What Mark Sanford can teach us about sex and love

The initial reaction to Governor Mark Sanford’s admission of infidelity has been to see it as one more example of the sexual depravity of politicians or perhaps of ambitious, successful men in general. Sanford was initially portrayed as another man who gave into sexual desire because he could, that is because some combination of the opportunities presented to him by women infatuated with power on the one hand, and his self-absorption, on the other, lead him risk his career and his family in pursuit of sexual pleasure. But, it did not take long for at least some people to see that Sanford is different. He’s no Eliot Spitzer pursuing sex with an expensive call girl. He’s no Jack Kennedy, keeping a few women on his staff for the purpose of satisfying him whenever he got the urge. No one in pursuit of just sex takes up with a woman thousands… Continue reading

Do we daydream anymore?

Do we daydream anymore? I’ve been wondering about that in the last few days after a conversation with a close friend in which we mutually confessed our penchant for daydreaming. My fear is that daydreaming is a lost art. But perhaps that is just a solipsistic point of view—just because we generally don’t see other people daydreaming, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I want to write here about why daydreaming is so important to me, why I fear it may be a phenomena in decline and why my daughter gives me some hope for the future. Continue reading

A blog / anthology of stories by, for, and about political organizers?

This is a proposal for a new blog for political organizers. It doesn’t have a name yet. And I’m not sure it’s going to happen. It depends on how the political organizers among you respond to the idea. The idea is based on a conversation I had with Hannah Miller which lead us to the idea of creating an anthology of stories by, for, and about political organizers. But the notion of starting with a blog and then creating an anthology of stories by and for political organizers is my idea. Don’t blame Hannah for it, or for the way I move to it in this post. But, if she likes the idea, she can have half the credit. Continue reading

Can the articles about teen-age blow jobs be far behind?

Tension between generations undoubtedly goes back to the time when extended families or tribes became part of larger communities, thereby giving young people the possibility of forming attachments and loyalties outside their own tribe. It got a new source of energy when companionate marriage arose to challenge the right of parents to marry off their children as they saw fit. It intensified again when adolescence and a distinctive youth culture was created in the early twentieth century. And it took its contemporary form in the fifties and sixties when rock and roll and the pill made sex (and drug and rock n roll) panics the preferred manner in which the older generated condemned the behavior of the younger generation. The latest sex panic article appeared in the op-ed pages of the New York Times yesterday. A piece by Charles M. Blow reports that dating appears to be dying among young… Continue reading

Natural Childbirth is Medicated Childbirth

An article in the Times has finally gotten me to write on a subject that has bugged me for a long time: our sexist denial of the pain of childbirth. The Times reports that some advanced thinkers are suggesting that not only should women be able to have relatively pain-free natural childbirth but that they should be able to have orgasms during childbirth. You see, if putting something into a woman’s vagina in the right circumstances—soft lights, relaxation, appropriate other forms of stimulation—cause orgasms, then why shouldn’t something coming out of the vagina do as well? Considering that it has only been in the last thirty years that we have gotten over the sexist notion that the only “mature” orgasm is one that results from vaginal stimulation, I am already suspicious of the notion that child birth should be a source of pleasure for women But not only does this… Continue reading

Sad day for the PA Constitution

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted yesterday in favor of a PA Constitutional Amendment that would not only ban gay marriage but could be interpreted to deny both gays and straights domestic partnership benefits. What do you say about this outrageous action? The legislators who voted for it know that they are, for the first time in our history, inserting a provision that discriminates against a group of people into our constitution. They know how ridiculous it is to say that people who want to the right to marry are a threat to the institution of marriage. They know gay and lesbian friends and family members who are appalled by what they are doing. They don’t care. They are pandering to their political base and hoping to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that will drive up turnout among the intolerant minority. Talking won’t do it. We need to… Continue reading

Gay Marriage and Polygamy

A common conservative critique of homosexual marriage is that it will threaten the institution of marriage. This is, in many respects an odd idea. It is not obvious why granting the right to marry to people who do not now have the right but seek it threatens the very institution of which these people want to be a part. Nor, given the mess that so many heterosexuals make of marriage is it all the plausible to blame gays and lesbians for threatening the institution. But there is one argument that I have found carries a certain weight in anti-homosexual circles, the notion that accepting homosexual marriage will set us on a slippery slope to the widespread acceptance of polygamy. (The junior Senator in Pennsylvania evidently thinks that it will also lead to inter-species marriage.) Since some people in Utah do seek the right to have polygamous marriages, conservatives ask us how we… Continue reading

Response to David Horowitz

I want to respond to David Horowitz’s criticisms of my teaching of Marx. Horowitz points to my web page, The Failure of Revolution, which, he says “faces the fact that Marx’s predictions about revolution have been refuted by history.” But he criticizes me because I go on to say “We can understand the failure of a revolution to occur as Marx predicted in Marx’s terms. The conditions that Marx expected to bring about a revolution did not arise. And we can give a powerful social class based explanation of the failure of those conditions to arise.” Thus Horowitz concludes that my point is that “In other words, even though Marx was wrong, he was right, and we can all be Marxists – or neo-Marxists – now.” To say that this is my point is both to take one sentence entirely out of  context and to hold an absurd view of… Continue reading

Athens and Betty Friedan

On Tuesday I will conclude my teaching of “The Funeral Oration of Pericles” to my students in Temple’s Intellectual Heritage Program. (IH is a great books program required of all students.) I will spend a significant portion of the class talking about people who are barely mentioned in the text, the women of Athens. I do this because no other female citizens of a political community in all of Western history were more oppressed than the Athenian women. Continue reading