Tweaks

Work was good last night. I had a few moments to watch part of a book reading on c-span; an author (reportedly a non-believer) was discussing her book Losing Our Religion. She was interestingly charismatic & an excellent speaker—I really wished I could appreciate what she was saying but, alas, as anytime someone tries to speak in a manner that lends merit to organized religion, the logic fell short of anything buyable.

Today:

Maddow (repeats) to watch. I want to educate myself more on the (political aspects of the) economy & financial crisis as well as Afghanistan.

There’s a never-ending stream of dishes to wash, especially after making dinner (I’m on a brussel sprouts kick -yum!)

Some yoga to do at the gym (Mondays always kick my a— with an hour of Active Yoga prior to Relaxation Yoga) but I love it.

I’d like to celebrate & support Wisconsin going smoke-free by going out to shoot pool tonight…if I can get & keep my anxiety under control…

“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.” ~BP CEO Tony Hayward, commenting on his company’s tragic & unrivaled oil spill.

He’d like his life back. Sure, he would. Since the spill, he has become seen as one of the most contemptible figures of this decade. He’s already had to pay out billions and billions of dollars, has been slammed with lawsuit after lawsuit, appeared at hearings on Capital Hill, and will continue to undergo intense scrutiny & criticism about the practices that have led his company to their top 5 financial ranking among oil companies. But, really, he’d like his life back?

What about the eleven individuals who lost their lives on the rig; the families who now experience the grief from those losses; the citizens of the communities that have been and continue to be grossly affected by the spill in terms of their livelihood and air quality; the marshes, wetlands, islands, and parts of the gulf that are beyond recovery; the pelicans, sea turtles, whales, dolphins, etc that are suffering, dying, and losing their habitat. Yet, Hayward would “like [his] life back”.

Is his comment supposed to inspire our sympathy? Or spark in us a belief that he actually cares about the irrevocable and long-term damages? (…You’re right, Mr. Hayward. You must be exhausted by this crisis, so… taxed by all of the damage this is doing to your company and your reputation. If only there had been something you could have done to prevent yourself from being so …victimized by this damn oil spill…)

You’d think that, given his propensity toward concern for the quality of his own life, he would have seen it in his best interest to adhere stringently to the few government regulations that exist. You’d think that he would have seen value in investing in technology to drill safely in order to safeguard himself against the trials and tribulations he now faces. You would think that, in the face of this disaster, he would own up to his feckless greed. You would think that he’d be humbled, just a little bit.

He didn’t and isn’t, though—and none of the top grossing oil companies have or are, either. They -he- choose to place money at the top of their priority queue. Above human beings. Above wildlife. Above ecosystems.

Tony Hayward, as CEO of BP, made his oily bed. Now it’s time for him to lie in it (lie as in lay, not lie as in continue to evade the truth). And that goes for the rest of the CEOs and the politicians who are willing to risk precious land, water, and life for profit. Let’s hope they see him as an example not to follow any longer.

For their own sake, of course.

Yeah, and nazis will be nazis. We don’t let them get away with their mistreatment of Jews. And bigots will be bigots. We don’t let them get away with their mistreatment of minorities. Why should it be any f*cking different for the way men mistreat women?

My favorite section of the Herald Times Reporter is the Editorials Page. Generally, I quickly scan it to see if they’ve published a new editorial by Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize winning writer with the Miami Herald. When they don’t, I scan the headlines but they generally seem to be written by old, white, republican dudes. -Thank you, no.

Today, however, was a piece entitled, “Where feminists get it right,” written by Jonah Golberg:

     In Cameroon, some mothers “iron” their daughters’ breasts to delay or prevent them from having sex. The procedure often involves grinding a very hot rock into the chest of the girl, but sometimes kerosene or hot plantain peels will do the trick. The practice, which permanently disfigures the girls, starts with adolescence because that’s when girls start becoming attractive to boys.

     And heaven forbid that anyone expect anything like self-restraint from the boys.

     I’d never heard of the practice until I read about it in the Washington Post. But the Washington Post. But the story is all too familiar. Around the world, women — girls — having to pay the price for the barbarity of boys.

     In Saudi Arabia, and across the Middle Ease, men can’t handle seeing a little leg — or even an ankle — so rather than put a blindfold on the men, they throw a tarp over the women. Indeed, throughout vast swaths of the Muslim world, men can’t compute dealing with women as equals, so they lock up the women.

     The Taliban in Afghanistan is the most extreme example of the trend. Its members claim they want to keep the “chasteness and dignity” of women “sacrosanct,” but it seems like what they really want is to protect themselves from the apparently hard work of not being a savage. So under the Taliban, women couldn’t ride bicycles. They couldn’t wear high hells because the sound of women’s footsteps might excite men. Forget appearing on radio, TV or at public gatherings. Women couldn’t step out onto their balconies.

     The Taliban has hardly given up on its agenda since being forced from power. In 2008, 10 Taliban militants were arrested for throwing acid in the faces of 15 girls going to school in Kandahar.

     The worst cases of female-phobia appear to by in the Muslim world, but the problem is hardly unique to Islam. Across Southeast Asia and throughout Africa, in Christian, animist and Muslim countries alike, women are asked to pay for male inadequacies.

     In Cameroon — not a majority Muslim country, by the way — an ob-gyn told Washington Post contributor Jamie Rich: “It’s very rare to see a 13-year old girl who is still a virgin.” And that’s why the mothers mutilate their daughters — because boys can’t be expected to keep it in their pants.

     “Feminism” is a loaded word in the United States because it carries to many controversial connotations. Professional feminists often insist that they have a monopoly on the word and its meaning, which forces lots of people to reject the label. Conservatives are the most obvious example of that, but many young people, including very “liberated” young women, avoid the term because they think it means rejecting any traditional understanding of motherhood, courtship, etc.

     But if you can lay aside all of those worthwhile arguments about Western society for a minute, the simple fact is that “the feminists” are absolutely right when it comes to the treatment of women in much of the developing world. If women were seen as a religious or racial minority, this would be glaringly obvious. Imagine if a white country refused to let blacks learn to read, never mind go to school or even go outside. I don’t know a social conservative — and I know many — who doesn’t agree with radical feminists when it comes to recognizing the barbarity of female circumcision, wife-burning, breast ironing and the rest.

     Forgetting the question of decency and morality for a moment, there’s the matter of national interests. Female equality seems to be a pretty reliable treatment for many of the world’s worst pathologies. Population growth in the Third World tends to go down as female literacy goes up. Indeed, female empowerment might be the single best weapon in the “root causes” arsenal in the war on terror.

     The reason strikes me as fairly simple. Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.

I agree that women’s expectations of and demands on men (can) have a powerful effect on men (and thus the status of women). All the same, that’s a heavy burden for us to carry when we already bear so much. Shouldn’t men just get their acts together & assume responsibility for their own decency (or lackthereof, as the case may be)? 

To be quite frank, I don’t know that I want to be held responsible for male decency. In fact, some days I wish I had a penis and the power such a privileged existence ensures. Some days, I wish I could destroy everything and one around me and get away with it. It would be better than drowning myself in cooking sherry, developing an eating disorder, or mutilating my or my daughter’s body.

Yes, some days I’d rather blow shit up than be a nurturing sweetheart or the patriarch’s oppressive leading lady. But, that’s why feminism saved my life: it gave me options.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

World War Z by Max Brooks

Brida by Paulo Coelho

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Chasing Harry Winston by Lauren Weisberger

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson

Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson

Signs of Life in the USA by Sonia Maasick & Jack Solomon

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

How to Watch TV News by Neil Postman

Whipping Girl by Julia Serano

I absolutely love the irony in how

• expectations are placed on women (i.e. to have a certain body type, wear certain clothes, behave in certain ways) and yet when they do people are A) confused as to why they do so or B) ridicule and belittle them OR when women don’t meet the aforementioned expectations they are A) ridiculed or B) ignored altogether

True story:

Tonight some guy asked to ask me a “female” question. After groaning on the inside, I said, “Shoot.” His question: “Why do girls always think that they’re fat, even when they’re skinny?”

“Because society tells us we are.” And even if we are thin, there is an intense, deeply ingrained social fear of not being thin anymore.. of gaining weight -because these things lead to a fear of not being desired when everything about our mainstream media tells us that, as women, our value coincides with our sexual desirability (desirability which includes factors in addition to weight). And what woman has not had her sexual desirability judged by such superficial social constraints?

About an hour later this same guy was laughingly telling a story about a girl who was given a less than desirable nickname based on her larger size. “This is exactly why girls worry about their weight,” I pointed out the asinine nature of his earlier question. “Well hey, I think she’s really cool,” he rationalized (still laughing), “I just don’t like bigger girls.”

Funny… there was a period of time in US history that heavier girls were seen as healthy & desirable. So maybe we should start asking ourselves why our desires have changed. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that women had less power decades ago, it was alright & acceptable to have a more …commanding presence. Maybe the fact that women have more power now has something to do with their desirability being tangled up in frailty. After all, we’re certainly less threatening when we’re 100 pounds and teetering in high heels.