Mark Shea Gets It

Yesterday Aussie Girl in Australia mentioned in the combox that Mark Shea had apologized to sexual assault survivors and taken down his offending post mentioning Lara Logan. It was quite late when I saw that, but I clicked over to Mark Shea's place and behold. (Ignore the dumber comments by the almost entirely male commentators. In fact, just skip the combox this time.)

That's one thing I like about Mark Shea: he is willing to admit when he is wrong, apologize and make amends by taking posts down. He lets you see his conscience at work, which is very brave, I must say.

Meanwhile, Mark's mea culpa reminded me of my post on his offending post, in which I suggest that any married man blogger think about his wife before posting anything touching on sexual assault:

I kept mulling it over, largely focusing on the logic and arguments and not really thinking beyond that. Then something occurred to me.

Would I have written it had my own wife been a survivor of rape? If the discussion has opened old wounds for her, would I have said it? The answer was a very clear, “No.” Nothing was worth making her cry or hurt. Even landing a good punch on real defenders of real evil. In fact, to do so was to fail to see her humanity, which is what defenders of torture do to their victims.

"Logic," said Spock's mother to Spock in Star Trek IV (or was it V?), "is only the beginning of wisdom."

When it comes to women's pain, the eyes of the heart see more clearly that the cold gaze of logic. I think this good advice for men who are absolutely bewildered by women's grief and anger.

And now I'm going to take my own post down, as it has served its purpose. And I hope what sexual assault survivors understand from my post and will now take from Mark Shea's apology is that we--your fellow Catholics, or just your fellow decent human beings--are listening to you. What you say and feel matters. We respect your feelings and opinions, and we don't want to add to your hurt. We hope for your healing, and we pray for an end to sexual violence.

When You Can't Stand Her Man

Is there anything more annoying than seeing your pal eat her heart out over a complete jerk? It's really awful. You hear all about Scooter (let's call him Scooter) and thus you are naturally interested in meeting this paragon. And then you meet Scooter and you are horrified. It's not who Scooter is--it's not that he's too old or too young or too foreign or too whatever, for you are a fair-minded woman--it's what he says or does to your friend and perhaps says or does to you.

And then, inevitably, your friend calls you up and asks, "What do you think?!" Or maybe she doesn't ask, even though you are dying for her to ask, so that you can try to shake sense into her addled brain, and you feel terribly unhappy.

For many years, I was under the impression that it was pointless and indeed counter-productive to tell a female friend what I thought of her boyfriend or crush object. I noticed, in high school, that a boyfriend could most definitely come between two friends and if a girl said, "I don't like your boyfriend," that could be the end of a beautiful friendship. This struck me as very stupid, as I had also noticed that high school romances didn't last that long whereas women often keep their high school pals for the rest of their lives.

But I didn't want to lose my friends, so I kept a shut-mouth policy well into university and beyond. I more-or-less kept my mouth shut about the fact that I didn't like what this friend's boyfriend said or did until after the boyfriend was history. Then I would let fly.

This policy changed, however, after a very good friend ended up in a long-term abusive relationship that left her a shadow of her former self. And it occurred to me that keeping my mouth shut was cowardly and that if a friendship can't survive me saying "I don't like his attitude towards.../I don't like how he treats you", then the friendship wasn't that strong in the first place.

So now I have become a menace to the male sex. When a woman asks me "What do you think of him?" I tell her what I think of him. If I think he's really cute, I tell her that I think he's really cute. If I think he is deeply unattractive, I communicate that he is deeply unattractive.

However, there are ways of doing this. I have had two bits of feedback in recent months about decisions women made about men based on what I said about them. Of course I am longing to share.

The first was by a very young and beautiful girl with a sunny, trusting view of the world. She believed that the middle-aged grad student who had asked to come along with her to church really had done so because he was interested in Catholicism. Ah ha ha ha. Oldest trick in the non-Catholic book. After an initially friendly chat with the middle-aged grad student, I was 100% sure he was not interested in Catholicism but in my very young and beautiful friend. Which I told her. I did not add that I was all too familiar with that kind of chippy, defensive, domineering, self-loathing kind of middle-aged male graduate student. Instead I just remarked that he was a hundred and two. And, apparently, that number stuck in her head. X, he's a hundred and two. (By the way, I cheerfully confess that I myself am fully a hundred and two.)

The second was by a friend who at the time had been ground down by a terrible relationship and so, of course, was ripe to be ground down by another one. I was really very frightened that she would consent to go out with this overbearing guy--her landlord, in fact. I was very down on the idea of her having dinner with this landlord, who was also, incidentally, a slumlord. And when I met the land/slumlord, I was even more down on the idea. Really, I was frantic.

"You said he had a head shaped like a potato," said my friend, years later. And that is what had stuck in her head. For he did have a head shaped like a potato, and she seeing his head as I saw his head broke the spell he was weaving.

I am not sure what sort of universal lesson I can make out of two anecdotes. After all, I have a counter-anecdote, in which I offered female solidarity to a Catholic woman whose boyfriend--whom all her friends despised--was pressuring her for sex and although she had told all the girls this, she told me in friendship-ending terms to mind my own business.

My counter-example leads me to the conclusion that you might be want to be super-diplomatic about lousy boyfriends when it comes to women who aren't your best friends. And you might want to wait until a woman asks for your opinion--explicitly or implicitly--before you say anything. (If she is sporting a black eye or is otherwise obviously miserable, I'd take the plunge though, personally.) And when you are choosing words, if you do choose to choose words, pick a startling image--something short, pithy and arguably "non-judgmental" that just seems to sum up the man, or what he looks like--that will be sure to linger in your friend's mind. You might have a lot more influence over your friend's opinions than you think.

Update: Before anyone asks, I have to say I think it even riskier to say what you think of a guy's girlfriend. Heavens! Unless he's your brother, of course, and he's already feeling unhappy. Don't tick off your boyfriends' sisters, girls.

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah!

Well, hello there, poppets! It is my birthday today, so I am in a mood to discuss birthdays which, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, appear to be more important to girls than to guys. I will not state categorically that birthdays are more important to girls than to guys because I try to save my gross generalizations for more important stuff.

Anyway, when you are Single, but sometimes also when you are married, because of the guys-not-always-getting-the-importance-of birthdays factor, making the most of your birthday is up to you. Not telling anybody it is your birthday and then getting more and more depressed all day about an uncaring world before crying yourself asleep at night is just plain wrong.

Forget that. If you are the sort of woman--like me--who cares about birthdays and thinks of her birthday--as I think of my birthday--as a temporal extension of her very SELF, then you have to do a lot of prep.

First of all, you have to let everybody know that your birthday is coming up. Facebook has made this easier than ever, for Facebook can tell all your Facebook friends for you. But you can also let your friends know by inviting them to a par-tay. Unless you are up to 90% certain your best pals are throwing you a surprise party, you have to do this yourself. Frankly, I don't think it matters who organizes it, just as long as it is organized.

Second of all, you must buy yourself a little present. Or several little presents. Or a big present. I, for example, bought myself a manicure. For one shining hour this morning, I sat across from a very nice manicurist, an excellent conversationalist, and watched the transformation of my fingernails. And yesterday I popped into a charity shop and, seeing the perfect little green dress for £6.50, bought it to wear today.

Third of all, you must do a birthday thing on your actual birthday. My birthday dinner has been moved to Friday night because of the difficulties of having a party on Thursday night when 90% of our parties end at 2 AM. But, you know, Friday is not my birthday. If you are a birthday purist, as am I, it is okay to have delayed birthday celebration, but only if you do something nice on your birthday. So I had lunch out with B.A. and coffee out with a friend who can't make it tomorrow.

And now another friend has dropped by as a surprise and I must go...!

Just a Number

To repeat, my three cardinal rules of dealing with men are as follow:

1. Men are who they are, and not who you want them to be.
2. Men are attracted to whom they are attracted and not to whom you think they should be attracted.
3. You can find out what men think, but you won't always like it.

This is not to say there is not a certain amount of pain wrapped up in this. An older woman I know--once a great beauty, if this adds to the story--bought a computer from her son's pal. She found p*rn on it, and she was devastated. She could hardly believe that that nice young man thought of women that way, and when next she saw him, she gave him a look. He blushed to the ears.

In this case a woman had merely stumbled on a guilty secret. The young man had no idea that his pal's mother had taken it personally--something the defenders of p*rn don't really get. They think the women who admit they don't like it are joyless prudes, but in fact we don't like it because we don't like what it says about women, which is to say, ourselves. Every dirty photograph is a judgement, a measure, standard: this is what a man thinks a woman is supposed to look like. And this is why breast implants and Brazilian waxes are now mainstream, and why some women now submit to genital cosmetic surgery. Such women want to be "normal", and this is what "men" (and women long for men) have said is normal and desirable.

But then there are men who make no secret of the fact that they have certain, quantifiable standards. Older men tend not to reveal them in front of women; either they have become kinder or they have learned some sense. But there are still, as there were when I was a teenager, young men who will shout numbers out car windows as women walk by.

Such a trivial incident, and such an ugly suburban parking lot, outside such a 1980s excuse for a suburban dance club--and yet I can still remember the three of us girls looking up, startled, as a car pulsating with music cruised past and young male voices shouted "6! 7! 7.5!"

In case the ranking is different where you are, these numbers were out of "10." "10" was the name of a film starring Bo Derek; when it appeared in cinemas,I was too young to see it, but I understood that "10" was what Bo Derek was, and her braided hair inspired a craze for braids among white girls, including little white girls like me.

I know the numbers change from country to country because a man casually bragged to me of the magical golden proportions expected of women in his country, and I went blind for a second. Actually blind. I've met one of his country's most elite scientists, a young Single woman, intense, incredibly intelligent, devout, attractive--and possibly not fitting into the magical golden proportions although how would I know? It would never have occurred to me in a million years to see her that way. Although I suppose if she walked down the street back home, that's all certain men would see: Oops, no golden proportions. Not for me.

My momentary blindness was caused by rage, and please don't ask me what the golden proportions are because I don't want to ruin your day. It's bad enough to have to tell you that some men--and not just sociopaths on the internet--still think like that. And I was not just mad for this scientist, and all of you, but for myself, because of course I do not fit those magical golden proportions either. And although it was completely illogical to feel hurt by that, I did. In A Handmaid's Tale (Opowiesc podrecznej), the Unwomen are all sent out to clean up radioactive areas; I think Atwood was channeling women's deep, deep fear of being considered Unwomen by men, any men.

But I should stress that some men still think like that. Not all men think like that. Very sensibly, I did what all happily married women should do when they are grappling with male psychology and consulted my husband.

"Is there some sort of magical proportion standard for women's bodies in Britain?" I asked.

Poor B.A. Now that I think about it, this is a heck of a question to ask a fellow when he first wakes up in the morning.

"No," said B.A. "Well, there was a lot of interest in Pippa Middleton's bottom, of course."

"I don't think anyone talked in terms of numbers, though, did they?" I said, greatly cheered.

"Maybe British men are bad at maths," said B.A.

Good. Or rather, good that they haven't agreed on a way to reduce women to numbers. Being reduced to mere bodies is bad enough, being reduced to numbers is truly dehumanizing.

Self-Censored

Sometimes I actually do censor myself. Wait a week or so for today's post. It was satisfactorily ranty, but prudence, prudence...

Beauty and the Market

Coco Chanel famously said that any woman who, after the age of 25, looks into the mirror to be pleased is a fool. But never mind mirrors. This is the age of the image--even more, I imagine, than in Coco Chanel's day. Worse, it is the age of the doctored image, so that most of the images of women we see don't look exactly like the models themselves. In related news, Cindy Crawford's daughter has begun her modelling career at the age of ten.

I don't need to tell you how this makes the rest of us feel, although of course feeling inadequate in the looks department is nothing new. When asked if she had any regrets in life, American former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of enormous accomplishment and popularity, said she wished she had been prettier.

To channel a very early blog post, I once complained to my mother about my lack of early success in attracting boys. I felt majorly ripped off that I did not look like Brooke Shields, for example. If I looked like Brooke Shields, I was certain, all the boys would like me.

"If you looked like Brooke Shields," said my mother, "you would just have her problems."

That made a deep impression on me at the time because I knew Brooke had played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, and she was also famous for having also been in The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, all of which films no one my age (or, indeed, Brooke's age when she made them) was allowed to see. Grown men did seem to have a prurient interest in very young, very beautiful girls, and they hadn't changed by 1996 when Liv Tyler starred in Stealing Beauty.

All the same, though. All the same. All the same, it does feel to many of us girls that we have just missed out on seizing the apples on the tip-top of the beauty tree. Of course, it doesn't occur to us that this is because not-so-stellar-in-the-looks-department men and women are nevertheless attracted to each other and thus produce millions of not-so-stellar-in-the-looks-department babies, including most of us. Just so long as we are clean and good-tempered, what we look like shouldn't matter a damn. Unless we are selling stuff. Ah, there's the rub.

I am brooding on all this because I have been out having my photograph taken by B.A. This is for an official "author photograph" and frankly I would have gone to a professional, were we not so intensely broke in that way people so often are after Christmas. (Did you know that if you make carrot-coriander soup from scratch, 8 servings cost only about 90p whereas two servings from a can of Baxter's cost £1.09? Fact.)

The session filled me with gloom until B.A. began to shout "Cracking!" in the way photographers do in movies, which I now realize is to make the models smile more naturally. And he also took 88 photos, which was equally cheering because the essence of having a good photo taken is good luck. The more photos taken, the greater the likelihood that one of them will look good. If you aren't beautiful, there is always the hope that you might look striking, like Jane Morris or Tilda Swinton or the lady monster from Where the Wild Things Are.

In some lights I look like the lady monster from Where the Wild Things Are, but in others I look as though I might have descended from Jane Morris. And this false family resemblance--although I am perfectly well aware that what we do is so infinitely superior to what we merely look like--has long been a source of comfort to me.

The Merciful Penance of Silence

I am sure I have blogged two or three times on this before, but I had a question the other day that has inspired me to blog on it again.

The topic is "Assuaging Feelings of Guilt by Blabbing."

Now, I will be the first to admit that talking makes me feel good. If I feel badly about something, I want to talk and talk and talk until I feel better. This is often at one in the morning, so it is fortunate that most of my female friends live in a different time zone.

However, over the years, I have learned what to tell my friends, and which friends to tell, and when I absolutely must keep my mouth shut and just suffer in silence. And when it is something that is clearly my fault and I feel guilty about it, even though I have made amends to whomever (if applicable/wise) and gone to confession, then I know that suffering in silence is part of my penance. And it is a merciful penance.

It is a merciful penance because although God forgives, the world does not. And if you don't forgive yourself enough to keep your own counsel, what makes you think the world will forgive you when you don't? And I'm not just talking about the world's delight in humiliating its enemies--look at all the mud it slings at Sarah Palin. I'm also talking about the actual harm public confessions can do to innocent people in the world.

For example, recently in Canada, the lawyer of a bishop caught with child porn on his computer explained to the court that the bishop was not a pedophile, really, but a homosexual who had had a series of homosexual one night stands and been in a secret homosexual relationship for ten years.

Maybe the court was, like, "Aw. Poor guy. Time served. Send him home." But Canadian Catholics were, like, "Say WHAT?! Our bishop also WHAT?!"

There are some sins that just grab the imagination of even very easygoing, very live-and-let-live, very kindly people and don't let go. Sexual sins are big on the list, thanks to the power sex has over the human imagination. Sacrilege is a biggy because of our passionate feelings for the sacred. (And combine sex with sacrilege--like having an affair with a priest--and blam! No Catholic who knows will ever forget.) Killing people or even family pets: yikes. Beating up people who were smaller than you at the time: ouch.

If you have committed these kinds of sins, no matter how sorry you are and no matter how much you have changed your life, they can colour other people's perceptions of you in ways you probably will not like and in ways that are not good for them.

St. Augustine, one of the most important Catholic Christian thinkers ever and writer of almost countless homilies and treatises, is unfortunately most famous for saying "Make me chaste, but not yet."

Thomas Merton, who wrote many beautiful books, was famous at my Canadian theology schools for having had an affair with a nurse. One elderly student proclaimed aloud that this should be evidence towards his canonization.

A much more likely candidate for canonization, a woman, was a modern-day St. Francis in her love for the poor, but it turns out she had an abortion before she became a Christian. She regretted this terribly and, as I suspect she knew perfectly well, if this had been widely known in her lifetime, she would not have gotten an iota of support for her sometimes controversial work. It is still not widely known, which is why I have not mentioned her name. I once read that someone justified her abortion by saying that this woman had had one; and all I can say is that the probable-saint would have been in agony had she heard that.

Before this talk-show, reveal-all age, people crept off timidly to confess their sins to priests, confident in the seal of the confessional, and to doctors, confident in doctors' codes of confidentiality. The seal and the codes are there for a reason, which is that there is a danger that people will be terribly hurt if their sins become common knowledge. Other people will be hurt, too. You think the other boys at school never told Princes William and Harry what the tabloids were saying about their parents' sins?

We are all sinners, and it is good to remember that, but it is not good to air to the whole world the exact particulars. So if you are feeling particularly badly about stuff you have done, even after going to confession, I recommend talking about it again to a priest in the confessional or to a therapist bound by a professional code of confidentiality. I absolutely beg you not to write about it on the internet, where it would remain forever. Such silence is not cowardice; it is prudence. And prudence is the "cause, measure and form of all virtues."