{"id":1129,"date":"2013-01-26T15:44:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-26T19:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2013-01-26T17:18:50","modified_gmt":"2013-01-26T21:18:50","slug":"corset-of-the-mind-or-why-it-is-easier-for-me-to-say-penis-than-appear-marxist-a-follow-up-to-the-duke-divinity-womens-center-panel-discussion-about-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1129","title":{"rendered":"Corset-of-the-mind; or, Why it is easier for me to say \u201cpenis\u201d than appear \u201cMarxist\u201d: a follow-up to the Duke Divinity Women\u2019s Center panel discussion about MEN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheLadiessWorldSeptember1895page10\"<\/a>One of the most beloved professors in the Yale American Studies Department used to point to the worn elbows of his tweed jacket and say \u201cIt is one thing to wear old tweed!\u00a0 But be sure not to become one of those scholars with tweeds-of-the-mind!\u201d\u00a0 I tried to draw on his (much quoted) phrase in a faculty meeting, to explain my concern about how the theological academy can warp women\u2019s brains and stunt our scholarship.\u00a0 We can become so determined to prove to our pious students that we really, really love Jesus; that we really, really are orthodox, it is like we \u201ctie our brain up in a corset,\u201d I said.\u00a0 The room was full of men, and they seemed baffled by my comment.\u00a0 Later, a male friend explained that many of them were probably too distracted by mental images of corsets to get my point.\u00a0 Sigh.<\/p>\n

I think I was beset by the evangelical \u201ccorset effect\u201d last week during a Duke Women\u2019s Center discussion on masculinity.\u00a0 The discussion will evidently be available online soon, and I hope this can stand as a substantial epigraph to that posting.<\/p>\n

First, some backstory.\u00a0 Years ago, when I started teaching on sex and gender at Duke, I took advice from some of the guys in the Mennonite Mafia in the doctoral program at the time and assigned the book Fight Club<\/em>.\u00a0 A really important passage in that book involves a penis (not symbolically, but quite literally) and, when it came time to talk about the book in class, I was unable to say the word.\u00a0 It was crazy.\u00a0 When Peggy Hill (life-partner of King of the Hill<\/em>) has to teach sex-ed in the Arlen, Texas middle-school, she is similarly tongue-tied, which gives me some solace.\u00a0 A few students found my incapacity so hilarious that, at the end of the semester, they gave me a quilt with the word \u201cpenis\u201d pinned to it.<\/p>\n

I told a shortened version of this to the large group at the Women\u2019s Center event last week, and some of the students frowned.\u00a0 I think I troubled some of them by saying the word, once.\u00a0 My capacity to know my audience, so to speak, is not always a gift.\u00a0 If I foresee frowning, and it has been a hard week, I may steer clear of topics that will offend.\u00a0 It therefore does not surprise me that, soon after seeing a few frowns, I paraphrased the Summa Theologia, by Thomas Aquinas \u2013 on the virtues, no less.\u00a0 When men at DDS are looking at you with a frown, quote Thomas!\u00a0 (Or Augustine, or Wesley, or MacIntyre, etc.)<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

You should still read Aquinas on the virtues (it’s in the First Part of the Second Part of the Summa), but not because I said so in this room.<\/p><\/div>\n

Besides body parts, certain cultural references, sources, and styles of analysis are also tricky in the evangelical world.\u00a0 This<\/a> article helped me so much to understand some of my current students, and what makes them frown.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is a useful quote:<\/p>\n

\n

Thus, for this group of young, Christian-college twenty-somethings, charity work is good, but political work is iffy. Protesting against contemporary slavery is honorable, but protesting against discriminatory hiring prejudices might take things too far. Non-objective art is beautiful; feminist art is discomforting. Talking about community is commendable; talking about alternative economic systems is extreme. We, like Goldilocks, are uncomfortable with the \u201ctoo hot\u201d (The Guardian) or \u201ctoo cold\u201d (Focus on the Family)\u2014we like our porridge \u201cjust right\u201d (the BBC).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Years ago, several students told me I had to watch the movie Saved!<\/em>\u00a0 even to begin to teach them sexual ethics.\u00a0 Who knew that hetero anal sex is considered preferable to vaginal sex for many evangelical teens?\u00a0 I sure as heck did not!\u00a0 (Dear. Lord.)\u00a0 <\/em>I had to regroup and rewrite a few lectures.\u00a0 The little essay linked above similarly helped me to understand why I had been given Sufjan Stevens by numerous students, and why I am really, really tired of requests to do reading courses on Tolstoy.\u00a0 Basically, hetero anal sex is permissible within some teen evangelical groups because, supposedly, technically, you are still a virgin afterward.\u00a0 You get to have your sex and eat your Jesus too.\u00a0 (It must wait for another post to sort out what-the-heck is wrong with Christian girls putting up with this . . .)\u00a0 I think maybe Mumford and Sons functions similarly.\u00a0 You can partake of slightly-cool, secular pop, and still keep cultural chastity.<\/p>\n

Which is all to say, I cannot believe I did not give a better, Marxist reading of the ways that some white, evangelical men\u2019s ministries take Judd Apatow\u2019s movies as indicative of THE PROBLEM<\/strong> facing twenty and thirty-something young white men.\u00a0 The only excuse I have is that somewhere, in the back of my brain, I know that it is more repulsive in some evangelical circles for a woman to sound Marxist than to say the word penis.\u00a0 As the quote above names, it is important to stay within that goldilocks zone, and giving a clear, class analysis of American culture is \u201ctoo hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phooey on that.<\/p>\n

So, here is my un-corseted comment on the currently popular idea among some talking, evangelical heads that young, white men need just to get off the video games, and get to work.\u00a0 I call bull-poop on that.\u00a0 More precisely, I want to ask:\u00a0 Which work?\u00a0 For whom?\u00a0\u00a0 Ok, I do get that there are some trustifarians hanging around outside Malaprop\u2019s in Asheville who could use their creativity in more, well . . . truly creative ways, but the idea that THE PROBLEM<\/strong> facing young men today is SLOTH<\/strong> is a very convenient narrative for the Godzilla Rich.\u00a0 It tells a story about individual men who need an individual savior to help them rectify their individual sins, so they can make up their mind and get to work!\u00a0\u00a0 (God basically stands in for the type-A, get-to-work girlfriend in Apatow movies.)\u00a0 It distracts Christians who care about ministry for men from the fact that we are living through the Second Great Depression and that there are structural forces of evil at work that treat human beings like cogs in the wheel and widgets in an assembly line.\u00a0 The \u201cGet to Work, Men!\u201d ditty sung by guys like Mark Driscoll keeps our minds off these facts:\u00a0 1) there are very few jobs to be had, 2) the few available service-sector jobs often require obeisance to thoroughly emasculating (dehumanizing) policies, and 3) the few available trade jobs require not only obeisance but also, often, a willingness to work in places that strategically ignore the most basic safety standards set for their industry.<\/p>\n

For more reading on this, please consider<\/a> these<\/a> links<\/a>, and maybe the movie Compliance<\/em> (even though, apparently, sadly, the guy who made that movie thought he needed a strip-tease with a cute blonde to get what I think was supposed to be a pro-labor point across).\u00a0\u00a0 As an aside, I should note that this is the white boy version of the boot camp narrative for African-American men.\u00a0 Whereas young, white men are depicted as feckless, young black men are depicted as violent.\u00a0 So, one very popular, evangelical answer for young, black men is some form of boot camp, which is tragically useful for military recruiters and similarly lacking in a structural analysis of systemic evil.\u00a0 This lack is obvious in this smash-hit story <\/a>about one mother\u2019s singular commitment to help save her son, by way of re-education at boot camp.\u00a0 (A mother\u2019s dedication, boot camp, plus bit of Jesus will get an African-American man a Rhodes Scholarship, evidently.)<\/p>\n

There is much that breaks my heart about all of this mess, and not just the fact that I failed to say it in Westbrook 0016 at DDS.\u00a0 Part of what breaks my heart is that both neo-liberal white and evangelical white thought-makers add on another layer of analysis that makes women the problem.\u00a0 So, the story goes like this:\u00a0 Young white men are sitting around playing video games rather than working.\u00a0 They lack initiative.\u00a0 They need to get back to work.\u00a0 We need to dig into the cause of their malaise (but not so deeply that it implicates the Godzilla Rich) so, we will blame the women who raised them and\/or the women who will or won\u2019t date them.\u00a0 Their mothers coddled them.\u00a0 Their mothers bullied them.\u00a0 Their mothers worked.\u00a0 Their mothers helicoptered<\/a>.\u00a0 Their girlfriends demand too much of them.\u00a0 Their girlfriends demand too little of them<\/a>.\u00a0 The women who should be dating them are too busy with their own selfish lives to take the time to love on them, or to push them, or to give them the requisite morning blow-job (thank you, Mark Driscoll).\u00a0 Blah, blah, blahdy blah blah.\u00a0 And, double-sadly, neo-liberal feminists like those at double-x spend their brilliant brain-power trying to sort out just which of these <\/a>gender-tension diagnoses makes the most sense.\u00a0 I think most of the analysis is based on a false premise to begin with:\u00a0 that is, that the problem facing young men these days is a lack of gumption, rather than a lack of 1) jobs and, 2) jobs that allow men to maintain their dignity and, 3) jobs wherein they can safely blow a whistle if they know what they are doing is wrong and\/or dangerous, to themselves or to others.<\/p>\n

I do not have a good Jesus-y word to end this post, except that I think Marx stole his best ideas from Jesus.<\/p>\n

And, I think Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a book<\/a> on that once.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most beloved professors in the Yale American Studies Department used to point to the worn elbows of his tweed jacket and say \u201cIt is one thing to wear old tweed!\u00a0 But be sure not to become one of those scholars with tweeds-of-the-mind!\u201d\u00a0 I tried to draw on his (much quoted) phrase in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-id","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1142,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/1142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}