Reading QOTD (2009-02-28)

K.A. Cuordileone, “Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity,” in the Journal of American History, discussing Schlesinger’s The Vital Center:

… [T]he totalitarian masses appear not just soft or emasculated, but downright sexually perverse in their “totalitarian psychosis,” their desire for “violent gratification,” their “losing of self in masochism or sadism,” their “masochistic delight in accepting correction.” “No one should be surprised,” Schlesinger insisted, “at the eagerness for personal humiliation,” for “the whole thrust of totalitarian indoctrination… is to destroy the boundaries of individual personality.” Quotidian totalitarian man assumes the feminine, submissive role in The Vital Center, yielding repeatedly to the “thrust” of totalitarianism, its “deep and driving faith,” its “half-concealed exercises in penetration and manipulation.” [emphasis mine] … If the reader has yet to grasp the essential point about Communism: it “perverts politics into something secret, sweaty and furtive like nothing so much… as homosexuality in a boys’ school; many practicing it, but all those caught to be caned by the headmaster.”

I think Arthur Schlesinger has some deep and unabiding desires he’s not telling us about.

Reading QOTD (2009-02-25)

From the annotations to Spenser’s Faerie Queene (does one italicize “Faerie Queene,” or put it in quotes? or inverted commas? which are the same thing? why did I end the preceding phrase with a question mark?) in the Norton Anthology of English Literature:

That Spenser contemplated (as he proceeds to indicate) a poem four times as long as the six books we now have rather staggers the imagination.

I was already feeling slightly pretentious for slogging through Spenser over tea. That, one of the most rarefied annotations I’ve ever read in a modern edition of something, totally just upped the ante.

Campus Dailywatch (2009-02-25)

There was a great letter to the editor in Haverford-Bryn Mawr’s Bi-College News today. I don’t really have anything to add, so I’ll just wholesale blockquote:

Elizabeth Held’s February 17 article “SGA Talks Plenary” surprised me greatly, not due to the overall content or the writing style, but because it referred to Alex T. BMC ‘09 with female pronouns.

I do not wish to speak for T., but as an acquaintance I believe that I can say with relative certainty that he prefers male pronouns and identifies not as a female but as a female-to-male transgendered person. If Ms. Held was confused or disoriented by T.’s gender presentation, or was unsure as to how to refer to him in print, then as a responsible journalist she should have asked.

In light of this confusion, it seems ironic that T. will be presenting a resolution having to do with gender-inclusive language in the Bryn Mawr Consitution and community. Perhaps we need that resolution more than we think we do.

Amanda Darby BMC ‘10

I remember some vague ruckus about this particular trans guy and his place at a women’s college; certainly there was that NYT Magazine article last year about young FTM (female-to-male transgendered) folks at women’s colleges. All my admittedly very sexist opinions about the place for women’s colleges in our society aside, I think Amanda Darby’s letter was absolutely spot-on. The kids at Bryn Mawr and Haverford do great things; I wish Princeton students had half their cultural awareness. But trans people—particularly young trans people, a relatively new phenomenon as people start to come out earlier—still tend to fly under the radar. There are ways, I think, to raise awareness about gender identity even on a campus where there might be only one or two out trans students, and this is really something we should be starting to do now that sex and sexual orientation awareness are becoming more normalized on-campus.

So yeah. Thank you so much, Amanda Darby, for bringing this to Haverford’s, Bryn Mawr’s, and my attention.

On Kinsey and His Methodology

We read excerpts from Sexual Behavior of the Human Male and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, Alfred Kinsey‘s meisterwerks (sp?), in my sex and gender class, and I was trying to remember where I’d read the Ginsberg reference that led me to believe once and for all that Kinsey’s methodology was flawed. Well, seeing that I own about as many books by or about Allen Ginsberg as the Princeton University Library (okay, that was slightly hyperbolic, but only slightly), it didn’t take that long. This is from p. 66 of Bill Morgan’s biography of Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself:

[Herbert] Huncke seemed to know everyone worth knowing on the street, from criminals to policemen. In fact, in 1945 Professor Alfred Kinsey was canvassing people in the Angler Bar as research for his pioneering study of American sexual practices. He recognized Huncke as someone who could secure interesting subjects for his study, and he offered Huncke a few dollars to bring him people willing to talk anonymously about their sex lives. Huncke was more than willing to oblige. He brought Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac to Kinsey for study and their interviews were integrated into his monumental study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948. Allen’s responses undoubtedly were the most uninteresting of the group, since he was still a virgin.

Yeah, that last sentence is a bit funny—but I think the prevailing attitude is “come on!” Huncke was a transient drug addict who knew his way around the underworld and counterculture of ’40s New York. He slept with both men and women, and he brought Kinsey the trio—Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. Kerouac, though he regarded himself as straight, had slept with men before; Burroughs, despite his common-law marriage, enjoyed his North African boys; Ginsberg hadn’t quite decided what he was in 1945, but his long relationship with Peter Orlovsky kind of turned him into a gay icon. And now let’s think: if you want to do a scientific study on the “sexual behavior of the human male,” and you want to extrapolate statistics such as what percent of the male population has had sex with a man, does it really make a lot of sense to seek out like the four men in New York who would actually admit to it?

Yeah, Kinsey was still ground-breaking, I think. But it was more in what he was willing to study than in his actual findings.

On a semi-unrelated note, I wonder if I, college freshman that I am, am really entitled to pontificate on quasi-intellectual matters when I haven’t the education or broad base of general knowledge to draw any informed conclusions. Your thoughts on the validity of my pontifications are always welcome. There’s a comments box below.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-22)

I found it in my school reading (Marian Mollin, Radical Pacifism in Modern America), but I think it’s of more importance than that. The quote is “Speak truth to power,” and it’s a Quaker thing: it came from 18th-century Quakers, but was adopted as the title of a 1955 pamphlet produced by the American Friends Service Committee. According to my reading, it “made both ‘a pointed indictment of military power’ and a social scientific argument for pacifism while emphasizing the power of individual action to effect change.”

How cool is that? Not just the nonviolence stuff, and not just the fact that it’s historically interesting to see the origins of the ’60s and ’70s anti-war movement in the mid-’50s. Those four words, “Speak truth to power,” are incredibly potent. They embody, I think, so much of what it means to be a voice against the established wisdom of the day, especially a voice for peace when the “power” wants to use its military might to control everything as far as the eye can see. It’s also a phrase I’d invoke today, when urging the current presidential administration to investigate the crimes of the last one, or when speaking up for a minority group to assure those who make the decisions that our voices do matter. These are four words of immense visual significance, which to me invoke all the greatest images of nonviolent demonstration of the past century. They bring to mind seas of strong, silent individuals who are gathered as one, holding signs and singing and standing up against all odds for what is right.

If you haven’t heard, NYU had some excitement last week. You should click on those links for more information, but basically a group called “Take Back NYU!” barricaded themselves inside the third floor of NYU’s student center, filled with shouting and demands, asking their university powers to do everything from freeze tuition to establish a socially responsible investment policy to give aid to war-torn Gaza. It was a mixed-up set of demands, and an ill-thought-out protest. It was disbanded after 36 hours; some students were disciplined and some will lose their college housing.

A lot of left-leaning college folks criticized this protest. I don’t blame them. It was a bit naïve and juvenile, really. It looked like a cheap knock-off of The New School’s December protest. I have some similar views, and I’m worried about the future of collegiate direct action, now that TBNYU has made it seem so risible and has incurred snark from exactly the people who I wish would support something like this. But I can’t find it in me to fault those kids. I can’t find it in me to belittle them, or laugh at them, or say they were wrong to do what they did. Maybe they didn’t exactly think things through. But I think I understand how it must be to feel so disenfranchised, and so angry, that you have to scream and you have to take action. There have been many times in my life, in high school and in college, when if I hadn’t been the only person who felt that way and if I had been something more of a natural leader, I would have taken similar action. I have to admire the bravery of kids who didn’t back down in the face of disciplinary reprisal, who were willing to risk arrest or injury for what they believed in, however muddled that belief may have been.

I was raised by pinko commie parents; I was indoctrinated to believe in the beauty and power of nonviolent action. I grew up thinking that you can get something done by gathering in large numbers and speaking out for it. I grew up thinking that there is an inherent good in speaking truth to power. So yeah, I’m biased. I’m way biased. But it seems to me that the TBNYU kids set out with the goal of speaking truth to power, and in my mind that all fuses with decades of marches on Washington and marches in New York and San Francisco; it’s one of those movie montages that stretches from the Bonus Marchers to the Prop. 8 protest I went to in New York in November. It’s “Peace now, freedom now!” “We shall overcome!” “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Solidarity forever!” Last November, for me, it was “Marriage is a civil right!” It all streams together with kids—they’re just kids—turning down the food they were offered when they locked themselves in a building at NYU because it wasn’t vegan. And it becomes one long saga of speaking to power that brings very impressed tears to my eyes.

Campus Dailywatch (2009-02-18)

Today’s Dartmouth has a pretty inane op-ed about Cornell’s LGBT group’s Valentine’s Day kiss-in, half of which just summarizes the Cornell Daily Sun article about the kiss-in and the other half of which states some things that seem pretty self-evident to me:

But at the same time, I think the shock value some of us find in “Queer Kissin’” says a lot about where we stand as a culture. We may be a relatively tolerant generation — on an intellectual level — but, in practice, we are not nearly as accepting as we claim to be. The Cornell kiss-in encourages us to reevaluate and question the tacit beliefs and prejudices we may not have known we had. By pulling these skeletons out of the closet, I think, we as a society can grow more accepting and understanding of varying opinions and lifestyles.

As if this is a unique discovery that Kevin Niparko ’12 (the author of the column) made himself! At Princeton, I’ve talked to quite a few people in the past week who said that they were all for gay rights, but why did the Pride Alliance’s “LOVE = LOVE” posters, featuring same-sex couples kissing, have to shove it in their faces? This is hardly an unusual phenomenon.

People like relationships—or anything else—that they can identify and classify. If a same-sex relationship can effectively be disguised as an opposite-sex relationship, and if all mention of the fact that the same-sex couple might be having sex is omitted, then we can reliably pretend that our conception of normativity and morality isn’t being challenged. But that’s no way to tolerance, really. It’s more along the lines of forced assimilation. We’ve got to take the “but” out of “I’m all for gay rights, but…”—and I don’t think it takes a Dartmouth freshman to point that out.

The day I knew I wasn’t in high school anymore

Was in the first week of this semester, three weeks ago, when my history of sexuality professor mentioned in passing that Jane Addams, the influential 20th-century reformer famous for her work in the settlement house movement, had a long-term female romantic partner. I’d had a decent high-school American history education; we’d learned who Jane Addams was. But to learn that she was in—gasp!—a same-sex relationship, and to have the professor mention it so nonchalantly, so usually? That was when things changed.

I’m still struggling to learn the modes of thought that go with real academic study. The transition to analysis, from the fact-based modes of learning and regurgitating that I learned in high school, is proving astonishingly difficult. And so it’s these little pieces of trivia that still fascinate me, almost more than the almost unbelievably higher level that all my classes operate on, and how blindingly intelligent my professors are. And so this fact stuck with me—not because it was a gay-themed fact, or a “liberal” fact, but because we as students are no longer accepting the facts as they are fed us. We are no longer accepting the spoon-fed narrative of American history that goes Pilgrims—Revolution—frontier—Civil War—Gilded Age—progressives—some more wars—freedom and democracy! I’m taking three classes this semester on American history and society, and they overlap a ton, which is fantastic, because between the three of them I’m filling in these gaping holes created by the omission of everything wrong that America has done, or social categories and questions considered too complex or controversial for treatment by a high-school classroom or an Advanced Placement curriculum.

And I almost don’t regret it being 1am and exhausted and not having finished my reading, or how soul-sapping working hard is, or not having a social life really (not that I ever had one to begin with). This shit is just so incredible that I’m in awe every single day of something I read or something one of my professors said or something that came up in a conversation with my friends at mealtime. It makes me think, too, that even if analytical and critical thinking isn’t coming so instantaneously to me, that this passion for the subjects I’m studying is enough that I can learn those modes of breaking down the facts. That graduate school and academia is a possibility. What my 19 years as the brattiest academic brat I’ve ever met have taught me are that more than anything else for getting along in academia, you need utmost passion about a subject. Well, I think I’ve got the passion—I just need to, a few years from now, figure out what to direct it at.

On a semi-related note, it’s validating to know that I can create my own little ivory tower within an ivory tower, and not be constrained to a “typical” Princeton undergraduate experience. I don’t want to prescribe what that typical experience is, but I think we’ve all got a pretty good idea what I’m getting at. Another “big idea” I’ve been learning this year is that Princeton can be all things to all people, and that there are other undergraduates who are essentially going to a completely different university from mine. I’m not happy 24/7 with the university I’m “building,” and I think I’m still adjusting to collegiate life, but it just keeps getting better and better. And I’m so grateful every day for the people who reinforce my desire to give in to my inner nerd, to talk about things I haven’t mentioned since I started socialization five years ago. In the past couple months, I’ve gone back to movies and books and music I haven’t touched since I was fourteen because I suddenly realized again what it was like to be passionate about these academic trivia. When I decided to start learning about Old English over intersession, I had a flash of memory of the time my family went to Powell’s Books in Portland, my dad said I could get one book, and I picked a 700-page academic tract about the 1745-6 Jacobite rebellion. I think I was twelve or thirteen, and I read the book all the way through, too, though the picture inserts were my favorite part—and I think they probably still are, of any book like that.

I still can’t control my book-buying habit; I still can’t resist reading aloud to my roommates every single passage in my school books that I think is cool. And although I’ll go to Terrace of an evening, and although I’m trying out this very new idea of training at my journalistic craft, the utter joy I’ve felt of being able to reclaim the almost carnal joy that comes from trivia and facts and as much scholarship as a college freshman can muster—this, this is amazing and validating and so utterly beautiful.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-17)

I was going to call this a “fun fact,” and then I realized it wasn’t that fun. From Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 GI Bill”:

Much less commonly remarked upon [when considering GI benefits] is a 1945 Veterans Administration ruling that denied G.I. Bill benefits to any soldier with an undesirable discharge “issued because of homosexual acts or tendencies.” The G.I. Bill deserves consideration by historians because it was the first federal policy that explicitly excluded gays and lesbians from the economic benefits of the welfare state.

WOW. From a history of sexuality perspective (a subdiscipline I’m growing ever more passionate about), that’s an incredibly interesting fact.

One of the main themes we’re learning about in the class I did that reading for (Gender and Sexuality in Modern America) is the idea of “institutionalized heterosexuality.” This refers to the trend, as the American state got ever larger in the 20th century, to enshrine the traditional nuclear family in law and exclude LGBT folks from the benefits given to the traditional nuclear family. This can include more obvious things, like marriage law, but also things like how postwar social security benefits were initially distributed in a way that favored a family where the husband was the breadwinner and the wife was dependent on him. This is something that it would never have occurred to me to consider in a million years… which is why, I suppose, I’m going to college and am strongly considering studying history.

Okay. I’ve got about 80 more pages of reading to go.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-15)

I find myself reading 100+ pages a day for my classes, far more even than my investment of time in our country’s college dailies, so I expect my reading is deserving of its own semi-regular feature on this blog as well.

From Roger Rinke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990:

Indeed, how could demographers, and especially their graduate students, fail to notice a whole shelf of books of religious statistics located alongside the regular census volumes? [emphasis mine]

Oh, those pesky grad students, never doing their advisors’ work for them well enough.

Happy blogaversary to me

According to my records, it has been four years to the day since my very first post on my very first blog, way back in the second semester of ninth grade. I’m reading that post now; it focuses on my emotions at the end of my time working on the school musical, Sondheim’s Into the Woods. I played viola in the pit orchestra, back when I still played violin and viola, before I got interested in the tech side of the theater world. This was so far before I got interested in the tech side, that I still hadn’t overcome my desire to act. I wrote about how I used to go into the theater at lunch, stand downstage center, and declaim Shakespeare to an empty house. I remember only knowing a few monologues—the Prologue from Henry V, Puck’s last speech in Midsummer Night’s Dream, a few bits from Macbeth. Part of “to be or not to be.” But I remember how long it took the penny to drop, how I didn’t realize that it was odd and awkward that I was the only non-drama kid to enter the Shakespeare recitation contest, for example.

I’m getting off-topic. But I think it’s odd, and maybe something worth complimenting myself about, that I was blogging in 2005, long before the new media really took off. I had a Blogger blog since day one, and I moved to WordPress in, if I’m not mistaken, 2007. I never used Xanga or LiveJournal. I talked about silly teenage things, though, even if my platforms weren’t teenage ones.

I was fifteen when Into the Woods closed, the most successful show I worked on in high school. It even got reviewed in the city paper, and some of the people who were in that production went on to take theater and film very, very seriously. But now, in college, at the age of nineteen, I know people who are or will be genuinely famous, who are indescribably brilliant at what they do, be it theater or anything else. In ninth grade, I had no idea how much bigger the world was going to get. I didn’t know how much I was going to grow as a person—a trajectory that’s evident from four years of almost-daily archives—or what the world outside my high school was like. In ninth grade, I hadn’t even begun the weighty processes of figuring out who and what I am that continues to this day.

I had tons of goals for high school. Some of them I accomplished, and some of them I didn’t. I made it alive through four years, an accomplishment which, for anyone, is larger than some people might realize. I made it to graduation without having sold my soul to the destructive culture that is public high school in America. I think that’s why I cried at graduation. I couldn’t believe that it was really happening, that I was really going to receive a diploma. And now I’m here, at Princeton of all places, and hating and loving every minute of it at exactly the same time.

But I’m sorry. I got off-topic again. Because this is supposed to be about blogging, not just about being older, though I think that is relevant too. This is about the first writing I ever really did outside of school—some of it private, and some of it public, but writing all the same. I did, and am still doing, what writers are supposed to do, keeping a journal of my thoughts and feelings and what happens in my day-to-day life. (I should mention, since I haven’t already, that the four-year blog in question is a private, password-protected site, while this new blogging endeavor is only a public manifestation of what’s been going on for years.) At the time that I began blogging, the writing I did was very limited: the only place anyone saw it was h2g2, a BBC-sponsored, Douglas Adams-inspired, haven that once was critically important to my life. But now I’m on the verge of conceiving of myself as a writer by trade. I’ve had enough experience to fill a resume, and I set my sights on very ambitious goals in the writing industry. It’s something that I try very hard at, writing. It’s a huge part of my life.

I know that all my writing is so personal, so much infused with “I,” that it couldn’t be without four years of writing about myself on an almost daily basis. Blogging is how I’ve developed (and am still developing) my voice, in addition to figuring out my identity (as a still-teenager, I feel as if that remains vital). And even of itself, isn’t it a bit of an accomplishment to have kept this journaling concept going continuously from my freshman year of high school to my freshman year of college? I remember when I’d start journals and never write in them again. I haven’t done that in quite a while.

I feel as if this isn’t a very good way to talk about conceiving of myself as a writer, because I’m just typing, and then I’m going to hit “publish” without proofreading what I’ve written. I’m sure someone will find typos and grammatical errors. I’m sure a lot of what I’ve said is clunky and kind of lame and self-absorbed, really. But hey. That’s what I’ve been doing for four years. And I really do feel as if it’s worked so far.