February 22, 2007 @ 4:06 pm | Category: Pop Culture, family/relationships
Another book about raunch culture is reviewed in Slate. This time it’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both by Laura Sessions Stepp. With one more book decrying the pathetic raunch culture young women are participating in, I wonder whatever happened to the guys? Nobody seems very concerned about their emotional health or long-term happiness. Don’t young men also lose? Maybe it’s because we assume very different things about men and women. Women are fragile and gullible easily taken in by offers of love and appreciation. The loss of their virtue will quickly send them into long-term despair and make them into damaged goods.
On the other hand, we tend to think that men are brutes not hurt by casual sex since raunch is in their blood by way of testosterone. While women will nurse their emotional wounds for years men just have another beer. Is this right? I don’t buy it. Can we get some new ideas here? Maybe we under estimate the spiritual and emotional damage incurred by men who engage in casual hook-ups and then try to pretend that nothing happened. We are still training our boys to take it like a man and develop a hard emotional shell. Then we wonder why when those men marry it results in emotionally empty marriages. I would like to see a book addressing the detrimental affects of raunch culture on young men because they are our future husbands and fathers.
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February 14, 2007 @ 7:41 am | Category: art, body
Since I was a teen I’ve had an interest in fashion. I don’t mean the mass produced stuff most of us wear or what you find at bebe. I mean fashion as runway high art, a fluid moving adornment of the body. It’s the fabrics, impeccable workmanship and artistic imagination, that create the art. More often than not it’s impractical to wear or financially out of reach. That’s o.k., because as art, you don’t have to own it to enjoy it.
The dark side of fashion is that it can assimilate the transgressive in society for its own purposes. You have seen the ads for haute couture with models that look like heroin addicts or youth adopting gangster garb. Addicts and gangsters become the hero – the authentic person. What could be more transgressive to western women’s sense of who they are than the burqa. Now we have the burqa, the head-to-toe Islamic enclosure, as a new and transgressive fashion on the runways of London no less. This isn’t the first time that western designers have incorporated this look. It’s transgressive because it blurs the categories of freedom and oppression. It’s negative because many women in the world don’t find wearing a burqa a way to show off one’s power. It never ceases to amaze me that we can take some one’s prison and create an art statement. It may be Ms. Goldin, the designer, is attempting to help us identify with burqa clad women. Somehow that strikes me as arrogant and patronizing. Or maybe it’s just art.
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February 11, 2007 @ 6:08 pm | Category: work
One of the things women do different is business. See this interview with Margaret Hefferman author of How She Does It from NPR Market Place. This is the type of story which highlights the importance of women creating their own businesses. In my prior career I saw women start ventures that allowed them to create alternative working styles; businesses that allowed them to be engaged at home and on the job. On the downside, which this interview points out, women continue to doubt themselves. They don’t trust what they know or know how good they are. I address this plague of self-doubt in my forthcoming book Chasing Sophia: Reclaiming the Lost Wisdom of Jesus.
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February 7, 2007 @ 7:28 am | Category: body, technology
When are women going to wake up and take responsibility for their bodies? See this article about the unprecedented rise in c-sections to 30% of all deliveries. The medicalization of a natural event continues to send the message that our bodies are a problem to be treated with aggressive intervention. Women will never feel completely at home in their bodies until they regain awareness about their fertility and the birth process. Modern medicine should be there to assist and render aid not run over the birthing process. Aid not conquest should be the role of medicine. Yet it is often women themselves who have bought into the idea of a convenient and efficient birth. It’s irksome to hear women make comments that show loathing for their own bodies. This has implications in how we view our entire lives which are messier than we would like to believe.
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February 5, 2007 @ 7:34 am | Category: family/relationships
Read this rather humorous piece about how Japanese husbands are learning to live with the new Japanese woman. Things are changing fast.
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February 1, 2007 @ 10:02 pm | Category: community, family/relationships, spirituality/religion
Tonight as I talked with a friend at one of those life crossroads we all eventually encounter it became evident that for her and for all of us we either commit to something or we die a slow unsatisfying death. Our wiring seems to drive us to commitments. No matter how loose and fancy free want to play it in the end our happiness demands that we commit to a work, a relationship or a community. Our desire to give ourselves to something outside ourselves creates a crisis in a culture that views commitments and duty with suspicion. A commitment is risking change and we can’t control who we will become or where a commitment will take us. It’s a leap into the great unknown. Nevertheless, the power of a commitment can serve as ballast in the turbulence of life. It’s true, as Jesus taught, we have to lose our life in order to find it. It’s the only way to truly live.
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