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I woke up this morning at around 4 am with a familiar sense of anxiety. My thoughts raced, as they often do at that hour, and I found myself thinking of a piece of advice I have often heard. A key to success, it is sometimes said, involves the willingness to step outside one’s “comfort zone,” take risks, embrace the unfamiliar and awkward. The thrust of the advice is that most of us tend to remain in our comfort zones (because, well, they’re comfortable) but in doing so we miss opportunities for personal growth, increased productivity, success. We really want growth, productivity, success, we really do, but we trade them for easy, lazy comfort. We should be ashamed of ourselves! Doesn’t it make you want to do something? Something… uncomfortable?

Something about this line of thought suddenly struck me amiss. Very amiss. I composed a very cynical status update for Twitter and Facebook– it was 4 am and I was cranky– but then my friend the backspace key came to my rescue. I eventually tempered it to the following:

That one even has a “comfort zone” out of which to take steps is a sign of great privilege.

Short, gnomic, but hardly a complete line of thought. And the update struck me even at the time as subject to misinterpretation. So, whether you liked it, hated it, or (most likely) never, ever saw it because I posted it at 4 am, I will try to complete my thought here.

What struck me amiss about the advice to step out of my comfort zone is that I don’t feel like I have a comfort zone. To be clear, since the advice of stepping outside of the comfort zone generally comes in the context of work, or professional development, or vocation, let me say that I don’t have a work or professional comfort zone. (My personal life has few comfort zones either, but let’s leave that aside for right now.) I wish I did have a professional comfort zone. Having one of those sounds nice. I think that in the past I have had one. But I don’t think I have had much of one for the last four years. So being told to step out of it feels rather like being told to leave the farm and see the world. Good advice, perhaps, but I don’t live on the farm. I don’t know whether there would ever be a place for me on the farm again, frankly. So it’s not advice I know how to use.

What’s more, it seems to me that to have a professional comfort zone is to enjoy a specific sort of privilege, and that, like other kinds of privilege (white privilege, male privilege, etc.), it can be difficult to see you enjoy it when you do. Not that a “comfort zone” is identical with any of those other kinds of privilege; I claim to know this only because I benefit from loads of other kinds of privilege even in the absence of a “comfort zone.” I am in fact rather privileged, and it would be foolish of me to pretend otherwise. Just this privilege seems to be lacking.

Perhaps some analysis is in order. What is a “comfort zone,” anyway, beyond just feeling comfortable at work? It seems to me that to be in a comfort zone involves the following.

(1) A comfort zone consists of tasks and responsibilities which are not only familiar, but which one feels one is able to do well, or at least well enough. I will leave it an open question just how well someone in her comfort zone actually performs those “comfortable” tasks in some absolute sense, or even whether she performs them to the best of her own ability. Perhaps leaving the comfort zone involves doing the same things, just doing them in a different way that moves one’s output from the merely good to the great. Perhaps not. What makes the zone one of comfort is familiarity and adequacy, not excellence.

(2) A comfort zone is one in which one feels, and probably is, largely insulated from risk and interference in conducting one’s “comfortable” tasks and responsibilities. It is a professional zone of protection, a safe space; the spatial metaphor of a “zone” is apt. One feels that one can go about one’s business in a comfort zone and expect the respect of others in doing so. Respect here might look like any of a number of different things.  It may look like others’ attention and praise. It might look like trust that others will cooperate in shared projects. It might simply look like not interfering or impeding one in doing what one thinks it best to do, even if the task could be done better than one will end up doing it. In short, the more control one exercises over the pace, timing, and direction of one’s own work, the more comfortable the zone.

(3) A comfort zone consists of tasks that one thinks are worthwhile. They need not be tasks that one thinks are the most worthwhile, just among the most worthwhile one is in a position to do at the time one is doing them. I may think that scaling Mount Kilimanjaro is incredibly worthwhile, and I might think my life a failure if I don’t scale it before I die. But I am not in a position to scale Mount Kilimanjaro any old time, and it is doubtful anyone will pay me to do so. But I can have a meaningful career nonetheless, and the tasks I perform may be among the most worthwhile I am in a position to perform on a routine basis.

Imagine by contrast what it feels like to perform outside our comfort zones. Circumstances force us, or we force ourselves, to do things we don’t know how to do, or we know we don’t do as well as others. We find ourselves suddenly insecure and exposed; we fear that what we are doing might invite increased scrutiny, disapproval, trouble, even active resistance. If we stumble or fail, we are already on shaky ground and we might not be entirely sure whether we know how to right ourselves or whether anyone else will be there to catch us. We may think that ultimately what we are doing just isn’t worth doing in the first place to boot. Outside of our comfort zones, we lack a sense of familiarity, adequacy, and control.

For the last four years of my life, my professional life has answered to the latter description far more than it has the former. The last four years of my professional life have been a cliff dive out of my comfort zone. This isn’t to say that my professional life has been completely bad in that time. It has just been extremely uncomfortable. I shan’t be more specific than this. I shall just say, should you be inclined to doubt my assertion, that you will simply have to trust me on this one. And you should trust me on this one. Really, you should.

Why, then, call a comfort zone a privilege? It certainly doesn’t sound negative the way that privileges tied to social oppressions are negative. On the contrary, a comfort zone sounds rather good to me. In fact, it seems like something like a “comfort zone” is necessary to finding meaning in one’s work at all. Who wants to go to work all the time feeling like one is doing badly, or that others are constantly looking over one’s shoulder, ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity to catch one in a mistake? Who wants to work without any kind of zone of respect? Who wants to do work that one doesn’t find worthwhile? I am hard pressed to think of anyone that, given the choice, would choose this over more comfortable work.

Where the element of privilege comes into play, it seems to me, is in the social context in which the very advice to step outside of one’s comfort zone so often emerges. If that advice was merely an encouragement to seek out challenges to keep one’s mind sharp and one’s day from becoming boring, that would be one thing. But more often than not the advice springs out of the context of an insecure, precarious labor market under late capitalism. Step out of your comfort zone, we are told, because if you don’t, your competition surely will. They will identify the new angle, the emerging market, the killer app before you, and then you will find yourself left behind, your livelihood dwindling and your job at risk. So step outside that comfort zone, do differently, and above all, do more. Complacency is laziness, and laziness will eventually leave you bloated, moribund, and dead in the water.

Aside from promoting the risible mentality that mistakes the slogans in commercials that air during golf telecasts for deep thought, this ideology of late capitalism has a completely different meaning depending on where you are located within it. If you are a wealthy venture capitalist, you can take “uncomfortable” risks and not fear for your ability to find health care or a place to live should your investments fail. This is not so clear if you are an entry-level employee or even a mid-level manager in a small company. Furthermore, if you are one of the latter for whom such risks threaten your very livelihood, the risks you take may not even benefit you as much as they benefit those further up the chain who have less of their life and limb at stake. In fact, your hard work may simply be underwriting the large strategic risks they are taking, often without your knowledge (much less your advice or agreement).

Thus the exhortation to move outside one’s comfort zone can be a call to consent to being exploited. Like the (thoroughly racialized) notion of the work ethic, it functions as part of a a strategy to redistribute risk from the more powerful onto the less, all the while sending the message that the way to become more powerful is to keep working more and taking on more and more risks. Perhaps what is needed, then, for our lives to be better is not more stepping out of our comfort zones, but instead a deliberate effort to recognize and honor the comfort zones we have and a deliberate effort to find and create zones of comfort for ourselves and others.

Marriage is the subject of endless discussion, but it is still poorly understood. Those of us who are married, after all, have far more at stake in understanding our own marriages and making them better than we do in understanding marriage itself, marriage as an institution. So much of what is said about marriage is devoted to idealizations about what it should be like for the married couple. Even so-called “real,” “honest” advice about married relationships of the sort purveyed by Dr. Phil consists mostly of strategies for “working” on the relationship to make it approach a (possibly more modest) ideal. If our marriages are good, they are good because of us, and if they are bad (or, Heaven forbid, fail), that badness or failure is on us, certainly not on marriage itself. Marriage itself can’t fail us; we can only fail it.

So says the prevalent thinking about marriage. But even before my own marriage ended last year I had begun to suspect that perhaps this wasn’t entirely true. I have come to believe that there is a vast ideology surrounding marriage in our culture that blocks access to the way marriage actually functions as an institution. For some time now, I have been struggling towards a critical theory of marriage. The fact that my marriage actually ended, and that I have come out the other side of it, as it were, has made it much easier for this critical theory to take shape. It has provided me a perspective on marriage, and a lack of investment in defending my own role in the institution, that it would be far more difficult for a married person to have. In what follows, I provide a sketch of a critical theory of marriage. The central feature of this account is that marriage is a thoroughly public institution whose aims are not necessarily, or even for the most part, those of the people who participate in it. Marriage as an institution is, as I hope to show, really the normative face of a public regime of sexual regulation that is thoroughly and inherently heterosexist. After sketching my account, I will draw some conclusions from it that strike me as especially important.

I feel compelled to say that very little of what I am getting ready to say is offered as terribly original. On the contrary, I am well aware that much of it is terribly unoriginal and can be found expressed with greater elegance, thoroughness, and precision in other authors, many of whom I haven’t read but hope to read in the very near future. The point of this post is to take a stand with respect to marriage, and in particular a critical one, so that anyone who cares where I stand can read this and consider themselves informed.

I

It is surprising—but maybe not that surprising, after all—that the claim that marriage is a social institution requires any emphasis. But it does, precisely because the aspect of marriage to which we seem to pay the most attention is that having to do with the private lives of the individuals who participate in it. Marriage, it is said, is something individual people do in order to solemnize their love and commitment to one another. The normative expectation is that people marry voluntarily for love (although the notion that anything done for love is “voluntary” deserves more careful analysis!), and that the people who get married derive some good from being married, in the form of companionship, emotional and personal stability, and sexual satisfaction, that they would not have enjoyed without marrying one another. I do not dispute that marriage does, or at least can, inure to the benefit of married people in this fashion, and that people are, or can be, motivated to marry by their recognizing these benefits and voluntarily availing themselves of them. However, a moment’s honest comparison of this picture against reality suggests that few people who are or have been married are related to their own marriages in this way. People marry for all kinds of reasons, some of which have little to do with any fully conscious reckoning with what benefit they may get from doing so. It is far from clear that marriage is the only way to obtain these private benefits, too; after all, partners can have companionship, sex and common living arrangements and honor mutual commitments to one another without being married. While marriage may produce these private benefits, and indeed may produce them better than other arrangements that aren’t marriage, they certainly aren’t constitutive of marriage.

If you doubt this, reflect upon the ongoing public and legal struggle over same-sex marriage. Isn’t a keystone of the struggle for same-sex marriage equality the observation that marriage confers very real, tangible benefits to married people that are unjustly denied to same-sex couples when they wish to marry but are denied the ability to do so? The answer is, of course, yes; in the United States married people derive great economic and social advantages, some of them clearly quantifiable (lower taxes), some of them less tangible but very real (the privileges that derive from the sense of recognition, respect, and normality attached to marriage). There is, to my mind, no particularly principled case to be made for granting these benefits to heterosexual partners but denying them to same-sex partners. But the important point here is that these benefits are not purely private ones that married partners confer upon one another within the confines of their relationship. These are public, social, and in some cases explicitly political benefits. All of these are clues that what is constitutive of marriage is how it functions as a public, social institution, quite apart from what good or benefit it may produce for the individuals who participate in it.

How, then, does marriage function as a social institution? What are its public purposes? For this we have to look beyond all of the attention lavished on weddings and romance—what I call the ideology of marriage—and look at marriage as it is reflected in legal, political, and social norms. Baldly and unromantically put, I contend that marriage is about two things: who gets to have sex with whom—a sexual economy— and who has rights with respect to children. These two functions are, for clear reasons, interrelated, about which more below. First, though, the sexual economy. Marriage is, first and foremost, a regulation of sex and desire, both within the individual and in exchange with others. The primary regulator of this economy is monogamy and fidelity: If you are married to John or Jane, you are traditionally expected to have sex with John or Jane and no one else but John or Jane. For that matter, you are really not supposed to desire anyone but John or Jane if your marriage is what it should be. Of course, desire can be spontaneous and unpredictable, and if you find yourself desiring Jack or Jill instead of John or Jane, you won’t be the first. But the normative expectation is that you will of course not act on your desire for Jack or Jill and will take that inappropriate desire as an occasion to work on your relationship with John or Jane. Many people fall well short of this ideal, though. One party strays, and the other party—and the institution of marriage itself—is wronged. If your spouse has sex with someone else besides you, or your spouse simply refuses to have sex with you anymore, these are violations of marriage’s sexual economy sufficiently grave to justify dissolution of the marriage. In the past, before the advent of no-fault divorce, these were the two major grounds upon which the state would grant a divorce at all. The state now asserts less of an interest in who did or didn’t do what sexually, but the public, social norms surrounding marriage still understand its sexual economy in this way and ritually shame violations of it. If you doubt this, look no further than the phenomenon of contemporary political sex scandals, which do more than anything else to demonstrate the American public’s notion of the sexual economy of an exemplary marriage. And the state hasn’t withdrawn from the marriage bed completely, either. A clear example of this is state laws in the US regarding spousal rape. A number of states in the US deem spousal rape a lesser offense than other forms of rape, place greater reporting burdens on victims of spousal rape than on other forms of rape, or explicitly exempt spouses from rape-related charges such as sexual battery (thus, among other things, making spousal rape more difficult to prosecute). These laws are a direct way in which social norms regarding marital sex are still reflected in legislation.

The second aspect of traditional marriage has to do with the procreation of children and rights in and to them. The traditional expectation is that married people will produce children, and that the children that issue from the marriage receive a kind of legitimacy from thus issuing that children born under other circumstances lack. In turn, biological parents, especially those in marriages, are deemed to have wide latitude by right over the care and welfare of their children, and they receive a great deal of presumptive deference from, and lack of scrutiny by, the state and other people in their doing so. People who have children out of wedlock fall well outside this norm; their parental rights are abridged, and their actions and decisions are subject to greater scrutiny and criticism. Married couples who do not have children are held in higher regard, but they are nevertheless viewed with suspicion if their childless state is the result of a deliberate choice as opposed to, say, the biological incapacity of one or the other partner to produce issue. Adoption is, of course, an alternative for married couples who cannot produce children of their own. But, as adoptive parents can tell you, the prevalent social norms regarding adoption tend to view it as at best a second-class status and at worst a tremendous embarrassment. It is common for adoptive parents to hear that they don’t have any “real” children of their own, “just” adopted ones.

The operative notion at work in all of the above is that of biological parentage—being able to say just who a child’s biological parents are. Or rather, who a child’s biological father is, since the fact that women bear children makes their biological role in producing a child unmistakable. Marriage is a way of regulating biological fatherhood more closely, especially in the absence of widespread Maury Povich-style DNA testing. This isn’t to say that marriage doesn’t also regulate biological motherhood; quite the contrary. Marriage as a norm tends to view the normative role of both partners as that of producing offspring and having a special role to play in their upbringing (although the expectations laid upon each partner differ widely based on gender). This privileging of biological parentage is, in turn, clearly tied back to marriage’s sexual economy and reinforces it. Aside from the prevailing norms of monogamy and their emotional counterparts, such as feelings of security and possession and, when threatened, feelings of anger and jealousy, the sexual economy of marriage underwrites and privileges sexual activity whose outcome is the production of legitimate children whose biological parents are identifiable.

Of course, not all sex within a marriage is motivated by the prospect of conceiving a child—at least, one hopes that that is not the only motivation at work—but the logic of marriage’s sexual economy places a special privilege upon sexual activity where propagation is at stake. A marriage in which sexual activity never means procreation, even potentially, falls outside the norm. And for obvious reasons, sexual infidelity, especially of married women, threatens this regulation of biological parentage at its core, by raising the specter of another person’s issue making its way into the regulated family unit. In fact, married women bear, in my analysis, far greater burdens in maintaining the proper functioning of this normative sexual economy than do married men. If married men stray, especially with other men’s wives, this is of course a violation of the sexual economy, but it is easier (or used to be, before DNA testing) for men to evade the consequences should they father a child. And it takes two people to tango, as the expression goes: if a married man cheats with a married woman, chances are the woman will be more likely to be viewed as at fault than the man. However, if a married woman is unfaithful, there is the risk that she will become pregnant with another man’s child, and her link to the child is obvious. Plus, the sexual norms of marriage do not arise in isolation; they intersect with the panoply of sexual and gender norms that lay heavier burdens upon women to begin with (not to mention the collaborative factors of race and class that are undoubtedly enmeshed with the norms of marriage and which a full analysis would chart).

In summary, then, the prevailing social norms surrounding marriage regulate sex and desire via the imposition of a sexual economy whose primary goods are monogamy and biological reproduction. Those who participate according to the sexual economy’s dictates are rewarded with benefits both tangible and intangible; those who do not so participate either fail to have those benefits or (especially in the case of women) actively punished for their failure to participate appropriately.

There are two further points needed to elaborate this conception fully. One is that the sexual economy of marriage does not just attempt to organize and regulate the sexual activity of those people who choose to marry. In other words, if one finds that the rules of the sexual economy are too oppressive, or that its implicit economics of scarcity doesn’t track the reality of one’s desire, it isn’t quite as simple a matter as just opting out of marriage. This isn’t to say that one can’t avoid getting married. Plenty of people do. But the entire cultural apparatus of sexual attraction is organized around a notion of romantic love constituted by the kind of exclusive sexual commitment and emotional intimacy encountered in “ideal” normative marriage. Countless movies, TV programs, novels, and pop songs reinforce this cultural norm in blatant and subtle ways. Cultural attitudes towards people who remain sexually active outside of marriage on a long-term basis prove this point: Either their lifestyle is glamorized as a form of defiant hedonism, or it is lamented that they are missing something important about mature adult life. And people in long-term monogamous relationships who aren’t married can sometimes be so much like married couples that we might almost consider them functionally married. In fact, depending on the place where the couple lives, their relationship might constitute a sui juris or “common law” marriage.

However, “common law” marriage is an exception, and one that proves the rule: Marriage is something that generally has to be solemnized in front of third parties other than the couple themselves in order to count. In the majority of cases, getting married involves some agent of the state signing a license granting the marriage, and the license must be executed in front of witnesses, who are presumably there to guarantee that the people entering into the marriage contract are who they say they are and of basically sound mind. As the old saying goes, it takes three to marry: the bride, the bridegroom, and the state. (Maybe more than that, if the couple is religious: God may need to be there, too.) The point is that two people just aren’t married absent this kind of recognition from political authority, no matter what they may feel for one another. Political authority’s right to marry those who it will and confer explicit political and economic benefits constitutes a kind of exchange between the married couple and political authority. In exchange for the political realm granting the benefit of legitimacy to their relationship, the political realm retains its sovereign right over marriage and the ability to steer it towards its own ends. This steerage is, at least in contemporary America, not blatant or obtrusive; not like the “one-child” policy of the People’s Republic of China, for instance. But the political realm even here takes an active interest in the reproduction of society and of biological reproduction itself being an aspect of good citizenship. Just because in our time no one person or group is clearly holding the reins of our sexual lives doesn’t mean that we aren’t all harnessed in one way or other, whether tightly or loosely.

II

Of the numerous conclusions one can draw from the foregoing analysis, two deserve special elaboration. The first is that, if the foregoing analysis holds up, it problematizes the “private” dimension of the relationship between married partners. In the normative conception of marriage as sexual economy, there is very little about it that is inherently private. Marriage itself is instituted via a public act and is not permitted absent state sanction. But even within the politically-instituted boundary separating marrieds from singletons, the sexual economy of marriage is hardly private. The state sanction of marriage does not exactly create, as in liberal theories of marriage, a private sanctuary. The details of a married couple’s sex life may not be something the public wants to know under normal circumstances. However, in situations where one partner rapes the other the state may suddenly demand a staggering amount of detail and pass judgment upon the partners’ respective sexual performance according to the obligations the sexual economy outlines. And partners who start to pass normal childbearing age without having a child have some explaining to do. Either they have to prove that they tried to have a child but couldn’t, or they have to live with the social judgment that their marriage was either not about sex at all or was about nothing but sex. The existence of children in a family (or lack thereof), a fact that would be difficult to hide even if people wanted to, publicly thematizes marital sex.

Furthermore, the sexual economy serves not only to forbid sexual exchanges between married partners and people outside the marriage, but it also regulates individual partners’ desires as a psychological matter and prescribes obligations of sexual performance to one another. The sexual economy regulates how people feel about their own desire, especially their desires for people outside the relationship, prescribing guilt and shame for desire that strays out of bounds (even if one does not act on it). It also dictates that, regardless of actual desire, married partners owe each other some amount of sex, the particulars of which may be negotiable but the overall quantity of which leaves both partners basically satisfied. If one partner routinely fails to perform for the other, or refuses to perform at all, he or she has failed as a marriage partner. The publicly prescribed nature of the normative sexual economy forbids one or both partners remaining in the marriage and seeking sexual satisfaction elsewhere, and so one either has to seek satisfaction in secret (adultery) or simply break the marriage completely in divorce. The larger point here lies less in the particulars of how the intramarital sexual economy functions (though they are of great interest) and more in the fact that they represent governing strictures, with the accompanying threat of social sanctions at their violation, which are not in principle private. To put it bluntly: The details of your marriage are not really all that private; it’s just that for the most part the public doesn’t find them all that interesting, since your marriage is normal, or nearly enough. Should your marriage become other than normal, though, and subsequently attract attention, all bets are off.

The second conclusion deserving greater elaboration is the fact that the normative conception of marriage as sexual economy outlined here is thoroughly and seamlessly heterosexist. I say “thoroughly and seamlessly” in order to underscore the extent to which it is heterosexist for reasons that go beyond its (not inconsiderable) intersection with other oppressive social norms tied to gender, sexuality, race, and class. Marriage’s normative sexual economy is inherently heterosexist. This is so for the simple reason that it regulates sex and desire with respect to the end of (actual or potential) biological reproduction. And, as the above account indicates, this end of (actual or potential) biological reproduction has as much to do with controlling the reproduction of society and the coordination and consolidation of human capital as it does with anything else individual married people might want. Calling this dimension of marriage “heterosexist” is not a knock on individual or married heterosexual people or heterosexual sex. Heterosexism names in the first instance a constellation of social power.  Thus heterosexism is woven inextricably into the underlying politics of the normative sexual economy of marriage.

I draw this conclusion explicitly in order to express a certain amount of critical caution and distance with respect to the debate over same-sex marriage. As a matter of positive law, same-sex marriage appears to be a simple matter of equality: straight people get to be married, so why shouldn’t LGBTQ people get to marry people of the same sex if they want? And it might have been that simple, if the liberal conception of state-sanctioned marriage conferring social benefits while protecting a zone of inherent privacy was tenable. However, I see sufficient reasons to doubt that this liberal conception is tenable. It presupposes a superhuman ability to insulate and purify political power from other forms of social power (a problem I have with liberalism generally). I want to clarify that I think that the fight for same-sex marriage may carve out a zone of relatively protected space for same-sex relationships, although the concern I have is that it may just turn them into heterosexual relationships that just happen to be between same-sex partners. Speaking optimistically, legalized same-sex marriage may open up a space for a different understanding of marriage that isn’t governed by a heterosexist sexual economy, one which would be less oppressive to heterosexuals as well as queer folk. A lot will depend on the extent to which heterosexism is woven into other social and political institutions beyond marriage. The struggle for social sexual norms that are not oppressive to queer folk (and straight folk!) faces far more serious challenges, though, than simply legalizing same-sex marriage. It is a struggle over broad-based social norms that elude the reach of positive law.

A final thought. Note that throughout this long discussion I have barely once mentioned the one ingredient the ideology of normative marriage would deem most important: love. What if people sometimes just marry because, gosh darn it, they love each other and that’s what people in love do? However, my omission of love from this discussion is deliberate. My critical judgment—take it for what you will—is that much of what people mean by “love,” and experience of it in their own lives, is desire refracted through the lens of the ideology of normative marriage. This is not to say that such love isn’t, or can’t be, good; it’s just good because desire is good, and when it ceases to be attached to desire it stops being good. Is there such a thing as love between people that isn’t at bottom ideologically refracted desire? I don’t know, but I like to think that there is, or could be. I think that it is rarer than we imagine, and I don’t really know what to say about it. And so I shall let that pass in silence to another day.

I am a vegetarian. I have been one for over four years now. In all that time, I have never been able to finish a blog post about vegetarianism. I have started several, and most of them have been attempts at coming up with a theoretical statement of my beliefs about vegetarianism and meat-eating. I did, and do, have interesting things to say about that subject, but I have realized that none of those things really capture why I became a vegetarian and the role that my vegetarianism plays in my life. To do that, I shall have to open up and tell a story.

I became a vegetarian at the end of March 2007. It was near the end of Lent, and Easter was approaching. I hadn’t given up anything that year– I don’t normally give up anything in particular for Lent– but I had had vegetarianism as a dietary practice much on my mind throughout the season and well before. I was still teaching philosophy at that time, and for several years I had taught a unit in my applied ethics courses on the ethics of humans’ treatment of animals. Through that teaching, I had come to the conclusion that there was little to no rational case to be made for killing animals and using their bodies as food, especially in the way the factory farming system does it. But yet I still ate meat regularly. I can’t recall exactly how I justified it to myself, other than that I had tried to quit before and I just couldn’t do it. I missed eating meat so much; every meal without it felt like a supreme sacrifice, and my thought was not on the food in front of me but on the meat it was not. It was maddening, and I consoled myself with the notion that the relatively small amount of meat I ate didn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

I was standing in my kitchen one afternoon, though, at the end of that March, when it finally dawned on me that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t eat meat. That was what I remember thinking: I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep doing something I know is this pointless and grotesque. It was early afternoon; the sun was shining outside. I must have been getting ready to cook dinner (I did the majority of the cooking even then). I stared out of the kitchen window, which faced our back yard, letting the realization echo in my head. I had become exhausted at the act of self-trickery it took to sit down to chicken or steak and try to forget everything I knew about how they got to my plate. And so I stopped. It wasn’t a willful thing, a forced act of foregoing something that I deeply, deeply desired. It came instead as that sort of profound relief that comes when one finally lets oneself acknowledge a great truth about oneself and realizes that the world hasn’t caved in on itself.

I won’t lie: It was still hard to stop eating meat, just not in the way most omnivores think it is. My then-wife and I cooked a lot of vegetarian meals already, so it wasn’t that I was at a loss for what to cook. The hard part was that it entailed an entirely new, focused, mindful attitude towards food that I hadn’t completely anticipated. Vegetarianism isn’t quite as simple as eating what you already eat and just leaving off the meat. A lot of dishes contain some sort of animal product, like broth, that raise the same sorts of ethical roadblocks as a steak. But it’s more than that. Being vegetarian means that one has to think about what one eats before one eats it in a way that is not necessary for omnivores. An omnivore can eat a vegetarian or vegan dish and not think much about what it is she is eating. It is simply one of a wide array of choices available, and the only constraint she need feel on what she eats is her personal taste and her available budget for food. The world is set up for omnivores, not for vegetarians. Vegetarians have to read food labels for more than just calorie counts. Vegetarians have to read menus carefully in restaurants and scrutinize the ingredients and likely preparation of even the meat-free dishes on the menu. Vegetarians also have to contend with the fact that most restaurants offer, at most, one genuinely vegetarian dish, and that even most of the salads have some sort of meat in them or on them.

Nowhere was this mindful approach to food more jarring than in my first few trips to the grocery as a vegetarian. For a vegetarian, I learned, the grocery store is full of foreclosed options and outright monstrosities. I had the distinct sensation in the grocery early in April of that first year that I was in a vast hall of death, a great cold morgue, the refrigerated and freezer sections teeming with finely dressed corpses, boxed, bagged and wrapped. This was of course not the whole truth about the grocery, and I soon learned that there is plenty of nourishment for the vegetarian in any grocery. But the point is this: The vegetarian has to think about that fact and look for what she can eat, and sometimes she must search hard.

For omnivores, this mental regimen must sound rather exhausting, and honestly it can be. But what I learned is that the mindfulness of vegetarian eating opened up a relationship to food, my body, and my ability to enjoy eating that I had never before experienced and that made up for the labor more than tenfold. When I was an omnivore, I never had to think much about my food: What was in it, where it came from, how I got it. Beef jerky and hot dogs are as close as any gas station convenience store, after all. When I had to devote more than a passing thought to my food, however, I found it impossible not to be intensely aware also of the entire experience of acquiring, preparing and eating it. I recall that for those first few weeks, and for a long time afterwards, I greeted every meal with a profound sense of awareness and an overwhelming sense of gratitude. The world of food was not set up with me in mind, I would think (or rather half-think, half-feel), and yet look at this rich abundance with which I have been blessed! This sense of mindful gratitude has, over the years, become a little less acute, but it is still there in however subtle a way every time I eat. No food I ate as a thoughtless, drifting omnivore tasted quite as good as anything I have eaten since becoming vegetarian, if only because I became present in and with what I eat. I am receptive to its flavor in an entirely new way. And, to speak more spiritually, I am able to eat in a way that does not involve me holding at unacknowledged arms’ length the vast machinery of death that makes most meat-eating possible. It was like the lifting of a great weight, and I could finally embrace eating for nothing more than the sheer, unabashed, virtually erotic pleasure of it.

Why am I sharing all this? I am not trying to browbeat you into becoming a vegetarian like me, although I can say without hesitation that if you do, I think it will improve your life. I also don’t pretend that my current dietary habits are somehow a model of vegetarian perfection. I am sharing this because I think that it raises a larger issue about embodiment and localization. To be a vegetarian is to be, among other things, localized. Omnivores in this country inhabit a largely undifferentiated, invisible world of food choices. Once one has stepped outside this world of omnipresent, easily available meat, one’s suddenly has a very specific location in the food economy. There are parts of the grocery that have lots of options and parts that have none. There are restaurants and markets that are especially friendly to vegetarians, and there are others that are either indifferent or hostile. One also has to own oneself and one’s desires as a vegetarian. My experience, at least, was that on most social occasions I was (and am) the only vegetarian, and depending on the occasion this is a fact that can’t help but stand out. I also have to contend with the occasional fleeting desire for meat, especially bratwurst and other sausages. Being vegetarian in an omnivore’s world means being contingent, specific, localized, embodied, three-dimensional.

The experience that gave rise to my vegetarianism occurred during Lent, the season leading up to Easter, the time in which Christians remember Jesus’s execution at the hands of the Roman state and his victory over death. I write about it in December, during the season of Advent, the season in which Christians wait for the birth of Jesus celebrated at Christmas. This is, I think, no accident. The savior Christians proclaim was born a human birth, died a human death, and presumably lived a human life in between, with all of its contingency and locality. This doesn’t mean that Jesus is not also here and now and potentially everywhere: It is that Jesus is not so much everywhere as he is somewhere. Jesus is in my bean burrito for me in more than just that bland sense in which God is said to be omnipresent. Jesus was born into the world in a reeking stable, presumably covered in a bloody mess, shitting, pissing, hungry and vulnerable. He was then and there first, nowhere and nowhen else, and like the rest of us his life was fully embodied, however embarrassing this can seem sometimes.

In Jesus God doesn’t just smile indulgently upon human birth and death, but inhabits it, becomes it, transforms and redeems it, all the way down. In so doing, he shows us that God is in our desires and pleasures, our satisfaction of our needs. It shows us that it is a problem when we submerge our bodies and their contingency and locality in the solvent of invisible, omnipresent, putatively universal norms and systems. What comes to pass in Advent and Christmas is an invitation to become mindful and grateful, and in so doing to become open to a joy and peace that does not stem from a denial of the body, but instead a full and loving acknowledgement and transformation of it. This is the Jesus who comes to meet us in the stable, as well as the Jesus that meets me still in my bean burrito and in all else I am able to receive with gratitude.

Some of you may not be aware that I am an alumnus of Penn State University. I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State in 2002 after six years in Happy Valley. My sojourn there was not the longest, but it was long enough for me to develop both a sense of the area and of the surrounding community. I love the area, and I still have friends who live in Happy Valley and work at Penn State.

It has been with above average interest, then, that I have followed the wake of the indictment of Jerry Sandusky and the associated revelations it exposed regarding Joe Paterno, the long-time head coach of Penn State’s football team, and Graham Spanier, Penn State’s president since 1995. And it is with a heavy heart that I say the things I am getting ready to say.

I will not rehearse the entire story up to this point, since anyone reading this likely knows enough. I write this immediately after Paterno and Spanier have been sacked by the Board of Trustees. This act has received widespread praise as an act of moral courage. Yet I have a hard time seeing it this way. I am not normally one to raise a high moral bar, but in light of what has come to light so far it truly seems that the Trustees merely managed to do the bare minimum needed for the University to emerge with any kind of integrity left. The real courage here is that of the victims themselves. It takes courage and strength to report abuse of a kind that few people, myself included, are ever called upon to summon.

Let us not forget that Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier were let go because of their part in failing to report allegations of child rape to the appropriate authorities. Were we not all reflexively socialized to treat successful and powerful people like Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier with the utmost deference and to cite with sympathy their duties to the institutions they serve, we would all be able to see the situation for what it is: One in which multiple people displayed monumentally callous indifference to the welfare of utterly vulnerable children induced by a desire to spare public shame to an institution that, for all of its virtues, has never for a moment been worth the rape of one child, much less several. Add to this that many of Sandusky’s victims are reportedly black and underprivileged, and it adds a layer of race and class to the moral lapse on display. The Board of Trustees has merely managed to view the situation through the kind of lens anyone who hadn’t spent fifteen years living in a hole in the ground would see it through.

As for the students congregating in the streets in State College tonight in apparent protest of Joe Paterno’s firing, I would only ask those of us with sense to reflect that it is precisely their reaction, which is predictable to anyone who has spent even a little time in Happy Valley, that demonstrates just how courageous the victims were to come forward. I would ask all of us to remember this the next time someone comes forward to accuse a powerful person of sexual abuse.

I do have a few words to say, however, against the notion that the Sandusky charges have little to teach us about top-tier college sports programs. It is true, and we mustn’t forget this, that the charges against Sandusky are against him, not against the University or its football team. The harm done to Sandusky’s victims is the paramount concern. Yet there is a lesson about college sports programs to be learned here all the same, and in light of my years in higher education I feel compelled to spell it out.

In my career in higher ed, I worked at more than one institution with a nationally-ranked NCAA Division I sports team. I never had any more than incidental contact with those sports teams or their staffs in my professional capacity. I figured out, though, that the relationship between a large Division I athletic program and the rest of the university is far more subtle and widespread than is obvious from the outside. Many people, especially students and their parents paying high tuition bills (that are going up much faster than the rate of inflation), point to the high salaries earned by top coaches and the state-of-the-art facilities the sports teams utilize and sense that athletic programs siphon off their hard-earned dollars. However, it isn’t as direct a matter as all that. Big, successful Division I sports programs actually not only make enough money to be largely self-supporting, much of it off of licensing of logos and insignias, but they also help fund the panoply of sports programs schools have to offer under the requirements of Title IX. Although I can’t boast full awareness of all the financial details, this is my general understanding. Whatever it is that big-name sports programs do to their universities, it isn’t first and foremost a matter of their draining the universities of funds that would have been allocated elsewhere.

In fact, this relative financial independence of sports programs is part of the problem. If Penn State’s football program had to siphon money away from faculty salaries and facilities budgets, the money might come with some actual strings attached that would give the university leverage over how the programs govern themselves. But this is not the case, and so successful programs know that they can operate in relative independence of their university presidents and administrations, since they don’t generally depend on them for money. Add to that the fact that, for reasons that my uninterested-in-sports mind will never fathom, sports programs drive general alumni involvement and fundraising in a way that core academic functions like teaching and research never do. So successful sports teams grow to take over the public face of the university in a way that all but forces university presidents and university adminstrations to support and boost them. This relative independence means, ironically, that sports programs enjoy even greater leverage over university administrations when it comes to any matters in which they require university concurrence to proceed. In some cases powerful coaches or athletic directors wield power over university policy– and, in some cases, local politics, urban planning and development strategy, and the like– that university presidents never possess in their wildest dreams.

What big-name college sports steals is not so much institutional resources as something more precious– institutional focus and priorities. It creates a situation in which university adminstrations are forced to serve as gratis front office staff for semiprofessional sports franchises. And when the most powerful people within the sports franchise– the Joe Paternos– do not possess the moral clarity needed to report child rape on their premises, there are few to no institutional checks in place that would take over. And there is every reason in the world for university administration to cover up anything that would make the sports program lose face.

So while I am shocked at what appears to have happened at my alma mater, I can’t pretend for a moment to be terribly surprised. And I also can’t help but link collegiate sports to the full dimensions of the problem.

So this week is shaping up to be a rough week in a rough year. I will spare you, gentle reader, a rehearsal of all of the things that have made my 2011 difficult. Some of them are well known, and others are simply unbloggable. What makes 2011 so remarkable is how difficult it also seems to have been for my friends. So many people I know are dealing with painful changes: Careers ending. Relationships ending. Moving to new places. Loved ones dying. None of these things are precisely new or unique to this year, but the quantity of these events in the lives of those I love and respect has been striking. Not all of these events are even bad– sometimes things must end to move us on towards better things to come– but all of them entail painful change.

And yet tonight has been a very good night despite a very lousy day. I received a package in the mail from a dear, dear friend that lightened my mood instantaneously. My son fell and hit his head right before preschool ended today, but he was fine and in high spirits tonight. We spent the evening reading books, reenacting the light saber fights from The Empire Strikes Back, and watching Dancing With the Stars. It was a great night, all things considered.

Not long ago I would not have been able to set aside the day’s cares like this. Knowing me, they will probably revisit me at four in the morning unbidden and unwelcome. But I am learning that the sources of worry, concern and fear in my life are not appreciably pacified by my obsessive worrying. The worry will return when it will, and I will have the same traction on what worries me if I worry for five minutes as I would if I worry for five hours. There is room in my life for delight. There must be, otherwise I am barely alive.

I also sense that as 2011 slouches to a close, good things are beginning to grow in the hollows the beginning of the year left behind. Old things are passing on, and what is close seems sometimes trackless waste; but new things form, still vague and shapeless, on the far-off horizon. Some of them have been coming from way off for a very long time, or so it seems. Formerly close people become distant in both physical and spiritual space, and others formerly distant are drawn closer.

It was ever thus, though until recently to my shame I had failed to notice it. The biggest lesson I am learning is that, in my zeal to make life happen before this year began, I simply failed to notice that life was happening all around me and that it continually escaped my attention. I now know that, for me at least, living is often little more than noticing.

For those of you keeping score at home, I am rather newly single. My marriage of twelve years ended in divorce in July of this year. If this comes as news to you, I regret that you are finding out this way. I hasten to add, lest you be inclined to worry, that I am doing just fine. I am in fact doing rather well, perhaps better than I feel like I have a right to be doing. On good days, I don’t second-guess how well I am doing and simply enjoy my life.

One thing, though, just doesn’t feel right: My apartment.

I moved out of the house my ex-wife and I shared in April and into a second-floor loft thing with two bedrooms and a full bath on a third floor. It is what is commonly known as a nice place. It’s in a nice part of town, everything works and is clean, the landlords respond to service calls and questions quickly. I haven’t done a lot of entertaining, but everyone who comes over expresses more or less the same sentiment: This is a nice place. More than one person, including my mother, has told me that the place would be great for having women over. Not that I am looking to do that sort of entertaining at the moment, but I can kinda see what people mean. This is a nice place.

I hate it. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

Let’s set to one side for a moment the fact that the rent is high (by local standards; my friends in denser markets would kill for the rent I pay here). This place is, well, just too nice. It’s like a really wonderful hotel room. It has no character. I like to think I know character. My apartment in graduate school had character. It was built in the forties and still had plaster walls. It had color-flecked laminate flooring in the kitchen that laid down in giant sheets that were curling and cracking around the edges. And that floor was profoundly dirty. I kid you not, it had grime on it dating back to the Ford Administration on the kitchen floor. The place had radiator heat that was out of control in the winter; I had to strip down at the door to avoid getting bathed in sweat.

The place was not quite a shambles; it was well-maintained for its age and quiet. But it had obviously seen a fair few winters. It was great.

Where I live now is too put together. It conveys an image of middlebrow achievement, of heroic competence, that is utterly at odds with my personality. And it has a fireplace, which is just comically swank, like a new college grad wearing his first interview suit out to pick up women. I currently have the thing blocked in with twenty boxes full of philosophy books, which seems about right.

I am doing well, but I am not really what one would call put together. A lot of people think I am. This is what is called “fooling the world.” I think I can fake being put together pretty well; in fact, I have been faking it for years. I am both practiced at this act and clever. My high school classmates voted me “Most Likely to Succeed,” which shows just how long I have been at it.

Underneath it all, though, I am not Competent Guy.

I am not quite a shambles, either. I’m just complicated: A drafty old place with spiral stairs and half the windows painted shut and radiators that you can’t turn off. The roof leaks and the front door has about twelve locks on it from a crazy old previous resident. It’s also subtly and unmistakably dirty. But it somehow all hangs together. And I think that one may as well live in surroundings that reflect one’s personality. Life is too short to put on an act forever.

So much to the chagrin of my family and local friends, I think I shall be moving when my lease is up next year. This place is nice, but it’s too safe and clean, too sterile and empty. It’s not alive. It’s the kind of place my separated self thought would deflect questions and quizzical looks. I shall winter here, but come spring, it’s off to someplace alive.