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Friendship is fragile because one may more or less freely disavow a friend; but the bonds are special, in part, precisely because we may walk away at any time. The freedom we all have to draw our own circle of affection does something to help explain why our friends are so precious: they are the chosen ones.
--Ethan J.M. Leib, Friend v. Friend

As you know, Bob, I think this is a simplistic way of looking at chosen relationships--I think very often we seek (or should seek!) to transform what Maggie Gallagher once called "You're mine because I love you" relationships into "I love you because you're mine" ones. My actual experience of friendship very strongly suggests a need and desire for friendships to become, over time, understood as given. Viewing friendships as endlessly-renewed choices may satisfy the Nietzschean, with his suspicion of mere promising and obligation, but I don't think it can truly satisfy the friend. (I acknowledge that this insistence on submission to the friendship and self-sacrifice for the friend, while entirely in line with Catholic philosophy, to some extent undermines the classical emphasis on friendship as a realm where love and equality kiss each other.)

Leib's whole book, in fact, is motivated by the understanding that friendship incurs obligations and constricts choice. So I'm not quoting this bit--from a much longer and more interesting discussion of criteria which mark true friendship--in order to criticize him. I'm just pointing out a commonplace, unexamined assumption that freedom is always the more romantic and admirable state than constraint.

BOSS LADY. Maggie Gallagher has a column on the whole red vs. blue families shtik. I generally think she's better in books than in columns, but this one is really good, assuming she's right about the numbers. More soonish.

COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Once I've actually finished Second Skins I'll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson's deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler's project. I basically felt like Prosser was defending... you know... common sense--which isn't really accurate, and certainly isn't an especially useful interpretive lens, even though I agree with and appreciate Prosser's writing.

But I was struck by how Prosser's work sidled up to what I know or believe without ever engaging directly! I genuinely think Second Skins would be better if John Paul II's "theology of the body" were engaged: He offers a theology of sexual difference, rather than solely a cultural history of sexual difference, and he does so while clearly separating sexual identity from gender expression. JPII lets Augustine cry. And so he challenges us to view sex as a real symbol, an enfleshed reality whose expression is deeply culturally-contingent. He takes the body seriously, and still proclaims iconic womanhood. In these two respects he is basically the opposite of (Prosser's representation of) Butler, and I wish Prosser had gone mano-a-mano with him.

Moreover, I think the excision of conservatism from academic thought--or the conservative recoil from academia, I'm thinking it's both--badly limited the metaphors available for Prosser. His basic project in the early chapters (it sort of changes later on, so hold on for my chapter-by-chapter review) is to reclaim the body against the Gnostic, moralizing, dissolvingly analytic tendency of queer theory. That's totally right-on and well taken! But Prosser kind of can't analyze gender in itself, because he lacks metaphors which allow for cultural constructions to be better or worse.

Wow, that was an obscure and abstracted paragraph! But the conclusion is really simple: Gender is like a lot of things. If Prosser were able to say that gender is like manners, or gender is like art, or gender is like tradition... he'd be able to, I think, maintain and even strengthen his anthropology while accepting that some gender is better than others. Manners are culturally-contingent, yet not optional! They imply a moral stance. Art is notoriously difficult to delimit, yet I can actually name some forms of self-expression as beautiful and others as ugly, or distinguish between sublime and banal. Tradition is precisely the kind of repetition Prosser loves (and I love it too!), repetition as redescription... repetition in a new context as a simultaneous acknowledgment of, response to, and reshaping of that context. This is pretty much the second-most awesome thing about tradition. An aesthetic conservative vocabulary would, therefore, seriously help Prosser both explain his gender theory and give examples. ...I think.

And on a related note (I almost typed, "an elated note"!), I think Prosser is mounting an oblique and perhaps-unintentional challenge to the basic queer-theory stance where every constraint is abhorrent. Prosser actually echoes Maggie Gallagher's Enemies of Eros in his hints that the flesh truly does constrain us. Maggie goes on to say that we fear the fleshly constraints of sex because we fear the ultimate fleshly constraint of death. Whether or not she's right about that, she's at least able to articulate an anthropology--and, crucially, an understanding of womanhood--in which the flesh constrains our choices and that's good.

Every now and then I toy with the phrase, "I am a conservative because...." My favorite Mad Libs endings right now are, "...I believe suffering is a complex good, not a necessary evil," and "...submission is the best form of leadership."

The last bus I missed to Maudlin Street,
so you drove me home in the van
saying, "Women only watch me
for my blogs..."

Sean Collins says more or less what I thought about Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm comic... except that he was easier on white-$#@!up Ursa than I was. But yeah, the art is amazing.

Maggie Gallagher on Ricky Gervais vs. Oscar Wilde (yeah, you have to fight through some partisanage, but it's worth it--scroll until you hit the Wildery if you have to).

Mark Shea on converts vs. cradle Catholics--yeah, I think this is a good assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of all us messed-up popish folk.