Bailie.com

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Redeeming social value of Will and Grace

My hairdresser tells me that when her sister and brother-in-law used to come to visit from Winnipeg, she was reluctant to send them out into the neighborhood - Vancouver’s West End - because of her brother-in-law’s rampant homophobia. So when they arrived this weekend to stay, and she needed them to busy themselves for a couple of hours before she could entertain them, she hesitated. But her brother-in-law said not to worry, he was going to head up the street to the local Starbucks.

Well, four hours later, when she and her sister couldn’t find him, they went on the hunt and sure enough, there he was, in Starbucks, and didn’t want to leave. Seems he was in the process of listening in on a number of conversations of the surrounding patrons and wanted to know how their conversations would end. It seems that a middle-aged gay couple was in the process of breaking up ("It’s so sad!") and a lesbian couple was talking about their impending adoption ("They sound so excited; they’ll make great parents.") It seems that after discovering Will and Grace and the humanization of the urban gay, we’re not so scary, and neither is walking around a gay neighborhood. Who knew that a TV show had such influence? Gotta love it.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

International Women’s Day

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually done anything for International Women’s Day other than take a moment for myself to think about the implications for my own life and the women around me. There’s not much discussion of it any more, just like there’s not much discussion of feminism any more. It drives me crazy when women say they’re not feminists, and that the feminist movement did nothing for them. (Oh yeah? Do they want to go back to the days when a bank manager wouldn’t give a woman a bank loan? Or give a woman a mortgage? Or give a woman a hassle about opening her own bank account, without the signature of her husband or father?) The completely irrational cop-out of “well, I don’t want to call myself a feminist because some thirty years ago, there was an urban myth about women burning bras that I don’t want to be associated with” drives me crazy.  The “I don’t want to call myself a [name any group] because there are some [name the fringe element to that group] that give that group a bad name” argument is so lame. I always want to respond with “well, I don’t want to call myself a lesbian because there were some incidents about man-hating separatists that I don’t want to be associated with. Apply that to religion, culture, status in life (motherhood, for example), profession ... anyhow, back to International Women’s Day.

I’m quite thankful for many of the women in my life. There are a couple that I want to throttle right now - I wish they’d renounce their womanhood so I could simply distance myself completely from them. I would like to be able to say that they have NOTHING in common with me, not even sex or gender. Well, one in particular I don’t consider to be of the same gender though she’s of the same sex. But life isn’t simple that way. We have to live with ambiguity and complexity, and interconnectedness of circumstance. I remind myself of this because even if I were able to say “we have nothing common,” it would still not give me license to hate. The difference in gender doesn’t stop me from deeply loving my grandsons. The difference in the values with which my granddaughters are being raised doesn’t stop me from deeply loving them. International Women’s Day reminds me of all these things, and more. - it’s a day for us, and for all those affected by us.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Say No to Bullying day

Yesterday I wore the one pink shirt in my wardrobe for Say No to Bullying day.  Though I’ve never been a big fan of Christy Clark (remember the statistically impossible “all our children should be above average” remark?), this is one of her initiatives I can get behind. I have no reason to divulge this, at least not often, but I was bullied terribly from grade 5 to grade 11. For me, that was age 8 to 14, more or less. Being younger, shorter, and different in a lot of other ways from the rest of the kids made me a walking target. My parents were no help. My mother, a fundamentalist Christian, counseled me with the “turn the other cheek” line - today that would probably get me killed; back then, it just got me tormented. My emotionally absent father was ... well, he had his share of bully in him, as well, so it took me into my adult years to stare him down, let alone ask for his help.

What I think did me in, though, was being smart, in a geeky kind of way. I lived a pretty isolated life - on a farm, away from other kids, not encouraged to socialize with the non-believers. It was a rural school - we were all bussed in from our farms and villages - but the social situation was the same as in the city. No one explained to me that girls aren’t supposed to flaunt their brains after grade 4. But being younger and weaker, I couldn’t run as fast as the rest of my classmates, or reach as tall as them, or get permission to do the things they did (I couldn’t even get a driver’s license until my graduating year of high school!), but I did seem to absorb information without trying, and being ostracized meant that I could speed read a book a day, and went through the school library pretty fast. Which probably made things worse, in retrospect. Smart, geeky, and my mom drove the school bus. As much as I loved school, I hated the school yard, and would do anything to get out of field trips, group work, team sports, and anything involving hanging out in the school yard. Hallelujah for library club.

OK, it’s forty years later, and the schools are just getting around to recognizing bullying as a phenomenon that needs some attention. Better late than never. Count me in - I’m there for my grandchildren.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Repressiveness taken to a whole new level

The other day I was channel surfing and ran across some medical show where a surgeon was doing breast reconstruction and commenting on some surgical technique. What struck me was that the breasts were blurred out in that way that television stations do to protect themselves from contravening obscenity laws. It made me wonder why they bothered airing the show at all - if the show is about a topic that can’t be shown, is there a point in showing it?

Of course, there are other, more fundamental questions, suc has why are breasts considered obscene at all? What is it that’s so terrible about showing the body that television stations could get fined for it? What have we become, as a society, that on the one hand, we obsess about the body (exalting extremely thin models, fashion that shows lots of the body) but at the same time, fetishing the body (blurring body parts, etc.)?

A number of years ago, someone asked of an orthodox rabbi whether it was OK to look upon nudity, and the rabbi’s answer was fabulous: it depends on the purpose. His take was that as long as the purpose was noble - which I would argue range from studying for medical school, bathing your kids, making out with your sweetie, and walking along a nudist beach - there’s no problem with it.

When the body is fetishized, then the decisions made around how to control the fetishes become irrational. When we see this in other cultures, we see it clearly because it seems strange to us. For example, in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, there is a passage describing how a young man claimed that a small, exposed patch of skin so inflamed his passion that he reported it, and the young woman was thrown in jail. Covering up is supposed to be the only remedy to such “indecency.” In North American culture, the cover-up is done with pixels on the screen. Either way, the idea is that the body is indecent. Not any act of the body, but the body itself.

Looking at this from another perspective. Let’s agree that the Judeo-Christian modesty continuum has become the global standard, and sex organs are considered private and always kept under wraps. Never mind that the breast is technically not sex organs, I won’t get into that argument right now - let’s just include them in the modesty taboo for the moment. Now what happens if someone decides that foot fetishes mean that feet should always remain covered? And then what happens if someone else decides that hands are really, really sexy and should remain covered? How far away are we from being covered by a burka? So what makes us different from the people that we consider “different?”

A friend told me that when he was a kid - so this must have been about 35 years ago - a woman chastized his mother for having him and his brother in the women’s changing room with her, and she replied to her children, “Don’t pay attention to her. She’s Canadian.” Meaning, she’s a prude. I never thought of us being prudish, and never really thought of Americans being prudes, either - well, except for the “banned in Boston” part, but that was connected to having a Puritan heritage, and that was supposed to be relatively raree - so when did slide start down the slippery slope? When did North America develop this hysteria over the physical bodies that God gave us? Do we really want to pass this type of shame and hysteria along to the next generations? I know I don’t. If I’m going to blur anything, it’s scenes of violence; I’ll leave the body intact.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Progressive versus crazy-making

I just have to contrast these items:

(1) South Africa legalizes same-sex marriage. Then again, it was the first constitution in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, so we shouldn’t be surprised by this amazing and progressive move.

(2) This Terrence Has Two Fathers video, as seen on You Tube, Netherlands’ Children for Children series. Again, amazingly progressive.

(3) Delta Airlines lets a flight attendant’s personal prudishness overrule public legislation when a woman dared breastfeed her child - in other words, commit a legal act (breast-feeding is protected under the Public Accommodations Act, meaning that a mother is allowed to breast-feed in public). How amazingly regressive!

(4) Passenger is removed from flight for wearing “offensive” t-shirt. Again, how regressive and anti-democratic. And selective about free speech - just about every time I’ve been on a flight, I’ve seen lots of stuff offensive to me, and those passengers have been allowed to fly. So who gets to decide what is offensive?