Features

 
Commentary

Illusions of superiority

I always thought I was one of the “good” white people. Until one day.


I stepped onto the speakers’ platform at the Virginia Festival of Books in Charlottesville with Newsday editor Les Payne to discuss our chapters in his book When Race Becomes Real. Bernestine Singley, the other panelist, had edited the book.

As I walked to my seat, I was well aware of Payne’s impressive record. I had read his work, and I know he is a more experienced journalist than I am. He’s won more prizes and written more important books than me. Payne has traveled more widely and reported on more complex subjects. He is older than me, and has done more in his life than I have. I also have heard Payne speak before, and know that he is a more commanding and more forceful speaker than I am.

So, as I sat down at my seat, I did what came naturally; I felt superior to Les Payne. If it seems odd that I would feel superior to someone I knew to be more talented and accomplished than I am, then here is another relevant fact: Les Payne is African American, and I am white.

I didn’t recognize that feeling of superiority as I sat down, or as I made my remarks on the panel. It wasn’t until Payne started reading from a chapter in his book and explaining how he came to write his essays that my feeling became so painfully clear to me.

Payne talked about how, as a teenager born in the segregated South who attended high school in the North, he had struggled to overcome the internalized sense of inferiority which grew from the environment in which he had been raised. He talked with a quiet passion and power, about how deep that sense of inherent inferiority can appear in African Americans.

At some point, I made the obvious connection. Part of the reason that the struggle Payne described is so hard for African Americans is because white behavior is a constant expression of that feeling of superiority, expressed in a fashion both subtle and overt. My mind raced immediately to that feeling of superiority I felt as we had taken our seats. I had assumed, despite all that I knew about Les Payne, his record, and his speaking ability, that I would be the highlight of the panel. Why? It might be because I’m an egotistical white boy. Maybe I’m a white boy with delusions of grandeur. The former is almost certainly true. The latter may be an exaggeration. But whatever my own personal weaknesses are, one factor is obvious: I am white and Payne is African American, and that was the basis of my feeling.

The moment that particular feeling hit me, I was literally left speechless, fighting back tears, with a profound sense of sadness. I struggled to keep focused on Payne’s words, but it was difficult to do as my mind raced to cope with what I was feeling. Payne finished, and Ms. Singley started her reading. When the speaking period ended, I was forced to engage in the ending, and I did my best to answer a question asked of me. But I remained shaken.

One of the ‘good’ white people

Why all of this drama? It was because I fancied myself one of the “good” white people, one of the anti-racist white people. I am politically active, and have worked hard to incorporate an honest account of race and racism into my school’s teaching.

But in that moment, I had to confront that which I had not yet relinquished: the basic psychological features of racism. As Payne talked honestly of struggling with a sense of inferiority, I had to face that I had never really shaken a sense of my superiority. As I write these words, the feeling of that moment of sadness returns. Do not mistake this for superficial shame or guilt. Do not describe me as a self-indulgent white liberal. The sadness I feel is not for me. It is sadness about how deeply embedded in me is that fundamental reality of racism; the assumption that white people are superior.

That doesn’t mean I’m a racist. It doesn’t mean my political work or efforts in the classroom don’t matter. Instead, it means that what I say to my students about race — that the dynamics of domination and subordination run deep, affecting us in ways we don’t always see clearly — is true not only in theory. It is also true in my psyche.

I have long known that. On the platform with Payne that day, his words forced me to feel it. That wasn’t his intention; he was speaking to the audience — which was primarily African American — not to me. Whatever the intent, he did me that service. But I am most grateful to Payne not for that, but for something that happened later. After the event, I was planning to drive to Washington, D.C. When I mentioned that to Payne, he asked if he could ride with me and catch a flight from D.C. back to New York. I jumped at the chance, in part because I wanted to hear more about his research for his forthcoming book on Malcolm X, but also because I wanted to talk to him about what had happened to me on stage.

In the few we drove together, I took advantage of Payne’s experience in journalism and asked his opinion about a range of issues, in addition to pumping him for insights into Malcolm X’s life. And, finally, I asked if I could tell him about what had happened on stage.

It turned out, not surprisingly, that Les Payne is a gracious man. He listened to my story, nodding throughout. Nothing I said seemed to shock him. He is, after all an African American in the United States; I didn’t expect that I would shock him.

It was after I had finished that Payne did something for which I will always be grateful: He didn’t forgive me. That is, he made no attempt to make me feel better. He didn’t reassure me that I was, in fact, one of the good” white people. He simply acknowledged what I had told him, said he understood, and continued our discussion about the politics of race in the United States.

Part of me probably wanted him to forgive me. Part of me probably wanted the approval of African American person at that moment, to help eliminate the discomfort, which I was still feeling. But what would that have accomplished for him, for me, or for the world? Without knowing it, Payne during the panel had given me the gift of feeling uncomfortable. In the car at this time, perhaps with full knowledge of what he was doing, he gave me the gift of not letting me off the hook.

When I dropped him at the airport, I had no illusions. The day had meant much more to me than to him. He had been willing to teach me something, and then he went on to other things. His personal struggle with internalized inferiority was largely over; his chapter in the book made that clear, as did his interaction with me. It was easy to tell by the way he spoke and carried himself that Payne doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether white people are better than him. But I was left with the unfinished project of dealing with my internalized sense of superiority. And it was clear to both of us that such a project was my responsibility, not his.

The gender question

The story of that day in Charlottesville can’t end there, of course. On the platform with us was Bernestine Singley, who is every bit as black as Les Payne, and every bit as accomplished a lawyer and writer. Why am I focusing on him and not her? Why did he spark this realization in me and not her?

In part it was because of what Payne talked about on stage; his remarks and his chapter had pushed my buttons. Also, I have known Singley longer and have a more established relationship with her. We live in different cities and are not friends in a conventional sense, but I consider her (and I hope she considers me) a trustworthy ally and comrade in the struggle, and a friend in that context. Singley and I also have very different styles, and when we appear on panels together we clearly are
not competing.

With all that said, it’s also difficult to miss the fact that Singley is a woman and Payne is a man. There was not only a race dynamic on stage, but a gender dynamic. It’s likely that I was, in classic male fashion, focusing on the struggle for dominance with the other man on the panel. This perception of myself also is hard to face; in addition to being a good white person, you see, I’m also a good man. I’m one of the men who is on the right side. But I also am one of the men who, whatever side he is on, constantly struggles with the reality of living in a male-supremacist society that has taught me lessons about how to vie for dominance.

Introspection on these matters is difficult; people in privileged positions often are not in the best position to evaluate our own behavior. But looking back on that day, it appears to me I walked onto that platform with an assumption of my inherent superiority — so deeply woven into me that I could not in the moment see it — that had something to do with race and gender.

From those assumptions, it is hard to reach a conclusion other than: I was a fool.

I use that term consciously, because throughout history white people have often cast blacks as the fool to shore up our sense of superiority. But in that game, it is white people who are the fools, and it is difficult and painful to confront that. Somehow, I had allowed myself to believe the story that a racist and sexist society still tells. Yes, I know that Jim Crow segregation is gone and the overt ideology that supported it is mostly gone. But in the struggle to change the world, what matters is not only what law is, or what polite people say in public. What matters just as much, if not more, is what we really are, deep down.

All this matters not just because white people should learn to be better or nicer, but because as long as we whites believe we are better, deep down in places most of us have learned to hide, we will not feel compelled to change a society in which black unemployment is twice the white rate. And in which, as a recent study has found, a white man with a criminal record is more likely to called back for a job interview than a black man with no record.

In the United States, the typical black family has 58 percent as much income as a typical white family. And at the slow rate the black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it will take 150 years to close. At the current rate, blacks and whites won’t reach high school graduation parity until 2013, nearly 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. That is an ugly society.

The first step for white people is to face that ugliness, to tell the truth about the system we live in and tell the truth about ourselves. But that means nothing if we do not commit to change, not just to change ourselves, but to change the system. We have to face the ways in which white supremacy makes white people foolish but forces others to pay a much greater price.

We have to stop playing the fool and start playing for keeps.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To Abolish It”
By Noel Ignatiev
URL: http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html

Articles and essays on race, racism and white privilege
by Robert Jensen
URL: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/racearticles.htm

“

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Interviews

Making a nation of difference

Race to the finish line? Exploring the past, present, and future of racial and ethnic politics in the United States. A conversation with Rachel F. Moran.


Colored Waiting Room. Rome, Georgia, September 1943. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

The interviewer: Laura Nathan / Austin, Texas

The interviewee: Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice, the University of California at Berkeley / Berkeley, California

Fifty years removed from that fateful May 1954 day when the Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal, scholars and people outside of academia frequently refer to the present epoch in American social history as the post-civil rights era. But what exactly does the post- entail here? How do we describe the post-civil rights era? Certainly, we can agree that the notion of “separate but equal” that maintained the black/white divide for over two centuries is no longer legally permissible. But did the Court’s ruling ensure full equality for all U.S. citizens, or did the Brown decision merely raise new questions about what should succeed “separate but equal” as the primarily social descriptor for the diverse collection of people residing in the United States? When I spoke with Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member at the Center for Social Justice at the University of California at Berkeley, she shared her thoughts on the end of segregation and suggested that racial, ethnic, and class differences continue to alienate millions of people residing within U.S. borders. In fact, as she suggested, events and cultural trends of the past fifty years have not ended the debate on equality in the United States.  Rather new questions and conflicts concerning race and ethnicity have predominated the post-civil rights era.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision is often heralded as the most decisive legal victory in the struggle to end segregation. But how effective do you think the Brown decision has been in altering attitudes about race?

Brown alone was limited in its ability to alter social practices. It was only after the Executive Branch and Congress backed the Supreme Court’s decision with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enlisted federal agencies to enforce this law that Brown’s broad [influence and significance could be grasped].

Some people say that Brown didn’t make a difference because schools have since re-segregated. But I don’t think this is the case. Many people have had newfound opportunities to occupy positions of authority and importance due to the end of segregated practices. That is, Brown adopted an individualist model, so now everybody has a right [to attend a given public school, regardless of their race]. There are, however, limits to the individual’s ability to alter racial and class differences, and the best prepared individuals change [and benefit] the most.

Although certain structural issues were not accounted for by Brown, the decision played a significant role in revising notions of what individual opportunity required. You still couldn’t undo structural vestiges as easily because the [U.S.] Constitution is built upon individual rights and limits the extent to which the federal government can regulate the states and tell them what to do. So there are gaps, but by rethinking individual rights and opportunities, people can influence these structures through the new opportunities [they gained from the Brown decision.] Those benefits are real and will be long-standing. We won’t see the black middle-class disappear. We won’t see a reversion back to pre-Brown segregation practices.

Do you think that race continues to play as prominent a role in the United States as it did during the mid-1950s? In what ways have white privilege and more covert manifestations of racial alienation become a means of perpetuating racism?

Well, it’s really difficult for people who didn’t grow up during the 1950s [or weren’t alive during that time] to remember how difficult things were and realize how much things have changed. It used to be that blacks would travel across state lines, uncertain as to whether there would be a hotel where they could sleep or a restaurant where they could eat on the other side. Black families would have to strategize about where they would sleep and eat.

People tend to forget that race was inscribed in ways that were deeply humiliating and very pervasive. There was a Denver hotel owner, for instance, who said [his hotel] would tolerate pets but not blacks or Hispanics.

Racial groups are not as stratified as they used to be; the civil rights model has become so engrained that people forget these things. That doesn’t mean race is unimportant, but the official participation in racial segregation is far less prevalent than it was in the ’50s. Even though the changes aren’t huge across the board, there are changes. There are black CEOs in major corporations. Blacks are now partners in Wall Street [law and stock brokerage] firms. In the [pre-civil rights] era, they couldn’t even get an interview.

This, of course, has created new dilemmas. Blacks have since found some kind of an identity built around race [through hip hop and other cultural phenomena]. Now there are questions about preserving this identity that they value while also participating in institutions that are predominately white. So these new dilemmas have … happened because change has occurred. Today race still affects the way we identify ourselves and relate to each other, and inequality is still real.  But if you did not grow up with Jim Crow segregation, you can’t imagine what that was like.

We don’t know now what the endpoint is; we still don’t know what racial utopia is or what it should look like. The worst transgressions of treating race as a caste system are over, so now we have to ask all of these questions. But we still haven’t arrived at a full understanding of what we’ll end up as. Will we be multiracial? Colorblind? Or something else?

Saint Louis children and their parents protest transferring to a school open to black children. March 1933. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

What impact do you think the contemporary debate concerning affirmative action in higher education and the rhetoric used by both its opponents and proponents has on the quest to achieve racial equality and privilege?

Well, I’m of the view that a lot of this debate [over affirmative action in higher education] is [actually] about access to elite institutions. Nearly everyone who is eligible to attend these institutions is privileged at some level. They have completed high school, and in the case of graduate admissions, college. And these applicants have [achieved] a level [of success] that makes it plausible for them to go on [to college or graduate school]. So it’s a fairly privileged cross-section of people who have an education and are successful and ambitious.

The rhetoric [surrounding affirmative action in higher education] focuses on leadership, so that the debate shifts from diversity as an internal pedagogical strategy to [understanding] elite institutions of public education and higher education as the training ground for leadership in various universities. This suggests that these institutions are the gateway to higher opportunities. There’s a huge [opportunity] gap between someone with a high school diploma and someone who doesn’t [have a high school or college degree]. [The disparity] is [growing], so the stakes … are higher. There’s a sense of scarcity; the costs of not making it are very high. People feel very vulnerable. There’s a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. So the affirmative action debate is really as much about how race affects who gets ahead. With fewer manufacturing jobs today, more people feel [like they have to get a college or even graduate degree]; there’s a feeling that it’s all or nothing. This bigger gap [between the haves and have-nots] gets masked, however, by the way that the affirmative action debate gets framed with regard to higher education. Centering the debate on a group of people who are academically competitive — regardless of their race — ignores the people who are left behind without meaningful access to educational opportunity.

African Americans often hear that they have been displaced by Hispanics as the largest minority group in the United States. How has the increase of Latinos affected the national conversation on race, which has historically been primarily a black/white dialogue?

Well, up until the 1970s, it was demographically a black/white dialogue. Back then, only one out of ten [people in the United States] would identify themselves as non-white, and nearly all non-whites considered themselves black. Today, far more Americans say they’re non-white, but the portion of the non-white group who identify themselves as black is smaller. And many issues affecting race relations and racial equality still haven’t been resolved.

It’s almost a bicoastal issue. On the East Coast, they’re still looking at the [U.S.] population in primarily black and white terms. But on the West Coast, they can’t [talk about race in those terms]. Latinos are now the majority in some parts of California. [There’s] a lag on the East Coast to come to grips with this presence [of other sizable minority populations in the United States]

African Americans [have] a unique history and connection. Many worry that their [history] will somehow get lost in the numbers, and problems they have as a community won’t get addressed. There is also some concern that African Americans won’t be able to build coalitions.

Although blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans share a number of concerns related to discrimination, Latino and Asian American communities also have some distinct concerns from blacks. Both groups have grown dramatically through immigration, and so they face language and cultural barriers, internal diversity because of a range of countries of origin, and the challenges of dealing with non-citizen status and naturalization. Relatively few blacks are immigrants, and so most are native-born, speak English, and are American citizens. The challenges for black immigrants are sometimes forgotten, just as the problems facing native-born Latinos and Asian Americans are ignored at times.

Latinos disproportionately find themselves in the ranks of the working poor, and so they often emphasize class-based concerns — lack of access to health care, inadequate job protections, insufficient resources for schools and neighborhoods — more than race issues.  

Asians, because such a high proportion are recent immigrants, worry about being treated as foreigners. Also, some Asians are affluent and highly successful. Consequently, Asian groups worry about hitting a glass ceiling, being told that there are too many Asians at the top. So, a black/white model that is wholly preoccupied with race won’t last. What takes its place is the question, and I think that’s a complicated question. Unexpected events like 9/11 could change everything. Think about the way that Arabs have suddenly become a suspect class after September 11.

School segregation protest. (National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

That raises another question. What impact do you think racial politics and white privilege are playing in post-9/11 America? In Bush’s America where partisanship reigns and you’re either “with us or against us,” do you get the sense that more people are interrogating racial stereotypes and what constitutes race? Or have people in the United States become more complacent, questioning racism and race consciousness less frequently and less critically?

Issues of racial profiling for national security have prompted questions about what race means. The debate [over racial profiling and civil liberties after September 11] shows that it is very difficult to define what constitutes a protected category. It is not just a racial issue; these questions also have to do with national origin, immigration, religious issues, and questions of what constitutes a relevant form of identity for intrusive practices. These are tricky questions.

But [these complicated issues are] not what most people are talking about. They’re asking whether [one’s racial or ethnic identity] is a legitimate consideration in predicting dangerousness. They’re asking what kinds of evidence [should be admissible], how useful [such evidence] is, and how we should balance individual rights against the national good. Now there seems to be more of an instrumental balancing approach. Many people [characterize this approach as one concerning] foreign nationals and [the] threat [they pose to the United States]. Here you can see that race is being treated as distinct from national origin, religion, and political ideology, yet many Arab Americans feel that they are being racialized by these practices. This debate demonstrates how difficult it is to characterize difference in general and racial identity in particular.

Consider how politicians and the media often talk about “the Latino vote,” “the black vote,” “the female vote,” and “the Jewish vote,” stereotyping or playing up just one aspect of the identities of the people who identify themselves as such. To what extent do you think the parameters and interests of these communities become oversimplified as a result of the media’s characterizations of particular categories of people?

Politics has always had that feel for ethnicity, [where a politician’s message changes] depending on [his or her] audience. You always [have] a way in which you want to reach people [by speaking to their interests] in hopes that they’ll vote for you. So [politicians look at the ways in] which [particular] characteristics will reach people and make them sign on.

It’s even trickier now. We live in a world with all kinds of media. Now there are also so many more TV stations. But newspapers and television news no longer predominate. They are being replaced by the Internet. So there’s no way to compartmentalize the way you behave with one group and keep other groups from finding out.

[Politicians] must think about how [the way that they] cater to one audience will be perceived by others; they often say the most innocuous things to avoid angering [other elements of the population]. Now politics is more impersonal than ever. Candidates don’t connect with you; instead they have to create the illusion of connecting with the little audience at a rally as well as the whole world that might see [or hear sound bites from the rally] later [in the media’s coverage of the event].

People used to say that [President Bill] Clinton felt everybody’s pain. Politicians take on personas like that [by speaking in] very general and generic [terms] and [creating] a brand of self [that makes] it seem like you’re someone’s friend, emptying out concepts of friendship, identity, [and] community. Everything you do is replayed on C-SPAN and the six o’clock news, so it’s hard to have a [public] personality that is real. You only have a persona, an image that’s managed … That makes it harder to do racial politics; you can’t do anything that will alienate the middle. The Democratic Party feels [like it has] been hurt by doing racial politics and then losing the white male swing vote. This has created a conservatism regarding difference. Because you have to make everyone like you, you can’t tailor your message to any group.

… Recently, there was a study that said single women don’t vote as often as married women and tend to be more progressive [than married women]. So people started asking why the Democratic Party doesn’t reach out to [single women] and mobilize them. And the Democrats said they couldn’t do that because they’d look anti-family. It’s a case of leveling out politics to the blandest common denominator. The same is probably true for race, ethnicity, class, and other categories as well.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

The writer
Laura Nathan, InTheFray Managing Editor

TOPICS > BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION >

Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education May 17,1954.
URL: http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html

TOPICS > POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA >

Racism in the post-civil rights era
URL: http://www.fetchbook.info/Racism_in_the_Post_Civil_Rights_Era.html

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Reviews

Welcome to ITF — OFF THE SHELF!

About our book club for readers.


Here at ITF we love to read, and our editors want to share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

We kicked off ITF — Off the Shelf in May with Jairus Victor Grove’s Heroic ethics, a critique of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.  Though May has come and gone, we promise to keep the intriguing books coming. Each month an ITF editor will review a book concerning identity and/or community. The featured works will be a mix of old and new, fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll keep our Bookshelf at Powells.com updated so that you can purchase the books we’ll be reviewing in subsequent months a month or more in advance. And don’t worry, if you prefer to shop at Amazon, just click here or on the titles of the books listed at the bottom of this page. You’ll be taken right to the Amazon site, where you can purchase those books and start reading. (Of course, if you already have a dog-eared copy of the book sitting on your bookshelf somewhere, more power to you.)

While we’ll make our book reviews available to all ITF readers, only readers like you who are registered on our site have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. In this space, members can access exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books and participate in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. Members can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. And you don’t have to wait for us to publish our reviews to submit yours!

So don’t just sit there — get your copy of Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History now! And at the risk of sounding like your high school English teacher, beware: There aren’t CliffsNotes for most of our recommendations. So it’s probably a good idea for you to get your hands on — and read — our featured books ahead of time.

Here’s what we’ll be taking Off the Shelf during the next few months:

May: Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth
June: Benjamin Weissman’s Headless
July: David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories
August: David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor
September: Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History
October: Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois From a Collective Memoir of Souls

If you have any questions about ITF — Off the Shelf, please email us.

Happy reading, writing, and discussing!

—The Editors

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Reviews

Got books? We do!

Introducing ITF — Off the Shelf!


Last updated on November 27, 2005

Here at ITF we love to read, and our contributors and editors want to share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

While we’ll make the book reviews available to all ITF readers, only those who register on our site (membership is free!) will have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. Members get access to exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books. They can take part in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. And they can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. (Did we mention that membership is free?!)

If you have any questions about ITF — Off the Shelf, please email us.

Happy reading, writing, and discussing!

—The Editors

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News

Healthy for whom?

President Bush's Healthy Marriage" initiative is great for traditional marriage proponents, but what will it do for the poor?


The wedge issue” is a time-tested election-year strategy, and the Bush administration is unusually fond of – and unusually good at – the practice. Oppose the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance? You must be an atheist. Oppose the Patriot Act? You must hate America, or have something to hide, or both.

The controversy surrounding “Healthy Marriages” – President Bush’s plan to use welfare money to spread marital bliss – isn’t a spectacular battle like gay marriage or the “under God” business, but it’s as much about creating divisions and gaining leverage. It’s just less “shock and awe” and more stealth bomber, engineered to both look impressive and go unnoticed.

Bush first introduced Healthy Marriages in early 2002, with little accompanying fanfare. But with the flap over gay unions bringing the definition of family to the top of the national agenda, the media are taking a second look.  

Ostensibly, the program is about improving the lives of poor children, by fostering “stable families.” And it sounds good. It appeals to core constituents and seems innocuous – if not downright reasonable – to most everyone else. The few opponents are so ideologically diverse that their varied objections dissolve in a sea of “ifs,” “ands,” and “buts.” Best of all, it won’t cost taxpayers a thing – at least, not so much that they’ll notice.


In light of the war in Iraq and the stumbling economy, Healthy Marriages may be considered a “soft” issue, but poverty in America is a pervasive and immediate problem. Approximately 35 million Americans – one out of every 10 people and one out of every six children – live below the poverty line. The Bush administration says encouraging marriage will reduce those numbers.

There is some evidence suggesting they may be right. Social scientists have found that children in married families are less likely to be poor, addicted to drugs, and involved in crime, and more likely to finish high school and have healthy families of their own. Under the new plan, the Bush administration would put more money toward eliminating the disincentives to marriage that now exist in the welfare system, support existing marriages by teaching relationship skills, and educate the country on the value of the institution.

But the administration is touting one fact – children in married families are generally better off than those in single-parent families – while conveniently ignoring another: We have no idea how to promote marriage among the poor. In his “Fatherly Advice” column for the National Fatherhood Initiative website, child psychologist Wade Horn even admitted as much. “There is no evidence that any of this will work,” he wrote in 2000. That was before he was appointed as Bush’s healthy marriage pitchman.

Critics argue that it’s premature to put so much money into what amounts to a vast social experiment. The enthusiasm for the plan, they say, isn’t as much about reducing child poverty as it is about defending traditional marriage as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. Critics allege that for healthy marriage defenders – a diverse group of concerned citizens, beltway policy analysts, and “faith-based” organizers – Bush’s program is meant to initiate a widespread culture change that extends beyond the poor.


And there is evidence to support critics’ claims. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, a bipartisan bill signed by President Clinton, already provides for all the “marriage promotion activities” included in the Bush plan. Under the 1996 law, states have recently begun experimenting with policies and initiatives to promote marriage. But as expert Theodora Ooms points out, “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.” In fact, the potential implications of current state initiatives are so unknown, the administration won’t endorse any particular method of promoting marriage.

Bush is betting that the perceived softness of Healthy Marriages will carry it through Congress. The welfare reauthorization bill has been hung up in the Senate for months, but lately the sticking point has been minimum wage, not marriage promotion. If the bill passes while Bush is still in office – there’s a chance that the Senate might not consider it again until 2005 – Healthy Marriages will likely pass with it. So far, the administration has succeeded in presenting it as a common-sense plan. But hard questions remain unanswered.

Clinton’s compromising legacy

The idea of the federal government promoting marriage predates the Bush administration. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, was pitching similar ideas to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, have been building the case for marriage promotion almost as long.

By 1992, when welfare dependence was at its peak, there was a widespread, bipartisan feeling that reform – including work requirements and family formation goals – was a legislative, if not moral, imperative. As a candidate for president, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it” by imposing work requirements and time limits on benefits, and funding programs that would reduce out-of-wedlock births.

At the end of his first term, during his bid for re-election, Clinton signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family,” Clinton said. “Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.” The new law effectively ended the New Deal guarantee of welfare for poor Americans.

Conservatives complained that their agenda had been coopted. Liberals cried treason. Two high-ranking Health and Human Services administrators, including long-time Clinton family friend Peter Edelman, resigned in disgust. Moynihan called the new law “the most brutal act of social policy since reconstruction,” predicting that the law’s backers would “take this disgrace to their graves.” But the plan was roundly regarded as a bipartisan success – it still is – and Clinton’s propensity for compromise helped deliver a landslide victory.

At the time, most critics were overwhelmed by the abandonment of the old welfare system and the sweeping changes of the new one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of welfare for six decades, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gave states more discretion over the use of funds, limited the duration of assistance to five years, and established strict work requirements.

The new law was focused on encouraging recipients to get to work, but it was also explicitly aimed at influencing family formation. New Deal welfare programs contained implicit financial disincentives to marriage for single parents; often, a mother’s benefits would drop significantly or end altogether if she got married. Under TANF, states could eliminate those disincentives, but they were also directed to actively encourage marriage as a method for ending welfare dependence.

While there were deep concerns on the left about welfare reform generally, the family –based objectives weren’t that controversial. Little was made of the fact that states could theoretically use 100 percent of their welfare grants to promote marriage – and not just among the poor. Programs aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births and encouraging two-parent families could be directed to the general population (see Box 2).  

Since it was unclear how, exactly, the goals were to be met, few states implemented explicit family formation policies. That is, until Bush became president.

How marriage will cure poverty and other tall tales

Shortly after taking office in 2001, Bush appointed one of the marriage movement’s most vocal leaders, former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Wade Horn, as Assistant Secretary in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With one of their own heading ACF, the movement has more clout than ever. But critics worry that the administration is publicly “soft-pedaling” a vague and potentially dangerous – and extraordinarily well-funded –experiment. Since 2001, 35 states have adopted some form of marriage promotion. And many states are already using TANF money for “marriage promotion activities” aimed at whole populations.


Horn is careful to say in public that the government won’t be “playing cupid,” and that the emphasis is on healthy marriages, not marriage for its own sake, or marriage as the solution to poverty. “We’re focused on helping low-income couples build strong marriages and get equal access to marriage education services on a voluntary basis,” he told the Boston Globe last month. (Horn denied repeated phone and email requests to be interviewed for this article.)

When speaking for the president, Horn anticipates and neutralizes objections to the plan, but it is not clear that he takes them seriously. “Someday someone has to explain to me what the controversy is,” he said to The Weekly Standard in March 2002, “why it’s a terrible idea to help couples who’ve chosen marriage for themselves to develop a skill set which will allow them to have a healthy marriage.”

But Horn’s posturing obscures the real issue. Few object to the expressed goals of teaching relationship skills or fostering loving families. Rather, critics fear that the administration is putting a pretty face on a dubious ideology that holds up marriage as the answer to poverty and the welfare state. They point out that there are very few restriction on how the TANF money can be used. The language is vague enough that faith- and community-based organizations can easily go from endorsing healthy relationships to promoting marriage as the only possible healthy relationship (see Box 1).

“In the abstract, this is a great thing,” said Stephanie Coontz, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She acknowledges, as most critics of the plan do, that a healthy marriage benefits both parents and children.

But she is uneasy about dispatching non-profits and religious groups – some with no training at all – to implement unproven programs. One marriage promotion method touted by the Bush administration, “Marriage Education,” can be taught by “para-professionals, lay leaders, teachers, clergy, or mental health professionals,” according to ACF literature. “Some courses require no training and are ready to teach out-of-the-box.”

Coontz is also suspicious of the intentions of the White House and its ideological backers. “The administration isn”t putting it forward as an anti-poverty measure “they’re soft-pedaling it as much as possible,” Coontz said. “Their biggest supporters are people who really do see this as an alternative to the welfare system.”

“The people at the Heritage Foundation clearly argue that getting people married is the way to stop poverty, and that that’s where the bulk of our efforts should go,” Coontz said.

She’s right. Heritage – the policy pipeline for the White House – is saying what the administration won’t. In a March 26 report, Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue wrote, “the collapse of Marriage is the principle cause of child poverty in the United States.” It’s a convenient theory, but not one that is widely accepted outside Bush’s tight ideological circle.

Most experts on welfare, marriage, and social policy share a lot of common ground and mutual respect. If it weren’t for sectarian ideologies, they say, they might be able to hammer out a workable healthy marriage program that could satisfy everyone.

“People on both sides who are debating this issue believe that families need help and support and need to escape poverty,” said Dorian Solot, co-author of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple. Solot is also Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which she founded in 1998 to advocate for marriage-neutral social policy. “I do think, interestingly, that these groups share very similar values,” she said.

But Wade Horn doesn’t see it that way – at least he didn’t use to. Before joining the Bush administration, when he was still president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, he characterized his opponents as “the we-hate-marriage left.” The Heritage Foundation voices this adversarial divide: “We have two very different worldviews and two very different strategic goals, and they’re totally irreconcilable,” Heritage policy analyst Patrick Fagan said in a phone interview. Like Horn before he was initiated into Bush’s circle of trust, Fagan is quick to dismiss his opponents’ arguments. He sees his side of the debate as “the traditional, Judeo-Christian, orthodox, ortho-praxis community,” and critics as “the newer, sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” community.

But the majority of concerned researchers and scholars locate themselves somewhere between the ideological poles. To them, the debate isn’t as contentious as the media or the Heritage Foundation are making it appear. “I’m not sure where these people are who he’s making out to be his opponents,” Solot said of Fagan, “but I’ve never met them.”

Fuzzy numbers, clear disclaimers

Both camps in the marriage debate have research to supports their views. But analysts at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), widely acknowledged as a responsible, non-partisan think-tank, argue that we don’t yet have answers to a couple of important questions. States are expected to develop innovative programs to promote marriage, but whether they have the know-how remains to be seen.

Much of the research on the relationship between marriage and poverty is imperfect, inconclusive, or worse, purposely partisan. Politicians and advocates on all sides manipulate the numbers to suit their needs; sometimes they even cite the same numbers to make different points. If the trend supports one’s argument, the unwritten rule goes, cite the trend; if the trend casts doubt on one’s argument, cite an individual case. It’s this rhetorical calculus that gave us the “welfare queen” in the 1980’s, and gives us the average “healthy” family today.

In a recent report that synthesizes marriage and poverty research, Mary Parke, a CLASP policy analyst, concludes that there are no simple answers. “Findings from the research are often oversimplified, leading to exaggeration by proponents of marriage initiatives and to skepticism from critics,” she writes. “While it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of income and family structure, clearly the relationship operates in both directions: poverty is both cause and effect of single parenthood.” It’s a conclusion that undermines the Heritage Foundation’s premise that marriage is the main cause of child poverty. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Heritage Foundation continues to insist that the merits of the initiatives are beyond doubt. “This is an equation made in Hell,” Fagan said of the historical resistance to federal marriage promotion. “We know that marriage reduces poverty,” he said. “It’s been a known, open secret for a long time.”

In any case, states have begun experimenting with a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing divorce rates, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births. Arizona has dispatched a 48-foot semi-trailer that carries marriage counselors to low-income areas. West Virginia is giving a $100 monthly bonus to poor couples that marry. Despite the flurry of new initiatives, the Administration of Children and Families acknowledges that most programs haven’t been properly evaluated, if they’ve been evaluated at all.

Theodora Ooms, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, regularly consults with federal, state, and local public officials on marriage promotion policies and strategies. She thinks federal marriage promotion is a good idea. But she has reservations about the plan as it stands. Since states have just begun implementing the programs, Ooms said in a phone interview, “it’s much too early” to know if they’ve been successful. “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.”

At a Healthy Marriage conference sponsored by the ACF last year, the Director of the Division of Child and Family Development, Naomi Goldstein, acknowledged that states’ evaluation methods have been flawed. “They are too often based on small, non-representative samples and lack adequate experimental design or long-term follow-up,” she said. “They have not generally focused on low-income populations and/or unmarried parents, or included child-level outcome measurement.”

The ACF’s published list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages includes such initiatives as modification of no-fault divorce laws and television advertising campaigns extolling the virtues of marriage, none of which are directed exclusively at the poor. Four states have passed reductions in the cost of a marriage license for couples, poor or not, who take a marriage course. Florida, for example, has dropped its fee from $88 to $55.50 for such couples. But these programs’ inclusion, the document warns, “does not constitute or imply favoring or endorsement by ACF.”

Although they’re clear in disclaiming responsibility, Bush and Horn have still not answered the central question: If we don’t have any confidence in the current programs and we haven’t evaluated them, why are we expanding them?

Deploying the culture warriors

We may not know Bush’s true intent for “Healthy Marriages,” but it’s somewhere in between a sop for “family values” conservatives and a nefarious Orwellian plot. What’s clear is, there’s a vast middle ground, and he’s not reaching out for it. He’s not even looking out for it.

By design and by some chance, the plan has eluded widespread scrutiny. Bush has managed to sell it as a soft-and-fuzzy, “it’s all about the kids” plan. But he has had to be deceptive to pull it off. The administration maintains publicly that the interest is in promoting healthy marriages, but without enough information to endorse any marriage programs, they can have no real idea what the results of state-sponsored initiatives might be.

Even the staunchest critics of the Bush plan acknowledge that the government would be wise to promote healthy relationships among the poor. But instead of trying to pacify his critics, Bush and his strategists prefer to deploy the culture warriors. Oppose Healthy Marriages? You must be one of those “sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” types.

Scales photograph from istockphoto.com

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Heritage Foundation
URL: http://www.heritage.org

The National Fatherhood Initiative
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org

Center for Law and Public Policy (CLASP)
URL: http://www.clasp.org

Administration of Children and Families
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov

Council on Contemporary Families
URL: http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org

Alternatives to Marriage Project
URL: http://www.unmarried.org

TOPICS>

Understanding the President?s Healthy Marriage Initiative
Report by Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue
March 26, 2004
URL: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/bg1741.cfm

ACF list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/region5/htm_pages/compendium.htm

Doing Something to Boost Marriage
Essay by Wade Horn
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org/articles/wh102500.htm

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
URL: http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/index.asp

“

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Commentary

Left/right love

Beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and the polling booths, Republicans and Democrats are finding innovative ways to bridge the political divide. But they still have miles to go before they can sleep together peacefully.


I swore I would never date a Republican. Ever. Then I met Miles. Alcohol and its logic-impairing effects were undeniably contributing factors. We met at some soirée in San Francisco’s Mission District, which served as a veritable breeding ground of multiculturalism before the dotcom explosion rocked the ‘hood into gentrification. It was during the rein of the first Bush administration, and with all of the glory and trauma of the Gulf War still a sore wound in my mind, it seemed unlikely that I would bond with someone so radically opposed to my progressive ideology.

But I did.

Three dry martinis into the evening I met Miles, a disarray of limbs and a blur of khaki and plaid. With a full head of wavy, auburn hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and alabaster skin, he appeared too straight, too conservative, too damn uptight for my taste. Oddly enough, Miles turned out to be a good kisser. A great kisser. A most supreme kisser with a killer physique to match. What he lacked in aesthetic appeal, he made up for with animal magnetism. He possessed that rare combination of child-like wonder and wanton virility that made me want to rip off his starch-white Polo button-down shirts with my bare hands.

He tried to convince me that he wasn’t like the rest of his ilk. Sure, he shared many neoconservative views, but he was definitely not racist, sexist, or homophobic. This, however, begged the question: why then are you a Republican?

And just because someone is a flag-waving, family-values, NRA-lovin’, pro-prayer-in-schools, three-strikes-you’re-out, say-NO-to-drugs-abortion-and-porno, capital-driven political aficionado doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid dating them. You have to keep an open mind and put your tolerant liberal theories into practice for a change, I told myself. Opposites attract. Look at Maria and Arnold, an ill-conceived convergence of brains and muscle, a couple who have remained happily married despite their political rivalry and his roving hands.

I tried. God knows I tried.

At first I desperately tried to overlook certain things, but slowly they began to fester in my head, causing what I feared to be a brain hemorrhage. When he attempted to regale me with diabolical sentiments such as “if it weren’t for Rush Limbaugh,” or lauded Ronald Reagan for his trickle-down economic policy in public, or lambasted “fat, lazy welfare mothers” for milking the system dry, I could feel the blood rush straight to my cortex. At moments like this, I would cringe my face into a spasm and walk to the nearest wall and hammer my head against it. Hard.

The fact that we met during a hell-ridden recession that left both of us out of work and flat broke didn’t help. Poverty, our common denominator, was the source of our bonding and dissension. Who’d pick up the tab was the terminal sore spot of our dates. Usually we’d end up splitting it in half, but more often than not I picked up the bill for no other reason than to avoid a scene. To my dismay, he was able to attend dinner parties, cocktail parties, pool parties, backyard parties, football parties, campaign parties, office parties, and rooftop parties without spending a dime. I held anti-party-parties. Parties where no one showed up — except me and a bottle of wine. I drank to forget him.

But it didn’t work.

At the time, I lived with three guys from Italy in a flat where the blow, the booze, and the women revolved through the front door 24/7. The first time Miles came over for a house party, I found myself avoiding him at every turn. I orbited the room in chronic circles, veering off into the crowd, dodging in and out of conversations, making small talk with complete strangers. Off in the distance I heard Miles’ voice rise: “Bunch of fucking illegal immigrants can’t even speak English …” I knew he was referring to my roommates. When Giovanni turned to me with a questioning look that said, “Where did you find this fucking whack job,” I did the first thing that came to mind. I ran. Down the hall, out the door, up the hill, and into the first place I spotted with lights on — an Irish pub. There I lingered, sunk deep in the dark recesses of the tavern until last call, and then stumbled home only to find the place completely empty except for a note on the refrigerator that simply read: “Dump him.”

But I didn’t.

While I spent my days as a Food Not Bombs volunteer doling out bread and soup to the lines of homeless snaking around the Civic Center, Miles would trek downtown in a three-piece suit to the swanky offices of the Republican Party. What he did there I never knew — and never cared to ask. When we met at night, both tired yet filled with an unwavering and often vying sense of purpose, most of our time was comprised of political discussions — which somehow led to sex. Miles rendered the brain an erogenous zone. It constituted mental masturbation: verbal intercourse as a form of foreplay. Tax cuts made him horny. Defense spending kicked his testosterone production into overdrive. For Miles, sex and politics were mutually combustible, and I often wondered whether he was tempted to jerk off whenever politicians debated issues like they do at the Republican National Convention. As a proponent of hand-and-mouth probing, I seldom found myself hot after analyzing Third World debt or the trade deficit. Occasionally, I marveled at his ability to get me so riled up that I would collapse on my back, screaming my lungs out, and kicking my legs in the air. Miles, ever the opportunist, would pounce on top and attempt to dazzle me with his latest trick. And it often worked.

Miles turned out to be pathologically ambivalent. Outside of the sack, I couldn’t tell if he even had a pulse. Void of an interior landscape, he averted his eyes, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and didn’t so much as even glance in my direction to meet my unrelenting glare whenever I brought up a topic remotely related to emotions. Seven beers later, he would gradually begin to respond, grasping at words, pausing between breaths, staring at the door, where long periods of silence filled the void while the shape of thoughts were still breeding in his mind. What an idiot, I thought; what a goddamn piece of work. Say something. Anything.

Nothing.

He sits in silence, jaw clenched, arms folded across chest.

If we couldn’t talk about politics or anything remotely related to matters of the heart, there was only one thing left to do. Around 12:30 a.m., we return to his over-priced, under-furnished, rat-sized studio in the Marina. We’re sprawled out on a florescent orange beanbag couch, some fleabag relic left over from the tacky 70s Partridge Family décor, watching Saturday Night Live in a drunken stupor. He crawls on top and soon we lie naked, tongues licking skin, mouths forming sounds, hands touching the most intimate parts of our being. Here, the lines blur, and there are no boundaries between us. We kiss, and our bodies entwine in a wordless conversation, a place where an unspoken language gives birth to a whole new territory. And, somehow, even this is not enough to keep our passion alive.  

We knew that we were headed nowhere, that we were traversing a hopeless trajectory. We will forever remain a half-read novel, with good dialogue but a weak plot whose ending we predict in advance without enduring a painstaking read of its final pages. Cut to the last chapter. Hurry. Read the last sentence, and then close the book. This how this story will end.

I will always be longing. For Miles, for San Francisco, for the years that passed like clouds racing through the sky, for the days when love seemed so close I could taste it in the air. I will always wish we could have conquered a bold new land, carved our names in it, and erased the borders with our own two hands. I will always be hoping for a new ending.

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News

Outsourcing marriage

2004 Best of Identify

Expat suitors are returning to India to sweep brides off their feet and their continent.


Red bangles are an essential part of the Indian bride’s trousseau; the color red is considered auspicious and signifies prosperity.(Inga Dorosz)

One afternoon, when I was a teenager growing up in India, my mother beckoned me to watch Oprah on cable. Oprah was profiling couples of Asian descent who had been raised in America but nonetheless entered into traditional arranged marriages. While the audience gaped, a husband beamed indulgently as his new wife shared how she was still discovering things about her husband each day even after being married for a few months. Thousands of miles away, I shook my head and thought, “I am never going to let this happen to me!”

Six years later, I found myself engaged to a man after meeting him for two hours in front of a food tray stocked with tea cups and black forest pastries, as my father and future mother-in-law compared notes about The Gita six feet away. Today, three years into marriage, I still marvel about the possible hardwiring of my system that may have led me to give my full throttled assent.

While my husband rode a horse on our wedding day much like our respective fathers had, much had changed in the intervening decades. After being reassured innumerable times that I had the right to say ‘no,’ I had the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with my prospective husband, something my university-educated mother and civil servant father never had. My future groom, a Silicon Valley geek, found himself having to defend his career choices.

Such alliances, bringing together tradition and modern liberal values, Indian and U. S. roots, have become less rare. A surge in immigration to the United States over the last few decades has brought a new twist to India’s ancient custom. The arranged marriage structure offers an invaluable way for ex-pats to keep ties to their home countries alive by giving them mates who share the same heritage. And for those with little time for courtship and dating or little inclination to search for a life partner on their own, returning to one’s country of origin to find a bride or groom is a quick and usually very dependable method.

To the Westerner, arranged marriages have become an exotic peculiarity of Eastern cultures. Recent movies such as Bend it Like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding have paradoxically both demystified and heightened the caricature of Indian marriages.

So what exactly is an arranged marriage? For the uninitiated and the unarranged, here is a quick primer: It is a match wherein the marital partners are chosen by others (typically family members), based on economic and social factors. Instead of marriage following love, in arranged marriages love follows marriage; love is learned as the marriage grows. In countries like India where the two genders do not mix very freely and family ties remain strong, arranged marriages address important needs. The attention paid to the appropriateness of the spouse, in theory, helps to improve in-law relationships (since the spouse is deemed acceptable by the family first), and increase compatibility.

And while audiences of Oprah may gape wide eyed when a girl raised in the United States by her Indian parents chooses an arranged marriage, there was a time when it was as much a part of life in the Western hemisphere as it is still in the East. Though it might seem hard to believe, arranged marriages were once the norm the world over — when the desire for a “pure” bloodline was common across cultures. All over Europe, kings married princesses, often much younger than them, who brought kingdoms as dowry. Romantic love was then considered a lower-class practice.

More than just a method of financial planning, arranged marriages ensured that everyone found a mate and those lacking charisma were not unduly penalized. Over time, marriage based on attraction between partners became more common and the creation of a society that has encouraged dating and liberalized its rules of sexual conduct made go-betweens and the need for family approval virtually unnecessary. All to the extent that today, arranged marriage strikes Westerners as alien or incomprehensible.

Yet, while the days of Mrs. Bennett seeking suitable men for her daughters in Pride and Prejudice have long since gone, the phenomenon of arranged marriage persists in the West under different guises: online dating, mail order brides from Eastern Europe and Russia, and blind dates set up by family, to name just a few.

At the same time, in Eastern cultures like those of Japan, Pakistan, and India, the process of arranged marriage has undergone significant modifications. From a time when future spouses would first set eyes on each other on their wedding day, arranged marriage has transformed itself into a system resembling quick blind dating initiated by family or friends. Photographs and biographical data are now freely exchanged over email as parents have become increasingly liberal and westernized. Shared veto power between the boy and girl means external appearances and polished social skills come at a premium. And more ex-pat Indian grooms means that dislocation and adaptation by both brides and their families has become far more common.

The bridegroom collects a blessing kiss from a senior member of his family before going to fetch his bride. The saber is a throwback to the times of warrior kings and communities and the sword is a symbol of honor, power and the promise of protection that men carry on their wedding day. (Rajveer Purohit)

An unlikely candidate

Dr. Rajveer Purohit, who has been married for three years, exemplifies the new trend. An urologist and a prolific painter in San Francisco, he reminisces in his two-bedroom apartment filled with his paintings, paint supplies, and antique furniture from Rajasthan, India.  

“I would define an arranged marriage as one in which there is limited pre-marriage dating and parental approval of the marriage, and by that definition, ours was one,” he says.

A distant relative introduced him to his gynecologist wife, Dr. Mamta Purohit. After exchanging emails and speaking on the phone, then-29-year-old Purohit flew to India accompanied by his older brother for a face-to-face meeting. A few family-sponsored dates later, they decided to take the plunge.

Raised in the United States since the age of five, Purohit continues to have strong ties to India, especially to Jodhpur, his hometown in Rajasthan. “I saw my desire to have an arranged marriage as something more fundamental and proactive. It was helped by the combination of finding the right person who shared similar values,” he says.  

His wife’s Indian nationality was a welcome part of her identity for Purohit. “I have a lot of affection for Rajasthan. And my marriage helped leave a lot of options open and gave both of us more mobility,” he notes. “We can think of retiring in India at some point.”

Purohit’s conservative Rajasthani family discouraged dating overtly. “Growing up,” he says, “I perceived arranged marriages as anti-modern, oppressive and fear-based choices. That my peer group viewed them the same way added to my sentiments.”

But soon Purohit found himself disappointed with the transitory relationships people around him seemed to have. He realized that he identified with the Indian community’s emphasis on loyalty, commitment and longstanding emotions, all values that have contributed to low divorce rates of Indian-Americans living in the U.S.

“I was disappointed by how relationships are commodified and subjugated to economics, finally becoming relationships of convenience,” he says. “There is a lot less mobility in the American non-arranged marriage than people acknowledge. People typically date among their own class. For example, people who are Ivy League marry Ivy League.”

Purohit, on the other hand, has seen many cases of couples in his own extended family who come from different economic classes.  Purohit felt confident that an arranged marriage would last, being based on a solid foundation. He believes “people who get into arranged marriages tend to have expectations besides lust and youth” and that “this keeps the relationship stable after temporary feelings have subsided.”

Purohit sometimes feels criticized by American and even Indian peers for his traditional choice. “I see Indian women who grew up here feeling threatened by and competitive about second-generation men going to and marrying in India,” he says. “But somewhere along the way I decided that there is no point in trying to educate peers or colleagues. It is not a public proposition that I want to go and sell, and perhaps what may be right for me might not be right for them.”

Purohit was also inclined to marry a career woman since he saw immigration to be particularly hard on his mother, who is a homemaker. Mamta seemed to him as the right blend of the traditional and the modern.

A relative of the bride smears vermillion on the groom’s forehead as the first step in the welcoming process. She will then do an ‘aarti’ wherein she will pray for him by encircling his aura with a special oil lamps. This process conveys the following sentiment: May the light of the divine be with you and may this start be auspicious. (Rajveer Purohit)

The suitable girl

Ipsita Roy, a 28-year-old scientific researcher who has also been married for three years, does not seem like the typical immigrant bride moving from India to America.   However, unlike a generation ago, the Indian women who immigrate today to be with their husbands are frequently highly educated professionals themselves. The petite and loquacious Roy shares a unique story that may not be so atypical.  

“Mine was not a spontaneous meeting and falling in love with someone, and the fact that the process was initiated by our families did not and does not bother me,” says Roy, who holds one masters degree in biotechnology and another in molecular biology. She moved to the United States after marrying Sumit Roy, a mild-mannered and unassuming director in an electronic design automation start-up company in Santa Clara, California.

When Roy’s younger teenage sister responded to an ad placed in a Calcutta newspaper, little did Roy know that such adolescent perkiness would locate her future life partner. Sumit’s Calcutta-based parents, now her in-laws, liked her profile and soon scheduled a meeting with her family. After Roy’s parents, who also live in India, met the prospective in-laws, they soon gave their approval. Although Roy and Sumit had only spoken a few times on the phone before meeting in person, Roy believes “our fates were already sealed together even before Sumit flew in from the U.S.”

“I saw that my future husband trusts his family completely and had very simple criteria for a life partner whom he thought should, above all, get along well with his family,” Roy explains. She laughs and adds, “I personally feel that the real test of a marriage is when you start living together. Because after a while it doesn’t matter how you got married. I have many friends all over the world who have had love marriages and they are facing similar issues that I am, such as the division of labor between the partners, adjustment issues with in-laws.”

Roy avers that although some people may want to test the waters by living together before getting married, her own sensibilities were already set and defined by the environment she grew up in — an environment where “shacking up” was not encouraged and the focus was always on total commitment. “But then, it all depends on the individual’s comfort zone,” she admits.

Both Hollywood and Bollywood often depict having a series of boyfriends or girlfriends as cool.  Such images subtly suggest that relinquishing autonomy and going for an arranged marriage somehow signifies a fundamental personality failure. But the majority of all marriages in India are still arranged, even among those in the educated middle class. Roy represents the growing number of Indian women who pick from either option. “I had a lot of suitors when I was in college. My parents were open to me choosing my own mate,” she says. ”My decision to let them initiate the process was totally free of pressure or coercion. It was a leap of faith and I took it because of the trust I had in my parents.”

One difference between those of Roy’s generation and her parents’ generation is the number of ex-pat Indian men entering the arranged marriage market in India. Roy’s father initially had difficulty in facing the fact that all her prospective grooms seemed to be settled in the United States. “We are a small family and my father wanted both his daughters close,” Roy says, “but when he realized the inevitability of it he made peace with the idea that my destiny might lie abroad.”

Ipsita and Sumit Roy on vacation in Hawaii during January 2003.

When the honeymoon is over

Roy talks animatedly about the dream-like six months between her engagement and her wedding — of phone calls, letters and a slowly blossoming long distance romance. “ I soon fell in love with Sumit and then my situation was just like that of any other girl who might have fallen in love and was about to get married,” she explains. “The only difference in my case was that my man was discovered by my family.”

This courtship made phase two, married life, a little hard to digest. Roy contends that marriage has been harder on her than on her husband. While he remained in Santa Clara, she moved continents to be with him, leaving behind all that was close and familiar while struggling to create a new life in the United States. She also experienced some of the gender distinctions that have traditionally gone along with arranged marriage for women.  “Indian society continues to be a very family oriented society with the bride deferring to the groom’s family after marriage — and arranged marriages help keep it that way,” she observes.

Turbulence between Roy and her in-laws cropped up in the first few months. Although still based in India, her in-laws visits brought out tensions. “I was brought up with a lot of liberal ideas for girls and my husband’s family subscribes to a passive notion for women. Dealing with that, I felt like everything of consequence to me had been stolen. Soon I found myself in a desperate bid to gain affection by trying to match everyone’s needs,” Roy says. “I still keep trying even though that doesn’t work,” she adds wryly.

Roy talks passionately about trying to work through this identity crisis and reconciling the two disparate life styles — one from her parent’s home and the other in her new family. “I would like my in-laws who are in India, to stay with me permanently so that I can take good care of them, but during times of stress, while talking to them long distance or during meetings, I wonder whether I should chose responsibility or comfort,” she says. “I wanted to be very close to them but somehow it has remained a formal and distant relationship.”

The clash between traditional mother-in-laws and their modern daughter-in-laws is one of the fruits of modern arranged marriage. As younger women become increasingly westernized, prospective mother in laws seek brides for their sons who, although educated, have been indoctrinated with once common notions of passivity. Friction arises when girls brought up in liberal and semi-westernized environments refuse to be docile. Roy elaborates: “Although my relationship with my husband has evolved wonderfully over time — he is my best friend — the marriage has been tough. But that is something one faces in a love match too. But of course since my in-laws chose me, their expectations from me are greater.” With a chuckle, she adds, “it’s like an employer asking you to feel grateful after giving you a permanent job.”

“Sometimes I think that had I been solely my husband’s choice, they would have been tentative about me and grateful for any positive signs,” Roy muses. At the same time, however, Roy believes that parents who have contributed to the pick are more likely to contribute to solving any problems that arise. “Observing others, I find that if one goes through a bad phase in a love marriage parents are generally not that supportive but since they feel mentally responsible in an arranged marriage, they help the woman start a new life if things go wrong,” she says.

“I feel that arranged marriages help in keeping Indians the family oriented people they are,” says Roy, although she doesn’t necessarily think they would work well for everyone. She adds that such marriages are like shooting in the dark but also shares that this disadvantage is probably a blessing in disguise. While Roys says, “There are times I think, ‘Oh my God, I got married like this!’”, she also believes that love matches can lead to disappointment, “while people like me have lesser expectations and try to hang in there and make it work.”

Purohit also adds a word of caution about matches arranged long-distance: “It’s always better to have someone you trust confirm the validity of things. People sometimes manipulate the process and lie about who they are and what they want, using marriage as way to gain economic security.” Despite such drawbacks, he believes that the tradition is an enduring one. “I think arranged marriages are a resilient form. The format might change but the structure will stay.”

Although Purohit sees himself as an anomaly, believing it is unusual for people to be raised here and then to seek an arranged marriage, he may be part of a growing trend. His conclusion bodes well for those who would follow in his footsteps: “I can’t imagine being married to someone I would be happier with.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

General information about arranged marriages
URL: http://www.mangalyam.com/arranged_marriage.htm
URL: http://schools.cbe.ab.ca/b143/humanrights/arranged-marriages/
URL: http://marriage.about.com/cs/arrangedmarriages/

Arranged marriages and the myth of romance
Essay by writer Hilary Doda
URL: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/vecna05mar02.html

First comes marriage, then comes love
Essay by Ira Mathur about Indian expatriates in arranged marriages
URL: http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3321/win4a.htm

ORGANIZATIONS >

websites that arrange marriages
URL: http://www.shaadi.com
URL: http://www.arrangemarriage.com/arrangemarriage/default.asp
URL: http://matrisearch.com/default.asp?source=GoogleUSA

“

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Commentary

The new civil rights movement

The struggle for gay rights will be exactly that — a struggle.


The more I follow the latest controversies over homosexuality — the furors over same-sex marriage and the consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop — the more I’m convinced that I am watching the latest civil rights struggle.

And the more I’m convinced that the emphasis is going to be on struggle.

Those of us who are geographically distant from events in San Francisco and New Paltz, New York, may be tempted to dismiss the lines at the city halls until they stretch into our town. We have a vague sense that something is happening, but we seem to take the instances as patches of trees, not a forest.

Television and newspaper reports contribute to this view. The events came across like sports stories as journalists tallied the increasing number of couples waiting to wed: first in the tens, the fifties, then the hundreds and thousands. Subsequent events were reported, in turn, with a breathless bit of surprise: it’s happening again, and again, and again …

But we haven’t made the jump to realizing that, in this case, a whole bunch of trees is really a forest. We haven’t put the events together to see them as components of a whole, as components of a movement that is emerging as we watch.

I wonder whether that inability rests on the way Americans have mythologized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the Civil Rights Movement — in capital letters.

Those twenty-odd years of battles for racial equality have been condensed into sets of buzzwords. We talk about “the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,” where four little girls died in Sunday school, or “the first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina,” where four college students first challenged segregated seating at a dime-store lunch counter.

We remember the march from Selma to Montgomery and, of course, the bus boycotts in that same city.

But we don’t talk about the other campaigns, like Albany, Georgia, where the local sheriff successfully outwitted organizers who came to his city.

I’ve seen this first-hand in the civil rights history of my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Most recitations stop in 1960, when a young civil rights protestor, Diane Nash, confronted the mayor on the steps of city hall. Nash asked the mayor point blank whether he believed that segregation was wrong. He paused, swallowed and answered yes.
The tale ends there, as if segregation disappeared in a matter of days. In fact, boycotts, sit-ins — and overt resistance to integration — continued until 1965 when those upholding segregation accepted the inevitable.

This romanticization of the civil rights movement has deceived the generations who did not witness it. They think the movement was a series of brilliant skirmishes instead of a war. They think that a few well-placed assaults, and a nimble charge or two will yield total and lasting victory.

Because America has frozen the civil rights movement in time, we have a distorted view of its methods.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, an organizer for the Nashville campaign, warned about the dangers of that view when he spoke in Nashville on Valentine’s Day.

“Young people feel that if they just get a march together, the walls are supposed to come down. When they don’t, they get upset,” he said during a panel on the methods of the Nashville campaign.

He was reminding his audience that the civil rights struggle demanded preparation and strategizing. Protestors didn’t rush into stores to sit at lunch counters. They practiced, honing their reactions to the abuse they knew they would receive.  That’s why they didn’t flinch when hecklers jammed lighted cigarettes into their arms during sit-ins.

They’d prepared at workshops beforehand.

Rev. Vivian and his contemporaries understood the scope of their struggle. In order to win, they had to destroy entrenched values and beliefs about one’s place in society and in culture. The struggle affected folks on both sides of the protests, because the possible outcome would be the end of the world as everyone knew it.

In its way, the civil rights struggle was an apocalypse. Some welcomed it, and they weren’t all blacks.  Others didn’t, and they weren’t all whites. Those who welcomed it, marshaled their efforts for it. Those who feared it, waged a dogged battle against it.

In the same way, the pictures we’ve seen of a beaming Bishop Robinson in full regalia, hugging his partner and of a lesbian couple embracing, kissing and crying for joy, contest our notions of family and religion.

No matter what we believe, we’re going to grapple with the changes that are bound to come.

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Commentary

She said he said

Behind John Fate’s self-help book for men about women is a woman. Incidentally, I am that woman.


Inundated by images, stories, and people reminding us that love and sex are basic human needs, few of us can avoid working to satiate these essentials. From reality dating shows like The Bachelor to the proliferation of online dating services to President Bush’s billion-dollar initiative to promote healthy marriages, singles are being encouraged to find love — or at least sex — in the most unlikely of places. But these schemes don’t necessarily pose equal opportunities for all bachelors and bachelorettes.

So some singles head down the ominous self-help aisle at the bookstore, or better yet, straight to the Internet, where they can purchase books such as John Fate’s Make Every Girl Want You and The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Girls without ever having to look a cashier in the eye as if to say, “Yes, I really am buying this book. What’s it to you?”

What consumers of these books are purchasing, however, is not merely advice for self-improvement. Perhaps unwittingly, readers of The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Girls and other similar relationship guides also partake in the circulation of certain stereotypes about the male and female genders and the billion-dollar dating industry that helps keep them intact. If gender norms are at least partially socially constructed, then relationship self-help guides have the potential to drastically influence the ways in which we act out our genders.

When men purchase Fate’s book, they look to him for advice and assume that his wisdom can send them down the road to romantic bliss. This expectation, of course, is in no small part the consequence of considerable self-promotion — and the promise that readers, too, can become genuine Nice Guys simply by taking advice from the pros. According to The Nice Guys’ website, Fate and The Nice Guys™ “were quickly crowned as the leading experts in the fields of meeting and dating women, as they pertain to both casual & serious relationships. They have since shared their expertise on NBC’s The Other Half, have gone toe to toe with Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, and have served as experts on The Ricki Lake Show, MTV’s Urban Myth Show, & many others.”

A tale of two genders

As the female editor of this guide to “getting girls,” I had a little Being John Malkovich — or rather, Being John Fate — experience of my own. By most standards, I qualify as a progressive woman. Prior to editing this book, I had done significant coursework in literature and advocacy work concerning gender, sex, and sexuality. Quite frankly, I never envisioned myself partaking in the crafting of a dating manual for men. But alas, hell just may have frozen over.

Why did I agree to edit this book if the subject matter and genre weren’t really my cup of tea? It certainly wasn’t the monetary reward, since I passed the age where $50 seemed like a generous paycheck long ago. Part of it stemmed from my desire to gain experience and get my foot in the elusive door of the publishing industry. I also thought that editing the book posed a unique opportunity to improve the lot of womankind by ensuring that men treat us better. Although I once naively believed I would never date or associate with a guy who didn’t respect women, I have learned that it is impossible to go through life without interacting with (and, unfortunately, even dating) such men. I have had enough experience with such guys to want to help other women avoid having everything from their brains to their beauty degraded by the men they associate with.

In retrospect, my expectations were somewhat shortsighted from the beginning. I assumed that this book, which was written for so-called nice guys by men from the Nice Guys Institute, might characterize women — and relationships between men and women — in fairly progressive terms given the day and age in which the text was written. To the extent that the book contains no offensive pick-up lines, I suppose it is relatively progressive for its genre. But based on what the text explicitly says, Fate and his book remain intimately tied to the romance industry that helps define and propagate gender stereotypes.

I am sure that Fate doesn’t think he is sexist. He did, after all, choose to have a woman edit his book and quotes several female friends in The Nice Guys’ Guide. But as demonstrated by my interactions with Fate and his characterization of relationships (sexual, romantic, economic, or otherwise), even Nice Guys can embody, contribute to, and circulate sexist and heterosexist stereotypes.

The color of money

It has often been said that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. And thanks to my fateful editorial experience, I am beginning to understand how this gender gap is maintained with the help of Fate’s “expertise.” Fate might call himself an expert on women, but he is no certified love doctor. Educated as an engineer, Fate’s knowledge about women derives from his friend Oscar’s observations and accounts from Fate’s friends. Friends, in my experience, tend to be a relatively self-selected group of people who are not representative of the population as a whole.

In constructing a community of men who fashion their behavior based on his so-called “expertise,” Fate seeks to maintain a monopoly on the knowledge about gender relations that he circulates. Literally minutes after I put several DVD’s and books — including the copy of Make Every Girl Want You that Fate had given me for reference — up for sale in the Amazon.com marketplace, I received an email sent by The Nice Guys. The text of the email simply read: “Selling the book I gave you on Amazon, Laura? Shame on you.”

While Fate could only afford to pay me $50, he makes plenty of money off of selling these books directly from his website for $15 a pop, teaching courses, appearing on talk shows, and giving  “emergency advice” to men in the midst of “relationship crises.” And yet he has the nerve to reprimand me for making money off of a book that I obviously had no use for once I finished editing The Nice Guys’ Guide. Nice, guy.  

I suppose that Fate likes to see how his books are faring and who is selling them. But this interaction was nothing short of creepy. Not only was my personal email address hidden from public view on Amazon, but I had also used an alias when I put the items up for sale. Maybe my location gave me away, though it seems highly unlikely that I was the sole person in Austin who possessed Fate’s book. Was he tracking my ISP number? I don’t want to know. Either way, his email only confirmed that the economics of the Nice Guys only flow one way — Fate’s way — as he tries to ensure that he remains the master of the knowledge he circulates and that only he reaps the benefits.

What lies beneath

Little does he know, I might have gotten the last laugh. While I struggled to reconcile the tension between my personal opinions of Fate’s work and my responsibility toward a book that I was asked to copyedit and make more enjoyable to read, I waged a little behind-the-scenes sabotage. Making a mockery of Fate’s characterization of women, I threw around a few stereotypes of men, partially in hopes that readers would get annoyed and pick up on what I was doing. Capitalizing on my sarcastic wit when I grew bored and annoyed with the triteness of Fate’s content, I found myself mocking the writer and his audience for writing and reading this book in order to entertain myself. For instance, Fate wrote:

This book is really intended to be a sequel to Make Every Girl Want You™, the book that I co-authored with my good friend Steve Reil. Steve and I used to be pathetic. Back in college, we were absolutely pathetic. We were so bad that not only wouldn’t women sleep with us, and not only wouldn’t women date us, but women would not give us the time of day!

Oh, sure, if I were sitting next to a girl in class, and she didn’t understand something the professor said, she may turn to me and ask for clarification. I may even have been able to chat with her for a few minutes in class. But if I saw her out at a bar or frat party later that night, I couldn’t get more than a 30-second conversation out of her.

Underscoring my sentiment that Fate was a bit pathetic for penning this book in the first place, I edited this section to read:

This book is intended to be a sequel to Make Every Girl Want You™, the book that I co-authored with my good friend Steve Reil. We wrote that book — and this one — not because we were natural-born ladies’ men looking to teach some old dogs new tricks, but because we know firsthand what it’s like to go for months or even years without a date. Back in college, there was a good chance that if you looked up the word “pathetic” in the dictionary, you would find the definition followed by, “See also: Steve Reil and John Fate.” In those days, Steve and I didn’t just fail miserably at wooing women to sleep with us — much less date us! — but we couldn’t get women to give us the time of day if our lives depended on it. It often felt as if every woman on Earth had signed a pact and agreed not to acknowledge our very existence.

Oh, sure, if the girl sitting next to me in class didn’t understand something, she might ask me for clarification. I might have even chatted with her briefly during class. But if I saw her at a bar or a frat party later that night, I would be lucky if I got more than a 30-second conversation out of her. Truth be told, I was never actually that lucky.

Later in the manuscript Fate explained:

One great way to convey interest in a conversation is by facing the woman. I’ve observed a lot of guys who will turn and talk to a woman with their face, but their bodies face a different direction. When you turn and face someone with your body, it sends the signal, “Hey, I’m interested in talking to you.”

I was certain that readers would fall asleep (and probably ask for a refund of the $15 that Fate charges for the book) thanks to the mind-numbing and banal nature of his advice. Accentuating male stereotypes in hopes of giving readers a wake-up call, I edited this paragraph to read:

I’ve observed a lot of guys who will turn and talk to a woman with their face, but their bodies face a different direction. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to cut it. Just as your TV would think that you didn’t care about the football game on the screen if you kept looking out the window and up at the ceiling (like that would ever happen!), a woman is going to assume that you’re not interested in what she has to say if you’re not facing her. In order to convey interest in a conversation, then, it’s important to face the woman. When you turn and face someone with your body, it sends the signal, “Hey, I’m interested in talking to you.”

But given the overwhelmingly positive reviews of The Nice Guys’ Guide on Amazon.com, I don’t think Fate and his readers picked up on the behind-the-scenes ridicule waged by the editor. Then again, his self-selected audience is probably too concerned with “getting girls” to think critically about literary conventions, so perhaps this was to be expected.

For the love of the game

What exactly Fate’s audience might have enjoyed unnerves me, however. Was it the title, which I would have encouraged Fate to change to The Nice Guys’ Guide to Meeting Women, had I been aware of it before publication? Fate’s phrase of choice —”getting girls” — suggests, after all, that women are merely a form of booty  (plenty of pun intended). Sure, women are often the objects of male pursuit. But this particular phrase implies that women are passive in relation to men, the aggressors who must pursue the chase. In fact, as Fate tells readers in his discussion of online dating, “Like offline dating, the male plays the pursuer while the woman waits to be pursued.” While the idea of being treated like royalty might seem alluring in the abstract, most women are not sitting around waiting for their knight in shining armor to show up. From what I hear, women talk, speak, and even make the first move sometimes.

Although many people — regardless of their gender — manage to botch things up when approached by an attractive stranger, Fate never so much as mentions what a man should do if a woman approaches him first. Worse yet, Fate focuses almost solely on how to initiate a conversation with women and get their phone numbers, offering scant advice on how to behave on a first date, make the transition from casual dating to exclusivity, and conduct a relationship. Yet, because these areas often produce the greatest conflicts and leave many people — regardless of gender — needing or wanting a little guidance, things do not bode well for Fate’s readers. Perhaps Fate should have more aptly titled his book The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Women’s Phone Numbers or The Nice Guys’ Guide to Scoring a One Night Stand to avoid misleading his audience.

Fate advises readers not to think of their interactions with women in terms of picking them up, but given his advice, how can it be anything else? With Fate suggesting that readers get to the airport five hours early to meet women, wait until a woman gets up to go to the bar or the restroom to approach her (to avoid seeming like a stalker, paradoxically), or shoot pool near the restroom at a bar in order to meet women, it seems difficult to imagine that his readers would do these things without thinking about picking up women (particularly getting to the airport five hours early!). Similarly, Fate advises readers to find out where women are from when meeting them at the airport in order to determine whether “it is worth pursuing.” But why worry about whether it is worth continuing a conversation unless, of course, you have a particular goal in mind, say, seducing the woman?

W.W.O.D.? (What would Oscar do?)

Consider the way in which Fate’s book takes guys who repeatedly fail with women and creates a new community of men — Nice Guys who suddenly have all the luck. What exactly distinguishes a nice guy from a Nice Guy, you ask? As Fate explains, “Nice guys . . . need their own approach” since typically, the only guys who succeed with women are “rich, famous, or good-looking.”

Modeled after Oscar, whom Fate mimicked after noticing his knack for dating, Nice Guys have their own terminology, including CCR (compliments, compassion, and reassurance) and know that airports, cruises, gyms, bars with a particular type of layout, and even the Internet are the most optimal places for meeting women.

For each of these locales, Fate provides a “step-by-step guide to meeting women.” While some of Fate’s advice is useful for teaching readers a little tact (i.e. not talking about oneself constantly), his guidelines amount to a one-size-fits-all formula for interacting with women. Typically rife with complications, dating is suddenly the easiest of LSAT logic problems in Fate’s book: “If you are male and see a ‘beautiful woman,’ do X, Y, and Z, and you will have her phone number within ten minutes.”  

Yes, Fate actually contends that “ten minutes is just long enough to get any woman’s contact information.” (Incidentally, he also instructs readers to speak with every woman in the room at a bar or a party for ten minutes to increase their odds of landing a date). The problem with Fate’s logic, of course, is that aside from biological characteristics, there are not any personality traits that intrinsic to all women — or men, for that matter. What works on one woman may backfire with the next.

Fate’s target audience may be fairly self-selected, but it is troublesome nevertheless that many of his assumptions are necessarily universal in reality. For instance, he writes that “Oscar epitomizes what every guy wants to be — a truly nice guy who women love,” and the slogan of the Nice Guys’ Institute is “Dedicated to helping nice guys make themselves more attractive to women.” But does everyone with a penis want to be “truly nice,” much less desired by women? And are all women attracted to so-called Nice Guys? Ever heard of the “bad boy syndrome” or James Dean? Or better yet, lesbians?

Since Fate fails to tell readers what to do when they discover that not every woman can be wooed by a Nice Guy — no matter how nice he is — their reactions to these women might end up offending the objects of their pursuit. In fact, Fate’s attempt to prescribe our responses to the sex we desire based upon gender differences risks bolstering many of the misunderstandings between men and women that he seeks to remedy.

In the book’s afterword, Fate writes, “When you have patience . . . women will be amazed and shocked.” While some women may be impressed with a guy who gives them the time of day and isn’t excessively pushy, it is foolish to suggest that many people do not expect this as a common courtesy from men and women alike. Sure, it might be exciting to meet someone who is exceptionally nice, but in this day and age, women are not so naïve as to be “amazed and shocked” by a friendly, mellow guy. I would even venture to say that some of us expect that.

Bodies that matter — and personalities that don’t

Many of us even expect — or at least hope — that people would outgrow some of the age-old stereotypes about the female body. But alas, this is easier said than done. For instance, in a chapter Fate saved for the sequel to The Nice Guys’ Guide, he discusses how men are inevitably faced with what to do and say when women ask their significant others if they are fat. Many women are in fact insecure, and body image concerns certainly haunt many of us. But body image insecurity is hardly a universal characteristic of all, or even most, women. Moreover, this problem isn’t restricted to women. Men of all sexual orientations also struggle with body image concerns. But by attempting to displace these insecurities onto women’s bodies, Fate reinforces the fallacy that a woman’s identity is defined largely through her body — and that a certain female body type is more desirable than others.

Fate’s recurring reference to “beautiful women,” a phrase he uses more often than the solo term “women,” is also rife with problems. It is unclear what Fate means by “beautiful women,” though I get the impression that it is a stereotypical, Cindy Crawfordesque notion of beauty defined primarily by a woman’s physical features. After all, Fate implies that one can meet beautiful women without knowing anything about them beforehand. Peculiarly, Fate never once uses “cute,” “cool,” “smart,” or “funny” to describe women one might pursue. Perhaps beauty encompasses all of these features for Fate, but if this is the case, why not diversify his choice of adjectives to describe what types of women one should pursue?

When Fate tells readers that he can point them in the direction of “these [beautiful] women” and warns them, “I’m not telling you to chase after ugly or below-average women now,” his double-standard for men and women becomes evident. While Fate complains that he always had trouble with women because he was not rich, famous, or good-looking, he does not hesitate to single out women who are “ugly or below-average.”

By encouraging readers to pursue women who appear desirable at first glance, Fate also lends credence to the stereotype that men are shallow. For Fate and the Nice Guys, it seems, individuality and differences — those ominous characteristics that make us unique and which make us attractive to some people and not to others — can be overlooked (unless, of course, we are talking about “beautiful” versus “average or below-average women”), making any “beautiful woman” the appropriate object of a Nice Guy’s pursuit. As Justin Marks, spokesman for the Nice Guys, said, “We don’t care what comes out of a woman’s mouth when we meet her. As long as she’s attractive, we want to go out with her.” Quite the charmer, eh? Perhaps someone should write a self-help book targeted at the Nice Guys.

The irony of the Nice Guys’ focus on “getting beautiful women,” of course, is that Fate tells readers that he had no luck with women initially because he was not rich, famous, or good-looking. Yet, while Fate gears his book toward “average guys,” he still gives an advantage to guys who can afford to pay — and seeks to improve his own standing through his money-making schemes.

Not only can men get Fate’s advice from his books, classes, and talk show appearances, but they can also email “The Nice Guys” with their questions during their times of need. Whereas men who pay a whopping $25 are guaranteed a response within 48 hours, those who do not pay should not expect to receive a reply. In order to determine which women are worthy of pursuit, I had a male friend email Fate and ask him to qualify what he means by “beautiful women.” Needless to say, the Nice Guys never replied. Perhaps they would have if he had paid the $25.

But alas, money talks. And these days, the dating industry is trying to convince us that wealth and beauty still determine one’s dating success. It appears, then, that even if money can’t buy men love, it just might buy them guidance on the coveted “Woman Question” — and some good old-fashioned gender stereotypes.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Against Love: A Polemic
By Laura Kipnis. Published by Pantheon Books. 2003.
Purchase this book from Amazon or Powells

PUBLICATIONS >

”Bush Leaves No Bride Behind”
By Arianna Huffington. Published by AlterNet, January 21, 2004.
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17624

‘Nice Guys’ Do Finish Last With Their Misguided Advice Book”
By Justin Dickerson. Published by The Hoya, February 20, 2004.
URL: http://www.thehoya.com/guide/022004/guide15.cfm

“Nice Guys still finish toward end of pack”
By Mike Forgey and Katie Silver.
URL: http://press.creighton.edu/021304/thescene.html

TOPICS > THE NICE GUYS >

The Nice Guys’ Guide
website of The Nice Guys’ Institute
URL: http://www.theniceguysguide.com

TOPICS > IDENTITY >

Quirkyalone
“The home of the quirkyalone movement.” “Quirkyalones are romantics who resist the tyranny of coupledom.”
URL: http://quirkyalone.net/qa/

Judith Butler/Gender Trouble
An introduction to Judith Butler and the arguments put forward in her 1990 book Gender Trouble
URL: http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm

“

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Photo Essays

Bill and Mary: Young lovers in their 70s

Fifty years, going on forever.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

The John and Al tapes

If only John Kerry and Al Gore would speak candidly in public ... But since they don’t, here’s a fictional late-night conversation.

BEST OF ITF GUEST COLUMNS (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Guest Columns (tie)


John Kerry calls Al Gore:

Al: Hi John.

John: Hey Al.

Al: Congratulations on the nomination.

John: Thanks, Al. How are you?

Al: Things are good.

John: How’s Tipper?

Al: She’s well. She’s right here in bed next to me.

John: Oh, tell her I say hello. What a wonderful woman she is.

Al: Yes, I’m lucky to have her.

John: So she’s there next to you?

Al: Yes John, she is.

John: That’s wonderful. It must be nice to sleep with your wife.

Al: I beg your pardon?

John: Oh Al, lighten up. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that Teresa and I haven’t slept in the same bed in years.

Al: Oh.

John: So how’s everything else?

Al: Good. Fine.

John: How’s that stoner son of yours?

Al: Stoned, I’m guessing.

John: Well it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You know I’d legalize pot in a minute if I could.

Al: Yes, I know.

John: But I can’t say that out loud.

Al: Of course not.

John: I’d never get elected. Bill Maher would love me, but I’d lose 45 states.

Al: Maybe more.

John: It’s like gay marriage. What do I care if they want to get married? You think I care? Of course I don’t care. I say, let them get married and be miserable.

Al: I know. But you can’t say that.

John: No, Al, I can’t. And why? Because we live in a country with a lot of stupid people.

Al: I know. You’re preaching to the choir here.

John: Sometimes I wonder if I even want these people to like me. You know what I mean?

Al: Yes, I do.

John: Because, in a way, if moronic people like me, what does that really say about me?

Al: It’s a valid question.

John: But Al, enough about that. I’ve been meaning to ask you a question.

Al: Sure. Go ahead.

John: It’s about the Dean endorsement.

Al: Yes, I figured it might be about that.

John: Were you on crack?

Al: John, I don’t do crack.

John: It’s a figure of speech, Al. You really do need to lighten up.

Al: Okay.

John: So what were you thinking?

Al: Off the record?

John: Al, of course. We’re friends.

Al: No, we’re not.

John: Sure we are.

Al: Anyway, it was Tipper’s idea.

John: Tipper?

Al: Yeah, she loves him. She still does. Thinks he’s great.

John: But he’s fucking nuts.

Al: Yes, but I didn’t know that then.

John: So Tipper told you to endorse him?

Al: Yes, she did. And he seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. You know, before the scream.

John: Yes, the scream. That scream won me the nomination.

Al: Yes, it did.

John: Loved the scream!

Al: Thought you might.

John: The scream heard around the world!

Al: Okay John. Looking back, endorsing Dean wasn’t the best decision I ever made. I’ll give you that.

John: No shit. Kind of like picking Lieberman.

Al: Yes, I know.

John: Al, you should have picked me.

Al: You were a finalist. But coming off Clinton, I couldn’t pick you. I needed someone squeaky-clean.

John: I’m not squeaky-clean?

Al: No John, you’re not.

John: So sue me, I like women. But Lieberman? I mean, who picks a Jew in a national election?

Al: He’s more annoying than Jewish.

John: Was he Tipper’s idea, too?

Al: Well, it doesn’t matter anymore.

John: Okay, fine. So why didn’t you endorse me?

Al: Honestly?

John: Of course.

Al: Tipper said you’re too stiff, too aloof, too long-winded. She said you wouldn’t resonate with voters.

John: I’m stiff?

Al: Yes.

John: Al, no offense, but you’re the fucking king of stiff.

Al: She said you were stiffer. And she said you come off as patronizing.

John: She said that about me?

Al: Yes.

John: Who the fuck is she?

Al: She’s my wife.

John: And what kind of moron takes political advice from someone named Tipper?

Al: John, if you’re going to insult my wife …

John: Al, I think you should endorse me now.

Al: I can’t do that.

John: Why not?

Al: You’re too waffly on the issues.

John: But Al, we’re in this fight together.

Al: Don’t use that word.

John: What word?

Al: Fight. You use it too much. It didn’t work for me. I used it every other sentence, and I lost.

John: You won.

Al: Well yes, but you know what I mean.

John: The word’s fine.

Al: I’m telling you John, the word’s jinxed. Keep using it, and you’re going to lose.

John: I’m not going to lose. The economy’s tanking.

Al: Yes, that is good news.

John: It’s fantastic news.

Al: But I can’t endorse you.

John: Fine, I don’t want you anyway.

Al: See what I mean about waffling?

John: You know Al, they’re already comparing me to you.

Al: Yes, I’ve heard.

John: One day I’m Dukakis, the next I’m you.

Al: I know.

John: I’m not sure which comparison is worse.

Al: Well, I’m a bit biased on the question.

John: Al, people don’t think very highly of you.

Al: I know.

John: Personally, I’ve always liked you. But the Republican smear machine really did a number.

Al: Yes, I know. But John, that was a long time ago. I’ve moved on.

John: Have you Al?

Al: Yes John, I have.

John: Saying you invented the Internet was pretty stupid.

Al: I didn’t say I invented the Internet.

John: And the eye rolling? Who rolls their eyes during debates?

Al: I could have done better there, yes.

John: In some ways, Al, it looked like you were trying to lose. I mean, the stiffness? You really are the king of stiff.

Al: John, I really should be getting to bed now.

John: Alright, alright. So a definite no on the endorsement?

Al: Yes.

John: Does that mean yes, a definite no, or yes, it’s not a definite no?

Al: John, I need to go.

John: Okay, okay.

Al: We’ll talk soon.

John: Fine. Oh, and Al, be sure to tell Tipper something for me.

Al: Yes John.

John: Tell Tipper that once I’m elected, I’ll let bygones be bygones, and she can come and spend the night at the White House anytime she wants.

Al: Okay, I’ll tell her.

John: In my bed.

Al: No John, not in your bed.

John: Because we’re in this fight together. We’re fighting for an America we can be proud of.

Al: I’m telling you not to use that word.

John: Al, with all due respect, you’re no brilliant campaign strategist.

Al: Okay John.

John: You going to sleep now?

Al: In a few minutes. Tipper and I need to make love first.

John: That’s hot.

Al: Yes, on a good day it is.

John: Tipper’s aged quite well.

Al: Okay John, I really do need to let you go now.

John: Fine.

Al: Goodnight, John.

John: So a definite no on the endorsement?

Al: Goodbye, John.

John: We’re in this fight together?

Al: John, go to bed.

John: Al, did I ever tell you my Vietnam war stories?

Al: Yes John, you did.

John: I’ve got some great ones.

Al: And they might just win you the election. But now I have to go.

John: Tipper’s champing at the bit, huh?

Al: John.

John: Yeah Al?

Al: Go to bed.

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Commentary

Spiral Railway

Field notes.


Park by Hudson River along empty stretch of road. Low, sandy, no-man’s land. Mountain behind us. Odd to find riverfront undeveloped this close to New York City.

Walking along road shoulder, discover why. Line of scrub opens to reveal two giant concrete domes. Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear power plants. No sign of people or activity over there. Stillness like a monument.

Roadway littered with usual plastic trash/broken bottles. Also, 100 or more spent highway flares: white plastic caps, few inches around. Major accident? Or prank? Kids want to take some home. “Maybe later.”

Start hike just past old sand quarry. Low willows and swamp maple, tangle of blackberry, leaves with that dusty, side-of-the-road look. In undergrowth, sections of carpet, rusted machinery, a bedspring. Kids delighted. This is better than nature.

As trail heads up, forest starts. Oak and birch, exposed gray granite. Then, suddenly, set of moss-covered stone steps. Kids sprint up, whooping. Discover tunnel –  twenty-foot long tunnel – in middle of woods. Goes nowhere, connects nothing. Inside, not quite dark. Man-sized sandstone blocks let light seep in. Spray-paint everywhere: “Fuck,” “Jesus Saves”; lots of names/dates. Like a cemetery. Or a news flash. “I was here. I was here. I was here.”

Outside again, check guidebook. Tunnel is from proposed Spiral Railway. 1889. Visitors meant to dock by river at hotel/restaurant (near sand quarry), then ride train to top of mountain. Two big steam generators – one halfway up, one at peak – to haul trains by cable over this tunnel, 900 feet to top. Ten minute trip. At peak, another hotel with observation tower/gardens.

“Visitors will be startled and awed by the sublimity of the views on every hand. Near and far they will behold a panorama of scenic grandeur that can be equaled nowhere on the globe … Elevations of thought and impulse, as well as bodily vigor.”

Elevations of thought and impulse!

But real pay-off to follow: trip down via gravity. Nine-mile spiral, three switch-backs, swerves, swoops, zoom through tunnel to starting point by river. Whole mountain transformed to thrill ride! Estimated train speed: fifty m.p.h. Estimated visitors: 2,000 per day. Site only thirty-five-mile boat trip from NYC.

“The toiling millions of people who take an outing once or often during the summer in search of strengthening, invigorating, life-giving oxygen of a pure air, and the healthful stimulant of a radical change from the monotony of their daily toil. …”

Life-giving oxygen of a pure air.

Ruins more obvious higher up. Old packed gravel rail bed, scars from dynamite, boulders stacked to side. Out through treetops: bits of blue river, houses on hillsides, green lawns. Routes 9 and 9-West follow curve of Hudson. Off in distance: Bear Mountain Bridge, traffic circle. Path gets steeper. Adults short of breath, kids looking for shade. Buzz of insects amongst oak, maple, pine. Then, boom!, woods gone.

Whole region hit by forest fires this summer. Newspaper pictures of men in smoke masks. Here, groundcover burnt black; big trees on ground, tops still green. Like pick-up sticks, or giant safety matches. Standing oaks have blue jelly residue around trunks: flame retardant. Kids’ sneakers gray with ash. Orange plastic “EMERGENCY” ribbons. Discussion of causes: global warming, natural cycle, bad forestry, God.

In spring 1890, crew of 200 worked here. (Italian immigrants?) No trees then: forest all clear-cut for lumber. “… A vast track of inhospitable mountain and rock. ….” Deer next-to-extinct. Workcamp down by road in flats. Big canvas tents, cookfires, streams of pack mules climbing barren switchback trail.

Eight months later: “[Progress is] considerably impeded at present by some trouble between the contractors and the company.” Grading two-thirds finished, huge steam generators ordered. National economy booming, but major strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania; Coeur D’Alenes, Idaho. Wall Street panic on the way. Newspapers predict the full force of men will go back to work [on Spiral Railway] after the first of January.” Never happens.

Past fire site, kids find another tunnel. This one dug straight into mountain. Dank air at rubble entrance, walls cold. As eyes adjust, floor littered with soda cans, trash. Too dark (high?) to see ceiling. This to be sudden shrieking entrance into chill passage, then back out into roller-coaster sunshine. Never completed. Pick marks still in rock, drill holes waiting for dynamite. Not a tunnel, after all — a cave.

Outside, sit on cliff edge, feet dangling. “Panorama of scenic grandeur.” Tiny cars on tiny roads, no sound. Keen of marsh hawk riding thermals. Dark river cutting green hills, making pine islands: how many thousand years? Glimpses of suburban houses. Pop. more than 17,000 within two miles; 75,000 within five miles; 250,000 within ten. But hidden by trees. On opposite bank, almost small enough to forget, concrete domes.

2:31 p.m.: Snack on pepperoni and cheese. Below, sensor in Indian Point 2 shows temperature problem. Workers assume false alarm (similar incident four days earlier). But reactor automatically shuts down; emergency generators kick in. Management decides routine glitch: good chance to catch up on regular maintenance.

3 p.m.: Start back down. Circuit breaker pops in back-up generator. Calculated odds of this malfunction: once in 1.4 million years. Later explanation: “Auxiliary transformer load tap changer” left in manual position by mistake. Emergency generator no longer feeding batteries. Water pumps/emergency core-cooling equipment not receiving enough power. Potential result: inability to cool reactor, meltdown.

No sirens, no sign of disturbance.

3:45 p.m.: Reach bottom after climbing over railbed, past scene of forest fire, through lower tunnel, down stone steps. Kids told to leave old highway flares alone. Car safe where parked, hot from sun. In case of “risk significant event,” escape plan calls for mass evacuation along this two-lane road.

4:35 p.m.: Slow drive home. Radio playing pop tunes, sports talk. Stop for ice cream.

8:30 p.m.: After dinner, kids to bed early. Tired from climb. Sweet snoring within minutes. Adults watch TV: nothing on. No news flash.

9:55 p.m.: Back-up batteries providing electricity to plant fail altogether. 75% of control room instrument panel goes dark. Start of official “Unusual Event,” level one. (Three Mile Island, 1979 = level four.) Public still not notified. Per owners of reactor, “operated in the red region of risk” but only one-in-500 chance of damage to nuclear core.

One-in-500.

10:30 p.m.: Adult bedtime. Management of Indian Point 2 makes first call to notify local authorities that plant “continually deteriorating” and on “Hot Standby.”

3:43 a.m.: Everyone sleeping. Reactor enters “Normal Hot Shutdown.” Plant exits “Unusual Event.” No story in next day’s paper. Six months later, when pipe in steam generator leaks, Second Level Emergency declared. Radiation escape. Again, no sirens.

6:21 a.m. Sunrise. Mountain in silence. Vegetation growing over Spiral Railway. Marsh hawk?

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