence, allowing him to excuse himself for sleeping with other women) and also refuses him daily forms of affection and intimacy.

And yet, Updike -- for all he was, I think, not interested in feminism -- plants the seeds of the women's movement to come in the novel. At least one wife has learned, when she boots her husband out, that his philandering has been a form of bullying. She learns that by accepting his professions of love and believing his lies, she has been a safety net for him, preventing any other woman from making a new claim that would end his sexual freedom. A six year-old daughter is unnaturallly obsessed with death: by the end of the book, you realize that it is the death of her parents' marriage she has been witnessing and that she is the only one in the family with the courage to break the rules and speak about it. And a third woman, admitting to her mother that she probably had an affair to break up her own marriage, tells her mother that it wasn't that she didn't love her husband -- but that she married the man her parents chose for her, not the one she would have chosen.

To me, this makes Couples not just an interesting account of the sexual revolution, but a comment on Updike as a writer in a generation of writers -- Norman Mailer, Philip Roth -- who wrote obsessively about women but didn't like women very much. Updike is, like Roth and Mailer, far more interested in men than women: the sexual liberation of men is described through abundant, interior narratives; and for women, not so much. We don't know what women really feel; only what they tell men, and what men intuit. Furthermore, the two women who do leave their husbands are able to do so because they have family money, something Updike never acknowledges, fathers who are willing to step in and play the role of husbands for however long is necessary until they marry again. This failure to acknowledge the vulnerability of women to a sexual culture run by men's rules and men's financial power, is like a sore tooth throughout the book. I kept reading happily, but it irked me all the same, and I couldn't stop poking at it. That said, unlike Mailer and Roth, Updike was a fanatically keen observer of women: his female characters make sense, they are different in their femaleness, and their differences are expressed often through sexual and self-knowledge far more complex than his male characters have access to.

One final note: for a book published in 1968, it's extraordinarily explicit. Not only was Updike predicting a sea change in middle class sexuality, he was on the cutting edge of a cultural revolution in which explicit sexual expression would become a core feature of novels, movies and the theater.