Notes on Teachers Appreciation Week

America is full of "hero" jobs. These are occupations that come with a lot of public praise, but also the expectation that if you work these jobs you are supposed to keep your mouth shut. The scope of this designation has expanded under COVID with the new term "essential workers." 

While the desk jockeys and bean counters have been able to stay at home, the essential workers have been delivering their groceries, slaughtering their meat, preparing their food, tending to them in the hospital, and yes, taking care of and teaching their children. This work has involved great personal risk (just look at the COVD death rate among line cooks.) It has not been met with additional compensation or power in the workplace. Instead we hear a litany of bosses bitching that they can't get enough workers to beg them for their shit jobs. 

The only added compensation has been in the form of lip service. I am thinking about that a lot this week, which is Teacher Appreciation Week. In normal years I groan a little at the noblesse oblige of it but appreciate the tokens of gratitude that come with it. This year it just makes me angry. 

Few other professions have been forced to so fundamentally change their practice. Each and every lesson I do had to be completely re-thought and done in ways I had never done before, all on the fly. After getting used to the virtual classroom, I then had to transition to the hybrid classroom where my brain must be in real and virtual space simultaneously. I have had to switch modes on a dime with little warning. The bean counters and desk jockeys haven't had to do all that much, except for learning how to use Zoom.

Our reward for our Herculean labors? Nothing.

Or I should say, nothing if we are lucky. If we are unlucky our reward is layoffs, furloughs, and legions of parents attacking us on social media. All the talk of "essential workers" just rings so hollow. I know plenty of parents are legitimately grateful for my work, but being reminded of that is more a salve for their souls than it is a benefit to me. 

It's obvious that if this society "appreciates" teachers it needs to put its money where its mouth is. 

"Our Girls"

Janelle Monae with the message we need

There's a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton called "Our Girls" that I use to teach 19th century feminism, in all its flaws. It makes a good contrast with Frances Willard's linking of women's rights to temperance and "home protection," and often surprises my students because they did not think there were women in the Gilded Age who thought as radically as Stanton did. The opening lines are certainly evocative:

"They are the music, the flowers, the sunshine of our social life. How beautiful they make our homes, churches, schools and festive scenes: how glad and gay they make our streets with their scarlet plumes, bright shawls and tartan plaids. Who can see a bevy of girls tripping home from school without pausing to watch their graceful motions, pretty faces, feet and legs, to listen to their merry words and peals of laughter. See how they romp and play with hoops and balls, with sleds and skates, wash their brothers’ faces in the snow, and beat them in a race on yonder pond. These boys and girls are one to-day in school, at play, at home, never dreaming that one sex was foreordained to clutch the stars, the other but to kiss the dust."

I think about these lines all the time when I watch my six year old daughters playing with their friends in their joyous, carefree way. It often fills me with profound sadness, because I know what society is about to put them through.

The glimpses are already there. Based on their behavior, the boys I see their age have not been taught a lot about being nice to each other or caring about other people's feelings. I know that in a few years my daughters' male peers will be judging them by their looks, and that they will be dealing with the Kavanaughs, Squis, and Judges of the world. My wife and I know that as their parents there is only so much that we can do, and that they are going to have to navigate the minefields of female adolescence mostly by themselves. Things were bad enough already, but with the election of Trump and the confirmation of Kavanaugh the abusers, predators, and misogynists can rest easy that their people are at the helm. I am sure that they feel emboldened.

I know too many people to count who have been sexually abused and assaulted (not all of them women, by the way.) I am sure that I know many more who have not shared their stories with me. I know that in some cases the resulting pain and trauma lasts a lifetime. I also know that not a single person who perpetuated these assaults on the people in my life ever had to face justice. I have also seen up close and in painful ways how institutions and authority figures makes excuses for abusers. Kavanaugh's confirmation sends a clear message to the already disbelieved and disrespected victims: your pain, your experience, and your life simply don't matter.

That's the message Trump's America sends to so many people on a daily basis. The children murdered in school shootings, the black men and women shot down by the police, the immigrant families broken apart and jailed, and the women who are sexually assaulted have essentially been told that their sufferings are justified.

I can't help but to make it personal, and to think about what my girls are growing up into. Those who want them conditioned to "kiss the dust" are behaving with impunity. They have control over the courts now, so their vile fantasies about what kind of lives our girls can and cannot have will soon be a reality. I owe it them to fight to my last breath.

Locker Room Talk

The discussion of Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh has brought back some buried memories of my time in high school.

I did not go to any parties in high school where drinking and drugs were present, but they were an omnipresent part of my teenage environment. Everyone knew about the "stoneys" who would get high before school. In my class there was even a group of "popular" guys who drank themselves into a stupor and called themselves the Brew Crew and even had their own t-shirts made (which they wore to football games.) In the rural Nebraska town where I grew up everybody knew teenage drinking and debauchery ran rampant.

My lack of interest in that culture was mostly due to my complete alienation from my high school's surroundings and my desire to get the hell out as soon as possible. (Once I got to college I started drinking and haven't looked back!) That was confirmed by what so many conservatives euphemistically call "locker room talk."

Most of this talk I heard in the literal locker room, after gym class, although I also heard plenty while working in the corn fields during detasseling season. Locker room talk mostly amounts to men discussing their purported sex with women, usually in a degrading and misogynistic way. What amazes me is that this has been used as a defense rather than an accusation. The president's Access Hollywood tape, for example, was written off as "locker room talk." This kind of talk is evidently the birthright of heterosexual men. If you were ever a boy in high school anywhere in America, you probably heard or engaged in your fair share of locker room talk.

It was my window into a different world, where I heard about all of the parties I wasn't attending and all of the sex I wasn't having. One consistent theme was humiliation. Girls who were willing to fuck, especially if they wanted to fuck more than one person or initiated sex, were branded sluts. The boys who fucked them, of course, were able to brag of their conquests. Sometimes this bragging was about how those girls had not only been fucked, but also demeaned in the process.

One boy who was especially awful boasted of how he had taken the panties of one girl and had put them on the antenna of his pickup truck for everyone to see. I remember another story about a boy intentionally getting his sperm in a girl's hair after a tryst a party in order to embarrass her. I heard that another girl in my class was nicknamed "blue lightning" for the veins in the very pale skin of her breasts.

When men defend their shitty behavior as "locker room talk" what they are really telling you is "I reserve the right in the company of men to demean and attack individual women in a sexual way." Anyone who uses this as a defense is telling on themselves.

Even if the allegations against Kavanaugh (which I believe) are not true, I still recognize his type from my high school days. The thought of one of those people being on the highest court in the land makes me sick with anger. The fact that one of them is in the White House is almost unbearable. 

Obama, Biden, Trump, Pence, and Masculinity

Watching president Obama's farewell address last week I was struck, after a year of hearing Trump's bloviating, at how he has always performed a very positive version of masculinity. For eight years boys around this country have had a great example of how to be a man. Obama has allowed himself to feel emotion in public, perhaps most famously during his speech after Sandy Hook. He showed similar emotion last week when talking about Michelle, his obvious respect and love were displayed for all to see. This was a man in a relationship of equals, not the usual politician with the smiling, prop wife. While Joe Biden still has a lot of his generation's male bravado and, well, handsy-ness, he has also displayed a similar relationship with Jill. And speaking of Biden, he and Obama have an obviously deep connection to each other. This is part of a positive masculinity where men can be emotionally vulnerable and honest with each other.

President Obama has also modeled how to confront one's enemies without resorting to aggression and anger. He has used humor many times, including in response to Trump's birther allegations. He does not engage in the kind of dick swinging that practically ever other president in my lifetime indulged in. I am thinking here of Reagan's "joke" about ordering the missiles to be fired at the Soviet Union, George HW Bush's TV attack on Bob Dole to counter his "whimpiness," or the innumerable examples of George W Bush swaggering like a two-bit cowboy ("smoke 'em out of their caves," "ride herd," "watch this drive," etc.)  Obama is what you could call a savvy nerd when it comes to his masculinity, the thing I basically aspire to be.

With Trump and Pence taking the White House, we are seeing two very different models of masculinity. Let's start with Pence, since he's the easier one. He represents patriarch masculinity. This kind of masculinity, usually wedded to religion and nostalgic and inaccurate views of the past, sees men as the unchallenged head of the family and leaders of society. They are there to protect women and children, but in a relationship that is hierarchical. This type of masculinity is also tied together with a painfully serious affect, as if nothing is ever to be a laughing matter. I know a lot of men who subscribe to this kind of masculinity back home, and they are almost always insufferable.

This type of masculinity, as limiting and toxic as it can be, is not nearly as poisonous as Trump's masculinity. Almost all the strains of negative masculinity are contained in his personality. As is usually the case, this wretched personality was fed by the manure of paternal neglect. With a loving father Trump may have just become a garden variety asshole, but by craving his father's never present approval, he (with all the money he had as an assist) went into full blown megalomania.

Trump does not have Pence's pretense of protecting women, home, and family. He has an obvious contempt for women, something clear to see even before the Access Hollywood tape came out. As I have written before, his version of masculinity sees women as beings to be conquered, controlled, and displayed, all the while being feared. But his attitude towards other men also betrays his toxic masculinity. He does not appear to have any close male friends. He is incapable of having friendship, since that involves a give and take of emotional support that he simply can't muster. Other men are to be belittled and dominated. The slightest criticism of him leads to angry tweetstorms and unhinged ranting. For him anger and violence are the only tools used when confronted by opponents.

I could never imagine Trump giving the kind of heartfelt dedication to Melania that Obama did to Michelle in a million years. I could not imagine a moment between Trump and Pence like the one we saw between Biden and Obama for a million more. We have enough toxic masculinity in our society as it is, from the soft patriarchal kind to the violent, psychopathic kind as it is. We don't need it modeled (and implicitly validated) by the new occupants of the White House. It's our job to push our boys and young men to something more positive.

A Letter To Young Beta Males

Hey there,

In the past few weeks after that horrible shooting in Oregon, I've been seeing a lot about the big reservoirs of resentment against women in online forums by self-professed "beta males."  The killer there, like a few others, appeared motivated in part by hatred against women fed by feelings of rejection.  I know most beta males aren't violent or hateful, but being a hetero beta male can lead to some distorted and messed up perceptions about women and gender.  (I know plenty of gay men who are betas too, but the gender dynamic is obviously different for them. This letter is more for hetero betas, but gay betas I feel your pain, too.)

I was a teenage beta male once upon a time, but people didn't use that phrase back then.  Wimp, nerd, geek, dork, pussy, fag etc. tended to be the nomenclature.  Trust me, at that time the phrase "nerd culture" did not have any positive connotations.  Playing video games and Dungeons and Dragons and reading comic books pretty much marked your status as a social outcast.  It was so intense that by my senior year I intentionally affected a different persona, wearing black and reading Kerouac and Nietzsche by myself in the hall during lunch hour.  I still couldn't get a date.  Then again, I never asked because my opinion of myself was that low.  In any case, I didn't kiss someone romantically until I was 22 years old.

It pains me to think about this, but I used to lament my condition, and wonder why girls didn't like nice boys like me.  Why did they go out with jerks and assholes?  What was I lacking?  Sometimes this lead into some bad territory, wondering what was wrong with girls.  Were they too stupid and shallow to not realize what they were doing?

These thoughts were really damaging, and let's face it, misogynistic.  I'd be willing to bet that you may have had similar thoughts yourself.  But you should not and don't need to think like this.  In the first place, to be a little stern, you aren't owed any woman's affection.  Women aren't pawns or status symbols.  I know that sounds preachy, but it's the truth, and you need to internalize it.  I remember when I had a little epiphany and started thinking about myself from others' points of view.  Would I want to go out with someone who was resentful, lacking in confidence, and always expecting me to make every move?  Of course not, so why should I expect someone else to do that?

Okay.  I know that can prompt some hard self-reflections, but don't worry.  It's a good way to think of girls and women not as strange and inscrutable creatures, but your colleagues in the game of life, potential friends and cherished collaborators.  When I was young I used to lament that I would be romantically attracted to a young woman, who would then become my friend rather than my lover.  These days your generation has a term for it, the "friend zone."  This phrase contains soft violence.  It implies that you're not really interested in women as friends, or that a woman should be bending to your will.  Instead, you should cherish your friendships with women.  That came home to me in my younger days when I was very attracted to a woman who became my friend.  I still silently burned a torch for her, then her boyfriend abruptly broke up with her, making her despondent.  I remember her literally crying on my shoulder, in intense emotional pain, and thinking that my feelings of romantic affection were pretty meaningless.  She needed me to be there for her as her friend, not her friend who secretly wanted to bone her.  I dropped the romantic illusions and developed an intense and deeply rewarding friendship.  From that point on I began to develop a lot of friendships with women, friendships that I still value and cherish.  Sometimes romance blossomed out of those friendships.

I know these years of your life can be tough.  I know that it is hard to be a walking bag of hormones and romanticism and feel like nobody wants to go out with you.  Most of this will pass pretty fast.  In the meantime, don't resent or hate women for your situation.  They are not inscrutable creatures, they are people like you, many going through similar struggles.  A lot of them also like comics, games, and Star Wars, and they might even feel more lonely than you do.  Get to know them better, be their friends and comrades.  Not only will it make your life a whole lot better, it will make society a lot better, too.

Track of the Week: A Tribe Called Quest "Bonita Applebum"

It's very strange seeing a Hollywood film coming out with a hagiographic vision of NWA, a group considered a threat to the public order in their heyday.  During the height of the band's fame I was an enthusiastic fan of rap music, I could never really fully embrace them, like I had Public Enemy or Eric B and Rakim.  (I guess I was pretty East Coast aligned from the beginning.)  This wasn't due to NWA's political stance or musical style, but mostly because of the hateful misogyny and homophobia in a lot of their songs.  I'd dug "Fuck Tha Police" and "Respect Yourself," but when my buddy Dan (who was an even bigger hip hop fan than me) played me Efil4zaggin in his basement I recoiled at the woman hating (as well as the violent attacks on the departed Ice Cube, who I considered to be the group's real talent.)  When I heard about Dr Dre beating up journalist Dee Barnes it seemed that the lyrics demeaning women weren't just words.  (This was also the same reason that I held certain rock bands like Guns and Roses and arm's length.)

When men sing songs about lust, no matter what the genre, the results are usually pretty ugly, whether it be Foreigner or Eazy-E.  It doesn't have to be, though.  A Tribe Called Quest penned what might be the best sensitive lust song (as opposed to love song) of all time, "Bonita Applebum."  It's got a wonderfully jazzy feel and a creative sitar sample to boot.  The lyrics are all about wooing the attractive lady of the title, but in a way that is unmistakably about sex, rather than mere romance. ("You gotta put me on.")  At the same time, it's a very non-macho overture.  The narrator promises to "say things other brothers won't" and to provide "mad prophylactics."  The likes of Ted Nugent, or most other rockers and rappers, don't talk like this, which is a shame.