feminine-genius

Too much Math, English, and Science?

Trash talk is at an all time low and girls are bearing the brunt of it. A new "top 25" list was made public which rated the girls at a particular high school, and the evidence should be frightening.

The crudely sexual "Top 25" list of girls at Mt. Lebanon High School certainly reflects the way teenage boys have talked about girls in locker rooms for generations. The list isn't much different from the commonplace "slam books" that mock students for their looks or behavior.

But numerous experts on teens, gender issues and sexuality believe the Mt. Lebanon list is a sign of a more recent phenomenon: a "just say anything" culture that normalizes the trash talk of Howard Stern and "South Park," crossed with the language of ESPN and sports talk radio.

The authors of the list -- which grades girls' breasts, buttocks and faces and uses pornographic and scatological terms along with ethnic slurs -- are still unidentified, so it's not known if they were athletes and thus part of a pervasive "jock culture," which has come under renewed scrutiny in recent rape allegations against members of Duke University's lacrosse team.

It's a distinction without a difference, said Dr. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook and an expert on masculinity. Whether it's a member of the football team or someone on the wannabe fringe, this kind of verbal violence toward women is part of "guy culture" today, one that young boys are pressured to be a part of lest they be thought less than manly.

Some people are outraged, and so they're attacking ... the present curriculum.

If anything, the Mt. Lebanon incident is a depressing reminder of how far we have not come in teaching our young people about sexual harassment and its emotional consequences, despite universal policies banning it in schools and workplaces, said Dr. Irene Frederick, a gynecologist and women's health activist based in East Liberty.

"As a female gynecologist, I've seen the effects on women of 'boys will be boys' again and again," she said. "For these young women, this could have a devastating effect, especially for those on the bottom of the list, who are going to feel particularly violated. It sends a very negative message to a young woman who does not have the perfect face or figure or hair about how they should respond around young men to get attention."

But young men will suffer, too, "if they are allowed to believe that this is the appropriate manner in which to think about young women."

Gee, where on earth would they get that idea?? Maybe they need more time in school to talk about how to process all the sex in the media, says Eleanore Childs, founder of The Heartwood Institute in Oakland, a nationally recognized character education program that is used in Mt. Lebanon's elementary grades:

Ideally, there should have been an active, ongoing program about sexual harassment in place before this happened, she and other experts noted, but in this era of "No Child Left Behind," such initiatives are crowded out of the high school curriculum in favor of bread-and-butter courses like math, English and science.

No, Eleanor. How about an active, ongoing program to take the toxic waste off the airwaves. All the character development in the world cannot compensate for the constant barrage that is destroying these kids. There is one childhood per child; one latent period which should not be violated. "Woe to those who scandalise the little ones."

The vocabulary used on the list was taught outside the classroom, and that needs to be curbed in a communal effort -- by parents, schools, pastors, and elected officials. What good is parsing this vocabulary inside the classroom, with a tsk tsk?? Sure there have always been less attractive girls who didn't make Homecoming Court, but now everyone has to compete with airbrushed porn stars and is rated accordingly. Whatever No Child Left Behind aspires to, it has to reach out to children floating on the flotsam of depravity. Until the faucet is turned off, the toxicity will poison any chance of success -- no matter how much math, English, science -- or sexual harassment guidelines are taught.

Courageous woman

There is no shortage of heroic women in our midst, as several previous blog entries have noted. Today, in chasing down a story about Sicily, I found Rita Borsellino, who is running for office and taking on the mob.

First of all, there is a movement to stop the local Mafia influence:

A group of 100 shopkeepers in Palermo, the nerve centre of the Sicilian Mafia, have staged an unprecedented rebellion against the Cosa Nostra by refusing to pay protection money.

Until now, almost every business in the Sicilian capital has quietly paid off the Mafia or faced retribution.

But since Bernardo Provenzano, the 73-year-old "boss of all the bosses", was arrested two weeks ago after decades in hiding, the island's anti-Mafia movement has gathered momentum.

Rita's name appears at the end, as the sister of an attorney who was gunned down by the mob 14 years ago. Here is a portion of an address carried on the Vatican website, in which she chronicles her intensifying prayer life which sustained her in her loss:

And one day at Spello, in a community of Carlo Carretto, in a little Church on the Subasio, at last I learned to call him "papa", to talk to him and listen to him. I learned to find by reading the Word the answers to my questions. Perhaps I was ready for the experience which was to turn my life upside down and change it. And in Via D' Amelio I met his wounds, his body insulted and offended, amidst smoking ruins and blind hatred which crucifies. But I found the strength to accept, to look ahead, the «Forgive them for they know not what they do», the resurrection of solidarity and awareness.I learned to seek the signs of the resurrection in the eyes of all those people who think they are alive, but are dead inside. I made extraordinary encounters, and I often found that the road I was travelling, sad and hard, was in actual fact the road to Emmaus. Today I see God in the face of every person I meet, whether they hold out their hand to offer help or to ask for help. I have learned to accept suffering and death as the way to the resurrection. I walk my road to Emmaus with my weaknesses, my doubts, my falls, but certain that I am not alone. And when the cross becomes heavier, when it is more difficult to accept and to perceive the divine light in the depth of certain eyes, those arms outstretched to embrace the world remind me of what Jesu said to the good thief: «Today you will be with me in paradise».

So beautiful, and intense as only those who suffer torments can be. We wish her well in her upcoming election.

UPDATE: adding to our "courageous women" list is this fine Cuban economist, who has recently sustained a beating that has left her "very scarred." May God console Martha Beatriz Roque as she recovers and protect her in the future. Blessed Mother, cast your mantle over these and other fine women who imitate your faith and integrity.

Two other women who dedicate their lives to promoting justice are found on the web here and here. Bless them -- "...and Mary kept all these things in her heart."

Passing of two geniuses

The Telegraph brings two fascinating obituaries, one an academic, the other a woman who embraced the life of her husband, a lawyer who was to be posted to various British colonies in his career.

Professor Mary Boyce was an expert on Zoroastrianism who studied it and its origins exhaustively.

[She] argued that it was Zarathustra, the religion's founder, who had instituted the original form of this and other rites still observed by the Zoroastrians in traditional Iranian centres such as Sharifabad. On this basis she justified the use of both contemporary religious practice and the texts written in Old and Middle Iranian languages as sources of equal importance for reconstructing the whole system of the religion.

Mary Boyce was the first to attempt to write a unified history of the religion from its prehistoric origins to the present day, filling in gaps in earlier treatments, such as the 500-year Parthian period or the initial 1,000 years after the coming of Islam. This historical approach underpinned her monumental History of Zoroastrianism, of which three volumes have appeared and the fourth is approaching completion.

Doubtless, an essential contribution, despite debilitating back problems, due to which

she did much of her teaching in the study of her flat in Highgate, lying on her back. She usually asked visitors to come in the early afternoon for tea and used a special cup with a spout so that she could drink while reclining. The ensuing discussions went on for many hours, occasionally until midnight.

That qualifies to make her a "feminine genius," n'est-ce pas?

June Knox-Mawer made the best of a daunting situation, beginning with her husband's first assignment, to Aden.

[She] prepared herself by reading TE Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark and made up her mind to love the place despite its reputation among old colonial hands as "the nearest thing to hell". She shouldered the "white woman's burden of sitting through endless dinners where you had heard everybody's stories a hundred times," but was impatient to get to know the place and the people.

Working as a stringer for the Daily Express, she began making adventurous forays into the interior. Her sympathetic reports on the Yemeni frontier raids and the rising tide of nationalist feeling against the British did not go down well at Government House, but led to her becoming a firm favourite with the feudal native princes and their harems, many of whom had never met a western woman before. "Riding at dawn with the men, singing and dancing with the women. That was the real me," she recalled.

She later parleyed her decades of experience into a Radio 4 show called "Women's Hour" which had an enormous following.

Fluent and direct of manner, with a talent for putting interviewees at their ease, June Knox-Mawer also presented travel features and documentaries and concerto chats with musicians. She possessed one of the most distinctive voices on the airwaves and was once selected as having the best woman's voice on radio.

Bully for them both, and may their souls rest in peace.

Collaboration for sanity

Friends, I am delighted to post here comments from a woman who responded to a discussion on authentic modesty begun below. This is essential for reasons I'll post after her comments.

As a Muslim woman living in Switzerland trying to promote progressive thinking within Islam, I completely agree with Dr Elham Mane'as stated opinion in her article published April 24th, 2006 on the veil issue. As a matter of fact, the lately predominant religious discourse holds all power of interpretation of the sacred texts, and pretends that "normal" believers are not entitled to undertake any kind of critical and independant thinking and rethinking of the religious main sources Qur'an and Hadith. He, the religious discourse claims absolute and exclusive authority on any issue concerning Islam. 

The hijab case as a matter of fact shows the dimensions of a word to word interpretation of a so called "duty" on Muslim women. If it really were a main duty why didn't God decide to add it to the five pillars and make it a "sixth" one? What we can witness today is that men - this is to be understood literally - have factually converted what was once meant to protect the wives of the prophet into a prescription for every woman.

This interpretation is completely  lacking - as so many other traditional scholastic interpretations do - the historical context in which the qur'anic text has been revealed. It  does neither consider the actual time of revelation of the sourate the hijab is based upon: mainly 24//31 and 33/59. Without going into deeper theological discussion, we must know that mainly 33/59 has been revealed in the late years of Mohammed's life, it addresses the female members of his household. In order to protect them from male agression taking place outside the house, they had to wear the jilbab,  resembling the Morrocan tunika men wear today, by far the opposite of that which became the black universal Muslim women’s "uniform,” a dress that turns women into monsters. 

So the final question is what was this hijab all about? It was [created] for protective purposes. But nowadays we live in civilised societies in which women and men are or at least should be acting and behaving on equal grounds. The hijab is no longer necessary because it exposes Muslim women rather then protect them (at least in non-Muslim countries). And by the way, why can men not pull themselves together and take their share of responsibility in respecting women the way God has created them and the way Mohammed had called them to do? 

When Muslims argue that hijab prevents the world from falling apart "as it happened or is happening in the West" then they take up the discourse of the pre-Islamic period, where, as we are taught, people seem to have behaved rather roughly towards one another. I think we have all experienced what the covering of women makes out of the male society of the Muslim world: the amount of "oversexualisation" is so evident. 

What we need as Muslims is to rethink our religion under the perspective of enlightement and pluralism, which by the way determined Islam for a very long period until the 13th century. I wish I had lived at that time, when open discussion and diversity were at hand. Hopefully we could regain these capacities. I am quite positive about it, with women like Elham Mane’a speaking out, this is a  promising step in the right direction.

I want to make two points here. First, I applaud the writer, Jasmina el-Sonbati, for appealing to the original revelation to find what God's will might have been in his discourse with Mohammed. Only with respect to such revelation can respect be shown to the concept of "God revealing truth," which is how we know His mind.

We have to caution both Christians and Muslims from rejecting the notion that revelation is to be honoured -- for modernism can strike anywhere, at the heart of any religion. Modernists assume that revelation is inspired/invented by man and can be rewritten when the mood strikes: wrong and bad.

Secondly, it is essential that we take note that the current culture war has three participants, not two (as noted to Tony in the comments here). Both radical Islam and western depravity are to be rejected. Faithful Muslims must cling to their faith -- even its excesses -- because many convince them that it's the only alternative to Hollywood and its dung heap of aggressive licentiousness.

The third way insists on respect for the family, purity, faith, and the integrity of all peoples. See how cleverly the Dark Forces pit two lies against one another to destroy mankind's chance to embrace truth.

I firmly believe, for all the reasons I've listed previously on this site, that women are called to restore a culture of life through authentic femininity. I welcome the chance to discuss this with all women of good will. There is so much that unites us, not the least of which are the affections of maternal hearts that sincerely want our societies to flourish and glorify God.

[My only dispute with Jasmina at this point is that I am very glad that she is living now. She has responded heroically to discuss an essential topic which has the potential of helping a great number of people!]

"Your mother wears army boots!"

As I recall from early school days, the greatest insult to a kid was to insult his mother. When an epithet was hurled in her direction, a boy put up his fists and began swinging. I don't know how much thought went into the deep psychology of such a taunt, but boys knew that "them's fighting words!"

Silly Tom Hanks. He's doing the same thing but unconsciously. He's gone as far as claiming he's helping our Mom with his insulting movie:

Tom Hanks hopes the The Da Vinci Code will make people flock to church. The Oscar-winning star hopes church leaders use his new movie - which investigates the possibility that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene - to increase church congregations.

He told US magazine Entertainment Weekly: "I think the movie may end up helping churches do their job.

Whether this theory is true or not remains to be seen. But what if another actor starred in a "fictional" account of the Hanks family in which Tom's mother played a doting soccer mom by day, and a lap dancer after hours. Ha ha ha ha ha! In the end, we could conjecture, it just might make Tom love her all the more for the suffering the detraction caused. Gee, maybe he'd deepen his appreciation for all the good she did in his life. Or maybe not.

I like Barbara Nicolosi's response:

Basically, I hate talking about The Da Vinci Code because I have a personal relationship with Jesus. I have met Him and He isn't a proto-feminist goddess-cultic with a weak personality that could have been simply co-opted by power-hungry misogynists. I love Jesus. It makes me physically sick to entertain discussion about the ways in which the defining acts of His life - His Passion, Resurrection and establishment of the Church - could be a diabolical scam that He never anticipated not experienced. It would make me sick to hear salacious lies about anyone I love, how much more my Savior?

Besides that, I don't think we should encourage people in the terrible sin against the Holy Spirit of speculating that things that are holy are evil, and that things that are evil are holy. Isn't that what is going on here? How is that not painful for anyone who knows the Lord?

Ditto for me -- loving Christ and His bride, Holy Mother Church. I don't think giving either of them a black eye is essential to deeper love. Sounds like the drunk who wakes up the morning after a night of abusing his wife, "Sorry, Honey. I only do it because I love you..."

Who's the enemy here?

"Children need their mothers." What an outrageous claim, say feminists and they are scandalised that a successful writer would dare put it in print.

Caitlin Flanagan has made a lot of women very angry -- and has positively outraged a few more after that.

Flanagan, a wife, mother of eight-year-old twin boys and staff writer at The New Yorker, did this by stating one bitter pill of truth: "When a mother works, something is lost." It is her opinion that the gold standard for raising children is at home with a mother who loves them, and the feminists hate her for it.

"I said the truth, and you always get in trouble when you say the truth," explained Flanagan, in Toronto last week to talk about her book To Hell with All That: Fearing and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.

She explains that women have a love-hate relationship with housework, being emotionally tied to it (as men aren't) and yet getting fed up with it on a regular basis. Even though they've walked away from it, they tune in to Martha Stewart and are fascinated by her.

As for how to deal with a less than fastidious husband -- and they are all less than fastidious compared to their wives -- Flanagan has few solutions.

"Everyone wants solutions, but the point of this book is the eternal conflict without solution. The only solution is to embrace the conflict and to say, 'I'm a woman and I really care about these things and the reason I'm so angry at him is traditional homemaking might be something that I want to do.' And if that's true, they should unleash their inner housewife."

Sure beats legislating 50-50 gender splits on chores! To read the vicious comments at the end is an eye-opener. Classic is the epithet that she suffers from "Stockholm syndrome" from her encounter with motherhood. Whew -- that would make kids ... the enemy!

Saved by Saint Charbel

May Chidiac is a heroic and feisty woman who has fought for change in her native Lebanon for years. Even a bomb blast in which she lost a leg hasn't silenced her:

At first, I didn't know about my leg," she said, recounting how paramedics in an ambulance quickly arrived to pull her out. "I saw my hand cut, it was still hanging by a small piece of flesh, but I didn't know that it was damaged a lot and was pointing to my hand hoping they could help me keep it."

They could not. Chidiac, an outspoken anti-Syrian Lebanese broadcast journalist, lost her left hand and right foot and suffered burns over much of her body. Syrian agents are assumed to have been behind the attack.

But in the months since she was maimed, Chidiac has made a remarkable recovery and is likely to emerge as an even more powerful voice than she was before against Syrian influence in her country.

Today, she navigates her electric wheelchair through the drab lobby of the hospital where she is staying like a queen aboard her barge. The high- necked ruffled collar and long lace cuffs of her white blouse contrast dramatically with the black, fox fur- trimmed cape covering her shoulders.

Pearl pendant earrings hang beneath the teased and molded mound of her blonde coiffure.

"I've been attacking the Syrian policy in Lebanon for a long time," she explained, discussing the attack with the good-natured detachment that might come from a woman whose costume jewelry had been stolen by petty thieves.

"I want my country to be free from all occupation and to recover its sovereignty for good and forever," she said.

She attributes her survival to Saint Charbel, to whose shrine she had just made a pilgrimage.

The day of the bombing, Chidiac's guest on her talk show was another outspoken anti-Syrian journalist, Sarkis Naoum. After the show, she drove to a friend's house and left her car on the street and rode with her friend into the mountains to visit a monastery where Saint Charbel, a Maronite hermit, lived and died.

She bought bottles of holy water, votive candles and icons and had lunch in a nearby restaurant there before returning to her friend's house where she got back into her car.

When the bomb went off, she was leaning between the front seats to put the bag containing the religious artifacts in the back of the car. The passenger seat shielded her face and right hand from the blast. Her left hand, gripping the steering wheel, and her right foot, pressing against the floor of the car, were blown away.

Saint Charbel was the one who saved me," she said calmly. "If I didn't have the candles and things to be put on the back seat, I'd be dead."

May was well aware of death threats but neglected to take precautions, trusting that such a thing would not happen to her since she was a woman. God (and Saint Charbel) provided the protection necessary, and the courage to carry on her work. Amazing. Saint Charbel, kindly intercede to protect all the faithful, especially in the Middle East.

The veil is political and insulting

Dr. Elham Mane'a, reformist Islamic woman has iterated what I have long thought but have no right to say, since I cannot speak about the tenets of other people's religions. She shows how political events (mostly in the 1970's and 80's) led to the promotion of a particular sect of Islam (Wahhabism). This in turn mandated the complete veiling of all women, which she find offensive to the dignity of both men and women:

"The veil, then, is a political issue... yet the arguments and the methods used to convince women that there is an obligation [to wear the veil] have taken three forms... The first argument claims that when a woman wears the veil, she covers up her feminine curves and protects men from licentiousness. The second argument claims that when a woman wears the veil, she helps to establish a good society. The third argument claims that it is, in essence, a religious [duty].

"The first argument is based on the assumption that the Arab man is a lecherous animal that cannot control its urges, and therefore, one must be on guard against it. [The Arab man's] thoughts are controlled by sex, and therefore he cannot be relied on, and the woman's [seductive] parts must be covered in order to protect him from the devil inside him. This premise is unfair to the Arab man, whom we know as a brother, as a father, as a husband, and as a human being. He is capable of treating a woman as a human being, and not as a commodity to be used for pleasure. He is capable of controlling his urges - even though they exist and he is aware of their existence - just as a woman is capable of doing so..."

"This first argument also includes a humiliating premise about women, since it portrays the woman as nothing more than a sex tool - not as a human being but as [a collection of] private parts. She isn't [considered] a noble or thinking being, but rather a being whose every body part arouses urges, and which consists entirely of sexual parts - [including] her voice, her hair, and her body... This argument disregards the fact that a woman can cause a man, and anyone [else] around her, to respect her through her behavior and her attitude towards others, and not by covering her head and her body..."

"The second argument is based the premise that there is a connection between wearing the veil and the establishment of a good society. According to this logic, a good society is one in which no intimate relations take place out of wedlock. However, this premise is at best mistaken, since, as a matter of fact, the societies that mandate the wearing of the veil and insist on segregation of the sexes are not those in which sex out of wedlock is least common. On the contrary, the forced segregation [of the sexes] has led to homosexual relations, as indicated by studies which show that the wearing of the veil in Arab and Islamic societies has not prevented some of the girls from having [sexual] relations out of wedlock. After that, they usually have surgery to reconstruct the hymen.

"The third argument rests on the premise that [Islam] has a firm position on the issue of the veil, while the fact is that there are many [different] religious texts on the subject. This abundance [of religious texts] has always existed. You, [the Muslim woman,] can read the texts for yourself, and need no intermediary. [When you read them] you will see that not only is there an abundance of texts, but that they also have numerous interpretations....

"As a matter of fact, the third argument, which claims that it is religion that imposes wearing the veil on women, is the weakest argument, since we never heard it before the late 1970s, and we didn't see it implemented until the orthodox interpretation of Islam became the most prevalent interpretation in the Arab and Muslim world.

Her writings are found here, although I'm sure she's anathema in much of the Islamic world. She writes with gentle firmness, while leaving the decision to each woman. So many, though, simply are not free to decide such things.