I’ve only dipped into the coverage, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone else has already said this. If they have, I haven’t seen it.

I suggest that Miley Cyrus always intended to apologize. Classic cake-and-eat-it, right? Grown-up pictures, Vanity Fair, she or her father had to know what was going to happen.  Just add one apology to show she’s still an innocent and you get maximum exposure. Of course there are seriously creepy overtones (‘though I have to ask, granted he’s not in VF’s demographic but is it wrong for my 15 year-old son to see this girl sexually?). But her dad was there, having a grand old time, apparently. OMG. They took advantage of me! rings hollow, no?

–TD

The meme of elitism that runs through this election cycle is upside down. Candidates and their surrogates are expected to distance themselves from their hard-earned successes. “Elite” is used as an epithet, as a way of painting a candidate as out of touch with the “regular” voter. Some on the left suggest embracing the meme and hurling it back at the right. But if you unpack the elitism from which the candidates and their spouses are said to suffer, it turns out to be a very (small “d”) democratic form of elitism and should, I suggest, be embraced as a positive rather than shunned as a negative.

Michelle Obama, e.g., runs from the charge of elitism every time she gives a version of this speech in which she touts her working class upbringing and her public school education and downplays her time in the Ivy League. She’s right to highlight her background, right to tie herself and, by extension, her husband back into the communities whence she came. But she does those very communities a disservice by minimizing the importance of where she went next.

After graduating from that “neighborhood public school,” the then-Ms. Robinson went to Princeton and Harvard. Two things must be noted. First, that is the very definition of elite. Second, it is far less impressive than it sounds (or so says this public- then Ivy-educated boy from a middle class upbringing). Thousands upon thousands of young men and women from all backgrounds—prep school, public school, rich, poor, on and on—graduate from our top-tier universities every single year. If it is an elite group, it is also pretty easily cracked.

Could there be more opportunities for middle and lower class students? Of course. But the point here is that a working class Chicago girl can make it to Princeton (or that a boy from Hope can become a Rhodes Scholar). So, “Hell yes,” Mrs. Obama should say, “I am from the working class, just like you, and hell yes, I have an elite education, just like you and your children can.”

Seriously. What’s more American Dreamy than rising up from humble beginnings to wealth, power, fame, fortune and influence?

–TD

I’ve become a bit obsessed with freecycle. I am endlessly fascinated with what people are giving away. Back in the early ’90s, when my ex-wife was pregnant, we often went yard saling and I grew convinced that there was a finite amount of baby gear that was simply passed from family to family. Watching freecycle, that notion is back in my mind. I’d say about 50% of the traffic on my local list is baby stuff.

But that’s just half the story. I joined about a month ago because I had a couple of framed prints I wanted to give away. Then I started looking and I just can’t stop. I even got a print from someone else and gave a table-top ironing board away. In the past week, people have given and received pots and pans and candle holders and vases and floor tiles and old tools and broken TVs and working TVs and lots of CRT monitors and clothes and blenders and shampoo and plants and cellphones and road cones and a mannequin hand. There are about 3000 people in my local group and it runs to about 1500 messages a month.

Sure, part of the appeal is marveling at the acquisitive nature of our culture, seeing just how many things we all seem to collect and realizing that only a fraction of it traffics back and forth along these mailing lists. The social critic in me notes the commonalities we share as evidenced by the overlap in the kinds of things given and taken and notes the differences between us shown by the unique, quirky items to be found.

But if I’m honest, I have to say that the main draw for me is that I find something very warm and reassuring about strangers sharing their stuff like this.

–TD

Hypothesis: Easy access to free amateur porn will ultimately have a positive impact on the body image of today’s youth.

Wonder if I could get anyone to fund that study. Not being a scientist, I’d have no idea how to design it, but something tells me getting teens to watch Internet porn wouldn’t be the hard part.

Easy access to the stuff is pretty much a given. I’d give links but I feel like enough of a hit slut saying “free amateur porn” three times and, besides, the point is that it’s trivial to find. What you see when you get there is the interesting bit. In among the professional porn, with the anorexic girls and the women with otherwise unattainable body types, there are endless clips of regular people fucking.

This is vastly different from the porn of my youth, Hustler and High Society and Debbie Does Dallas on betamax, all full of women with a limited number of “idealized” body types.

It is a given that young women are bombarded by images of unattainable physical types in all possible media. That even our tiniest, sexiest people get airbrushed tinier and sexier is no secret.

Obviously, there is plenty of that unattainable in today’s porn, with professional clips on the free sites and semi-pro, size two waifs working their way through college on web cams, with or without company. And while I’ve yet to stumble across any goat fucking (strikes me as the kind of thing you’d have actually to look for), I admit that I’m not crazy about the idea of my son learning about the power dynamics of sex by watching (even amateur) bukkake sluts taking it in the face from half-a-dozen guys.

But if we accept that fashion images and AVN Award-eligible porn (feminist or not) engender negative body images in our girls and put unrealistic expectations in the minds of our boys, it seems to follow that we must at least entertain the idea that streaming video of Stretch Mark Sara and Beer Belly Bob going at it with abandon could well have a positive impact on body image and expectations.

–TD

(Consider the AVN link NSFW.)

Last week’s torah portion, called Tazria, leads off by detailing the length of time a woman is unclean after she gives birth (seven days if she has a boy, 14 if a girl) and points out that this is the same impurity she has when she’s on her period.(*)

Last Saturday, a conservative synagogue in Monmouth County, N.J. celebrated Junior Congregation at their morning shabbat services, during which pre-bar and bat mitzvah students had the honor of reading Tazria from the torah.  Twelve year-old girls, A-cups advertising their own candidacy for ritual impurity, chanting verses calling them unclean.

Hard to imagine that scene being unique to that temple but it happens that this is the same synagogue in which, I’m told, one (but not all) of the hebrew school teachers insists that girls in her class wear pink yarmulkes. Traditionally, yommies were worn by men and boys but yarmulke wearing by girls spread through the Conservative community in the late 20th century, along with female rabbis and cantors. A fine thing. Having girls wear yarmulkes implies a lack of distinction between genders, at least as far as covering your head before God. If the yommie’s gotta be pink, what’s the point?

–TD

—
* – If you’re curious about how various translations of the bible phrase this ever so delicate concept, go to Bible Gateway. The link starts with the King James version because, well, doesn’t everything?  We’re looking at Leviticus 12:2.

Earlier this week I read something which suggested that ours is an amnesiac society.  The author, I think it was Hitchens but I can’t swear to it, has a point but, true as it is, I don’t think it’s simply a matter of laziness or disinterest.  I think it’s a matter of volume.

The world was a lot smaller when I was young, smaller still when it was Hitch (he’s got 15+ years on me).  We did not know about the world outside our doors.  Where I grew up, there were Jews and Italians.  The Blacks lived on the other side of town, near the Irish, and we didn’t meet them until high school.  Except for the Puerto Ricans in the Bronx and, of course, those people down in Chinatown, there were no other ethnicities in my world.  I didn’t know about Islam as such.  Rather, it was all Arabs and PLO and Munich ‘72 and they practice this other religion that preaches holy war.  I was physically stunned when, in college, I learned there were over a billion Muslims and they weren’t all Arabs.

Now we know about the rest of the world. Some of us even teach our children about it.  On top of our own histories, we have to learn about everyone else’s.  Which is as it should be.  But, unless it is our job to look at, research, record and comment on the world–and not even then, Mr. Hitchens–one cannot know everything.  A sense of history, however necessary, is hard to come by and partial at best.  We have to keep working at it.

There are other forces at work here too.  Priorities have shifted.  We furiously record our the details of our lives, our observations and opinion, and consume that of others, as we swim in the 24 hour news cycle.  It’s a societal obsession and it is all about the now.