Slut shaming, it’s nothing new. Long before that Rush ‘to judgement’ Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” on his radio show, young women everywhere have been objectified and marginalized for ages. Think of the adulterous “A” sewn onto Hester Prynne’s bodice, now think of the “walk of shame” I first heard about when the kids went off to college. If you haven’t heard about it, ask a twenty something. I remember feeling pained even then, we “Our Bodies Ourselves” feminists burned our bras for what?
Now it’s back with a vengeance – the public humiliation of a young woman for embracing her sex. Yes, I’m talking about 20 year old Miley Cyrus, and isn’t everyone else? The Rocker and Cait first filled me in on the controversy between Miley and Sinead O’Connor last weekend. Odd I thought. One rocker who chopped all her hair off and ripped up a picture of the Pope 2 decades ago vs the Wrecking Ball baby. I missed her stellar performance on SNL, but did catch Miley on Ellen this week, doing her best to explain her fascination with her own tongue (turns out she just hates smiling on the red carpet) and her love of wearing onesies, oh and teddy bears. And this morning I read a great new blogger’s take on the whole shebang, http://fishershannon.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/the-s-word/
The problem with the word “slut” is that we don’t have a male equivalent. It’s like the French don’t have a word for “snack.” It’s because they just don’t do it, no fast food, no eating in the car, no walking down the street with coffee in hand. Nope, the French sit down and savor every single morsel of food and drink. Let’s think for a minute, what if we did have a derogatory term for a man who was enjoying his body and didn’t mind having a little sexual fun with it, no regrets. What would it be? Player, no since this is gender neutral. Manwhore, no since the whole whore part is female specific. Sex addict, maybe. Hmmm, a promiscuous man. “A single young man who sleeps readily with a number of women would probably not have any label attached to his behavior.” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fighting-fear/201302/certain-aspects-promiscuity
Slut first appeared in the written language in 1402, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , that great repository of language information. At that time, slut meant roughly what one sense of slattern means today: a slovenly, untidy woman or girl. It also apparently meant “kitchen maid” (”She is a cheerful slut who keeps the pots scrubbed and the fires hot.”). By the end of the 15th century the sense “a woman given to immoral or improper conduct” had come into use, and it is the only meaning in use today. Interestingly,the same second meaning, a promiscuous woman, developed for the term slattern. dictionary.com
So Miley isn’t writing songs about her old boyfriends who we must presume she’d been intimate with a la Taylor Swift. Taylor, who mostly keeps her clothes on is still rather boy crazy. Miley didn’t fade into the woodwork, like Annette our first Mouseketeer. She twerked her way into America’s pop culture, for better or worse, with her mother in the background signing her checks. And taking a selfie with the signature “tongue and wink” move in this AP pic.
My brother Dr Jim, the psychologist, called Ms Miley a master marketing strategist, and I have to agree. So stop feeling sorry for her America, she refuses to be shamed into submission. And let’s drop the word slut from the Oxford English dictionary. After Britney’s brief affair with a boa, and Madonna’s many semi-nudist and full frontal nudist concerts and picture books, and Cher, and Lady Gaga, Miley romping around in a teddy bear outfit that covered her like a one piece bathing suit with a foam finger is pretty tame, or lame, depending on your point of view. Let’s get off our puritanical white horse…and wink back.
It’s that time of year again. No, not carving pumpkins time and trying to find or create a family-friendly Halloween costume. It’s the Nobel Prize announcement time; time to try and figure out just what the Higgs boson particle really is and how it’s responsible for the secrets of life and our universe, and I am not speaking biblically.
But try to find the 2013 recipient of the prize in physics, Peter Higgs, and you’d be out of luck. The elderly Edinburgh scientist left his cell phone behind and like Garbo, would like to be left alone. Of course, once that Large Hadron Collider at Cern proved that his theory about the “god particle” was correct, Higgs was considered a shoe-in for the Nobel in Physics.
So maybe we’re closer to knowing “how” we got here, two other winners this year help us understand the “why.” A man whose mission is to heal won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology. Since I have a few healers in the family, I was interested in this article I found courtesy of my musical great niece: http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/10/nobel-medicine-winner-says-i-owe-is-all-to-my-bassoon-teacher.html Dr Thomas Sudhof credits his music teacher with imparting a sense of discipline that helped to forge his “…powers of analysis and concentration.”
I always try to understand everything I encounter—not only in science, but also historical and political events and music and movies—get to grips with the content, meaning, and process. This is immense fun, as strange as that may sound.
Who was your most influential teacher, and why?
My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.
Science and art, the interconnections are endless. Next is a woman whose elegantly sparse prose helps us to understand the human condition, along with the roles we all play; an artist who is also part of the faculty here at UVA. Congratulations to Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature! This 82 year old Canadian writer had her first book of short stories published when she was 37…take heed all you late bloomers! She has only taught the occasional writing class in Mr Jefferson’s Academical Village, and was unavailable when I was studying fiction as a community scholar, unfortunately for me. She is Queen of the Short Story, and has recently published Dear Life.
Rumor is she will stop writing now, but I find that hard to believe. Here is what Munro, America’s Chekhov, had to say about her attempt at writing a novel, and I feel her pain:“It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it,” she said. “I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way.”So that’s my problem. Too many years writing 300-500 word newspaper columns. Thank you Ms Munro, for sharing your knowledge and sense of possibility with us.
My son the Rocker and his sweetheart Ms Cait were here over the weekend. We defied Gravity in IMAX 3D, then descended over 100 feet to another eerie landscape in the caverns of Luray, VA. I pretty much knew from the moment he was born, this baby boy liked action and adventure. What i didn’t know when his band, Parlor Mob, broke up last year was that he’d not only pursue music for film, but he’d continue to support and play music with his friends in the burgeoning arts scene of Asbury Park and beyond…
All the way to Brooklyn this Friday! While cooking another one of his favorite dishes, he casually asked me if I liked Norah Jones. “Yes,” I gushed like a teenage mutant fan, “I love her!” Well it seems Norah’s got a side project, it’s her band Puss N Boots. And he’ll be onstage with her Friday night at the Bowery Electric, since he’ll be playing guitar for an old friend, Nicole Atkins. You remember Nicole, I called her a “… stunning performer with an incredible voice.” https://mountainmornings.net/2011/05/22/hello-apocalypse-no/ And Nicole is headlining!
It’s times like these when I really miss my Jersey Shore life: hoping a train to the city for a concert or a play; walking my Corgis past egrets nesting in trees; waiting for the drawbridge in Sea Bright to deliver us to the beach. Small pleasures that amounted to a life filled with possibility. But I can’t complain, at least I’ll stop complaining right now. Just because I caught a doozy of a cold from my lovely husband Bob, and I’ll have to miss my son’s side project with Nicole, doesn’t mean I can’t fly away in my mind, and play a little Norah on my old fashioned CD player;
Come away with me in the night
Come away with me
And I will write you a song
Come away with me on a bus
Come away where they can’t tempt us
With their lies
I wonder who was tempting her with their lies? Because I can’t even watch the news anymore, and all the lying going on about who’s holding our government hostage. Wake up. It’s about 40 perverse Republicans who think they can ignore the constitution and walk us off the edge of solvency. I think these guys need to be furloughed without pay. And since they seem to operate with impunity, we need to fix the gerrymandering that created these districts of bloody red zealots.
Let’s teach them how to live without benefits, with part-time work and side projects to make ends meet. That would be a real life lesson for Ted Cruz and his cronies. We need leaders like those WWII vets who stormed the monuments in DC. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/ted-cruz-blasted-by-angry-gop-colleagues-government-shutdown-97753.html
Yesterday was Kale Day, but today is the official national book reading day for millions of children in libraries, homes and schools all across the country, and the idea is that we’ll all be reading one book. Well, you could read more than one, but doesn’t everybody love a tractor?
The book for Jumpstart’s 2013 Read for the Record campaign is Otis! Published by Penguin and written by New York Times bestselling author Loren Long, Otis is the timeless story of a friendship between a lovable tractor and a calf that live on a farm. On October 3, 2013 children and adults will come together to read Otis as part of Jumpstart and the Pearson Foundation’s Read for the Record campaign.
I packed a box full of toys and books for the Love Bug’s arrival. And her parents brought her favorite books with them as well. I’m even working on a children’s book inspired by the Bug, so here’s a little clue:
We started reading early to the Bride and Rocker, almost as soon as they could sit semi-steadily on our laps. And I’m happy to see the tradition continues. I found a beautifully illustrated book, I’d Know You Anywhere, My Love by Nancy Tillman. It’s about how we parents would always see through any animal disguise in pretend play, and recognize our beloved child.
And while talking all things literary today, let’s jump ahead to the next book on my list. I cannot wait to dig into Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, The Signature of All Things. I follow this author on Twitter so I was aware of its release date, then I caught her on the Today Show and later heard her interview on NPR.
The heroine is a botanist in the early 19th Century, who travels to Tahiti and discovers herself, along with “…varietals of vanilla pods; a sky-high waterspout; abolition…” and so much more, including a bit of Victorian pornography. Gilbert’s book, Committed, helped the Bride and many of her friends in their understanding of modern marriage. So I had to smile when Gilbert said she married a man who believes a wife belongs in the kitchen…”with her feet up and a glass of wine, watching her husband cook dinner.”
We read around here for the love it, to escape and be challenged, to learn and to laugh. For the record, ebooks, podcasts and iPads have their place, but in my life, nothing will replace the feel of a real book in my hands!
Our mountain house is too quiet.No more Love Bug yelling , “MA” at the top of her voice, no more breakfasts for five or Mozart in the morning.
When my kids were little, we would get in the car and immediately chaos would descend about who claimed the shot-gun seat, which radio channel we’d tune into, whether we would stop at 7-Eleven on our way to the beach every morning, why the Corgi can’t come, etc. And usually by about halftime I’d holler “Let’s have some Ps and Qs.” Peace and Quiet.
I’m not sure how or why that worked, but they both knew that those little words meant Mom had had enough. Before there were smart phones and iPads and Apps, and Disney videos strapped into the back of every car seat or hanging projector-like from a Suburban, we parents had to rule the roost…while driving. Bickering died down and actual conversations might just happen. In fact, parents everywhere should take note, some of the very best conversations ever with your kids may just take place in your car! There is nothing like a captured audience.
But when all else fails, then and now, we sing! Our Love Bug is a Nashville baby.
Because the mere thought of strapping a one year old into a car seat that resembles a NASCAR engineering project for 9 hours of driving is my idea of family torture, so we sing. One year olds can’t tell you they have a dirty diaper, they can’t say “Id like to lay down for my nap now if you don’t mind,” they can’t point out the 7-Eleven and ask for a Slurpee. Babies lack the vocabulary to express their storm of emotions. But this baby loves to sing, yes she’s even starting to hum along with us!
So I’ve got to hand it to the Bride and Groom for their courage and creativity on this trip. For endless rounds of Old MacDonald and Baby Beluga. For not being too upset when they learned that I thought the Bug might like playing with her food. Which she did! For loaning me their precious little girl full of sunshine and light for a little while.
For helping me to realize that peace and quiet isn’t such a great idea after all.
This is a letter the Love Bug dictated to me for her parents, who are returning from the Outer Banks today.
Dear Mama and Dada,
OK, first. Life is good here with Nana and PapaBob. I point to things and they get them for me, all the time! Not just sometimes. And we do a lot of walking, I mean a LOT of walking around. And I don’t have to hold hands all the time anymore, get it? Ya!
Mornings from now on will have to start with dog kisses. This Ms Bean dog, she puts her head through the bars in my crib and she kisses me every morning. So even if I wake up with a poopy diaper, the day has a great start. And if I’m really really hungry, they let me have some Puffs in the living room. Get it?
I have learned many new skills. Like how to open and close windows with a crank and crawl in and out of a rocking chair with the dog’s toy and my toy monkey too! It gets crowded but we manage, Nana keeps me from falling out. We also pick flowers on the deck. And we play Mozart and dance in the morning after Sesame Street.
I like to get outdoors in the afternoon. A little fresh air never hurt anybody, that’s what PapaBob says. We watch bees buzz, and clouds and planes fly by, and we like to go see the horses next door. Nana says her friend has alpacas, and I don’t know what they are but I can’t wait to see them.
There will be Mac and Cheese for dinner every night, what’s not to like? And Nana said not to tell, but I DO like chicken mac nuggets. Especially if we dip them in yogurt! And here are some other new foods on my list: Irish oatmeal; white nectarines; hot dogs; cookies. Don’t judge me.
I still like baths the way you do them, although they can never be long enough, right? Just keep the water warm and wait till my fingertips turn into raisins. But try not to nibble on them please. Nana is always nibbling on me, on my ears and my toes. You’d think she just couldn’t get enough of me.
I’m flying solo at home for a few days as a Nana. Bob helps out at night thankfully. With back to back Cville weddings, the Bride and Groom are taking a mini second honeymoon this week, leaving the Love Bug with us. What an awesome responsibility. I guess when you’re having your own babies in your 30s, theres no time to think about it. And also car seats and strollers somehow just seemed easier to handle…in fact, i don’t think we even brought the Bride home in a car seat!
I can’t get enough hugs and kisses. The first night was rough, I kept listening for her cry, but she slept right through the night. Guess she likes her new/used crib, a super find on Craig’s List. We take life slow here, we’re on baby time. We walk around the property with Ms Bean, pointing out hawks and clouds. We climb in and out of her rocker and practice going up and down stairs. We have picnic lunches and feel the wind in our hair.
As usual, baby time means I’ll catch up with the news next week. But I did hear about the possible government shutdown, and how President Obama was using “soft power” to try and work with Congress. Fancy dinners and phone calls to gently cajole or persuade those recalcitrant Republicans.
But the White House cancelled their annual picnic. And that may be the problem. Everybody knows, even a baby, you don’t cancel picnics!
And I say “Hell no!” My indignation this morning has nothing to do with the five, count ’em, 5 weddings we’ve been invited to this year. I’m actually glad our friend’s children and our children’s friends have decided to tie the knot. I’m equally ecstatic that my niece in MN is finally allowed to marry her partner.
What gets my Irish up is our Republican candidate for Governor – Ken Cuccinelli. If you think our current ultrasound Governor, who will hopefully be indicted soon for accepting boatloads of gifts from a political donor who presumably expected payback https://mountainmornings.net/2013/08/04/a-gift-horse/, was bad, you won’t believe what kind of religious zealot Cuccinelli is; he would like to take us back to the past, long before “irreconcilable differences” became grounds for a divorce .
His record as AG and Senator is indicative of his extreme ideology; he would like to regulate ” who you marry, what kind of contraception you use, and when you can end a bad marriage.”
Besides the GOP stand or “war on women,” as adjuncts to men, you know made out of a piece of rib or something, my dander is severely raised when they try to deny science. Because this too is personal. Over the past year, three cousins and a friend have been diagnosed with cancer. They are fighting the good fight, with surgery, chemo and radiation, and I’d like to believe that our legislators will continue to fund evidence-based research at our esteemed public universities. My love and a casserole or a prayer shawl are with them all. And my vote, for Terry.
This morning it’s overcast and calm. Only the first ridge of mountain is poking up between the clouds. Not like yesterday, when we woke to a clear day and another mass shooting, this time closer to home at the DC Naval Yard. And if you happened to miss the physician, Janis Orlowski, who treated some of the survivors make her heartfelt plea to end gun violence, here it is:
“There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate,” she said, adding that “I would like you to put my trauma center out of business. I really would. I would like to not be an expert on gunshots.” She added: “Let’s get rid of this. This is not America.” http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/09/watch-dr-janis-orlowskis-moving-plea-against-gun-violence-after-navy-yard-shootings/69471/
If you don’t work in a trauma center, if you’re not an ER doctor or nurse, you may have watched or listened to the incident unfold with a cynical eye. It’s just another crazy person; didn’t they have to go through a metal detector?; how did the shooter obtain clearance to enter a secure DOD facility? But if you’ve actually seen what a bullet can do to a body, if you’ve had to race against time to save a life, if you’ve had the heartbreaking job of telling someone’s family that your patient, their loved one, has died, well then you understand the problem.
And the problem is GUNS. The epidemic is gun violence. Because that is what’s evil in our society, it isn’t the mentally ill person who believes that a voice is telling him to shoot up a school or a movie theatre. Mental illness affects many of our families and friends, that is inevitable, it’s been around since time began, or Cain and Abel if you prefer. People who suffer from mood disorders through those with paranoid schizophrenia can seek treatment, they can live a normal life. We are the Prozac nation after all.
What we cannot escape is guns – they are sold in parking lots, and online, as if they are candy. They are glorified in film and on TV. I’ve said this before, I don’t need to know why some one entered a Naval facility with a rifle and picked off his victims from an upper landing in a beautiful atrium – the motive really does not matter. Let’s ask ourselves why our legislators could not get a simple background check law passed. Because as we saw yesterday, having more guns inside a facility isn’t the answer.
Yesterday we were a nation in shock again. When I walked out to my car I saw this. How could this happen? Was it another angry bird that flew into my car’s window, a hunter’s gun shot, a deer antler? I live in the woods, nothing was taken, so Bob and I picked up thousands of pieces of shattered green glass. And I thought about the survivors of the Naval Yard shooting, the people who saw the carnage up close and personal.
Today I’ll have my window replaced, but I wonder how long it will take the survivors to put the pieces of their lives back together. And when our nation will stop electing puppets of the gun lobby. Or are we immune now to this, even after small children are massacred in their classrooms, have we become habituated to shock?
August and September are filled with birthdays in my family. The Bride and my sister Kay share back to back birthdays, I call us Virgo/Libra types (you can count me in later this month) – the Christmas party babies! Happy Birthday to them on this glorious weekend.
These two share more than a couple of dates on the calendar. Kay introduced the Bride to art in her New York City apartment. My sister studied at the Art Student’s League and she also helped to illustrate many medical books during her years working at Mt Sinai Hospital and producing graphic art for the Medical School. With sun pouring through her beautiful Upper East Side window overlooking a garden, the young Bride was given a pencil and a blank canvas along with the love and encouragement of her Aunt Kay.
Painting has been a common thread throughout both their lives. After a long high school day filled with too many AP classes, the Bride would settle into her art class and paint along with beautiful music. My home is filled with drawings from those days. And Kay’s renditions of our farmhouse in the Berkshires, and our beautiful Welsh Corgis will always decorate our walls.
This meditative time, setting up the instruments of art, the pencils or delicate brushes and turpentine, the smells, the easel outdoors, the time alone to ponder and really see – to see their way into a subject – this bit of creation helped them deal with the everyday stress of school and work. It helped them to slow down.
The Bride sent me an article this week about being busy. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=1&
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
The author, Tim Kreider, calls this addiction to busyness a kind of hedge against emptiness, an “existential reassurance.” We impose it on ourselves and it makes us feel important. After all, if we’re always so busy, how can we ever take time off for self-awareness. He posits that you don’t hear people holding down two jobs with four kids complaining about being too busy, because they’re just plain exhausted. Interesting stuff, this monkey brain!
Surprisingly an old friend simultaneously posted an article about being a distracted parent, about always saying, “Hurry up!” to her child. And I could see how this attraction to being busy can get its start. The child who likes to dawdle, who stops to talk with strangers, who wants to engage with her environment soon learns to make a goal and stick to a time schedule. And if she or he doesn’t, they may be labeled “special” in school…instead of “artist.”
The Love Bug likes to stop for ice cream with her parents. Slowing down is something children can either help us to do, or we can teach them how to be anxious. We’re the adult in this equation, it’s our choice.
MountainMornings 