Sex and Violence

Now that I have your attention.

I am crazy about Jim Jefferies.  He is Australian, now living in the U.S.  I discovered him when a friend sent me a link to a stand up comedy bit he did on guns.  It is biting, hilarious, and just as relevant today as it was when he first did it.

He also has a filthy mouth.  He happily pushes the limits way past humor.  He has to tone it down for basic cable, but his podcast is something to behold.  It is basically him and a couple of his writers getting drunk and dirty for an hour after the show each week.  The filth is pretty meaningless, just drunken slobber for the most part.  It would be nice if it were funnier, but his political commentary is so brilliant, as is his humor, that I will plow through the pure crap for it.  I don't know many who would.  Even my son has said, Uh, no thanks.

But Jefferies follows a long line of great comedians who pushed the limit.  Lenny Bruce was slightly before my time, but he fought the law for freedom of speech.  George Carlin did it when the zeitgeist welcomed it, and I am so glad he did.

As he branched out from the seven words you can't say on TV, two things happened.  He really exercised his First Amendment right, and in so doing, exercised it for the rest of us.  And he offended a lot of people.

Being a child of the 60's and in full-blown rebellion against parents that would curse at times but tell me it was a sin, I rejoiced in Carlin's literally calling out the hypocrisy.  In my home, "god-damn" was the forbidden swear word, requiring confession on Saturday.  Carlin welcomed sexual curse words into our vocabulary.  It was glorious to be able to toss out a "fuck" back in the day.  Today those dirty words more often are uninspired, about as clever as a burp, but truly tinged with violence.

Today we have a "president" who dismisses his comment about grabbing pussy as locker room talk, and then is celebrated at the annual prayer breakfast.  Granted, you still can't say "shit" on TV.  But Roy Moore very nearly became a US Senator with the religious right fully aware of his pedophiliac past.

I was planning on writing about sexual harassment and women's rights.  But there is the power of words, and maybe we need to start there.  After all, it was a matter of empowerment that African Americans have forced our entire country to say "N-word" instead of, well, you know.  And yet, "bitch" isn't even consistently bleeped on TV.

A staple of Bill Maher's comedy for the past two years has been inviting his audience to join him in calling Donald Trump a "whiny little bitch."  This gets my back up.  And yet, when I searched for the inception of this routine I came up with the funny and ironic "New Rule" in which he turns the stereotypes of women on its head, and applies those stereotypes to the whiner-in-chief.

The most powerful of words, the dirty words, have power because they are sexual.  And they have the potential to twist our morality into knots because our sense of our sexuality is so twisted.

Men who, despite their thoughts and prayers, don't flinch over mass murders, are willing to legislatively rape women in the name of "saving babies."  And women have been willing to let them.  The most logical comparison is of the fight to preserve a man's god-given right to own a gun versus the fight to allow women to control their own bodies.

In the 60's we welcomed those seven dirty words into public life, but began to refer to sex as "making love."  Is sex talk dirty, does it have to be?  And when is it degrading, because it surely can be.  As, for example, when used by the "president."  And what does it do to women, who are still considered the weaker sex?  When is sex talk violent, and when are insults sexual?

#MeToo has us all wondering how afraid men should be about stepping over the boundaries between approach and harassment, sex play and coercion.  I would like to suggest that sexual harassment and assault is the end result of verbal attacks on women that we ignore and/or accept.  If you aren't uncomfortable with Maher calling Trump a "whiny little bitch" you are either a man or a woman who doesn't recognize the power that words have to demean you.  If you don't cringe when you hear men insulted by being referred to as "girls" you are accepting not just that women are physically weaker, but that women are weaker.

The answer is not censorship.  The answer is changing perceptions, refusing to accept stereotypes and insults.  The value of forcing us to refer to the derogatory term as "n-word" (when we are in civil society) may be a constant reminder of how wrong it is, but it also denotes the power that African-Americans now have that they can compel this change.  Sadly, another result is that racists become ever more filled with rage at the imposition on their freedom to publicly display their bigotry; the backlash was destined to happen.  But African-Americans aren't taking it anymore, and that too will be quashed.

Women don't like to fight.  We want to fix things.  This makes us appear to be weak, and people like Congressional republicans and Donald Trump will use us as a battering ram to force their way into power.  On the other hand, they can dog whistle other misogynists by painting those of us who aren't compliant as bitches, you know, like Hillary, Nancy and Elizabeth.

Sexual equality is going to mean a fight.  Our daughters have grown up in a world we thought was safe, but was still fraught with sexual harassment and degradation.  As long as there are laws that establish rules about what is contained within our bodies, men will control us.  And we will be demeaned.

Those dirty words have power.  I am all for the well-placed curse word, but we have to admit that there is violence in sexual language.  It is not just that men in power can "grab pussy," it is that they are so confident in that right that they are happy to tell others about it.  Confronting men who assault women sexually is the beginning; their acts must have consequences.  What we  do as these men are confronted is going to be a long and tangled path.

But we need to first become sensitized to the words, their meaning, and their effect.  Not to censor, but not to ignore.  Indeed, until there are consequences for a man who brags about grabbing pussy, women will be under siege.  Denial of the power of those violent words leaves us vulnerable, and grants permission to men to continue to put us "in our place." 

It is time to let men know that we are the ones who will determine what our place will be.

The Ironic Cherry Reads...

...Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

Two decades after I graduated high school, I ran into one of our class's popular girls.  She was well-liked, a cheerleader, and academically successful.  In our short conversation, she commented on how horrible high school was.

Dave Barry has facetiously said that when an adult of any age commits suicide, it is because he can't get out of his mind some dumb thing he did when he was a teenager.

The young adult book, Some Girls Are, by Courtney Summers, was one of the choices on the 9th grade honors summer reading list at West Ashley High School this year.  Thanks to a single parent's protest, it was removed.  I happened upon it at my branch library, where free copies were made available and displayed during Banned Books Week.

And I read it.

I was astonished at just how good the book was.  Yes, parties with drugs and drinking.  Sex, including attempted rape.  Smut, as this horrified West Ashley parent called it.

But that is not the point of the book.

Teenagers, trying to grow up, facing pressure from peers and teachers, and oh, clueless parents, all while trying to excel:  at academics, at sports, at popularity, at love.  Given the incredible mistakes adults make in their lives, it is no surprise that teens will make big mistakes.  And suffer for them.

I identified with this story on so many levels.  As a former high school psychologist.  As a parent.  And yes, friends, as a former high school student.  Because the conflict was there, the longings and the hurt, the striving and the feelings of failure.  All those hormones don't just go into the drive for sex, although they do indeed go there.  The passion for wanting to be a part of what is going on, while never really knowing what is going on, or what it is you really want, who can forget that?  How many people do you know that honestly enjoyed those school years?

And don't forget those clueless parents.  Parents who are proud or disappointed, who ask the wrong questions and hear what they want to hear.  Parents who have somehow blocked the pain of high school society from their memories and have no idea what their kids are going through.

Parents like this helicopter mom at West Ashley.  Who reads along with her daughter's summer reading assignment, but just can't handle the material.  Who can't deal with the discomfort of the bad things that do happen in high school.  Who was so blown away by scenes that reflect the reality of drugs and sex that she wasn't able to see the fear and pain that floats under the surface, under the facade of confidence, throughout every school day.

Who saw to it that if she couldn't handle it, no one else would get the opportunity.

I thought it was interesting that she took the book away from her daughter, got it banned from the school, but finished it herself.  Proclaiming about its indecency all the way through, while having her moment of fame and power.  Almost as though she were still there, in high school.

Of course, there is no excuse for the actions of the principal.  Except that is exactly what the principal at the fictional high school would have done.  We will have no controversy in our schools.  We will cover over the problems with a poor paint job, censorship, and detentions.  We will not defend our teachers' professional decisions, because we are afraid of creating a controversy.

Meanwhile, our students are dealing, every day, with tough decisions about conformity and rejection.

The banning of this book is exactly what the writing of this book illustrates.

The alternative would be letting teens know that they are not alone, that adults have been there and will be there for them.  Opening the discussion about how it feels to be afraid of making the wrong choice, of being rejected, is the way to give our teens real options.  Banning the discussion is the way we perpetuate the tyranny of high school.

And by the way, the educator that put this title on the summer reading list had intended that it would pave the way for the reading and discussing of books like Lord of the Flies, also banned in its day.

Some Girls Are is a quick read, and a page turner (I don't blame that West Ashley mom for not wanting to put it down), and the characters are intense.  In a very real sense, they are alone on an island, with the grown-ups far away and unreachable.  I urge you to give this book a try, and then pass it on to your teens.  

April 1 Breaking News

On this day each year, I like to highlight important breaking news.  Here are today's likely headlines:

Anti-gay activists promise to mind their own business.

In related news, anti-abortion radicals say:  If we don't believe in abortions, we won't have one.

On the 2014 campaign front, since learning that Lindsey Graham may be "ambiguously gay," his four primary opponents have vowed that in a run-off they will join together to support him.

Finally, due to the popularity of the decision by the state budget committee to censor college assigned reading by withholding funds, our legislators have decided to also withhold food stamps from those who read foreign language books.

Enjoy your April Fool's Day.

Pathways to Censorship

Well, the South Carolina House took a break from is persecution of women yesterday to weigh in on college reading lists.  According to our representatives, a licensed physician needs to be regulated by our legislators and so do our university professors.

Wait a minute!  Are these the guys (and Nanney) who are constantly harping on freedom and how regulation is destroying our country -- God bless America, hallelujah!?  Apparently, this bunch has done a bit of research and found that there are some areas, none of which would adversely affect themselves, where we citizens need to be instructed -- by them.

For example, Wendy Nanney has it on good faith (faith being the instructive word) that at twenty weeks a fetus feels pain.  So she has another God-fearing expert testify to that effect, and wins out handily against the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

And now we have a budget amendment that would have part of a university's funding held up until they ban using "pornographic content" in classes.  Representative Mac Toole from Lexington adds that "pornographic content" is not defined because we will know it when we see it.

Oh, my, if only Molly Ivins were here to do justice to this state of affairs.  She was the go-to gal on ignorance in the Texas lege.  She once said about a state legislator from Dallas:  "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."  And now that I think of it, taking care of infirm legislators here in SC could be considered a jobs bill.

While we are whiling away our time, setting around trying to make ends meet, we do have hard working legislators making sure we don't step out of line.  Freedom is okay, as long as it's accompanied by lots of campaign contributions.  After all, money is speech.  Which is exactly what they want us to understand about our colleges.  The politicians have the money, so they own the speech.

I am thinking this might be one of those instances where we might just sit back and watch censorship in action.  After all, we'll know it when we see it.