During the last couple of years I've done a lot of thinking (or more than usual - it's not like I just started) about women's bodies, body image, health, and societal norms. This has led to some interesting conversations and revelations in both online and offline life with friends, Twitter acquaintances, local artists, and others. There are some incredible things happening in Richmond right now that I'm looking forward to sharing in the future.
Right now, I'm working on Susan Singer's body image survey. She's looking for more women to participate, so go!
In the past few days, these videos have caught my attention. Great messages!
"Do you think that this tree isn't pretty because it doesn't look like that tree?"
This video from Planned Parenthood is aimed at teens, but I think many adults need to hear that "different is normal," too. I wish more teenagers had access to the kind of education that PP can provide. Less abstinence-only sex ed, more copies of Taking Charge of Your Fertility.
In case you weren't already aware, Planned Parenthood is under attack by many of our elected officials. If you're one of the people who thinks PP is some kind of immoral abortion factory that must be shut down, please educate yourself regarding what important services they actually provide. If you already know about and value PP, go here to offer your assistance in the effort to make sure reproductive health services remain available to those who need them.
On a lighter note, I've also had this one stuck in my head on auto-repeat.
Love the inclusion of stray hairs and stubble in the close-up shots. Here I thought I was the only one who looks worse shaven than not, thanks to sensitive skin. I've been crushng on Amanda Palmer lately, she who proclaims, "I don't believe in the beauty standard."
I think this post marks the first time I've used profanity in a title. Yay, milestone moments. It's a tip o' the hat not only to Amanda Fucking Palmer, but also to the irresponsible media outlets who misreported the findings of a University of Arizona study showing that cussing helps to ease pain, but at a social cost. Multiple media sources who picked up the story reported that cussing women suffer socially more than men do. Hold on just a cotton pickin' minute, y'all. The study ONLY looked at women, so neither the researchers nor you can say anything about the effects on women vs. men. Not that it would surprise me at all that women would be more penalized for their language than men are. But until we see a study that clearly supports that claim, I'll thank the media not to create the very misogynist environment that they are supposedly reporting.
My sister shared this video on Facebook last week, and it has been stuck in my head ever since. It's a brilliant reimagining of the song that inspired it, Apologize, and borrows heavily from the original video's style. The divergence - and perhaps what makes this version so great - is the reframing of the central conflict. Rather than addressing irreconcilable differences between lovers, it applies the concept of a relationship being too damaged for apologies to King George III and the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. We'll overlook the third-grade-textbook portrayal of the king as a greedy tyrant (history shows the conflict to be a struggle between the colonists and parliament, with George supporting the British constitution and the actions of his ministers). As a statement of independence, it's outstanding.
Today, while the song was playing in my mind for the billionth time, it crossed wires with some thoughts from Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting. I've read a fair bit of Kohn's shorter articles and have skimmed bits of the book before, but this is my first cover-to-cover read of the book.
Two key concepts to Unconditional Parenting are:
Those practies that define conditional parenting tend to be ways of doing things to children to produce obedience. By contrast...unconditional parenting [hinges upon] the theme of working with children to help them grow into decent people and good decision-makers.
and:
How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.
This mixed in my head with these lines from the song:
We want to make it clear, we believe this much is true All men were created with certain
Unalienable rights Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit Of happiness
Which refers to this passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
And as these things mixed in my brain, I mused...what would parenting look like if it has as a basic assumption the idea that every person, including children, had these inalienable rights?
As citizens of the USofA, we say that we believe these things. Actually, I believe we would say "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Self-evident, as in, so basic that they shouldn't even need to be said. Unfortunately, we seem to expect to have our own rights acknowledged by government, but often don't consider these rights as something each of us ought to respect and protect on behalf of other people, even outside of government affairs.
I had to wonder, how exactly does one define life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Ayn Rand has a fantastic Q&A regarding just these principles. Regarding life, she says:
the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
She comments further that the enjoyment of one's life includes the rights to liberty and pursuit of happiness. Life is the fundamental right and all other rights are "consequences or corollaries" of this right.
She describes liberty thusly:
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.
and also:
Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.
And finally, regarding the pursuit of happiness, she writes:
The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that Man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men. It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the purpose of a man’s existence nor prescribe his choice of happiness.
What do you think, do you see seeds for parenting there? How do the concepts of unalienable rights overlap with parenting philosophies such as Kohn's or others?
The prefix grand-, as in grandmother and grandfather, dates from the early 13th century. In case you were wondering.
One of my earliest memories of my paternal grandparents' room includes this mysterious pear-shaped bank, which sat for decades (at least 30 years) on my grandfather's dresser. I say mysterious because I never did learn: What the heck is it? Why is this bank shaped like a pear? Why did my grandfather have it? Was it special to him? Did it remind him of somebody or something? Did he just like the whimsy of it? After he died, when the house was being closed up, my parents asked if there were anything I'd like to have, and my mind went straight to the pear. They had no idea what I was talking about, but there it was, right where I had described it.
I have to wonder if my early exposure to this pear fostered my love of Mr. Potatohead and the fabulous operatic stop-animation orange who used to sing the aria from "Carmen" on Sesame Street. I mean, I love that orange. Love. Lurve. Looove.
Anyway, the bank now lives with me, and while the years have not been kind to her brittle plastic features, I still love her. She was empty until today, when it occurred to me that she would be a great keeper of good fortunes.
In the absence of a grand contribution from Griff today, I give you Señora Naranja. I wonder if Pop-Pop ever saw her?
If I had a daughter, I would be grateful if she had even a fraction of the moxie that Ruby has! I love this girl. Check her out in all her taekwondo/flamenco-inspired glory:
A friend posted a link to this amazing video, which she described as "like parkour on crack."
Another friend commented on the incredible knowledge of physics that a person must have to be able to perform like this. I reflected that what she was getting at was the notion of kinesthetic intelligence. People like this don't just have an intellectual understanding of the laws of physics; they have an innate physical sense of how their body can move and its relationship to the rest of the world. It reminds me of my brother, who can look at a shoe and see something beautiful; not only that, but he can spend one minute sketching and have something that clearly looks like that shoe, five minutes and the shoe gains more dimension, fifteen minutes and he has produced this amazing image beyond anything I will ever be able to draw, because he sees something different when he looks at that shoe, he sees the way every line, every shadow, every color in that shoe all comes together. That spatial ability is beyond me.
These are the gifts that Howard Gardner calls upon in his theory of multiple intelligences. I think of my youngest son listening intently to environmental sounds and trying to reproduce them in his infancy, my middle child counting syllables on his fingers before he even knew what syllables were, my eldest son seeing the patterns around him and connecting things together with a natural sense of logic. I think of my husband's easy charm in social situations, my lust for categorizing things, for observing the key components of something and using them to identify and label things, the way that learning a name enables me to pursue more information.
It is amazing to consider the innate abilities in each of us, how varied they are, and how we put them to use. There are things each of us just know in our bones. The first time I saw a crepe myrtle, I knew, I just knew, that that was what it was. I had read the name in books and when I saw the tree, it was just obvious, that if anything in the world was a crepe myrtle, this was it. I have a feeling that Oli Lemieux up there also just knows how to jump, how to balance, how to do these amazing things with his body, and with some work to build upon his native intelligence, look what he can do!
What is the knowledge inside each of us, and what can we do with it if we pay attention to it?
I adore this little stop-motion tale (which, by the way, I found while viewing my current favorite video, Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance). Sweet Dreams is worth viewing...just don't do what I did and neglect to view on your own before viewing with your kids. I'm pretty open-and-honest with the boys, but would rather not be answering questions like "why is the cupcake rubbing the butternut squash?"
Recent favorite video over here. I'm charmed by the way tilt-shift photography makes the world look like an adorable miniature. My two-year-old love the boats and 'copter. The music by Megan Washington has joined my frequent playlist, too.
