“ANDREA DWORKIN AND ME”: Maggie Gallagher

…Yes, I received a gift from Andrea, the kind of gift which, intellectually speaking, you can receive only from someone with whom you profoundly disagree. From the opposite ends of the political spectrum, we had each glimpsed a piece of the same truth. Against the backdrop of a pornographic Playboy culture that tried to teach us that sex is just a trivial appetite for pleasure, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that “sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal.”

I was not alone! Andrea saw it, too. As I wrote in “Enemies of Eros”: “In sex, persons become male and female, archetypically, exaggeratedly, painfully so. And to us, corseted in modern sexual views, femininity appears incompatible with the personhood of women. … What Dworkin observes is essentially true. Sex is not an act which takes place merely between bodies. Sex is an act which defines, alters, imposes on the personhood of those who engage in it. We wander through the ordinary course of days as persons, desexed, androgynous, and it is in the sexual act in which we receive reassurance that we are not persons, after all, but men and women.” …

…For as she spoke, it occurred to me that everything I had written about (as everything I’ve done since) was a deliberate and desperate attempt not to live in her kind of world. I longed to find marriage ties as binding as the ties between mother and child. I wanted not only to get, but to become the kind of person who can give that kind of dependable love, the kind that can be taken for granted because it lasts.

According to Reuters, “Dworkin is survived by her husband, John Stoltenberg, also a feminist activist and author.”

Maybe in the end, she found that kind of love, too. I hope so. Rest in peace, Andrea.

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THREE THINGS WHICH ARE TOO WONDERFUL FOR ME, YEA, FOUR THINGS WHICH I KNOW NOT: This post at JaneGalt is must-reading on libertarianism, tradition, and gay marriage. It’s long, but look, it’s almost certainly the most important blog post you’ll read today, so why not click through?

BLEG: If any of you all have tips on 1) pre-marriage counseling in the DC area (Christian but not necessarily Catholic)–I mean counseling for couples who are considering marriage but aren’t sure–or 2) DC groups that work with fathers to help them build strong relationships with their children, could you please drop me a line? THANKS.

RIGHT NOW, AT MARRIAGEDEBATE: Bisexuality at Yale, boars replacing babies in Italy, “the Bible too is a living word, just as the Constitution,” what does it mean to say marriage “creates kin”?, and much much more. Everything from legal strategery to how to get a date at BYU. (Note, I only plug my day job here when I think there are some posts up that would be especially interesting to readers who don’t check in on MD.com all the time.)

FEASTING WITH PANTHERS: So I spent this past weekend in New Haven. I was spending time with my college debating society, for their annual banquet (hence the title of this post). I have a few things to say about the weekend, but, on the car ride back home, I realized that most of those things circle around a central theme.

I spent a weekend with people who, for the most part, think the world is a very hard place, and if you find something good you should fight like hell to protect it. These are people who know that the world is broken and that we are broken. Something has gone wrong. (“Something fell.”) We are left with the aching love of the good that proves we knew wholeness once, but have never seen it in this life. It’s startling how often this came up: in discussions of what we can learn from the success of faith-based organizations in helping people who have seriously wrecked their lives; in discussions of children’s literature (in this vein, I can’t recommend The Last Unicorn highly enough–a beautiful book); really all over the place. This world is a very hard place to be. Everyone you love will get hurt badly. No one here gets out alive. Evil is worse than suffering, and therefore, you will have to choose suffering sometimes. Make the best of it, because no one can do it for you. There’s beauty and there’s joy, astonishing friendship and the always shockingly strong passion for children; but all our happiness is as fragile as our skin.

I’m pretty sure this attitude or stance underlies most of my politics. I don’t think it’s necessarily dispositive as far as political philosophy. There are some claims it definitely rules out (hi, I’m here to cut off the Enlightenment for nonpayment of its electricity bills), but on many of the important political questions people who share this deep-rooted understanding will disagree. The two most obvious examples for me are same-sex marriage (I do think Jonathan Rauch believes in some variant of the liberalism of fear, which I deeply respect, even though I think ultimately he’s a lot less conservative than he thinks he is–and yes, I just used “liberal” and “conservative” to refer to different shadows of the same edifice, welcome to America) and the war in Iraq (I think Jim Henley might actually have a darker view of human nature than I do, which is impressive).

A few more scattered notes from the weekend:

* I was reminded yet again that all friendships and institutions rely on a base of almost incessant patience and forgiveness. I only hope I will have the opportunity to repay all the patience and mercy that has been paid out to me.

* Nothing is as inspiring as seeing undergraduates go through that incredible personal transformation that our debating society makes possible. Every year I forget that it happens, and so every year I’m surprised again. It’s not growing up–it’s not just progress–it’s a phoenixlike descent into ashes and rebirth in fire.

* I like the song “One Night in Bangkok” a lot more than I thought I did. And I promise this is related to the rest of this post!

Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth!

Six parts gin to one part vermouth!

–Tom Lehrer, “Bright College Days”

THE ROMANCE OF ERRATA: Some notes on the big gender post below.

1–I think that post focuses too much on pregnancy as a risk, rather than a reward. That doubtless reflects my volunteer job and my general bachelorette lifestyle, among other things. But the post should have had a much more positive view of pregnancy and childbearing.

2–Jim Henley is overreading me, here, though that’s partly my fault–the last para. of my post is really unclear, sorry. The post isn’t a persuasive argument against same-sex marriage in part for the fairly basic reason that it isn’t an argument against ssm at all. You can agree with all of it (except the Catholic one-liner at the beginning…) and still support ssm. That just isn’t what I was trying to talk about. I wanted to do a much more narrowly-focused post on sex differences and whether homosexual and heterosexual relationships are “the same.” Obviously, your position on those questions will affect your views of ssm, but, like I said, it’s not dispositive.

ETA: No, that’s not quite right. It was thinking hard about the meaning and societal implications of sex differences that led me to oppose same-sex marriage, so I do think this argument eventually goes there (among many other places it goes). But I wasn’t trying to take the argument all the way there in the “Romantic Comedies” post, so again, it isn’t a persuasive case against ssm at least in part because that isn’t what I was trying to write.

(If you do want a really good exchange on ssm, though, you cannot do better than the debate between Maggie Gallagher and Jonathan Rauch that you can find here.)

3–I do want to point out that I was talking about a level of friendship and non-sexual love that’s a lot more than “going to football games together or being fond of your siblings.” But I suspect that ranting more about the contemporary denigration of friendship would be riding a dead hobbyhorse, so I won’t. Well, maybe a little: Here’s Camassia on the “if it isn’t eros, it’s crap!” mindset–which I don’t think Jim shares; I just want to clarify that I’m talking about a larger conception of love between people who have no romantic relationship than his rhetoric in this one case acknowledges. I think he’ll find that he was misconstruing that paragraph as an anti-ssm argument, which threw off his reading on the broader “what is love?” points as well.

4–Anyway, I do appreciate the links and comments, from both Jim and Peiratikos (who connects my post with Love and Rockets!–there’s lots of wonderful comicsness in that post, and, in the comments, Rose catches a stupid turn of phrase on my part).

ROMANTIC COMEDIES: So, I said I would reply to Sean Collins. And here it is. If you don’t want my opinion, don’t rattle my cage.

His email reads thus:

Hi Eve!

[Eve said, re Sullivan:] “Andrew Sullivan: ‘And, as I’ve said many times, homosexuality is very easy to understand. It is exactly the same as heterosexuality, with the gender reversed.’ Um, only if men are interchangeable with women. So, no.”

But my wife is not interchangeable with my friend Jesse’s wife, or Paul Newman’s wife, or whoever. Does that mean that my heterosexuality, Jesse’s, and Cool Hand Luke’s are all fundametally different somehow, a la Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-X–Heterosex-Sean, Heterosex-Jesse, Heterosex-Paul?

I dunno, obviously we’re never ever gonna agree on this, but I always thought this aspect of your argument was spectacularly weak and relied on assertions based on a faith that not everyone shares. Men are certainly different from women on several fundamental levels, but in terms of couples, love is love.

So let’s take this bit by bit.

SAME DIFFERENCE. First of all, it might be helpful to point out that you can think two things are different without thinking one is better than the other. For example, I think men are different from women. I don’t think guys are better than chicks, or vice versa. I don’t, as you all probably know, think that homosexual relationships are good, whereas heterosexual relationships can be (although I totally agree with Camassia’s comments here about the ways in which sinful relationships can be infused with love and apparently-okay relationships infused with sin). But I think, actually, that you can agree with everything I’ll say in the rest of this post and still think gay sex is a-okay.

I want to say more than that, really. Actual existing queer people don’t all sign on to this belief that homosexuality is mirror-heterosexuality. It might be worthwhile to listen to people who do think that, even absent Societal Prejudice, a guy who wants guys would not end up identical to a guy who wants girls. It might be worthwhile to listen to people who have actually dated chicks and dudes (hi! *waves*) when we say that it really isn’t the same.

Are the differences cultural constructs? 1) Probably not all of them, yo.

2) If they’re cultural constructs, doesn’t that just push the weight of explanation back one level? Why these cultural constructs and not others?

3) If they are cultural constructs, do we really want to live without them? Do we want an androgynous world, or do we find men and women, ladies and dudes, sexy?

TYPICAL GIRLS… ARE SO CONFUSING: I think a lot of opposition to any talk of sex differences at all is based in the belief that acknowledging sex differences will mean oppressing women. I wrote here about sex differences that don’t rely on some mythos of the “angel in the house.” If that’s why Sean leaned so heavily on individuality in his email, well, let the record show that I agree. I’m sure there are men with whom I have lots of things in common that I don’t share with most women. (The Old Oligarch‘s attentiveness to abstract theory [“world-animal lobster”!], to take the most obviously gender-coded-male example.)

HEY–WANNA TURN THIS INTO AN ART DEBATE? But look, I’m a writer. I write fiction. That’s the biggest reason I can’t accept the philosophy that men and women, or homosexual and heterosexual relationships, are the same.

A friend recently pointed out ways in which Jack Stafford, in “Kissable Pictures,” didn’t talk like a guy. That’s just true. I need to fix it, so that his character will be believable. If I’d defensively responded, “But why can’t a guy act that way?”, I would have lost credibility and would have lost the opportunity to write a different and believable character.

Similarly, I’ve written stories that address both homosexual and heterosexual relationships. I’d be lying if I portrayed them the same way; they’re not the same! “Desire” is the most blatant statement of that, with the confused-but-perhaps-intriguing “Ship Comes In” a close second; but in almost all of my stories, to change the central relationships or orientations would have deeply disrupted the story. I couldn’t write “Judge Me, O God” about a straight girl (or guy, in the sections from Charles’s POV), and I couldn’t write “Why Can’t He Be You?” (current title of the story that used to be “A Separated Soul”) about a lesbian. It’s obvious that one woman won’t necessarily act like the next–compare Suha and Laila, who are sisters!–but it’s equally obvious that women don’t generally act like men, and that sexual relationships will differ based on whether a) both partners are women, b) both partners are men, or c) one is a woman and one is a man. Honestly, I don’t get why this should be hard to acknowledge.

OH BONDAGE! UP YOURS! 1-2-3-4!: I don’t know. I’m not, maybe, in the most accommodating mood to answer these questions, since I spent 2 1/2 hours at the pregnancy center tonight. If you want to have it rubbed in your face that women who sleep with men take different, specific, culturally- but also biologically-imposed risks, why don’t you go do pregnancy tests for women who were on Ortho-Tricyclin, or women who’d had their tubes tied? (I did both tonight.) Women who pretend that sleeping with a man is the same as sleeping with a woman will get hurt. They will get hurt because intercourse still makes babies, despite all our efforts; they’ll get hurt because women aren’t raised the same way men are, despite all our efforts. They’ll get hurt because, from the ice age to the dole age, gender propels us into action, and gender shapes our actions and reactions. The women I’ve known who have been able to take control of their lives have understood that.

THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND CRIME: Finally, is love love?

No.

Seriously. I’m beginning to be fed up with this astonishingly imprecise term, “love,” and this is a perfect example. Is the love of a man for his stepdaughter the same as the love of a woman for her husband? Obviously not. What about the love of a best friend? Is the love of a woman for a man necessarily the same as the love of a woman for another woman? Well, how do we even know? Certainly in terms of risks and rewards faced, they’re not the same. (Pregnancy and dealing with The Weirdness That Is Men vs. societal and familial disapproval, for example. That’s not a universal comparison–some heterosexual couples won’t deal with pregnancy, although virtually all will deal with the possibility/expectation/desire of pregnancy, and not all homosexual couples will deal with comparable degrees of societal or familial disapproval. But I hope the example will at least give a sense of what I mean, that different structures for relationships provoke different reactions in both outsiders and the couple themselves.)

In “The Lion in Winter,” does Henry love Eleanor?

I am perhaps oversensitive here, as I find that gay-marriage proponents tend to denigrate my closest chosen relationships (hi, I’m single) in favor of the Real True And Only Possible Love that is sexual. So yeah, I get a bit snippy (as I think that last sentence did!), and I want to point out that deep abiding love can be as strong or stronger between people who have no romantic relationship as between people who do. I get the impression that our current cultural understanding of “love” is deeply confused, and so I’d rather have it all spelled out (in this case, “Homosexual relationships must be treated equally to heterosexual relationships because a, b, c, which are the relevant factors in [societal honor, governmental preference via marriage, or whatever is really being argued]”) rather than relying on imprecise terms like “love,” which cover all kinds of relationships, and a myriad of sins. Like I said, I’m a writer; but I’m also a tabloid journalist. I want to know the details.