Not Santa's Little Princess

If my mother wrote this article on Christmas Eve, I'd have low hopes for getting what I want for Christmas. Peggy Ornstein wrote this fantastically feminist piece for the New York Times on Christmas Eve. And by fantastically, I mean fantasy. It's such shrill scaremongering that it's quite hilarious. Apparently Disney's fastest growing franchise is "Princess", a generic pink royal character that every girl wants to be. Or at least, play dress up to look like one. And Peggy's outraged."More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen? On the other hand, maybe I’m still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can “have it all.” Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what’s wrong with that? "
I particularly like the my-3-year-old-as-intentional-princess/patriachary-annoyance theme. Well, Peggy's very quick to sweep all the perceived ills of modern girls to the feet of the Princess and lay the blame right at her twinkle toes -There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business.
Of course, there are no studies declaring princess=bad. Common sense (if we’re allowed to use such a commodity when discussing princesses), would dictate that the very women who have realised the feminist dream of independence played with dolls. And didn’t need feminist reconditioning to forget the experience. Foisting feminist interpretations every game played by preschoolers and the colours of their dress up is madness – can you imagine a pink Batman to remove the violent, masculine tones of the current black?

Peggy shares her great fear, a rather rare fear among parents, I would imagine - that by denying the princess, you'll run the risk of messing up their "gender constancy"  - What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?.....By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.
Of course, no article about children's toys would be complete without celebrating the toy-serial-killer that lurks in every princess -  There is spice along with that sugar after all, though why this was news is beyond me: anyone who ever played with the doll knows there’s nothing more satisfying than hacking off all her hair and holding her underwater in the bathtub.

Then there's a rather long section about superhero princesses who have "grit and grace" and princess that resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.

Peggy, selflessly on our behalf, braves the world of children's toys - from the innocent pink of princess to the hot, sexy pink of the porn star slut waiting to burst forth your average 8 year old.  She faces the dilemma – early sexualistion of children or the early patriarchal pink brainwashing? I would choose the innocent pink, but then again, unlike the children featured in the article, I didn’t get to go on trips to toystores or demand every toy I saw on TV. My mother, in her wisdom, exerted full control over what toys got brought into our house. Such a discipline almost seems too simple a solution to the quandary Peggy’s warring feminist notions poses.

But Peggy's story has a happy ending - no doubt, through Peggy's careful questioning and constant feminist scrutiny, her daughter wants to be a fireman. Is this the moral of this (long) story? If you're a good enough feminist mother, ever on the watch out the devious anti-feminist Disney consumerist moves, you can let your little princess wear pink and she'll turn out alright? Alright is defined by Peggy as " I still hope she’ll find her Prince Charming and have babies, just as I have. I don’t want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, one who loves and respects her and also does the dishes and half the child care."

Is Peggy making the point that the alternative is the truly frightening vista? That the pink princess marks the decline of womanhood as we know it - the next generation of women will be pink wearing, alternately obese and anorexic, non-softball playing, depressed, pregnant “little women at home"? Men will take over the world again and professional feminists like Peggy will be able pinpoint Matteo and Disney as the great architects in the mass exodus of the most well-educated and long-living female generation back to their cage at the kitchen sink? Rest assured though, we'll have always have women like Peggy, author of the forthcoming book "Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother", to point out the traps and the obvious (non-research based) "atomic bombs" placed in the princess's path to becoming a fireman.

Go On, Shows Us Your Boobies

Despite the impression the title of this post might give, I have not turned into some mad breast fetishist – I’m referring to the 5th annual blogger Boobiethon – an online fundraising initiative for breast cancer.

Apparently “"If they're worth looking at, they're worth saving!" and the way this bare breasted gang of bloggers are going about raising money it is to post pictures of breasts – covered ones for free and naked ones in a paid members section.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually agreed with a feministing.com post (with not being a feminist and all that) but I found myself in the unusual situation of nodding along to this post- I don't like the implication that certain parts of women's bodies are "worth saving" because they're sexy. Boobiethon is sending a message that breast cancer should be stopped because it claims beautiful breasts as its victims-- not because it's a horrible disease that's killing women. I'd almost prefer a website that featured women naked from the belly button up, and showed their faces. Because at least then you can see that this disease affects real women, not just disembodied breasts.  

I disagree with this campaign for number of reasons – the feministing reason above would be one.
Others would be that the objectification of breasts can’t be a good thing simply because it’s for a good cause.
Breast cancer is not about breasts, sexy or otherwise, it’s about women (and the small number of men) who get cancer. And cancer affects your body, your physiology, your person in a holistic way – it spreads, it attacks, it can kill all of you.
I’m nearly anti-breast cancer campaigns because they’ve become so woman/breast focused. I’m all for breast awareness, in the same way I’m all for young men knowing that lumps in their testicles should be checked out and middle-aged men with dribbling and hesitancy should be worried about their prostate – or smokers with heavy coughs, their lungs. Cancer awareness is about knowing the symptoms of early cancer that we can do something about – not just about standing up for breasts.

There are many other cancers that people get and their pictures aren’t as sexy – I doubt all but the most intense gastroenterologist could get excited at a picture of healthy pink colonic mucosa with normal glandular architecture – unfortunately live video footage of colonoscopies aren’t going to make every person who spends a little too long straining on the loo wear a little brown ribbon and walk for rectal cancer. Nor would pictures of healthy cervices make women run out for Pap smears.

Breast cancer is not a gender issue, it’s not a political issue. It’s a health issue. The funding of cancer research is something public and private interests are occupied with – ordinary people’s involvement with cancer research allows relatives and “survivors”/patients to contribute something. Saving women should become before saving boobies and fighting cancer as a disease entity should come first – which should translate in to things like urgently trying to reduce the number of women smoking as lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer, even though breast cancer is more common.

Sorry to disappoint, but my boobies are remaining covered and offline.

Common Sense about Rape

Fatmammycat.com a blog I read a lot and should link to more has a very interesting piece on date rape , slutty behaviour and that red-light trigger word "deserve".

Drinking until they pass out, acting with sexual aggression, celebrity pole notching, kiss and tells, dressing like porn stars and taking more and more risks.
It is an unpopular thing for a woman to say-I know I always get slated by my female friends whenever I say it- and sister of my friend gets particularly angry about it, but while yes, every woman has the right to be safe and not assualted or raped, those rights must go hand in hand with good sense.
If you are a young woman, staggering down a dark street, blind drunk, with hardly any clothes on, in the middle of the night, it does not mean you 'deserve'(I am really starting to hate that word) to get raped, far from it. But if you do get raped following the above scenario, you do need to ask yourself, did I practice good judgment? I don't deserve this, but was there anything I could have done to minimise the danger I put myself in.
At the end of the day rapists doesn't give a fiddler's fuck about rights, girl power, deserve, Sun campaigns, bloggers or consent. What the rapist is looking for is vulnerability. And that is something where we women can hold the upper hand.

Camille Paglia's opinions on date rape have had a similar ring of common sense about them -
"...feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.
"In dramatizing the pervasiveness of rape, radical feminists have told young women that before they have sex with a man, they must give consent as explicit as a legal contract's. In this way, young women have been convinced that they have been the victims of rape."

(happily culled from Wendy Elroy's site - tried finding a different quote from Sex, Art and American Culture but my paperback version doesn't have a search function)

Virginity or Death or Same Old Feminist Delusions

Ana Marie Cox of wonkette fame reveiews Katha Pollit's new book, "Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time" in today's The New York Times.
She ends with -
If self-described feminists choose to wear 'excruciatingly high heels' and submit to Botox, Pollitt sees a charade: 'Women have learned to describe everything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because personal choice is what feminism is all about.'
This may be the book's most cogent statement, though a headline in The Onion put it better: 'Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.' But there's a world of difference between choosing to wear heels that require foot-soaking and choosing to cut your toe to fit your shoe. When women dress up damaging choices as empowerment, it weakens feminist argument. But when feminists start lecturing about wrong choices, it lessens their numbers. I wish I had an easy answer about how to navigate between stridency and submission. Then again, I wish Katha Pollitt did too.

The NYT gives access to the first chapter as well. Pollitt laments the lack of "grassroots" among women who have had abortions - apparently they are unwilling to campaign. Of course that could be that they regret their decision, something Pollitt would never dare factor in, or maybe they just have not fully processed their feelings about it.
She describes the serious business of feminism as daycare, abortion, equal pay as being interlinked with sexual self expression (and darlings, of course we express that through the Vagina Monologues) - How can you see yourself as an active subject, the heroine of your own life, if you think you're an inferior being housed in a shameful, smelly body that might give pleasure to others but not to you?
In honour of EWI's sensibilities, I won't discuss my views on vaginas again, but I find this aging feminist obsession with them interesting. To the casual observer of young women, shame about their bodies is not so much tied up with sexuality as the self image, control and emotional issues of anorexia. Porn has even become mainstream, fun and cool.
Perhaps feminists should worry about their ideaologies and hobby-horses and realise that they will never again regain the conformist "revolution" of the 70s - women will make bad choices and feminists, like the patriarchs of old, simply cannot dictate to a population created by sex, which choices they deem acceptable. Realistically, wearing stilettos is not exactly the worst choice a woman could make.
And to be honest, there are times when I would rather a Victorian "man of the house" who occupied himself with the mundane realities of making money, allowing his wife to devote herself to the exalted domestic sphere to a radical feminist interested in making all women market commodities, trading fertility for abortion, child-rearing for day care and refusing to accept that equal pay is already here.

Sex, Lies and Feminism

Suzy at Maman Poulet asks us to think about the increase of domestic violence associated with the World Cup. Given the increase in alcohol consumption, an increase in all violence is probably to be expected.
But as the feminist story goes, men ravaged by the evil testosterone lose the run of themselves while watching rarefied soccer players kick a ball round a field. This then leads to the normally restrained male acting out his true nature and beating any woman unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity, usually his wife.
Soccer is not the only sport that unleashes such violent demons in our brothers, fathers and husbands – American football, the Super Bowl Sunday in particular, was also attributed with such an alarming rise in domestic violence.
While such phenomena seem intuitive to believers of such balanced works as Dworkin’s Intercourse, the rest of us remained unconvinced, especially in light of the complete absence of evidence to back up such claims.
The shameless padding of statistics and gross lies of the feminist establishment with regard to sports and domestic violence was reported by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book “Who Stole Feminism?” It is very sad that the feminists involved, though admitting their lack of data, felt justified in their deliberate inaccuracy.
I don’t however – domestic violence is too serious to be lied about. It doesn’t do anyone any favours – those who peddle the inflated claims are discredited and we all get the impression that inside every ordinary man lurks an unrepentant wife batterer.
The Women’s Aid website just mentions “evidence” and “research” and “findings from America” without any actual references, as do many of the local British police sites and news articles. I’m presuming they’re acting on anecdotal evidence from their localities, though over the years the US has proved that even such anecdotal evidence is hard come by.
The American group “The National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women” has an information pack on domestic violence and sports, which emphasises no substantive link between sporting events and domestic violence and exhorts those working in the area when contacted by media to stress the everyday prevalence of domestic violence.
A quick pubmed search (on dial-up so this is taking aaaages) on domestic violence and sports reveals only 1 article – the famous 1992 article that guesses “that viewing the successful use of violet acts may give the identifying fan a sense of license to dominate his surroundings” . This is the article that has given rise to the hyperbole and has since been discredited. Even wider research into sporting events and general accident and emergency admissions has shown no increase.
I posted a few days ago about the worrying actual trends in female violence – this is just as serious an issue and one which shouldn’t need a sporting event and some innuendo to popularise it.
When I first saw Suzy’s title “Sex, Violence and the World Cup”, I presumed she was talking about another sex, violence and soccer story – that of the increase in human trafficking to assuage the demand for prostitution in Germany for the World Cup. If you are concerned about you might want to sign this petition from the Coalition of Trafficking Against Women.

They Only Hit Until You Cry

A new study at Glasgow University found that 60% of female students interviewed approved of husbands hitting their wives. 35% said they have assaulted their partner, 8% injuring them. 41% of english women in the study have assaulted their partner, with 5% injuring them.
The worldwide study found that out of 6,500 female university students interviewed, 4,800 female students approved of assaulting their partner and 2,000 admitted to pushing, shoving, slapping, throwing objects and twisting their partner's arms or hair.
One of the authors of the study said - The bottom line is that we need make the same 'big deal' about violence by women as we do about men who behave violently.

Are Women Human?

Catherine McKinnon is probably the only woman left in the world who thinks that's a valid question. Well at least she should be in the western world.
Stuart Jeffries interviews her in today's Guardian about "Are Women Human?" her new book that attempts to answer the most redundant question of 2006.
Apparently she thinks we're not.
If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre)?

One of her many many many many gripes with the world is that, well, Sex with a dead body is necrophilia but it isn't regarded as rape.

I know this is just one part of her philosopy, but how can anyone take her seriously?

In defense of the inner housewife

Interview with Caitlin Flanagan in The Boston Globe about her new book "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife".
I feel the earliest kind of feminism demanded rights for all women. But I associate feminism now with women who are like me: white, educated, middle to upper-middle class, and who feel they are still getting the shaft. But, for heaven's sake, if anything, we have the privileges now; we are now the men of the '50s.

Q: You write that many contemporary feminists are hypocrites. Do you include yourself?
A: No. In the first place I'm not a feminist, so my hypocrisy is along other lines. I'm very grateful to all the women who fought for these rights before me, and I'm very disgusted by women who say ''But now I can't be a good mom and be partner in a law firm." That's just tough. Another thing about feminists: They're all unhappy

She's not unafraid to annoy people and this is not always a good thing. But I like her writing. Her book is added to the "read when exams are over" pile.

Sarah Carey linked to a very critical article about Flanagan in Elle a while back.

I think her voice is important in discussions about feminism. I also think pointing to her employment of personal organisers (which appears to be a job similar to a housekeeper) is irrelevant and doesn't stand as sufficient criticsm of her position on modern feminism (which for most part I agree with).

Update - nor do I think dismissing the book based on for congratulating herself on being the type of woman whose husband treats her well while she has cancer. Bad things do happen to good people, as well as to bad people, to feminists and anti-feminists, to women who forgo careers for their families as well as women who just pretend to. Flanagan's book is a sad and scary fable about fear of abandonment, and its supposed happy ending really isn't one. Another review from Salon.

Just because it's blue hat, doesn't mean that it's a boy's hat!

Come on people get with the PC, blue is a gender neutral colour programme!
I came across this exchange of emails from parents in the apparently upmarket Park Slope in New York via the Corner.
Entitled the The Park Slope Hat Spat by the Gawker, it's worth a read if you want to be frightened by decontructing, sociological mumbo-jumbo spouting, sexism spotters. All over a mother who picked up an "adorable" blue hat and thought the owner would like it back and titled her email "boy's hat".

First Arab Catholic woman to be member of Israeli parliament

An interesting character. Nadia Hilou is a member of the Labor party and is a woman's rights and free education activist.
From Catholic Online.
"First woman to do X" stories normally don't interest me, but her story does.

The Joys of the Great Big Loving Sisterhood

From The Brussels Journal -
Sharon Dijksma, a leading parliamentarian of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) wants to penalise educated stay-at-home women. “A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

How delightfully tolerant she is.
She's not the only one with this viewpoint - Mary Robinson has expressed a milder version before.

As a young educated woman who plans on staying at home to raise her children, I'm basking in the love of our feminist foremothers.

I've never read Playboy

even for the articles, so this New Yorker review of "The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds" is quite educational.
I especially like these paragraphs -
Today or, actually, by the eighties - one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt's nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness - a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres's, Degas's) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl. Kenneth Clark, in his classic book "The Nude" (1956), repeatedly compares a period's nudes to its architecture. The Playmates of the past few decades look to me like the "cereal box" buildings that went up on Sixth Avenue in the sixties, those cold, shiny structures, with no niches, no insets�no doors, it seemed. Likewise, the current Playmates seem to have no point of entry. And wasn't entry the idea?
Perhaps, despite the continuing girl-next-door protestations, the very remoteness of these women is their attraction. Clark, in his book, speaks of the "smoothed-out form and waxen surface" of the academic nudes of the nineteenth century. Hefner's latter-day nudes have the same look: the skin like polished armor (and it is polished - a side photo of Miss June 1981 shows her getting her hip sprayed with Formula 409); the golden light; the velvet thickness of the paper. This is not so much sex, or a woman, as something more like a well-buffed Maserati.

Is this evidence that the feminist project has succeeded? Or that feminism has truly been thwarted and has failed, now that feminine sexuality is protrayed as a glossy silicone monotony?

Should we be disgusted that Playboy is the best selling magazine in the US? Should I still be disgusted that a friend of mine had a Playboy in her bag at my birthday party a few years ago and took it out and several other girls joined her in giggling at the naked women and saying they were "hot"? Before, I, in my prudishness, asked her to put it away.
I am reminded of one of the women Ariel Levy interviewed in her book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" - she described how she loved porn and strip clubs becuase of the bored look on the women's faces as they performed.
I've never read Playboy - but I would much rather the innocent sensuality of the 1950s to the plastic and dehumanised pictures that represent "liberated" modern day female sexuality. There's nothing liberating about becoming half silicone to appear sexually aggressive and easy, cheapening sexuality to transactions of power and economics - is this the feminist dream of androgynous sexuality?
The intensely personal has become the public and the intimate has become the inanimate. I just don't think that's "hot" or "sexy".

Hands Off Our Ovaries and International Woman's Day

I had a crazy day yesterday and was saving this site to post on International Woman's Day - a day I don't celebrate. But anyway, this site was launched yesterday and is an interesting contrast to other events organised.

Hands Off Our Ovaries has a simple manifesto - because losing even one woman's life is too high a price to pay.

More details -
Biotechnological research and development affects women more directly than men. In the case of human embryonic cloning, women’s health and safety have already been affected—adversely. Sadly, there have been too many instances of coercion and deception, and violations of informed consent. Left uncontrolled, research demands will place undue burdens on young, poor women. We deserve a biotechnology that is not degrading and destructive to women's health. The ends do not justify these sorts of means.

Chocolate, Sex, Valentines and Popes

My ultimate consumerist St Valentine’s Day fantasy would be a dark chocolate Matthew McConaghey with his accent somehow being expressed in the confection (warm, melting caramel perhaps?). Or Matthew McConaughey feeding me chocolate.
This St Valentines Day I’ve a date with my surgery textbook (the chapter on stomas actually – riveting, page turning stuff) but before I do that, I’m finishing Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI’s 1st encyclical.
And the first fantasy pales into comparison with what Il Papa is saying.
You might ask, why on earth is she reading this stuff? Has she no life?
I have a thing for encyclicals about love. John Paul II started off his philosophy-ing with Love and Responsibility, a book I recommend to anyone who wants to know what the Catholic Church thinks about sex. (And please differentiate it from the Jansenist heresies that have held force here in Ireland for way to long – sex is not dirty, bad, guilty etc) I started reading it because I was quizzing my mother about it after I read Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn and found the mission speeches on sex rather perverted and sterile. My mother, in her maternal wisdom told me that the Catholic Church believes that the joy of orgasm is akin to joy of everlasting love and the communion of saints. Needless to say, given the choice, I preferred reading about the Church’s position on orgasm than listening to my mother talk about it.
I learnt that this is not only true, but JPII, as Karol Wojtyla in Love and Responsilibity, says that husband should make whatever sacrifice necessary for his wife to orgasm. At which point, I was thinking, wow, this is rather far away from Kavanagh’s Monaghan Redemptorist mission.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about romance, love, sex and how we view and relate these things. While it hasn’t taken on here yet, in the US, St Valentine’s Day, a day of soppy poems, red roses and chocolate is being transformed by some into V-Day, a day about vaginas. I’m as fond of my vagina as the next woman, but I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t find discussion of it, either scientific or dramatic (Vagina Monologues) that romantic. I’d much rather schmaltzy red rubbish than reclaiming my vagina’s authentic voice.
Then, this week is SHAG week in Trinity – I’m all for everyone being educated about sex – but leaflets about premature ejaculation just aren’t my cup of tea. (nor do I think decorating the stall with pink hearts makes it romantic either)
I’m not saying anything particular about vaginas or sexual health, but I feel that there is a loss of romance, a loss of mystery, a loss of wonder at human sexuality. And this is lamentable. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice the awe in our desire to be responsible and educated about sexuality.
Anyway, back to B16 (Benedict), Deus Caritas Est is much more readable and accessible than JP2, and JP2 was quite accessible.
He’s pretty straightforward –
Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness…………
Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.
I guess I’m pretty unusual (certainly among my circle of friends) that I accept the above passage and reject the casual sex that is an integral part of our culture. I don’t think it’s just sex –just pleasure, just reproduction, just fun – but something more.
I feel pretty vulnerable even blogging anonymously about this – it’s something I’m kinda reticent about discussing. I don’t like the funny looks or the patronising comments that “you’ll find someone”. It’s not from lack of opportunity (wounded pride screaming out) but rather a conscious decision that I don’t have sex.
There are a lot of things that are taken for granted in terms of healthy sexuality – one is that you must have sex. The 40 year old virgin was a trip in the hilariously uncharted waters of the ultimate middle aged saddo. I guess my life could be viewed as being similarly strange. I don’t even snog randomers on a Friday or Saturday night (or any other night).
Maybe I’ve been reading too many Georgette Heyer novels recently, but I don’t get the romance of scoring. Of “being with someone”.  Of waiting for text messages from someone you’ve shared body fluids with. I don’t believe that sex with someone you barely know is the best way to start any kind of relationship.
I don’t think I’m a prude. I don’t have a problem with everyone else in the world “getting some” (even though I hate that phrase) – I don’t think young teenagers are mature enough to make fully informed and free decisions about their sexuality and should not be encouraged to have sex.
Yes, the sexual revolution brought us freedom. I’m using mine to not have sex.
I had an unusual experience a few years ago during SHAG week in college. I handed back the brown paper bag containing condoms, information and plastic gloves to the girl handing them out. She ran up to me, telling me how important it was to have safe sex. I told her I wasn’t having unsafe sex, I wasn’t having any sex. She laughed and then tried to give me back the bag, saying you never know. I told her I did know and that I would certainly not be having any consensual sex anytime soon. (Even if Matthew McConaughey came along). She then told me that being repressed is not healthy.
No, it’s not. Neither is sleeping with anything that breathes.
But there’s nothing repressed about wanting something more than just sex. There’s nothing passive about waiting for it. There’s nothing asexual about not having any. There’s nothing immature about a little self restraint.  There’s nothing prudish about believing that sexuality is God’s greatest gift to creation, as is its product – a new love, a new person. There’s nothing strange or delusional in expecting that a grand passion will someday come my way and believing that my sexuality is something sacred to me, irreducible to a fleeting encounter, will be worth it.
And there’s nothing quite as romantic as reading a white haired celibate priest on love on St Valentine’s Day!
It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.          

Caitlin Flanagan on American Girls' Knees (Teenage Oral Sex)

Caitlin Flanagan reviews Rainbow Party
by Paul Ruditis, a young adult book that takes place on a single day, in which a tough little sophomore named Gin issues invitations to a party at which she and five of her friends will perform oral sex on the lucky guests, a group of popular boys. The girls will each wear a different color of lipstick, so that when a boy has completed the circuit, his penis will bear the colors of the rainbow. The party is to take place after school, to last about an hour and a half -- including time for chitchat -- and to conclude before Gin's father returns home from work.

In her review, the consistently thoughful writer for Atlantic Monthly, asks lots of pertinent questions like
How, exactly, in the course of thirty years, did we get from Katherine to Gin? How did we go from a middle-class teenage girl (fictional but broadly accurate) who will have sex only if it's with her boyfriend, and only if her pleasure is equal to his, to a middle-class teenage girl (a gross media caricature reflective of an admittedly disturbing trend) who wants to kneel down and service a series of boys? Katherine and her mother (who still enjoys a pleasurable sex life with her husband) represent two points on a continuum. In the mother's generation sex was contained by marriage; in the daughter's it was contained by love and relationships. The next point on this progression ought to be a girl who feels that nothing save her own desire should control her choice of sexual partners. Instead we see a group of young girls who have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether and have made of their sexuality something that fulfills all sorts of goals, but not the one paramount to Katherine and her mother: that it be sexually gratifying to themselves.

She also discusses the American's media obsession with teenage oral sex (which is girl on boy - where are the feminsts of the Story of O now?) as
It's a no-miss formula: descriptions of young girls performing oral sex that are so luridly specific as to seem pedophilic in the adults' retelling, coupled with stern warnings to parents that their daughters are in harm's way. All of which misses a less alarming but more poignant fact. What's most worrisome about this age of blasé blowjobs isn't what the girls might catch (one can contract an STD through oral sex alone; however, the risk is lower than for most other forms of sexual transmission), it's what the girls are almost certainly losing: a healthy emotional connection to their own sexuality and their own desire. In this context all the unflinching medico-sexual naughty talk is but a cowardly evasion of a more insidious problem -- one resistant to penicillin.

She then goes on
Blowjob nation has also been blamed on "abstinence only" sex-education programs. In this line of thinking the evil Republicans have made such a fetish of the intact hymen that teenagers -- parsing the term "sexual abstinence" with Jesuitical precision -- have decided to substitute oral sex for intercourse, thereby preserving their technical virginity. I'm no fan of these programs. In light of advances in birth control and the economic advisability of delaying marriage until after the college years, sexual purity seems a goal best advanced by those religions that advocate it, not by our public schools. But even if "abstinence" is at stake, why would girls voluntarily turn to giving blowjobs? Whatever happened to the hand job? Whither the dry hump? Why do girls prefer the far more debasing, uncomfortable, and messy blowjob? And why are they apparently giving them out so indiscriminately? These are questions that none of the usual suspects can answer.

Wherever there's a girl gone wild, there's a gender-studies professor not far behind, eager to blame her actions on the patriarchy.

She ends with

I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households -- individual mothers and fathers -- are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it.

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls. I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert -- or even to acknowledge -- that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature of who we are.

We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood's response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy -- which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America's girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America's girls: on their knees.

Apologies for the crazed cut n' pasting but Flanagan says it very well.
I'm going to post my review of Female Chauvinist Pigs later on this evening after I do a bit of college related study!

Equality Legislation

I don't like it. Oh, I'm fine with the big picture - we're all equal without question or qualification. But I hate this nitty bitty lawyers-gone-wild stuff which enumerates every possible inequality and puts realms of it into law.
It's fundamentally pointless.
Richard Waghorne at his hugemongous blog
Sicilian Notes has a post on Maman Poulet's posts on the EU's Resolution on Homophobia.
Legislating against speech is a bad idea - for the most part it's subjective and the test of reasonableness is hard found.
Crimes are crimes regardless of who they're committed against or why - the thug who beats up a homosexual person commits the same crime as the thug who beats up a heterosexual.
Why do we need laws to protect minorities when the main priniciple that they're protected under, namely the right to be treated equally, stands on it own?

Reactions to my post on Kevin Sharkey focused mainly on why the opponents of gay marriage should not be allowed to air their views, at all. The reasons being their hatred, homophobia and general awfulness and similiarity with Nazi apologists - I do not accept this view at all.
I think it's censorship rooted in a smug superiority that's afraid, or unwilling to engage opponents in a meaningful discourse.
If you are so adamant that those who do not agree with you are so fundamentally wrong, why shy away from the public forums where you can competently and convincingly dismantle their arguments?
Why resort to name calling and excessive labelling?

More on Abortion, Mental Health and Feminists

I posted a month ago on new research linking abortion to negative mental health outcomes.
Well, there's new research out this week saying the same thing, this time from New Zealand.
From the abstract
Those having an abortion had elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours and substance use disorders. This association persisted after adjustment for confounding factors.

Also, OxBlog links to an exercpt from Meet the Press with Kate Michelman, the president of NARAL. She gives the pretty standard feminist party line on the issue...

But you can be absolutely anti-abortion, if you will, and pro-choice; believing that women ultimately, not the government, not Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, but women themselves must determine the course of their lives, and central to that determining the course of their lives is determining when and under what circumstances they will become mothers. Because the thing that most women want is to be successful at mothering. And the first ingredient is being able to determine when that time is right and not being forced by the government and by politicians or by judges to bear a child under circumstances of one—not of one’s choosing. So I...

MS. O’BEIRNE: Well, as Kate just explained, you cannot believe that there ought to be legal protections for the unborn and not be read out of the modern women’s movement.

Teenage Sex causes Depression in Girls?

Was looking something else up and came accross this article entitled "Which Comes First in Adolescence—Sex and Drugs or Depression?" from October's American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The research is based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the US and looks at depression and the risk behaviours of sex and drugs.
From the conclusion of the article -
"Depression is a complex problem that is determined by both proximal and distal biological and experiential factors.The present analyses provide strong evidence to support the hypothesis that adolescent sex and drug behaviors may play a causal or mediating role in the development of adolescent depressive disorders. Our findings, based on nationally representative data, are consistent with longitudinal studies indicating that adolescent substance use contributes to depression. Our results also add new evidence that patterns of sex and drug behaviors during adolescence pose depression risks, particularly for girls. Further, present findings do not support the theory that youth initiate sex and drug behaviors to "self-medicate" depression.
Previous examinations of adolescent depression, and attempts to explain gender differences in depression prevalence, have not systematically considered sexual experimentation and drug use. Instead, earlier work has focused primarily on hormonal and morphologic changes related to puberty, and psychological/affective reactions to these physical changes and to other life events. Our findings, however, indicate that experimentation with substance use and sexual activity play an important role in depression, regardless of pubertal timing or status. They also offer insight into sex differences in depression. For females, even modest involvement in substance use and sexual experimentation elevates depression risk. In contrast, boys show little added risk with experimental behavior, but binge drinking and frequent use of marijuana contribute substantial risk.
Our findings are consistent with theoretical perspectives suggesting that girls' greater interpersonal sensitivity contributes to higher levels of interpersonal stress during adolescence. "

I have posted about sex education before, and whether or not it's actually the most useful and effective away of disseminating information about responsible sexual practices.
Research like this begs the question - should sex education be more about delayed onset of sexual activity and empowered decision making than simply "here's a condom - use it"???

If you're still interested in the whole feminism debate thing....

check out these posts about feminism, anti feminism and the feminism smorgasbord....from Protein Wisdom and Cathy Young.
Sinead at Sigla is still keeping an eye on the Irish version....(which I think is much better!)

Motherhood not the career of Gold Diggas

While Kayne West spells Gold Digger like so, not like Digga, I still can't make out a word he's singing about. Which is grand, given I'm not at all fond of hip-hop music. It bores me easily.
But Amalia Miller, an American economist has done research on motherhood and she finds that gold digging it ain't.
So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you're giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There's an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth—right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s. Once you're in your 30s, there's far less reward for continued delay.
I like this kind of research but is earning 10% less a good enough reason to delay childbearing into your 30s when fertility and IVF becomes a real issue?
I'm not saying that everyone should take a trip to their local maternity hospital a few months after graduation, but the economic benefits of delayed motherhood hardly outweighs the other drawbacks.