Trampy Hallowe'en!

I have been sooo busy, poppets! But here I am again. I have even managed to carve a jack o'lantern despite not having time to get a pumpkin: I remembered the old butternut squash squatting on our cookbooks. The year simply would not be a proper year without a jack o'lantern on October 31; I could not cope.

Now I was going to write a condemnation of trampy Hallowe'en costumes, but then I remember in time that last year I dressed as a Jordan Wannabe, and if you are British you know what that means: fake tan, fake eyelashes, tons o' slap, and trampy outfit. I thought if I went really over the top, it would be more funny than trampy. However, I knew I had failed to reach the level of funniness when the church organist arrived, took one look and said, "You should go to church like that."

I would love to post a photograph of my wonderful last year Jordan Wannabe costume, but the internet is forever and I would like to keep my job. Fortunately, none of my guests are Facebook fans. How girls dare to wear trampy costumes in the Age of Facebook is a mystery. I repeat: the internet is forever.

When I was at an American Catholic college, the conservative student newspaper complained that Hallowe'en on campus seemed like nothing but an excuse for girls--and, increasingly, guys--to wear sexy costumes: sexy nurse, sexy witch, sexy vampire--possibly even sexy Lonerganian Teaching Assistant (whoa!). It made seriously serious Catholic girls really uncomfortable to come to parties in unsexy costumes and, indeed, one of the great life lessons I have learned regarding my own confidence is that I must never come to a party looking bad. If I went anywhere dressed as a ladybug,I would try to be the most beautiful ladybug I could be. I'm not saying I would be a sexy ladybug; I'm saying I would aim for a Pretty Ladybug With High Self Esteem.

I bet the Catholic blogsphere is full of diatribes against Sexy Costumes today. Undoubtedly sexy costumes for children are just completely inappropriate. And, yes, really we Catholic adults should do our best not to scandalize others, although how we are likely to do that if the evening's community standard is Sexy French Nurse is beyond me.

However, I reluctantly admit that "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is a lousy attitude, even on Hallowe'en. My advice is to search the internet for Japanese goth outfits and take notes. Goths, bless 'em, tend to go for long skirts and black kilts. Guy or girl, you can dress all in black, iron your hair, powder your face, indulge in tons and tons of grey eyeshadow, pop in some vampire teeth and--hey presto! Modest yet attractive in a creepy way. If you have the money or the sewing skills, Beheaded French Aristo is also modest, attractive and creepy.

I feel a bit guilty harping on attractive, and if you are the kind of girl who enjoys dressing up in a gorilla suit or as a nuclear holocaust survivor, then I am full of admiration and giggles. However, I personally need to feel confident when I go to a party, especially if there are strangers or university students or such of my husband's pals who are under the impression that I am a little sister to be upbraided and oppressed at every opportunity.

The thing is, there is such a thing as being attractive in a classy way, even on Hallowe'en. Some of my girlfriends back home had a party where all the female guests had to dress like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's; they looked amazing. And for one of my favourite birthday parties ever, all the guests dressed up as Goths, many for the first time ever. We all looked great, even I, who was fighting the flu.

Now doubtless many of you are down on Hallowe'en, but I love it because it is the one day in the North American calendar when everyone can indulge their imagination to the extent of dressing up in costumes (and I love spooky stuff, so thrilling and so much less disgusting than the horrors of real life). Anyway, if you are going to a party tonight, I hope you have a very good time, and never forget you can look great without being flagrantly immodest, even on Hallowe'en.

The photo is of part of a tomb in a mostly Presbyterian Edinburgh graveyard. Spooky!

Drifting

I do hope Father B chimes in to tell us what he meant by "drifting" in the Seraphic Goes to Scotland "Knowing Young Nuns" post. It makes me think of skeletal wraiths in worn shrouds floating about the library downstairs. (Eeek!) Wraiths are a better image than zombies because although zombies are rather unthinking, they at least have a goal: "Braaains! Braaaains!"

To take a stab at what he might mean by drifting, I will say that I think he might mean a rather unthinking habit of following the path that grown-ups set for us, be they parents, teachers or taste-makers, while choosing those things that we think (for complicated reasons perhaps unknown even to ourselves) we think we should choose, and then coming to the huge foggy void that meets us when we finish education.

As much as we love Brideshead Revisited, I think we should be told that this is no model for the undergraduate life. Waugh almost ruined his life by behaving like Charles and Sebastian. It wasn't their fashionable homoeroticism (which in Brideshead Revisited is worded very, very carefully indeed) as much as their drunkenness, their snobbery, and their contempt for work in general.

Charles and Sebastian and Waugh himself were serious drifters. After Oxford, Waugh drifted into teaching little boys, whom he loathed, and longed for his fashionable friends and wrote. He almost drowned himself. Fortunately for him, he wrote a book about people who drift, and it was a huge hit. Realizing he could make money through writing, Waugh ceased to drift quite so much.

In this he was like Charles, who discovered he could make a living through painting, although poor Charles does drift in and out of marriage and from country to country and from love to love, doesn't he? Poor Sebastian drifts in and out of sobriety and finally applies to a religious order. They are very nice men, but they can't take him on because he really doesn't have much to offer by then, poor man.

I read Brideshead Revisited at 11 or so, and as its homoeroticism went way over my head, as Waugh meant it to do, it became my second Bible. I fell in love with Sebastian, of course, so thank goodness this was in Canada, or I might have ended up like the young Nancy Mitford: longing to marry a charming, handsome aristocrat who mysteriously was not at all attracted to women.

I fell in love also with Oxford, which made any Canadian university a sad second choice, with literature, which--as everything I studied was written before 1950--gave me an unhealthy distaste for ordinary employment, and with aesthetic thrills:

Then we talked of [the wine] and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, and on to the other, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, til we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic...

...And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle on the rocks.

'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning.

'Yes, I think so.'

'I think so too.'

The idea that young loves are replaced by higher, more progressive, loves also left its mark.

Waugh was uneasy about this book for the rest of his life, and well he should. He made the young Charles and Sebastian so enchanting that the young reader does not compute that Charles' youth leads him to an unhappy, lonely middle-age and that Sebastian ends up penniless, bald and drunk in some godforsaken African dump.

Hindsight is 20-20, and if I had not been such an ass when I was young--and I vaguely knew I was an ass, incidentally--I would have avoided anything hard-but-classy (like Ancient Greek, for which I simply was not clever enough) and worked my butt off for top grades, so as to go to law school. Alternatively, I could have gotten over my snobby attitude that only "dumb girls" studied French and Italian so as to become language teachers for the district school board. Their pension---aah! What was I thinking?!

I'll tell you what I was thinking--when I was thinking at all, that is, since most of the time I was feeling. I was thinking that I was just going to get a Ph.D. in English Lit on the strength of my delicious writing style, and that bestselling books would just come to me as I gazed from my mullioned office window into an elegant Victorian Gothic quadrangle. A much more important concern was whether I should marry or remain Single, entirely wedded to my Academic Career.

Meanwhile, I spent my five undergraduate years battling a kind of interior fog. It had crept in when I was a teenager, despite loving high school so much more than elementary. What I didn't know then, but certainly know now, is that I suffer from a tendency towards clinical depression.

Sitting about determined to be sad and snarky about everything is a moral failing, but clinical depression is a physical, as well as a psychic, illness. It can sometimes be managed by eating the right things and sometimes by medication. It can be worsened by all kinds of external things. It is a very interesting condition, as I can say at the moment, as I am between bouts. Of course, bouts are hellish.

If you have a terrible feeling that you are just drifting and are willing to do anything, including JUSTGETTINGMARRIED to get it over with, or JUSTSIGNINGTHEPAPER to get it over with, it might be that you have some kind of depression. And if you think you might have some kind of depression, it might be helpful to talk to a doctor or counsellor about it.

I am not a doctor, of course, but I do caution you against using the possibility of being "a depressive" to feed an addiction to DRAMA. I've met too many people hooked on the DRAMA of being on Zoloft, etc. It's not helpful. Really, my vulnerability to depression is just as banal as my youngest sister's vulnerability to bronchitis. The poor child never comes to the UK but she gets the most awful colds. And they go on forever.

Sadly, because I love them, you can't be on my kind of anti-depressants (SSRIs) if you are married and "open to life" because SSRIs scramble baby brains. However, I very much wish I had found out what the fog in my head was when I was 19 and gone straight onto lovely lovely What-Was-It or, actually, I suppose, since What-Was-It wasn't invented yet, its grandmother Prozac. [Update: On the other hand, I see that teenagers and adults under 24 aren't supposed to be on SSRIs, and that they don't work for milder forms of depression, which means most kinds of depression. Oh dear. Well, talk to a medical doctor, if you think you are depressed.]

And now I shall toddle off purposefully to the library to work on my paid article about James III/VIII and Family.

"Young Nuns"

In a rush, poppets. Read what I wrote over here, come back, discuss in the combox.

All I want to add is that the French nun who spoke to Catherine and the cameras stressed that a vocation can be judged by how much you want it. It is a falling in love.

"Falling in love with Jesus" does not necessarily mean becoming a monk or nun. You have to fall in love with that kind of life itself, and with a particular Rule, and with a particular group of people living the Rule. Jesus is the spouse of every Christian soul, so perhaps it is wrong to overemphasize the "Bride of Christ" aspect to religious life.

Strictly Dancing

It was quite hilarious and led to broken glass, but yesterday evening some of my friends and I began a Scottish country dance. Although we often meet for a meal after Mass on Sundays, we do not usually break into dancing. I do seem to recall spontaneous waltz some months ago, when someone began to play a waltz medley on the parlour piano, but usually no. This time I found a reel on Youtube, and my husband began to shout instructions, and almost before we knew what going on, all had joined hands and were jumping about in a circle.

Country dancing is great fun, and in its way it is like Gregorian chant: it doesn't need a lot of training and anyone can learn it. And I know anyone can learn it because I can learn it, and I am the biggest dunderhead at choreography ever. I was the bane of my ballet mistresses and their carefully planned year's end performances. Eurgh! My youngest sister is lucky to have been spared ballet; she was sent straight into Highland Dance.

So I must admit up front I have a terrible bias against partner dancing, including the waltz. I realize that in partner dancing the lady (or "follower") is supposed to just do whatever the gentleman (or "lead") wishes, but I resist such notions. Only my husband has the right to give me orders, thank you very much.

And in the case of gentlemen dancers so talented that they make the lucky ladies in their arms feel like they are floating, I am much too wicked for such temptations. My head might float away, and then where would I be, eh? So I leave the waltz, the tango, the salsa, and all other modern dances to the pure. That said, the easiest way to get over a crush on a Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or differently Germanic guy is dance a salsa with him. Total anaphrodesiac.

I hate partner dancing so much I wonder why I have taken so many classes in it. I think, though, that it is usually because of peer pressure. The words "Come on it will be fun" ring a bell, as do the words "I don't want to go by myself." It is the sort of thing my Single friends would do, and then not do again once they were married. The great majority of husbands are allergic to going out in the evening, to say nothing of going out swing- or salsa-dancing.

However, ethnic country dancing of the kind all generations can and often do at ethnic weddings is a different story entirely. For me, that means reels, jigs and dances named after such mysterious individuals as Gay Gordon and the Dashing White Sergeant. The happiest "real" dances I have done have been group affairs with callers and fiddles and occasionally pipes.

What is the difference? Not to sound like a member of the Anti-Sex League, but one big difference is that the emphasis upon Boy-Girl is almost entirely removed. It is never about Him and Me or Her and Him but upon All Of Us. In country dancing, men and women and men and men and women and women hold hands and link arms with zero sexual significance. Partners are switched with dizzying speed; all that is constant is the group.

In a world that acts as though sexual partnership is the be-all and end-all of post-pubescent existence, it is wonderful that there is an ancient social activity for men and women that celebrates them not as couples but as all together, married, single, widowed, clergy, teen.

Update: Okay, I realize that this is a total old lady question, but...ummmm...is there grinding in all the dance clubs now? I ask because I am plotting to go outdoors really late for an old person to check out a dance club downtown soon, and I have heard weird stories about women in it.

Compassion

Some men are jerks; most men are not. Frankly, I do not think there is a better way of correcting the bitterness searching Single women so often feel that by upbraiding the little voice that tells them the "problem" is men.

I think it must be "Man" week on Seraphic Singles because I keep thinking about the ways in which society has shortchanged boys and men. The "hook up" culture of high school, college and clubbing is horrible for women (and the children they have or abort), but it is also horrible for men. Sex on tap is emasculating. Past generations of men knew this, from Homer--who portrayed Paris as a dumb pretty-boy--to George Bernard Shaw, who credits Napoleon with saying that "woman is the occupation of the idle man."

I do not think the deep rift between men and women can be healed until women are moved to compassion for men. And by this I mean a real, disinterested compassion, one that is not about binding a man to one's side, and not about being supported by a man or having children of a man.

Men, like women, want to be loved for themselves, their concrete selves. Women are terrified that they will have to support a man who just mooches off them; men have the same fear. Women are no longer so worried that men will see them as baby-machines; this is something that now terrifies men, and it should: occasionally I get emails from women who wonder if they should marry a man they don't love just so they can have babies. Imagine if that man was your brother or son or friend.

It is hard, as a woman, to feel compassion for men and see how weak and enslaved they are to so much, including their own sexual drives and expectations. Men are usually bigger than us and stronger; that can be scary. Men can be very dangerous, to us but also to themselves. Young women do not videotape each other being pulled on sleds along icy highways by cars; young men do and if the video makes it to TV, not-so-young men watch, absolutely rapt.

However, it is not very difficult to see how advertisers, in cahoots with the entertainment industry, are constantly stabbing through the weakest link in men's armour, their sexuality, to separate them from their money.

It's so base and yet so basic that it's part of the furniture of daily life. Every morning when I check my email I have to erase yet another invitation to increase the size of a body part I don't have. If I walk along Toronto's Yonge Street or Montreal's Rue Ste. Catharine or Edinburgh's Lothian Road, naked neon dames flash on and off, tempting men to walk inside the strip club. And the pop singer Rhianna squirms around in tiny outfits on TV, singing about "whips and chains" exciting her.

(Imagine if people forced you to read erotic passages every day while handsome men gently gave you back massages. Exactly.)

And it's not just the entertainment industry. In my local medical office, scowling, sexy, nearly-naked men glare from posters warning men with SSA that only condoms save. "Relationships can't protect you from HIV" says the poster, a blatant, brainless lie if you think for two minutes about what "relationship" actually means. And it makes me angry as a human being that the National Health Service thinks it needs to use soft porn to get its advice across to certain men.

And then there's the "progressive" double-standard, as I noted while studying for my "Living in the UK" exam: more women than men receive higher education, but nobody seems to think that this is a problem. The fact that men make more money (if they still do in the UK, which I doubt, given the benefits culture and post-industrial collapse) than women is seen to be a problem.

So yes, men sometimes hurt our feelings and sometimes disappoint us, especially by not matching up to the version of them we have in our imaginations. And they sometimes embarrass us by asking for that which a big, lying, pornographic, entertainment/psychiatric/ideological industry has led them to expect. But they are our fellow human beings, and they are in a terrible fix. I think that it is our job to help to save them from drowning--without, of course, being dragged under ourselves.

Compassion literally means "suffering with."


Update: Thanks to Healthily Sanguine in the combox for linking to this! A hilarious and touching example of How Men Think.

Maggie Gallagher on the Atlantic Piece

Good response by Maggie Gallagher to the Atlantic "All the Single Ladies" piece.

My one caveat is that many Single women do not choose to be Single and that many women who have been open to marriage, and have lived according to Christian virtues of chastity, do not marry until their forties or later.

Singleness can and should be celebrated for its blessed opportunities, which do not include the opportunity to get it on with a variety of "partners", no matter how much younger.

Men Are Who They Are

...and not who you wish they would be.

This is a quote from He's Just Not That Into You, a book I very much enjoyed, although religious girls have to mentally rewrite some parts. For example, the authors are of the opinion that if a man is that into you, he will do his best get you into bed. Catholics and other Christians and women from other religious traditions know that this is not necessarily true for men committed to their faith tradition. If an unmarried religious man is "that into you" he marries you, and if a married religious man is "that into you" he tries to avoid you, and if a priest is "that into you" he goes into denial and blames you for the whole thing. (Ha, ha, just kidding, priests. Mostly.)

(By the way, we know crushes on priests are very, very dangerous, yes? If you have one, don't beat yourself up--crushes are just the common cold of the psyche--but don't encourage it either.)

Anyway, I have been thinking about men this week because the combox has been a bit harsh on them, and the last thing I want to do is encourage a men-are-scum mentality. Men-are-scum is not a rational belief, and it is the hallmark of the Bitter Woman. Bitterness is the Single's Enemy Number One.

I may be the General of Generalizations, but the truth of the matter is that all men, although they share maleness and thus tend to share certain behaviours, are unique, and that should always be taken into consideration. And men should be taken into consideration in a logical, methodical way. When I was a teenager, I would get a crush on a guy based on what he looked like, and from his looks I extrapolated what he might be like. And then I would be away into Fantasyville because very rarely did I get to know my crush very well.

I knew boys and men in books and on TV a zillion times better than boys and men in real life. And in elementary school I had found it very disappointing that boys and men were so unlike boys and men in books and on TV. They used bad language and said very rude things and either hated girls or snogged them behind the school (or both), and often delighted in making the weak suffer, which was not something Aragorn son of Arathorn--or even Henry of the Purple Crayon--had let me to expect.

Anyway, now that I am grown-up and even married, I take a scientific interest in concrete men and watch them and listen to them and try to determine what they are like and to predict what they will do in a given situation. For the generalities, I rely on books like He's Just Not That Into You and mull over things men have told me about men and whether experience has proven those things true.

Anything is better than wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is when you think about men not in terms of who they really are but in terms of whom you wish them to be. A very, very, basic example of this is mistaking "A man with such a pleasant smile must be a wonderful man" for a viable intellectual conclusion instead of a wish. (N.B. The worst of the bullies of my elementary school had a smile that charmed the hearts of all female creatures older than the ones he beat up/molested.)

Another wish is that men be as pure as Saint Dominic Savio, who once tore up a magazine of "bad pictures" that had found its way into his schoolyard and was being gazed at by his fellow students. However, very few men are as pure as Saint Dominic Savio, who wanted to be a priest, and died at 14 anyway. Come to think of it, most women are not as pure as Saint Dominic Savio either, as you should reflect the next time you leaf through Cosmo, Vogue or a romance novel.

I am reminded of a great young Catholic friend, a married guy, who half-ruefully told me (when my other friend his beautiful wife was in the room) that he thought he might be too preoccupied with sex, and I said that I didn't see anything wrong with that as he was a young man, and married, and it was good for the species.

I thought of this because of Denise's anecdote (thank you, Denise) about the guy who said he and his friends thought of the kind of girl who threw herself at men in bars as "Practice." Denise was angry about this, and I would be angry, too, although not because men think like of girls "like that" as "Practice". Men have thought of girls "like that" as "Practice" for at least six thousand years. If they didn't avail themselves of the girls and call them "Practice", they merely despised them from afar and called them "Harlots." The Old Testament stresses avoiding such women entirely.

I can't speak for Denise, but I would be angry because not only do I not want to be thought of as "Practice", I want to be the sort of woman to whom a man is embarrassed to reveal the seamier side of male culture. I want to inspire a man to think of higher things, etc., etc., and to reflect that all womanhood is noble and that all women are made in the image and likeness of God. Obviously, the poor benighted goop who shocked Denise was not inspired by Denise to reflect upon this. But at least he is old-fashioned enough to believe that there are some girls, like Denise, who are not "for Practice." Some men think all women are up for grabs.

This is not me saying that you should give male sluts the time of day. In fact, if I were Denise, I would have told the man that I was offended by his exploitative attitude towards the silly girls who, like everyone else, just want to be loved, and gone home. But I would not have been particularly surprised by his attitude because men-in-general have, openly or secretly, despised women "like that" forever.

As generalizations go, I think I am on solid ground when I say that. Meanwhile, the substance of the post is "Men are who they are and not who you want them to be" and this is all just commentary. I will just add that if you let a man talk more than you, or just sit silently listening to him interact with a group, you can learn a lot about him.

Don't block it out or conveniently forget it because it does not jive with your expectations. If he says something that seems disappointing or unreasonable, and you are reluctant to ask questions about what he has said, go check it out with your brother or a good male friend.