And Now for Something Fun & Mindless

A visit to Daily Candy! The web's best source for fun local treats and treasures. Every day offers a new adventure in fashion, food or just plain fun. Enjoy!

Moral Motherhood

I would be lying if I claimed to be bright enough to comprehend everything embedded in the heady pages of Father Neuhaus's impressive journal, First Things (the subscription is in my husband's name for a reason). Still, from time to time I find a nugget of readable and comprehendable insight that revolutionizes my world. This month's opinion piece, Pregnancy & Moral Labor by Agnes R. Howard, provided me with one of those rare and coveted opportunities to feel smarter and more insightful than sheer objectivity would otherwise suggest.

Prompted by language in the 2004 report from the President's Council on Bioethics that calls for "an effort to express our society's profound regard for human pregnancy and pregnant women", Howard launches into a compelling and theologically rich explanation of pregnancy as a moral act and moral labor by women, which cultivates virtue and honors mothers with a unique position as co-creators with God.

In an illustration of pregnancy as community she writes:
Pregnancy is a primary community, an exhibit to onlookers, as well as to mothers of interdependence, charity, and life together. It qualifies our assumptions of autonomy, the liberal romance with individuality and self-sufficiency. None of us at the beginning is autonomous, and the continuation of the species depends on the partial sacrifice of autonomy that women make in childbearing. Learning to extend oneself on behalf of the child in utero (and observing women who provide this aid and comfort) nurtures community within and beyond the family.

In discussing pregnancy as work and virtue she continues:
Pregnancy is not just waiting but real work. Exactly what kind of work is it? Terms offered by the market are not much help: It is not evaluated like salaried tasks, and phrases like "maternity leave" construe the event as though it were vacation or hiatus from meaningful employment. We might better avail ourselves of theological categories to help make sense of women's labor in this phase of procreation: Hospitality desribes the mother as welcoming a needy guest, Self-denial honors the pains and costs of that nurture, and Stewardship observes the boundaries of her agency in respecting Providence.

Throughout the article she effectively juxtaposes this holistic view of pregnancy agaist the more prevalent societal view that pregnancy is akin to manufacture:

After thousands of years of assuming generation and the child's soul to be primarily a male accomplishment, the discovery that mothers contribute both seed and matter might have inspired fresh consideration of maternity. Instead, we have passed from the ancient description of babies as essentially man-made to considering them as basically self-made.

...Maternity is not manufacture. A woman carrying a child is not making a baby in the sense that she can control the outcome. She is working together with God in the creation of a new human life, of which, at the end, is not the author.

And on and on she goes with her superb and winsome argument about why pregnancy - not just reproduction or procreation or the raw science of fertility, but pregnancy itself- has moral connotations for the lives we live. Unfortunately, because First Things has a policy not to post the contents of its current issue until a new issue is released, Ms. Howard's article is not yet available online. This is what the intellectually elite commonly refer to as a BUMMER. I will post the link as soon as it is available.

Vanity Bare

So much for this being the month for Valentine's Day or the even nobler Black History Month. After this week I am officially re-dubbing February "Month of the Mainstream Nudey Mag."

First we have the "Why-bother-with Swimsuits?" Issue of Sports Illustrated featuring 10 topless cover girls (covering themselves with their arms of course, how modest!) . And now, not to be outdone, Vanity Fair just released its newest issue featuring a stripped bare Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johanson on the cover with an additional promise of 47 barely covered actors and actresses within its pages.

So what is "the buzz" on this new spread? Here are a few comments from a FoxNews report :

The reason female stars disrobe is simple, says Janice Min, editor of the much-read celebrity magazine US Weekly. "It's tried and true. You show some cleavage on an actress. You make her look sexy. You make her look hot." She needs to be hot — because in Hollywood, "you have to be sexy to be a successful actress. You just have to be."

So where's the nude photo of Brad Pitt? Or George Clooney, who appears later in the issue, dressed, amid a bevy of women in flesh-toned bras and panties? Let's face it, Min says: Women do like to see sexy men — just not with all their clothes off.

"Men just aren't viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are," Min says. "Women don't think about men being naked in the same way that men think about women."

Hmmm.... Men just aren't viewed as sex objects and women are. Well, now that that's settled....
WHA?!?!?!?!

What boggles my mind is why these women who are successful in their chosen professions, who are attractive, who seemingly have all the things women around the world think they want to be satisfied, Why are THESE women posing nude? Is it for the sake of art? Is it to make a statement of some kind? (not for liberation I hope) Do they think they have to? Or could it be that they really think it's no big deal? Sadly, if I had to guess, my money would go to that last one.

Why do I think that? For one thing, because I know that I have personally justified any number of otherwise embarrassing choices with the idea that none of it was a big deal. Also, because I lived with several girls in college and I observe women in my life everyday who have a similar laissez-faire attitude about their own sexuality. "So I took my shirt off at a party because I had one too many gin-and-tonics....what's the big deal?" Or , "So, I kissed a 40-year-old stranger but I barely remember it....what's the big deal?"

This passive, "whatever" attitude about our sexuality is harmful to women primarily because whether or not we strip naked for the world to see does matter, or maybe I should be more direct and say It IS a big deal. It matters in how we see ourselves and how we come to shape our own identity, it matters how others perceive us. Most of all, it matters because it exposes our deepest vulnerabilities in a forum that has no context to receive our flaws or insecurities with grace. We open oursleves to be seen and critiqued as a sum of our physical parts rather than seen and accepted as a whole person. Sure, a woman can say - and even believe - her body exposed is not a big deal or even that it will ensure her acceptance, but eventually her experience will tell her otherwise.

Case in point? Read the last sentence of the article:

So buzz-worthy was the VF cover, Min says, that her magazine went out and asked people what they thought of it.

The answer? Most thought the actresses looked better with clothes on.

OUCH!

Idolspizing Our Frenemies

Just about every woman I know will feel like they have a friend in Ann Hornaday after reading her article in today's Post, That Wonderful Woman! Oh, How I Loathe Her.

Describing the female phenomenon of being able to idolize and despise another woman at the same time, an emotion she dubs "idolspizing", Hornaday explores the root of woman's most vicious and unique brand of vice.

As she writes:
We all have them, those close friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances or complete strangers whose lives and careers exist -- it seems to us -- solely as a rebuke to our own. We respect them, admire them from afar, maybe even love them -- but with a twinge of . . . what exactly? Jealousy? Envy? White-knuckled rage? They're the people who are constantly reminding us that we'll never quite measure up. They're the valedictorians to our salutatorians, the bestsellers to our mid-listers, the mid-listers to our never-published, the homecoming queens to our also-rans. They seem to have sprung fully formed from our ugliest competitive streaks, our egos at their most fragile, our deepest self-loathing. They are our own squandered potential, fully realized.

It's amazing to me that this article ran just one day after the aforementioned Bravehearts book club met last night in my living room to discuss two nauseatingly accurate chapters about what else BUT jealousy and envy. Yet, unlike Hornaday who does no more than diagnose the vice, BraveHearts author Sharon Hersh instead offers a construct for understanding this uniquely female occurence. As she explains:

Jealousy grows out of a longing to be considered, remembered, inlcuded. Jealousy is cultivated by a desire for permanence, security, and abiding relationships. Jealousy is vulnerable to loss, winces at betrayal, and hates unfaithfulness. The roots of jealousy reveal the holy longing for relationships that God has written on our hearts.

AND later... "if jealousy fears to lose what it has, envy is pained at seeing another have what it wants for itself... Envy wallows in wishes and fantasies of things being different than the way they are. Envy ultimately wants to eliminate the object of envy. Envy destroys what it most admires and cannot have for itself." "

To be clear, Hersh is not justifying jealousy as a minor flaw. To the contrary, she goes on to discuss its destructive and painful effects in great detail. Yet for both writers, what seems remarkable to me is how consuming, distracting, and universal such petty comparisons can be. Hersh, presumably, has taken an inventory of Christian women and found that jealousy and envy are rampant. Likewise, Hornaday has presumably taken inventory among her New York writer friends and discovered the same phenomenon. What is equally remarkable is how epidemic their proportions are uniquely among women.

If I had to pick between Hornaday's perspective. which seems content to simply identify the trend in pettiness and rest in the justification that she's not the only one (heck no!), or Hersh's take, I much prefer Hersh's explanation which allows my weaknesses and insecurities to take context in a bigger story that helps me put words to disappointment or frustrated desire rather than pretend none of it really matters in the first place. Dreaming and desiring and loving and longing all demand high risks, but when we dismiss our losses (whether perceived or real) as nothing more than "a little healthy (or petty) competition" too often we diminish the very dreams that lie at the root of our envy.

Sucks-To-Be-Spoiled is More Like It

As a fellow "twentysomething", I'm not typically one to rain on our parade, yet I am inclined to agree with twenty-plus writer Daniel Gross in his recent critique, The It-Sucks-To-Be-Me Generation:Twentysomethings who can't stop whining about how the economy is screwing them. The article reviews two new books about why 20-30-year-olds in America are facing unprecedented economic disadvantages and how they deal with the angst and woe those disadvantages inevitably create. As the unsympatheric Gross writes here:

...twentysomethings, by contrast, have their whole lives in front of them. Want a cheaper house? Quit Manhattan and move to Hartford, Conn. Want to make more money? Pick a different field.

In Kamenetz's book, there are plenty of poor, self-pitying upper-middle-class types, disappointed that they can't have exactly what they want when they want it. Sure, it's tough to live well as a violinist or a grad student in New York today; but the same thing held 20 years ago, and 40 years ago. To improve their lot, twentysomethings have to do the same things their parents should be doing: saving more, spending less, building skills that are marketable, and aligning aspirations with abilities. It's tough to have a bourgeois life at 26.

It sounds heartless to admit, but I endorse Mr. Gross's assessment. There are certainly economic difficulties and challenges to being young, no doubt. However, I think the far greater challenge for up-and-comers lies in how we equip those of us who are well-trained in the art of instant gratification for the lifelong endeavor of building sustainable and fulfilling lives.

The reality this article (and presumably the books) fail to explore are the incredible opportunities that are uniquely available to our generation, particularly for women who have the greatest access to education and professional advancement than in any generation prior. I learned a long time ago that ingratitude is the root of envy, so rather than dwelling on all the things that are out-of-reach in our immediate twentysomething futures, I think we'd best embrace the opportunities at our fingertips and leave the economic conspiracy theories to the fogies.

Miss (and Mr.) Independent

Well, I figure by now I've covered sex, politics and religion so why not round it out with one more dinner-party-faux pas... MONEY. But not JUST money, no, the gender politics of real estate investment to be exact.

In today's NYT an interesting piece, "For Men, A Fear of Commitment" examines why single women are twice as likely as single men to buy homes. As the writer, Stephanie Rosenbloom, observes, the phenomonenon among both genders likely has more to do with establishing identity than leveraging (or not leveraging) investment:

"They [men] consider buying a home detrimental to their independence, as it tethers them to one location, squelching any youthful fantasy of a nomadic existence. Indeed, for many single men without children, buying a home is a commitment akin to getting married — and they are content to put it off.

Single women on the other hand seem more interested in establishing a sense of security, or "nesting," as several brokers and buyers put it. They consider buying a home an act of independence. It is an asset, a symbol of their financial strength and proof that they need not wait for a man of means to provide them with the security they crave.

This is not a battle of the sexes. It is a battle of semantics. Both men and women view their decision to buy or not buy as a declaration of independence, though they have cultivated very different definitions of "independence."

As I read this article I am sad that this false notion of independence-as-liberty has taken such a strong hold among my peers. Not to say that independence is all bad (nor is home-buying for that matter) but rather that no other values seem to rival it, like say, community or honesty or sacrifice or discipline. I don't have a poll or a study to prove it, but I doubt that these non-tethered grown men are feeling nearly as fulfilled as they insist they are in their lives as as perpetual rush chair. Nor do I think that women are being completely honest when they assert that fulfillment can be achieved outside human relationship through finacial and professional achievement alone. But then again, maybe that's just a hunch.

NOTE: For more on money and the gender gap catch this review of "Why Men Earn More" at NRO

Who doesn't love John Cusack?

Apparently I'm not the only one, according to this fun though rather meaningless story about his most-beloved character, Lloyd Dobler, from the 80's cult classic Say Anything.

And while the story itself is nothing more than some Valentinian fluff, I did find this quote about the appeal of Lloyd's character interesting:

"Fake love is a very powerful thing," Klosterman observes. "I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. . . . It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. . . . But here's what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They don't love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in 'Say Anything.' . . .

While I doubt Mr. Klosterman, the author of the deeply reflective book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, intended anything too significant in these comments, he is still able to capture quite a bit about how unhealthy idealism can stagnate relationships. I agree with him that fake love is a very powerful thing. It is also the thing that too often inhibts the real thing.

More often than not, we find we are not characters in a romantic comedy as much as we are broken people in broken relationships striving for something good, and maybe even glorious, despite the bumps and brusies along the way. Still, most of us would agree that despite their inevitable challenges, relationships, whether romantic or not, are better to have than not. I like how Jack Johnson says it in his song "Better Together:

Love is the answer
At least for most of the questions in my heart
Why are we here and where do we go
And how come it's so hard
It's not always easy and sometimes life can be deceiving
I'll tell you one thingIt's always better when we're together

My friends know a thing or two about community

My newly published friend Susan enhances an already well-written article on Navigating the College Tranistion with her valuable insight about friendships and community:

We work out all the questions of life and faith in the context of other people. And those people affect - for better or for worse - our beliefs and behaviors. The people you surround yourself with make all the difference in the world.

You can find the full article and other interesting pieces about faith and vocation in the excellent Canadian Journal Comment.

For the record, I like to think that my friendship with Susan is included in the category of making "all the difference in the world. " It certainly is true of her for me.

Bitter or Better Off?

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a confused editorial by Judith Warner titled "The Parent Trap" arguing (at least as best as I can tell) that because women still tend to do the bulk of household chores in any given family, feminism has failed to reach one of its most basic objectives. As she writes here:

The fact is, no matter how time- or sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of household chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households. After all, no one really wants to do the scrubbing and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs. (I'm leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it doesn't feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it's the lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the lower-status member of the household who is called a "nag" when she repeatedly tries to get other members of the household to share in doing them.

This is just one indication that the feminist "revolution" that was supposed to profoundly reshape women's lives remains incomplete. Another is the fact that there are no meaningful national policies to make satisfying work and satisfying family life anything but mutually exclusive for most men and women.

The interesting part about this article is that Warner says at the outset that she works out of the home part-time and stays at home part-time. Assuming she approaches her household duties as part-time work, to some extent or another, doesn't it just make sense that she would do proportionately more laundry than her husband who works full-time outside the home? I get that she is trying to make a universal plea here on behalf of all mothers everywhere who have to work all day and then mop (oh the horror!) but for some reason, I have a hard time believing her work-at-my-leisure and stay-at-home lifestyle is the picture of female oppression.

One of Warners big "beefs" is that our cultural and social institutions haven't changed sufficiently to support women in this new era of "work/life balance" so, of course, I had to smile when I found this great article, "Employers Step Up Efforts to LureStay-at-Home Mothers Back to Work" in the WSJ just one day later explaining how America's companies are stepping up efforts to create opportunities for women to more easily work and mother at the same time:

A growing number of employers are taking major steps to help women with an age-old problem: Returning to the work force after taking time off to raise kids.

Booz Allen Hamilton, Lehman Brothers, Deloitte & Touche and Merrill Lynch, among others, are working to lower the barriers with targeted recruitment, special retraining, mentoring, and new kinds of employment relationships designed to keep ex-employees tied to the firms. While such programs amounted to a trickle in the past, they've now grown to a stream, and a few employers are beginning to reap results.

I think I would be willing to march on Washington with Warner if she could convince me that feminism is in fact all-powerful enough to one day prove my mother wrong and make the chores do themselves, but in the mean time I think I'll keep enduring the great feminist burden of cleaning up after myself.

All sexed up and no place to go

I've heard a lot of "buzz" about Pamela Paul's book, Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Familes . I even went so far as to check it out from the library (not ready to purchase it until I know more). This interesting piece, The Pornification of America, from the Boston Globe last week makes me even more curious about this edgy book.

On the one hand, when I read the article I think I am very much inclined to nod vigorously in agreement with Ms. Paul:

What is new and troubling, critics suggest, is that the porn aesthetic has become so pervasive that it now serves as a kind of sensory wallpaper, something that many people don't even notice anymore. The free-speech-versus-censorship debates that invariably surround actual pornography do not burn as hot when the underlying principles of porn are filtered more subtly into the mainstream. And those principles, critics say, often involve reducing women to subjugated sex objects while presenting men in dominant roles.

Braving the inevitable accusations of prudery, which they reject, critics such as Paul are sounding the alarm. They say the current hypersexualized climate distorts the attitudes of young people toward sex and relationships. In particular, they contend it has a damaging effect on the self-image of young women and girls, who are confronted with a culture that objectifies them while disguising it as female empowerment.

On the other hand, I am troubled by her comments in the conclusion of this article such as the unfounded assumption that conservative religion exacerbates the effects of pornogrpahy in culture (wha!?!?) and her argument here that suggests smoking and sex are comparable addictions:

Whether or not that happens, Paul hopes that porn's hold on the culture will eventually be weakened as the ramifications of its watered-down versions sink in. "Our culture once glamorized cigarette smoking to a large extent. It was promoted by the medical establishment, the film industry, TV," she says. "But once the evidence of harm began to be disseminated by the government, and by schools and the private sector, the number of people who started smoking went down. My hope is that once people realize the negative effect that pornography has on individuals, their children, their wives, and society as a whole, there will be a mind-set shift."

From all that I know, sex is a far more potent drug than nicotine in its power to shape or misshape one's life and identity. More importantly, its misuse renders effects that reach far beyond lung disease. Beyond the risks of physical harm, sex is a drug that threatens to damage a persons very soul.

I hope she is less cliche in the rest of her book.

The best line in this article? It comes from social historian and author Barbara Dafoe Whitehead when she says, "We have an aging society and an adolescent culture."

Well said.

NOTE: If you can't link tothe Globe article, email me and I'll send it to you: harriskc@gmail.com

The Marriage Gap

My husband told me about this thought-provoking article on marriage that ran in City Journal last week and now, having finally read it, I think it is only right to pass it on to the blog world.

Kay Hymowitz, a fascinating contributor who writes like a sociologist although she is actually an English professor, explores the growing socioeconomic divide between women who marry and women who don't. She then expands on the sociological impact and trends that result from marriage. I have no idea what ideological camp she is in, but based on everything I've read she seems to err toward thoughtful conservatism and she cares deeply about the poor. Here is a brief excerpt outlining her argument about why marriage still has significance as a social institution:

There is something fundamentally different about low-income single mothers and their educated married sisters. But a key part of that difference is that educated women still believe in marriage as an institution for raising children. What is missing in all the ocean of research related to the Marriage Gap is any recognition that this assumption is itself an invaluable piece of cultural and psychological capital—and not just because it makes it more likely that children will grow up with a dad in the house. As society’s bulwark social institution, traditional marriage—that is, childbearing within marriage—orders social life in ways that we only dimly understand.

For the full (lengthy) article, click here.

Next on the list

Reading for pleasure hasn't been my forte in recent weeks, but the next book on my list is most definitely Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I have now had a total of three trusted friends recommend it and I just read this great review of it on NRO so my next stop is Amazon for a purchase.

I'll post on it again once I have a review of my own to share, but for now I have sufficient confidence that this tidbit is worth passing on to others.

Here we go again...

The annual Ivy bachannal, subtly dubbed "Sex Week at Yale", is back again starting February 13 in celebration of Valentine's Day (as in SAINT Valentine, the Roman who was martyred for refusing to give up Christianity for anyone who was wondering...)

Ron Rosenbaum attended the Week's inaugural year for Atlantic Monthly in 2003 and wrote this telling piece from his experience. He dubs Day 4 the "Spiritualization of Sex" which is a theme I find particularly interesting and particularly prominent in most best-selling novels these days.

Which, incidentally, reminds me of Dan Heimbach and his relatively new book "True Sexual Morality" that talks about this rising trend in American culture.

For more on this sex-week-like phenomenon, check out this short article by Federica Matthewes-Green, "What to Say at a Naked Party"

The Feminine Mystique

Best-selling author and founder of modern-day feminsim, Betty Friedan, died on her birthday Saturday at the age of 85. Her most well-known book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, set the groundwork for allowing women to build careers. It also provides the justification for modern-day feminism's insistence on abortion rights and homosexual unions, despite the fact that Friedan herself initially believed "the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected." (Wash post article is here)

While I am not too fond of Friedan and what I believe to be a misguided understanding of women's sources of fulfillment (The NYT outlines some of her own personal struggles here), I agree that many of the questions she explored are universal for all women, as she writes, "A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children."

She musn't feel inherently selfish or neurotic for having the desire to utilize her talents and gifts, no, yet she also must acknowledge (like people of every gender must) when those desires do in fact lead to selfishness or neurosis, as strong desires are often want to do. As reponsible actors in a moral universe, women and men alike must learn to find the true source of their longings and pursue them in the context of families, friends and communities rather than simply as independednt agents.

As Frieden's own inconsistency and evolving ethic suggests, by defining fulfillment only by acheivement of an abstract goal, women are destined to spend a life constantly revising and changing and expanding that goal to fit their needs (real or perceived) of the moment. Instead, I believe women are mush wiser to explore the deep questions of existence and identity within the context of relationships with other women AND men to set goals and benchmarks with the help of others. For one woman, motherhood may bring the height of fulfillment and to insist upon a career is to rob her of great purpose and joy, whereas another woman may live to practice law and to be homebound is to stifle her. In most cases, as in most of life, I think it is probably a bit of both. The challenge for women to navigate with one another is how to strike a balance in the midst of these unavoidable tensions, not to ignore them.

It is here that I would direct my women friends back to Sharon Hersh's book, Bravehearts, which offers a number of practical and contextualized responses to the seemingly insatiable desires of a woman's heart. She prescribes honest friendships, trusting faith, and patient waiting rather than a progressive agenda loaded with entitlements. Lilian Barger's book, Eve's Revenge is another great resource.

So this is Women's Lib?

[This is from Friday, February 3 -- delayed post]

If you have been watching Fox News anytime over the past 24 hours you could not have missed its obsessive coverage (or should I say lack of coverage) of the third annual Lingerie Bowl.
Now, I won't even bother to ask the obvious question, "What is so newsworthy about the flippin' panty parade?" -- because that has been made perfectly clear to me by every male colleague in my office. A titillating story is a titillating story, apparently.

What does interest me is how well the "Bowl" illustrates what I think is the most fundamental flaw in feminist thinking. By defining feminism's success on its ability to enable women to somehow become like men, very bright women often fail to acknowledge what would otherwise be a very logical boundary between what is mobilizing and what is mortifying. Rather than defining success in terms that seek to create opportunities for women to become more fulfilled as women, modern feminism (unlike the original feminists of the 1920s) more often rely on women to outplay men at their own game using the same terms, particulary when it comes to sex.

The outcome isn't just the masculinization of feminine sexuality, but it also has the added adverse effect of emasculating men who have undoubtedly become increasingly passive toward sexually dominant women who leave little to be discovered or desired. It also perpetuates a growing disinterest in "traditional" sex in favor of exotic, and often demeaning forms of kinky or violent sex that takes the person almost wholly outside of the act and leaves pleasure as the only object. Take this tasteful column from ESPN's "Page 2" about last year's Bowl which describes this man's boredom with the lack of stimulation offered by the 7-on-7 tackle game of half nude women:

"As it turned out, the Lingerie Bowl was about as titillating as tossing a football through a tire hanging from a backyard tree. Suprisingly, the football was almost decent, in a Pop Warner/XFL-ish sort of way. On the other hand, the sex appeal was sorely lacking. Blame it on the player outfits, which simply weren't skimpy enough. I was counting on thongs. Tassels. A smattering of pasties. In short, everything a reasonable person might expect in return for a cover charge. Yet both teams were decked out in short-shorts and what appeared to be Kevlar-plated push-up bras -- not bad, but nothing compared to Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime number."

Naomi Wolf called it years ago and expands on this phenomenon in the Porn Myth (linked in a January Post below). But I still wonder where women went wrong. If a tulip were to aspire to become the most tuliplike it could be, why would it define its goals as aquiring all of the attributes of a tree or a shrub? Likewise, why would women who desire to become as wholly woman as they can be aspire to develop characteristics of men? I find the same thing puzzling in the fight for gay marriage because I can never understand why homosexual men and women have any interest in borrowing what is an inherently heterosexual benchmark as their gauge of success, (doesn't that seem illogical?) but then again that is another story.....

Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day

And so it is with Maureen Dowd, who embedded this remarkable observation (for her) between her more typical lines of chronic discontent in the column, "Oprah!How could ya?"(I linked it here although it really isn't worth the read):

Despite George Washington and the cherry tree, we no longer have a society especially consecrated to truth. The culture produces an infinity of TV shows and movies depicting the importance of honesty. But they're really talking only about the importance of being honest about your feelings. Sharing feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth. We've become a country of situationalists.

As I said, even a broken clock....

Girls (and Boys) Gone Wild... again

I'm sad I missed this great piece by David Brooks just less than a month ago, but thanks to best friend Susan (pictured here with much beloved hubby Nate) I have the opportunity to post it now. It's about time for her debut!

David Brooks is an interesting guy who I like mostly because he chooses to err toward optimism rather than the stereotypical pessimism most bright people who get paid to write about all that's wrong in the world do.

The piece is titled "Bondage and Bonding Online: Online social contact leaves much to be desired" and it offers shrewd insight into the impact of personal blogs (watch out!) and other online information-sharing resources like Facebook.

Brooks argues, "The idea on these sites is to show you’re a purebred party animal, which leaves us fogies with two ways to see MySpace. The happy view is that this is a generation of wholesome young people building nurturing communities, and the smutty talk is just a harmless way of demarcating an adult-free social space.

The dark view is that these prolonged adolescents are filled with earnest desires for meaningful human contact, but they live in a culture that has provided them with no vocabulary to create these sorts of bonds except through cleavage and vodka."

I agree with Susan that that last line is so true it makes me want to throw up. The increased sexualization and objectification of women at younger and younger ages is startling in-and-of itself but it becomes downright scary when you consider the reality Brooks spells out here:

"To get the attention of fast-clicking Web surfers, many women have posed for their photos in bikinis or their underwear or in Penthouse-parody, “I clutch my breasts for you” positions. Here’s a woman in a jokey sadomasochistic pose. There’s a woman with a caption: “Yes, I make out with girls. Get over it” — complete with a photo of herself liplocked with a buddy.

The girls are the peacocks in this social universe. Their pages are racy, filled with dirty jokes and macha declarations: “I’m hot and like to party. Why have one boy when there are plenty to go around?!” The boys’ pages tend to be passive and unimaginative: a guy posing with a beer or next to a Corvette. In a world in which the girls have been schooled in sexual aggressiveness, the boys sit back and let the action come to them."

More on this sad phenomenon later, but for now... YIKES.

Something about Mary

Well, I may not be a Catholic but I sure like a lot of what their intellectual history has to say about life and embodiment and purpose and vocation. Here is a small excerpt from an article in this month's Touchstone that has been on my mind for a few days. While the article itself is a little too Mary-rific for me, I do think this observation about the uniqueness of women's physiology and our heritage as daughters of Eve and gracegrandchildren of Mary is a thing worth pondering:

Men are often tempted to think that their bodies were made for their own use. To a great extent this is true for everyone: Your hands, sir, are yours, they are for your use, and mine are for my use. A man can indulge this illusion of autonomy even further by supposing that even his genitals are there for himself. They’re a source of at times almost compelling drives and intriguing sensations. Even his testes are useful for him, in that the hormones they produce provide certain secondary sexual characteristics he has an interest in maintaining.

But a woman’s body has all these nooks and crannies which are no use to us but evidently were put there for someone else. Don’t get me wrong: We women have our pleasure doodads and our own hormonal self-interest as well. But then, well, there’s the womb. That’s not there for me. I can do without it. It was obviously put there for someone else. The same is true of mature mammary glands, rich with branching ducts and reservoirs, as they are found in nursing mothers and as they are not found in childless females, however nubile and Partonesque they may be.

Our female bodies are connectors: Inter-connectedness is not just a concept, it’s built into us. This gives us the sense that we find in Mary’s Magnificat, of being, within our own bodies, the living link between past and future: “Behold, all generations will call me Blessed. . . . His mercy is on those who fear him, from generation to generation. . . . As he spoke to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.”

Mary sees ancestors past, and posterity future, linked in the center of her being. Her person—her body, her soul, her faithful heart—is the connector. She who is more spacious than the heavens. This makes autonomy, as an ideal, a poor fit for women. Women have a special gift, even a genius, for bondedness.

Book Club

Last night marked the first gathering of the BraveHeart Book club in my living room. There was no shortage of fanstastic women there and the discussion affirmed the perennial truth that we are all much more alike than we think we are!
Here is a link to the book by Sharon Hersh that inspired it all: Bravehearts: Learning to Love with Abandon. While I am not typically a big fan of the "Christian inspiration for women" kind of book, I am impressed with Hersh's practicality and winsome truth-telling about women's unique desire for relationships and seemingly insatiable longings to know and be known. She is very observant about women in general and is particularly good at translating her own experience into a story that resonates with all women. PIck up a copy and start your own club. It's fun!