Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - Posts
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Apologies for the caps, but this NINETY EIGHT POINT FONT Drudge EXCLUSIVE about the prediction of one Igor Panarin that the United States was going to collapse and break into six separate nation-states (not including Alaska, which he advises Putin to annex) DEMANDS TO BE READ if you haven't done so already. Who is Igor Panarin? I'm not entirely sure, I'm on an iffy internet bus connection and lacking the instawisdom I might gain from a Nexis search. But if you Google him the Facebook page of a guy named Igor Panarin leaning down and holding his mouth to a watermelon will appear on the first search page. I don't think that guy is him, but it's symbolic. Because it's pretty silly! As is the thought of China and Russia becoming the world's regulators and standard-bearers or that the Pacific Coast secession will be led by its "growing Chinese population."
The big failure of Igor's logic, I know you'll be eager to hear because his case is so convincing, is that while he is right to point out that the people who have all the money control what happens in the world, they did not get that way -- not Putin nor the Chinese Communist Party nor the handful of plutocrats who profited off the mushrooming of that risk shift I was talking about -- by pretending they were Genghis Khan. They all have some interest in that money not suddenly turning out to be worthless. They do not think anarchy is that cool. I was looking for something to be thankful for!
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Meghan, I think I agree with your diagnosis but perhaps not your prescription. It’s true that every woman in the public eye in America is instantly run through the sum-of-her-choices machine and found wanting. From Sarah Palin to Angelina Jolie, it seems nobody has calibrated her responsibilities to her job and her family in ways the rest of us can applaud. It’s also true that as women we run ourselves through the sum-of-our-choices machine on pretty much a daily basis. (This morning my 3-year-old’s preschool teacher handed me a laminated book of Our Feelings, in which my son is featured in a desolate-looking photo with the caption “I am sad when my mommy goes for walks and leaves me alone.” Awesome. Immortalized for life as the Mommy Who Ditches.)
I agree that any story about women and choices is mommy catnip, a way for us to check our own bargains and compromises against everyone else’s, which really increases our efficiency by allowing us to beat up on ourselves and others at the same time. But I wonder what’s required to, as you put it, “break free.” I don’t know if it requires reconciling ourselves to the choices we have made or fighting harder for better, fuller choices for women. For Michelle Obama that might mean redefining the role of first lady as something more substantial than Traister imagines. For the rest of us, it may require giving up on the idea that if we take turns in our marriages, the choices for women will get easier or better. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her.
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Ann, I have long been creeped out by the endless sex advice doled out by Christian ministries. This practice began in the '70s by none other than Tim LaHaye, of Left Behind fame, who wrote a very explicit guide to what he then called "the marital act." What began as a slightly squeamish enterprise has now turned into a publishing and preaching empire, with hundreds of guides and manuals extolling the joys of "Christian sex." (Dagmar Herzog chronicles the history of this genre in this book I reviewed for the Times.) Many of the books seem like thin excuses for Christian authors to titillate their readers with so called "morality tales," a la Daniel Defoe. All of them leave teens with a confusing message: Sex is dangerous; it could leave you emotionally scarred, sick, even kill you. Until you get married, and then it's godly and awesome.
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Ladies, gentlemen: Are any of you, like me, getting tired of all the discussion surrounding Michelle Obama's "choices"? Yesterday in the New York Times: a long piece about women worrying whether Michelle "will become a pioneer or a dispiriting symbol of the limitations of modern working motherhood." And last night on CNN: a spiraling segment about Michelle and what she "represents" to all the “little girls out there.” So here’s a woman who has a powerful job and decided to give it up to support her husband when he became president. Does that really send such a terrible message? Or is the terrible message our obsession with scrutinizing her choices and finding fault? Rebecca Traister recently wrote a good piece about the "momification" of Michelle, critiquing the fact that the media spend so much time on her role as a mother. But I think the problem is more complicated: The media know that all they have to do is utter the words "work" and "mother" and "choice" and everyone gets all frothed up, like Pavlov’s dogs at the dinner bell.
To me, the real difficulty in being a professional woman today is that no matter what you do—whether you make the decision to stay at home or go to work, to take time off to help a sick parent or to stay focused on your work—someone criticizes it. Often, you yourself criticize it. You spend lots of (otherwise useful) energy wondering if you’re doing "the right thing." At this point in time, women are called on to be both individuals and symbols—and they treat one another that way. And sure, symbolism is important: I’m a poet, for god’s sake; I get it. But if women are going to push forward toward further equality, the media has to let go of our obsession with turning powerful women’s choices into representative dramas—from Hillary to Michelle to Sarah Palin. Because this psychological wheel-spinning is starting to hold us back, I think—it’s the kind of obsessive "should we, shouldn’t we" that happens when you’re at the end of a relationship and can’t figure out whether to break free.
So, let’s break free. As Michelle herself has said, being first lady is a powerful platform. And the modern professional marriage, for better or for worse, usually requires some alternating in who gets to take the professional lead (that is, if you want your kids to get any attention). It’s too bad, sure, that there aren’t more men stepping up to support their wives—but it’s not as though that’s not happening in our political culture. (Hi there, Todd Palin!) The best way Michelle Obama can act as a role model for women right now is not by making the decision any one of us would make (because we’d all make different decisions), but by reminding us that life is fleeting, and we ought to immerse ourselves in the opportunities and joys of our own life as it exists. Not as it might exist.
Oh, but also this, Michelle: In eight years, tell your husband it’s your turn.
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Hanna and Melinda, did you read the Times article yesterday about the evangelical approach to marital sex? In mid-November, the Rev. Ed Young, pastor of the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, was up in the pulpit, urging his flock to fortify their unions with Seven Days of Sex. "A sexperiment," he called it as he sermonized in front of a big bed to an audience presumed to be not getting nearly enough of it. In my uptight, blue state way, I found myself wondering about the kids ("a word that Mr. Young told church members stands for ‘keeping intimacy at a distance successfully' ")—particularly teenagers.
Talk about a sex-ed message that seems tone deaf to adolescents, no matter how you slice it. For any teens who might have been in the congregation listening to the exhortations to parental "whoopee," can you think of any greater gross out? And if they could bring themselves to think about it, the reverend's diagnosis of sex-starved couples undermined the promises preached to youth: These teens are being told to save themselves, the better to enjoy the bliss that arrives with marriage. I wish I thought the spectacle of their elders' confusion could help kids see what a complicated business sex can be, but somehow I don't think that's what sinks in.
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Oy. All due respect, et cetera. True love does not wait. True love necks, cops a feel. True love tries to put off the inevitable and distracts itself giving a blow job. True love gags a little bit, momentarily forgets it is true love, re-evaluates itself—if this does not feel particularly loving, does my selfless dedication to this higher purpose at least underscore its truth?—oh crap here come the Park Police …
Now, I speak as an avowed nonbeliever in the sacredness of sex. I have committed the act hundreds of times, not always under the influence of alcohol, and never once felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.* And I am one of those heathens who has run the numbers on America's Gross National Sin way too many times to be particularly inclined to get up in the morning if not for some deeply-ingrained irrational hope that some savior, perhaps under the guise of a cleverly formulated stimulus package designed amid a powerful resurgence of cultural humanism, might descend and forgive the bulk of them. I feel the Holy Spirit all the time, at the deli and the movies and sometimes even looking at pictures of children that light up when they call their parents' iPhones.
You never hit "ignore" on your kid. That feels like a sin. And adultery—not redefined Clintonesquely to include premarital sex, but full-on cheating— feels like a sin. Merely flirting with cheating generally feels bad enough to deter wusses like me, and maybe that is why I haven't married, but anyway, the point of this is that the older I get the more confounded I am that so many Americans strive so hard to ask our kids—who are, to be sure, the byproducts of our screwing but we hopefully weren't thinking of them at the time—to take sex seriously as a sin.
I grew up the eldest child in a very conservative Catholic family (whose conservatism has basically been all but decimated by time and events and exposure to the Simpsons, thank Jesus or this week would be painful). Growing up, I thought premarital sex was sinful. But I had spent a few formative years during the first Bush administration in China, a society that had declared an entirely different battery of activities to be sinful: reading, expressing opinions, owning stuff—especially if it in any way acknowledged the past—failing to renounce one's parents if they happened to be bourgeois counterrevolutionary running dogs, etc. etc. Even at 12, it occurred to me that (protected) sex, if one could find a place to have some, might be the one uncorrupted joy experienced in the lifetimes of most of the dreary-faced adults I saw (bicycling, very mirthlessly, to work each day) on the street. I remember feeling so awful for them. I remember feeling terribly sinful that I could not, or didn't want to, give anyone "half" of what I had, as Jesus would have, not that there was any real practical way of doing that, which, by the way, is a big reason communism didn't work out.
But anyway, the point is that I never felt remotely that sinful about sex. I think most of the guilt that we feel about sex has to do with confusion we've created by dubbing it a "sin." Of the various reasons I've felt guilty about honest, unadulterated sex—does he think I am his girlfriend now? why did I watch that porn?—it always seems to go back to fundamental dishonesty. Elevating sex to sin, that is to say, was the original sin.
*Ha ha, boner joke optional here.
(And P.S., any future kids of mine who might ever stumble across this blog post or anything else I've ever written on the subject, there are a LOT of conditions, footnotes, and appendices to all this and by the way, I was nearly 19 when I lost my virginity, and as far as I'm concerned, you can wait that long, too.)
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Not sure this is a liberal-vs.-conservative divide exactly, Hanna, or even a religious-vs.-secular one, though that's probably closer to the mark. It's definitely not only in red states that parents would prefer that their kids delay having sex. How to communicate that while also teaching them about birth control—does the one message undercut the other?—is an old, old problem. And because people being people it's not always communicated perfectly or received gladly doesn't mean there's no point in trying.
At a meeting on sex ed in Sunday school at our church last spring, one of the other parents remarked that even those of us who don't believe everything the church teaches about sex want our kids to believe it, and everybody laughed. Only, when it came down to actually talking to my kids, I felt compelled to explain both the church teaching on birth control and why I see it more as an ideal than an absolute. Did I worry about this obviously mixed message? Yes. Do I get the appeal of a more clear-cut approach in either direction? You betcha. But I see risk in punting on either the moral or the practical dimension of sexuality, and in the end, that's a line every parent has to locate for himself. One of my many hopes for Obamamerica is that we will no longer see "red state sex'' as a distinct phenomenon.
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