Hilarious? Hmmmm, Nope

People are always saying this is hilarious, that is hilarious: it's beginning to really bother me.Some things are funny, sure, but hilarious suggests such an over-the-top reaction to a thing that might, only might, tickle your funny bone it puts me off.Plus, not to sound like a grouch here, but I don't think you get to say "Oh, listen to this, it's hilarious."I mean, the person himself has to decide what's funny, no? Otherwise it's just the hard sell. It's like what advertisers, or the media, do with sex vis-à-vis young people:They take it away from them, take away what is rightfully theirs to find out about, trick it up and try selling it back to them.It makes me feel a mite queasy, you know?

Fifty Shades of Who Cares

So why IS this book Fifty Shades of Grey such a best seller? They say that for Victorian men one major draw in visiting 'Ladies of the Night' was  to enjoy the feeling of not having to be in control for a while  - so wearying to run an Empire AND bully your wife over the dinner table! -  but I imagine the old Joy of Sex was pretty high on the list too.Still I don’t find the idea of reading one silly handcuff story after another all that compelling.I have nothing against handcuffs. I saw the film Bill Durham like everyone else; I remember how rookie Tim Robbins gets to pitching so much better after Susan Sarandon starts tying him by his wrists to the bedposts and reading him poetry - remember?But still: I’m pretty sure when God gave us sex he was thinking "Here’s a fun thing to do," not "Here’s a fun thing to watch, or read about - other people doing.Plus you don't get a new person with second-hand sex. and new people after all are what it's all for. ;-)

A Poem on Love (and Words)

Who can read this and fail to swoon at the beauty of the imagery?

  Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter, by Robin Robertson

 The slow-grained slide to embed the blade

of the key is a sheathing,

a gliding on graphite, pushing inside

to find the ribs of the lock.

Sunk home, the true key slots to its matrix;

geared, tight-fitting, they turn

together, shooting the spring lock,

throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics-

the clinch of words - the hidden couplings

in the cased machine. A chime of sound

on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning

and holds. The lines engage and marry now

like vows, their bells are keeping time;

the church doors close and open underground.

                                            

God Can't Be Shocked

Some people criticize John Updike, saying he objectified women, portraying them as mere sex objects and so on.I never saw it that way, even though I read Rabbit Run the summer of my 13^th year and felt my world split open upon reading the sex scenes. 'Grownups do this?' I asked myself stunned. This is what they're up to when they’re not buttering our toast or rotating the tires on the family car?'My big sister Nan had tried to clue me in on the particulars of sex; by the time she was ten she had sent away for a thousand pamphlets on the subject. And certainly her information was better than what the boy down the street said happens after you get married: He said they then take you into a secret room and tie you together by your underpants.What Updike described was much more specific. And once you got used to reading the actual truth, anything but shocking. No, he never objectified women, in my book; in my book he only loved and noticed them.He is the person who singlehandedly opened my eyes to writing. Three years he is gone now and it has taken me almost that long to read his final collection of short stories, slim as it is. I just didn’t want it to end, knowing there would be no others.Here's one thing he said that I love and agree with. He said his theory was that God already knows everything and can not be shocked.In the same essay he also said,

Only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibility in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books.

I love that last sentence: Out of soiled and restless life I have refined my books. And I understand exactly the part about the shelter his creative writing made for him, remembering a description earlier in this book of the place he loved best as a child: it was the spot on the side porch of his first home where he would upend and then hide under the wicker furniture to become the observer unobserved.It’s what I wanted to be since my own baby days, only my spot was under the dining room table. Now I lurk in my car or on the park bench, listening to the old men and yelping teens and the women together talking. It’s what I have been since the dawn of the Reagan years when I began writing my column. For all these years I have written every week for the papers and now, here on this blog, I write every day.Seeing and then telling what you have seen is for me what I think it was for him too: merely a way of saying thanks for it.

Give That Girl an Oscar

I’m really hoping Keira Knightly is named for her role in A Dangerous Method when Oscar nominations are announced today. In this latest David Cronenberg film she plays a raging and distracted mental patient, who, when introduced to a calm empathetic listener sitting in a chair behind her, recovers clarity of mind and goes on to graduate from medical school and become a psychotherapist herself. (OK it’s also true that this calm empathetic listener sleeps with her too, then puts her aside when it suits him, but she expresses her feelings on these events in one blindingly fast three-second gesture that made the audience I was part of gasp with surprise.)But this is Jung and his onetime mentor Freud we're dealing with here, in the first decade of the last century when people were just getting the idea that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Freud had just dropped his bombshell of a theory about the dark impulses involving sex and aggression that lurk just under the surface of our conscious thoughts – and as you can imagine, sex and aggression would rattle the teacups in any polite society back then, in those quiet years before the slaughter of World War I commenced.I’m wondering now if Freud’s ideas didn’t take hold more easily on account of that war, which killed an entire generation of young men and exposed how thin a veneer ‘civilized’ behavior really is.The losses from the "war to end all wars" were felt even over here in the States, however slow we were getting into it. It wasn’t just the speakeasies and the bathtub gin that made the Twenties roar, I don’t think. It was also the horror people felt after witnessing the carnage caused by trench warfare: A million casualties in the Battle of the Somme alone! They just wanted to forget it all. They roared too because Freud and his sometime protégé Jung had let this particular genie out of the bottle: no one in polite society had ever before spoken of our so-called baser impulses.In one of his plays 200 years before, Molière satirized the class of "genteel" people who refused to use the word for 'legs' – too coarse! Too vivid! They wouldn’t use the word 'teeth' either, calling them instead 'the furniture of the mouth.'But Freud and Jung? They kicked all that over. They kicked it into next week as the saying goes.The woman Keira Knightly plays was a real person named Sabina Spielrein, who suffered humiliation at the hands of her spanking-obsessed father, but then recovered just as she does in the film and contributed greatly to the understanding of our deepest impulses. (My heart squeezed shut when they rolled the credits to reveal that she and her two daughters were shot to death in a barn by SS officers. (They were Jews, as was Freud.))What I will remember is the image of her so sharply suffering at the beginning as Keira Knightly plays her. She writhes in the arms of the hospital orderlies; extends her already long lower jaw in a simian rictus of agitation. She looks like an animal being tortured. Poor young woman! Poor all women in those days when they called our anger “hysteria” and took away our humanity. Tough century, the 20th; thank God for every Suffragette and Feminist who worked to put things right.Anyway here's the trailer under one last picture of our girl:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjyP9DjUdVk]

Whose Body Is This?

When Our Bodies Ourselves first appeared in Boston as a stapled-together pamphlet in 1969 it was hard to find reliable information about birth control. Why? Because thanks to the Crimes against chastity law, the distribution of contraceptives by anyone other than a doctor to anyone other than a married person was illegal, even in the now-progressive state of Massachusetts.I don’t mean abortion; I mean birth control.This man, Bill Baird, was arrested at Boston University when after addressing an overflow audience of 2500 he gave a condom and a package of  contraceptive foam to an unmarried undergraduate woman. Arrested. Hauled off to jail and held there for months.This was in 1967.The law was still unchanged  in the summer of ‘69 when the women of the Boston Women's Health Collective were writing this pamphlet that would become a book. 250,000 copies of it sold in the first year, mostly thanks to word of mouth.I was about to enter my senior year in college in the summer of '69. The summer before that, I had fallen in love with a boy named David. We had told our families that we'd be marrying as soon as I graduated. I was 19-and-a-half. I didn’t know much, but I knew I needed a prescription for the Pill.But how would I get such a thing? Especially on the serene and cerebral  campus of  my women’s college? Lucky for me that college was Smith College, that drew from every state in the union,  and the roommate I'd had freshman year was from the sunny sane west. A citizen of the world from Aspen Colorado, she knew a lot more than I did.  “Call the Infirmary and tell then you have to see a doctor." she said. "Say ‘I’m thinking of becoming sexually active and I need protection.’”But could it BE that easy? Could I just say that to some stranger, just as if I had a right to ask such a thing?  It could and I did. I said what she told me to say and just like that I was protected until the time of my marriage and for half a dozen years afterward, until this David and I welcomed our first baby and thus began upon the joyful chapter of life that brought us three kids of our own and the opportunity to welcome and shelter a five more kids beyond in their teen years.  Our Bodies Ourselves, now in its 11^th printing, is not just about sexual health but about health of every kind. Here are  some of the women who worked on it, as they looked in those heady and complicated early years, this from the forepages of a companion work Ourselves and Our Children. I salute them. 

Sex and Men

I’m shootin’ the breeze with a coupla older guys I see in the course of my weekly rounds and don’t they start talkin’ about women:“So here’s the deal,” says one. “Women in their 20s and 30s will sleep with you on the fourth or fifth date.”“That’s true!” says the other, “but with women in their 40s and 50s it's a WHOLE  different thing.”“Right. Women in their 40s and 50s if they'll see you at all - bang! - it's right to bed on the very first date!”“Plus! They're very aggressive!" says the one. "They're always slidin' phone numbers across the bar to guys.”“I had a woman do that with me just last night!” says the other.Meanwhile here's me in my highly married state and what do I know? My last date took place when Three Dog Night was the hot new band.So I ask a question:“Why do you suppose that is?”“Why? Because the younger ones are still playin’ the game. And the older gals are DONE  with all that crap,” says the one.“They’re grownups” says the other. “If they see something they want, they go after it.”“Exactly,” says the first. And suddenly I feel like Margaret Mead, only not short with the weird hair of course - that's old Maggie at the top there -  but in the sense that she was an anthropologist. Were these guys reporting an actual phenomenon or was this just a kind of performance on their part, some sort of joke like God made in designing baboon bottoms? I do seem to remember hearing that the Samoans who Mead wrote about later said they made up half the stuff they told her just for laughs and maybe these guys were doing that too.Who knows?  I’m sure no expert - except I do know that however ‘willing’ these older gals may be, on that deep, deep level that not even speech can’t touch men are hard-wired to want to do one thing and that is  to pass on their DNA  - which leaves our 40- and 50- year-olds either singin' the blues or sighin' with relief you tell me.And speaking of singing can we ever tire of this? Ann Renfroe's take-off on Beyoncé's All the Single Ladies?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaruNs_7okY]

First We Tie You Up...

Here's what my friend Ann Aikens had to say in reference to yesterday's Mad Men Bad Men post: "OML even in the 80s, the weirdos that would take me out to lunch to give me 'advice', saying maybe they could 'do something' for me! One asked leading questions like: 'You have to be willing to take chances. Are you willing to take chances?' If I were less naive, I’d have replied, “Why, in fact, I’m willing to take a chance and HAVE SEX WITH YOU RIGHT NOW–but first can we call your wife? She has 20 years on me, maybe she has some insights, too, Mr. Businessman!”Ah good old Ann who always calls 'em as she sees 'em. Now, just for added fun, this short trailer to the great 1980 film "9 to 5." Women aren't 'just' secretaries anymore but the themes touched on here sure still have their appeal :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVKTZ4CEM90&feature=related]

Mad Men Bad Men

A woman who worked in New York in the Mad Men era saw my column last week and wrote to say how accurate the series really is. “I was there! Most of the men I worked with were married and commuted; most of the women were single, living in apartments in the city. Some of the men certainly were sleeping with their secretaries which was  especially noticeable when they went on business trips and took their secretaries along to ‘take notes’  or just took them off for long lunches. Many times the men had to stay overnight in the City because they had to ‘work late’ or ‘entertain a client.’  They all took long two-hour lunches where martinis were definitely consumed...”She went on to say how she herself steered clear of the carefully-baited traps but boy did this email bring back memories! I was 19 with a summer job in the city at the very final second of the Mad Men era.I remember a much older male relative taking me to lunch and ordering up those double-whiskey drinks for the both of us, even though I wasn't old enough to drink alcohol. But nobody asked for They never did in such circumstances. If you were with an older man you were his problem – his 'property'? - and what waiter (much less waitress) would dare question an "executive?"The next summer when I was 20, a creepy old guy asked me to attend some conference for pay as his ‘Girl Friday’. He had already taken me along on a business lunch with several other old guys and also to the office of a local college president though I did wonder what on earth I was doing at either place since the guy didn’t know Thing One about me except that I had shiny hair and a big smile. I guess he thought he’d look pretty good walking in to a place with a spring lamb like me at his side.Luckily I had met David the summer before who I would marry within the year. Though Dave was just 22 himself and hardly a man of the world, he saw right away what the guy’s real agenda was and clued me in so in the end I was spared.... But make no mistake you young ones: Those weren't the glamorous times with clinking glasses and tinkling female laughter. They were the bad times when women had no voice at all or voices they didn’t dare raise.You doubt me? Consider what Peggy endured in Season One and obviously suffers over still; just look at her face as she's lying next to the  fool she slept with last week. "I want to be your first," he had said by way of courting her.  Sorry but that sounds to me a lot like what the Conquistadors said to the indigenous people.

On This Soft Anvil

I was saying yesterday how organizations change when there get to be more women than men in them and at first I thought that’s why my fellow columnists behaved so well when Dr. Debra Herbenick came to speak at our annual conference. I can tell you that back in '95 when this membership visited an outfit that extracts and freezes bull semen, the tour-guide chastised two of our guys for laughing uncontrollably. But yesterday when Dr. Herbenick came to speak with us on her work with the Kinsey Institute not a soul laughed, even when she she showed explicit slides and held up stuffed toys resembling female body parts.Maybe it's because she has a manner as open and sunny as a farmhouse window. A dead ringer for the Charlotte character from Sex and the City, she seems so sweet and guileless only a cad or a moron would have laughed, and we had no such men among us this time.She told us she speaks often to college students who take her class to get information on what practices (besides the most obvious one) can result in pregnancy.  She quoted former Indiana President Herman Wells, himself a firm supporter of the place where she works. "We have large faith in the value of knowledge and little faith in the value of ignorance,” he once said.She had also let it be known earlier in the day that she would answer any anonymous sex-related questions we cared to pose and when the time came she did this. The questions were dead serious with the exception of the one that said, “Where DO babies come from anyway?”She said she used to ask that question of little children at an earlier stage of her career and one child had an answer that she still remembers. The child’s little sibling began by saying that your babysitter the baby and she got it from the doctor who gave it to your mommy - only wait, maybe it was the other way around. It was then that the slightly older child spoke up and clued Debra in on what really happens, a process involving these things called 'cells' and your mother’s stomach where the baby grows.“But then how does it get out of there?"  Debra asked."Well,” said the little girl, “it seems there's this little door ….”Indeed there is.So let us close now with words by penned by an English earl in the 1600's who said of this little door's close neighbor the mons veneris, “On this soft anvil was mankind all made" - to which I now say Amen! and also Thank you, God, for the dandy design (!)

You Gotta Hand It

As they say about the blind prostitute… You gotta hand it to her.And you gotta hand it to him too: nice campaign Scott Brown.

Guilty

Mea culpa: That’s part of the old Catholic  prayer called The Confiteor in which you ask for pardon for all the bad things you did this week. Anyone remember the old-school sacrament of Penance and all that sweating-it-out we once did in the Confessional? As a little child my poor mom once offered up the fact that she had torn the wallpaper as her big sin. “DON’T WASTE THE PRIEST’S TIME” came the icy voice from the behind the darkened screen, shaming the girl even more.I can tell you I never wasted the priest’s time and if this were a less family-oriented blog I’d tell you the terrible follow-up question a priest once asked me when I admitted to having impure thoughts. (That was the umbrella term you’d use for mortal sins like French kissing or Kissing For More Than Five Minutes which no word of a lie were actually capable of sending you to Hell and I can tell you they were about as 'mortal' as we got since there was no birth control back then. Plus we all wanted to get in to Heaven or at least that’s all I wanted: To get in to Heaven and to college, preferably with a  scholarship to each.)But here’s the really bad thing I did, I who am always semi-whining about the time I spend caring for Uncle Ed even though I love him. I get a little sore see because he sometimes tries to guilt people. For example my kid in Brooklyn asked him on Thanksgiving what he did for his birthday the week before. “I was all alone,” Uncle sadly intoned. “Nobody called. Nobody came.”  Whaaaat? Hadn’t I organized a visit by no fewer then seven people that day, plus didn't I send him something  AND call AND write an early-morning email before showing up with the all these family members who brought flowers and gifts and food and two sweet little children to delight him?  It really ticked me off, his saying this - until whoops! The realization came just the other day when the pharmacy kept not finding him in their records by his date of birth as I recited it. The sad truth? After 40 years knowing the man, after being his closest friend and the executor of his very will I still, after 42 years, get his birthday a little wrong. I showed up with that caravan of family members the Day AFTER his 89^th birthday, so he really did spend the day all alone! Mea Culpa is right!

I Wouldn't Trade

Just so you know, that sailing trip I took last week wasn’t some lazybones cruise where you’re always waddling to the midnight chocolate buffet. It was a lean mean expedition where the rules were all about having the smallest possible impact on our poor little planet.  Example One: right from the start you were told straight up how UNCOOL it would be to wander around your little stateroom brushing your teeth and looking for your underpants with the water in the sink even on 'trickle'. Example Two: you couldn’t flush your toilet paper ever, which is evidently the norm in many parts of Europe.  In fact sometimes all they have are ‘Turkish toilets,’ plain old holes in the ground over which you have to stand to relieve yourself, which can make you feel pret-ty peeved if you’re among the unlucky half of the human race NOT equipped with one of those dandy retractable gadgets the other half is so vain about.Here’s some comfort though: On a morning’s trek through the ragged terrain of one Greek isle, the expedition’s botanist pointed out the female of the cochineal bug, which (a) lives on the prickly pear cactus, (b) secretes white fuzzy stuff  and (c) when squashed, yields up the deep red-dye that was first used by the Aztecs but after the arrival of those pesky Conquistadors became All The Rage back in the Old World too.But it wasn’t until we were back  on the ship eating lunch with this same botanist that I learned the best part: the male of this species lives so very briefly - only long enough to get the female pregnant - that God didn’t even give him a mouth. So BOTTOMS UP and pass the popcorn, girls! Turns out there are compensation after all!

(some critters really don't have mouths!)

Also: to see what these little kids at the top are saying click here