A year ago if you had told me I’d get into spinning, I would have told you that you were crazy. Like CrossFit, which I haven’t yet tried, spinning always struck me as one of those cults. It’s the beaming face of someone just dying to tell you:
“I used to be miserable like you, until I found:
Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior
The Paleo Diet
Neo-Conservatism
My Current Lover
Ketones"
I tried yoga for a while, but lacked the Zen personality and discipline. The challenge was finding the right outlet for my innately American bifurcation of hedonism and masochism. We like our masochism “lite” -- just enough self-flagellation to “take the edge off” the guilt of the anticipated cocktail of indolence and self-indulgence, later in the day.
In this worldview of Excess, Exercise, as a form of self-improvement and admission that we are innately Not Worthy, is the heir to Calvinist, Puritan culture. It is the ghosts of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or Cotton Mather’s faith and works, as the two oars with which the righteous man attempts to navigate his way through the treacherous waters of life. At the same time, we’ve replaced the transubstantiation of the Body and the Blood, with diet cola, margarine, skim milk, the egg white omelette, and gluten-free diet (for non-celiacs) -- in short, the charming idea that we can have our cake and eat it too...even if it doesn’t taste very good.
I immediately know another person and I will understand one another and possibly become great friends if they admit to two things: hating egg white omelettes and exercise.
Two conversations inspired me to attend Wheel of Torture. The first was with a German woman, who told me how she had been a very accomplished athlete in college, so much so that she injured her back and had suffered lifelong complications. These had now flared up to the point where she could no longer attend classes at Wheel of Torture. She told me that she missed these classes so much so that she was planning to undergo an extremely painful and invasive surgery and recovery, just so she could return. I was immediately impressed. No wonder the Germans gave us Protestantism and flirted with the idea of a master race.
In contrast, a few years ago my French spouse thoroughly enjoyed the interlude of having a broken ankle, from a ski accident -- the perfect injury “lite,” where you get all the sympathy and don’t have to endure much pain. He delighted in such consequences as being catered to by his wife, not having to do anything or have anything required of him, opiate painkillers, and the ability to focus on Physics.
My second inspiration was entirely different. I was having coffee with a good friend. Every person should have a friend like “Jackie,” if they enjoy outrageous, irreverent and salacious conversation. Jackie had recently met up with an ex, who after dating her, decided he preferred men. That wasn’t what bothered Jackie.
“‘Ben’ had completely buffed up. He proudly told me that he now attends the 6:30am class at Wheel of Torture every day. And then it struck me. Here it was: the prime example of sexism in our country: not the obvious pussy grab or the underhanded slur, but the fact that even men have to up their game when they start dating men. Meanwhile, the middle-aged, mushy body was good enough for us women. That f@cker, I bet he even started waxing too!”
I zoned out. I wasn’t thinking of sexism or the slings and arrows of Jackie’s love life. I was thinking of the quick fix. If one month of Wheel of Torture was enough for gay men to notice Ben, maybe it would achieve the necessary calorie burning and muscle toning for me? Perhaps even gay men would approve of me.
If you blended a Satanic ritual, tent revival and a rock concert, you’d come up with something resembling spinning. Wheel of Torture, appropriately, is located in a basement. Like many franchise meetings, I suspect each coven of Wheel of Torture reflects the local demographic. For my neighborhood (and the class times I attend), this means predominantly blond, middle-aged, lululemon-wearing women. Self-consciously, I tell myself I am not a Basic Bitch. I am not a groupie, I am not a follower, I am not like them. I search for some evidence of this. All I can come up with to mildly differentiate myself, is that I am a brunette.
The men in the class are a definite minority. I mentally divide them into three categories: gay men, middle-aged men trying to fight the “dadbod,” young hipster Millennials, often training for triathlons. You would think the opportunity to spend an hour ogling the backsides of a bunch of fit, appearance-conscious women, twerking and exerting themselves in tight clothing would be Shangri-La for straight men. The only possible explanation I can think of for why there aren’t more straight men in Spinning is that the workout or the estrogen level is too much for them.
The initiate enters a dark room of anonymous people, mounted on stationary bicycles, arranged in a semicircle (often prolonged by mirrored wall). The initiate will remain anonymous, unless he or she becomes a regular, in which case, the instructor honors you with a special shout out, as one of the “Saved.” In my case, I was only too happy to sweat off my sins in anonymity. Once class starts, the instructor calls out the cues. Pranayama breathing is one way to try and quiet your mind. Another way is to spend your time busily adjusting torque, speed, and moving between three different positions on a bicycle, in a dark room, blasting music at an ear-violating pitch. The Try Hard Die Hard’s register their names so they pop up on the class monitor. I haven’t worked up the courage to do this. I also can’t think of a cool enough handle.
One month into Wheel of Torture and I still can barely figure out how to fit the shoes into the clips and I hate it, but I keep going back, because I like the way I look and feel afterwards. Some days I’m trying hard not to throw up because if I don’t eat first thing in the morning I basically can’t function. I am pretty sure the guards at Guantanamo blast this exact same soundtrack to prisoners’ cells. Think up tempo, Trap version of “Life is a Highway.” Actually, on second thoughts, I imagine Gitmo guards probably blast the Original version of “Life is a Highway.”
Each instructor has their signature motivational cues:
Be stronger than your excuse!
Most people can’t do what you’re doing right now!
If you can’t keep up with the torque and speed, don’t beat yourself up. You already did the first, most important thing today, you showed up! (I make a mental note of this one).
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone!
If you were able to believe in Santa Claus for 8 years, you can believe in yourself for 5 minutes!
Once you join Wheel of Torture, you can search for your “guru.” The nice thing about the class format is that you can shop around for this instructor with minimal awkwardness and commitment. It takes me almost a month to find her. She is petite and feminine, but tough, with muscular arms, a good-natured Irish face, and reddish brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a can-do attitude. “Mary Alice” has the right combination of workout and playlist, so that I feel challenged and don’t see time pass -- per my other compulsive gear check during Spinning -- using the mini “active recoveries” to look at my watch. When she plays an up tempo remixes of Prince’s “Dirty Diana” and Beyonce’s “Formation,” I’m hooked.
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Saturday, January 31, 2015
"What Does She Do With Her Time"
Why thank you very much ______ for asking that question. My husband asks me the same thing. What do I do to while away my hours as a Lady of Leisure? The more pertinent question might be what DID I do in the past that enables my present situation?
In my case, the past specifically refers to the eve of the year 2000 - a very nice celebration for most people, but a particularly LOW point in my life. I was working at a 30 hour-a-week corporate job (that provided us with much needed health insurance) and taking care of an 18-month old toddler, when my husband's company unraveled. We lost all of our own and some portion of my in-laws' savings and I was recovering from a miscarriage that might have been brought on by the stress of the failed company, exacerbated by the threatened law suit by his former business partner. I don't have any real interest in explaining here what I did at this point (except to my own children, so that they understand the origins of the opportunities they now enjoy), but it involved picking myself up and getting back on my feet, rolling up my sleeves and putting myself to work helping my husband create the company that not only recouped our own and the family money we lost, but provided the basis for the financial security we enjoy today.
Did I have people to help me with some house work and childcare? Yes. What does that really mean? It means that, while these people have a set list of every day responsibilities, you have to constantly manage them. It is generally pretty hard to explain to somebody how to cook a meal or clean a toilet if you have never done so yourself. It also means these people generally communicate problems to you and you have to figure out how to solve them. The timing of these problems is rarely convenient. The moment you are in the middle of dealing with a PR nightmare where, unawares to one half of the company, the other half of the company has staged a walk-out and set up a competing shop, will be the exact moment your nanny calls you up to tell you that the washing machine is leaking water all over the kitchen or your child's school calls you to pick them up because the child has suffered a concussion.
But that's all in the past. What do I do today? When I worked outside the house, I shared the same challenges as many women of my generation. The difference is that now, when I or my contemporaries "work" in the house, very few people, including myself (thus the use of brackets around the word work) take what we do seriously. Still you asked for it, so here's a list:
Leveraging my technology skills: The glasses in the dishwasher are coming out opaque? Time for some Jet-dry!
Meal Preparation: Making sure my family enjoys a tasty variety of healthy meals that include protein and vegetables -- looking up recipes, grocery shopping, cooking and making sure the kids do the dishes. Note: the amount of time you spend preparing the meal and its healthiness will be inversely proportional to how much your family appreciates it.
On Children and Chores: Men tend to think that children will do things Because You Asked Them To. They give an order and trust in the results. This is a big mistake. Children (like husbands) make a habit of not listening to you 90% of the time. Also, while whatever you have just asked them to do is very important for you, it is a complete pain in the neck for them. And then you have you have to understand the logic of the child brain. This operates as follows: "Mom and Dad are always yelling at me anyway. If I don't do what they ask, I at least get to have more time for gaming, watching crap on Youtube, bla bla. There is a fifty percent chance I will get away with it. Even if I don't get away with it, then I'm no worse off than I would be anyway." Solution? Always. Follow. Up.
Managing the House: At any given time, ten issues will need fixing/taking care of at the house. Basic high-school level familiarity with Existentialism and the Myth of Sisyphus helps me understand how this process unfolds. Every time you fix one item on the list, another item will appear -- thus all the work I do, in addition to being unappreciated is essentially futile. I use my "Physics for Poets" class, taken to fill the dreaded C category -- math, science, technology -- college graduation requirement -- to understand the Quantum Appliance. The quantum appliance is that appliance that malfunctions 90% of the time with the EXCEPTION of that one rare day when "Cletus" the redneck repair guy with ear gauge and always-visible butt-crack, shows up. Cletus will then claim he cannot fix your appliance unless he sees it malfunction. Needless to say, that is the one time the appliance won't oblige.
Housecleaning: Given the fact that I don't have a brigade of domestic help 24/7 and my husband and children, Hurricane Fleury, are capable of trashing the house in one hour flat, not to mention the low level of attention to detail my kids put into doing the dishes at night, I would be living in a complete pig-sty if I were not frequently picking things up and scrubbing dishes or wiping down counters. Also, given these conditions, it is also hard for house-cleaners to be effective if you don't first (or simultaneously) pick things up and put them in order.
Healthcare Specialist: It's been a lovely year so far (like most mom's the year starts with the Hallelujah moment of "Back to School" in the fall and progressively begins to suck the life energy out of you from there): we've had Broken foot one (child A), mono (child A), Concussion (Child B), broken foot two (Child D), pseudo concussion (Child D) - the kind where he tells the nurse "everything is all blurry" but suddenly springs to life once he comes home and wants you to make him pancakes and plays some pretty lively rounds of GI Joe. This culminated in the call from the school nurse (she and I are best buds) on Friday - "Child C showed up with a panic attack in my office this morning claiming he is dying of a fatal disease whose symptoms include rash on chest, yellow liquid poo, and 99 degree fever." Oh and the most dreaded words any mother could hear? "Mom my head is itching," prelude to that other obligatory parental right of passage -- The Lice.
Homeschooling: No matter how good your public school system is or how much you pay for your children's private school education, you will probably wind up partially home-schooling your children. When I was in kindergarten through 3rd grade, I had no real homework and spent my free time happily watching Tom and Jerry or riding my bike. Somehow, despite the fact that I, and generations of kids like me, went to school with larger class sizes and no real homework until fourth or fifth grade, we managed to learn to read and write. Not so anymore.... and it only goes downhill from there. Everything has gotten lots more competitive. Unless your child scores at 750 or above on every category of the SAT, is an Olympic hopeful, concert-level musician and has a GPA of 4.5, you will be confronted (by more successful parents) with the horrific possibility that: Your Children Are Being Left Behind. Your child's school will bombard you with an average of three emails a day. Figuring out which of this pellet blast of emails actually contains important information is probably the business plan of a highly secretive Silicon Valley start-up right now. The only thing that will help you muddle through this is building your own network of parent-friends to fill you in on all the meetings you miss, and all the important information the school DOESN'T give you.
Chauffeur, Child Activity Coordinator: Not only do children require a lot of driving to regular and specialist healthcare appointments, sports practices and games, tutoring and extra-curricular activities; at some point your children will have a more active social life than you do. Be prepared to spend time responding to Evites and playdate requests, frequenting Jumpy Palaces, Chuck E. Cheese's, Dave & Busters and Six Flags, tracking down the parents of your tween or teen's friends to make sure everybody is where they say they will be and taking tweens and teens to friends' houses, parties, dances, high school spirit nights, etc.
Miscellaneous: self maintenance (hair salon appointments), exercise (usually avoiding it), time spent with friends.
Trying to do Meaningful Work: In my case this is writing. I envy my husband's ability to shut out all outside stimuli and devote himself to Physics or Music for hours. In my case, multi-tasking and taking care of everything above, in an environment where, at any given moment, somebody is complaining about a problem I need to solve or making a demand on my time, makes it difficult to finish even the most simple thought process. Add to this the challenge of being a person who likes neatness, order and silence in order to be able to concentrate. Then, try believing you have anything to write about when 90% of what you spend your time on goes un-noticed, un-valued and un-appreciated by those who benefit from it the most...
In my case, the past specifically refers to the eve of the year 2000 - a very nice celebration for most people, but a particularly LOW point in my life. I was working at a 30 hour-a-week corporate job (that provided us with much needed health insurance) and taking care of an 18-month old toddler, when my husband's company unraveled. We lost all of our own and some portion of my in-laws' savings and I was recovering from a miscarriage that might have been brought on by the stress of the failed company, exacerbated by the threatened law suit by his former business partner. I don't have any real interest in explaining here what I did at this point (except to my own children, so that they understand the origins of the opportunities they now enjoy), but it involved picking myself up and getting back on my feet, rolling up my sleeves and putting myself to work helping my husband create the company that not only recouped our own and the family money we lost, but provided the basis for the financial security we enjoy today.
Did I have people to help me with some house work and childcare? Yes. What does that really mean? It means that, while these people have a set list of every day responsibilities, you have to constantly manage them. It is generally pretty hard to explain to somebody how to cook a meal or clean a toilet if you have never done so yourself. It also means these people generally communicate problems to you and you have to figure out how to solve them. The timing of these problems is rarely convenient. The moment you are in the middle of dealing with a PR nightmare where, unawares to one half of the company, the other half of the company has staged a walk-out and set up a competing shop, will be the exact moment your nanny calls you up to tell you that the washing machine is leaking water all over the kitchen or your child's school calls you to pick them up because the child has suffered a concussion.
But that's all in the past. What do I do today? When I worked outside the house, I shared the same challenges as many women of my generation. The difference is that now, when I or my contemporaries "work" in the house, very few people, including myself (thus the use of brackets around the word work) take what we do seriously. Still you asked for it, so here's a list:
Leveraging my technology skills: The glasses in the dishwasher are coming out opaque? Time for some Jet-dry!
Meal Preparation: Making sure my family enjoys a tasty variety of healthy meals that include protein and vegetables -- looking up recipes, grocery shopping, cooking and making sure the kids do the dishes. Note: the amount of time you spend preparing the meal and its healthiness will be inversely proportional to how much your family appreciates it.
On Children and Chores: Men tend to think that children will do things Because You Asked Them To. They give an order and trust in the results. This is a big mistake. Children (like husbands) make a habit of not listening to you 90% of the time. Also, while whatever you have just asked them to do is very important for you, it is a complete pain in the neck for them. And then you have you have to understand the logic of the child brain. This operates as follows: "Mom and Dad are always yelling at me anyway. If I don't do what they ask, I at least get to have more time for gaming, watching crap on Youtube, bla bla. There is a fifty percent chance I will get away with it. Even if I don't get away with it, then I'm no worse off than I would be anyway." Solution? Always. Follow. Up.
Managing the House: At any given time, ten issues will need fixing/taking care of at the house. Basic high-school level familiarity with Existentialism and the Myth of Sisyphus helps me understand how this process unfolds. Every time you fix one item on the list, another item will appear -- thus all the work I do, in addition to being unappreciated is essentially futile. I use my "Physics for Poets" class, taken to fill the dreaded C category -- math, science, technology -- college graduation requirement -- to understand the Quantum Appliance. The quantum appliance is that appliance that malfunctions 90% of the time with the EXCEPTION of that one rare day when "Cletus" the redneck repair guy with ear gauge and always-visible butt-crack, shows up. Cletus will then claim he cannot fix your appliance unless he sees it malfunction. Needless to say, that is the one time the appliance won't oblige.
Housecleaning: Given the fact that I don't have a brigade of domestic help 24/7 and my husband and children, Hurricane Fleury, are capable of trashing the house in one hour flat, not to mention the low level of attention to detail my kids put into doing the dishes at night, I would be living in a complete pig-sty if I were not frequently picking things up and scrubbing dishes or wiping down counters. Also, given these conditions, it is also hard for house-cleaners to be effective if you don't first (or simultaneously) pick things up and put them in order.
Healthcare Specialist: It's been a lovely year so far (like most mom's the year starts with the Hallelujah moment of "Back to School" in the fall and progressively begins to suck the life energy out of you from there): we've had Broken foot one (child A), mono (child A), Concussion (Child B), broken foot two (Child D), pseudo concussion (Child D) - the kind where he tells the nurse "everything is all blurry" but suddenly springs to life once he comes home and wants you to make him pancakes and plays some pretty lively rounds of GI Joe. This culminated in the call from the school nurse (she and I are best buds) on Friday - "Child C showed up with a panic attack in my office this morning claiming he is dying of a fatal disease whose symptoms include rash on chest, yellow liquid poo, and 99 degree fever." Oh and the most dreaded words any mother could hear? "Mom my head is itching," prelude to that other obligatory parental right of passage -- The Lice.
Homeschooling: No matter how good your public school system is or how much you pay for your children's private school education, you will probably wind up partially home-schooling your children. When I was in kindergarten through 3rd grade, I had no real homework and spent my free time happily watching Tom and Jerry or riding my bike. Somehow, despite the fact that I, and generations of kids like me, went to school with larger class sizes and no real homework until fourth or fifth grade, we managed to learn to read and write. Not so anymore.... and it only goes downhill from there. Everything has gotten lots more competitive. Unless your child scores at 750 or above on every category of the SAT, is an Olympic hopeful, concert-level musician and has a GPA of 4.5, you will be confronted (by more successful parents) with the horrific possibility that: Your Children Are Being Left Behind. Your child's school will bombard you with an average of three emails a day. Figuring out which of this pellet blast of emails actually contains important information is probably the business plan of a highly secretive Silicon Valley start-up right now. The only thing that will help you muddle through this is building your own network of parent-friends to fill you in on all the meetings you miss, and all the important information the school DOESN'T give you.
Chauffeur, Child Activity Coordinator: Not only do children require a lot of driving to regular and specialist healthcare appointments, sports practices and games, tutoring and extra-curricular activities; at some point your children will have a more active social life than you do. Be prepared to spend time responding to Evites and playdate requests, frequenting Jumpy Palaces, Chuck E. Cheese's, Dave & Busters and Six Flags, tracking down the parents of your tween or teen's friends to make sure everybody is where they say they will be and taking tweens and teens to friends' houses, parties, dances, high school spirit nights, etc.
Miscellaneous: self maintenance (hair salon appointments), exercise (usually avoiding it), time spent with friends.
Trying to do Meaningful Work: In my case this is writing. I envy my husband's ability to shut out all outside stimuli and devote himself to Physics or Music for hours. In my case, multi-tasking and taking care of everything above, in an environment where, at any given moment, somebody is complaining about a problem I need to solve or making a demand on my time, makes it difficult to finish even the most simple thought process. Add to this the challenge of being a person who likes neatness, order and silence in order to be able to concentrate. Then, try believing you have anything to write about when 90% of what you spend your time on goes un-noticed, un-valued and un-appreciated by those who benefit from it the most...
Saturday, October 11, 2014
A Feminist Raises Its Daughter
I am currently reading Naomi Wolf's "Beauty Myth" which I suggested to my 15-yr old girl to help in critical "methodology" for her IB MYP project on "The image of women in advertising" and have conjured up more enthusiasm for the book, after toiling through the first 50 pages of conspiracy theory. Interesting point that the only professions where women are consistently paid higher than men are modeling and porn. Automatically ruling out porn, why would mothers NOT encourage their daughters to ever enter any profession (not just modeling, but including TV presenter, housewife, etc.) where their most valuable attribute is their appearance?
Because to do so, would be condemning your child to a life-time of insecurity, always worrying that she will be too fat, or too thin (aka not voluptuous enough because every smart woman knows the commercial appeal of Kate Moss is that, until she drank and drugged herself into middle-age, she looked like a child, which is disturbing if you think about that too much), not young enough, not mainstream enough, not exotic enough, not this year's look...always subjecting yourself to a judgment criteria you don't control.
"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at...confuse desiring with being desired...a beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring and inert." "A man's right to confer judgment on a woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given." "Though God made Adam from clay in his own image, Eve is an expendable rib. God breathed life directly into Adam's nostrils, inspiring his body with divinity; but Eve's body is twice removed from the Maker's hand, imperfect matter born of matter."
"The beautiful woman is forever excluded from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love herself "for herself alone." "When men are more aroused by the symbols of sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists. Fetishism treats the part as if it were a whole; men who choose a lover on the basis of her "beauty" alone are treating the woman as a fetish--that is treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her sexual self. The woman's value as a fetish lies in the way her "beauty" gives him status in the eyes of other men.
Wolf's thesis is that in "modern" European and North American culture up through the 19th century up to WWII, in mainstream culture, a woman's value was determined by her moral and spiritual purity, her religious devotion. With the end of WWII and the conversion to the consumer era, this religious fervor was transferred to the "Feminine Mystique" the value of the woman as the ultimate house-keeper, mother and home-maker, opening up the possibility to sell them detergents, house-hold appliances, sewing machines, baking accoutrements. Cleanliness was next to godliness and the new holy waters were soaps and detergents. With the feminist revolution in the 1960s and the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, this no longer became as economically attractive a business model, so a new standard was invented - the Beauty standard.
Like any ideal, ideal beauty can never be achieved. Beauty is made into a religion in our culture. Like any religion, you must suffer and pay a high price to be beautiful, whether it is through gym work-outs or endless beauty maintenance rituals, ranging in pain and invasiveness from eyebrow pluckings, to laser treatments, to plastic surgeries. The holy oil of purification in the Beauty ritual is the ultimate consumer product: skin cream which promises to revitalize, rejuvenate, replenish nourish, reverse the signs of aging, protect your skin from a "hostile" environment, provide the skin with the calorie-rich indulgences "caviares" and "mousses" that most thin women cannot ingest as a food. The holy oil of beauty cream has a 10x profit margin on the base ingredients, cannot be misrepresented because everybody knows these products don't actually do what they promise - since none of these products actually penetrates the stratum corneum to effect any changes on a cellular level, and the more you charge for it, the more people will pay.
My daughter is now plotting (she is 15 and her "future job plans" change every week) to go to work for the health and beauty division of a consumer products company.
How does a Feminist raise its sons? Well, in addition to educating themselves to the level they need to engage in a fulfilling and self-sustaining (aka not sucking off the parental teat) profession, like my daughter, before they leave my house, my boys will know how to clean a bathroom like nobody's business, cook at least three full, healthy meals, open the door for any woman or girl and treat women with courtesy, respect and old-fashioned manners, and maybe just maybe if they attend SEC football games, wear a coat and tie? Because, at the end of the day, George Clooney dated cocktail waitresses and television presenters, but he married an Oxford-educated international human rights lawyer (who also happens to be beautiful), and I want my sons to find smart life partners with character, moral and family values...
Because to do so, would be condemning your child to a life-time of insecurity, always worrying that she will be too fat, or too thin (aka not voluptuous enough because every smart woman knows the commercial appeal of Kate Moss is that, until she drank and drugged herself into middle-age, she looked like a child, which is disturbing if you think about that too much), not young enough, not mainstream enough, not exotic enough, not this year's look...always subjecting yourself to a judgment criteria you don't control.
"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at...confuse desiring with being desired...a beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring and inert." "A man's right to confer judgment on a woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given." "Though God made Adam from clay in his own image, Eve is an expendable rib. God breathed life directly into Adam's nostrils, inspiring his body with divinity; but Eve's body is twice removed from the Maker's hand, imperfect matter born of matter."
"The beautiful woman is forever excluded from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love herself "for herself alone." "When men are more aroused by the symbols of sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists. Fetishism treats the part as if it were a whole; men who choose a lover on the basis of her "beauty" alone are treating the woman as a fetish--that is treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her sexual self. The woman's value as a fetish lies in the way her "beauty" gives him status in the eyes of other men.
Wolf's thesis is that in "modern" European and North American culture up through the 19th century up to WWII, in mainstream culture, a woman's value was determined by her moral and spiritual purity, her religious devotion. With the end of WWII and the conversion to the consumer era, this religious fervor was transferred to the "Feminine Mystique" the value of the woman as the ultimate house-keeper, mother and home-maker, opening up the possibility to sell them detergents, house-hold appliances, sewing machines, baking accoutrements. Cleanliness was next to godliness and the new holy waters were soaps and detergents. With the feminist revolution in the 1960s and the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, this no longer became as economically attractive a business model, so a new standard was invented - the Beauty standard.
Like any ideal, ideal beauty can never be achieved. Beauty is made into a religion in our culture. Like any religion, you must suffer and pay a high price to be beautiful, whether it is through gym work-outs or endless beauty maintenance rituals, ranging in pain and invasiveness from eyebrow pluckings, to laser treatments, to plastic surgeries. The holy oil of purification in the Beauty ritual is the ultimate consumer product: skin cream which promises to revitalize, rejuvenate, replenish nourish, reverse the signs of aging, protect your skin from a "hostile" environment, provide the skin with the calorie-rich indulgences "caviares" and "mousses" that most thin women cannot ingest as a food. The holy oil of beauty cream has a 10x profit margin on the base ingredients, cannot be misrepresented because everybody knows these products don't actually do what they promise - since none of these products actually penetrates the stratum corneum to effect any changes on a cellular level, and the more you charge for it, the more people will pay.
My daughter is now plotting (she is 15 and her "future job plans" change every week) to go to work for the health and beauty division of a consumer products company.
How does a Feminist raise its sons? Well, in addition to educating themselves to the level they need to engage in a fulfilling and self-sustaining (aka not sucking off the parental teat) profession, like my daughter, before they leave my house, my boys will know how to clean a bathroom like nobody's business, cook at least three full, healthy meals, open the door for any woman or girl and treat women with courtesy, respect and old-fashioned manners, and maybe just maybe if they attend SEC football games, wear a coat and tie? Because, at the end of the day, George Clooney dated cocktail waitresses and television presenters, but he married an Oxford-educated international human rights lawyer (who also happens to be beautiful), and I want my sons to find smart life partners with character, moral and family values...
Friday, September 19, 2014
Wife Drives Husband's Tesla
I had hoped Marc Fleury learned his lesson the last time he borrowed my "clean diesel" SUV to transport his pinball machine and forced me to drive the Tesla. This resulted in an unfortunate encounter with the right curb on those inconveniently narrow lanes on Piedmont road that led to tire and hubcap replacement that COST MORE THAN my first car. If you think handing your wallet over to the pretentious German motors garage (where they serve you cappucino!) is painful, wait until you get the service and maintenance bills from Tesla.
And, no you WON'T have a choice on where to go because only Tesla services and makes parts for Tesla. You think Steve Jobs and Apple's custom interfaces are bad? You haven't even begun to start kow-towing to Elon Musk. Tech geeks love Elon Musk. Elon is the alpha-geek's alpha geek. They even based Iron Man on Elon. How smart is Elon? Well, my guess is that he's so smart, he'll have himself cryogenically frozen so he can extend his dominance to future generations.
Giving a person like me a Tesla or any powerful car to drive is a waste. How bad a driver am I? My father, in trying to teach me to drive stick shift, after I had stalled out for the twentieth time, once famously suggested that I drink a beer...to loosen up. However, like most people who are aware of their shortcomings, my caution serves me well. I have never had any accidents (except those involving curbs or objects placed behind my car, like tree branches). Part of the reason for this is that when I get on the highway, I place myself in the 2nd to right lane and go at a consistent speed of 60-65mph, and don't move because that's EXACTLY the advice they gave me in the Driver's Ed educational movie I watched at age 16.
However, I am stuck driving the Tesla again because my 15-yr old wants to practice driving and feels the immediate need to go to Publix grocery store...to buy air freshener for her room. So, the only thing worse than me driving the Tesla would be our daughter driving the Tesla. Did I mention she's 15 years old. My husband decides to drive with her. And, I find myself driving the Tesla on The Mission: Pick up the three boys from catechism and deliver them to their cousin's house in the ATL suburbs so they can go to his birthday party at SKY HELLZONE.
If you want to lose your religion, try getting out of a large Catholic church parking lot after the 10:30 mass and Sunday School. Every other person drives a Chevy Suburban or GMC Yukon, and it's not because they all have ten children. As I try to navigate around the butt end of some sort of monster 4x4 truck crammed into a parking space that is way too small, I start to experience the first symptom of driving a fuel-efficient vehicle: feeling self-righteous. I can barely restrain myself from leaving a note on the windshield of afore-mentioned monster 4x4. "Buddy, what do you think you are doing? We aren't within 60 miles of a farm, and you are driving this aberration in-town? It's thanks to nimrods like you that American lives are being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention that we're destroying our environment back home with horizontal drilling..." Thankfully before I have time to compose said note, the line moving out of the parking lot moves forward.
The children safely acquired, I now have my husband's Mini Me in the car to help me figure out the Tesla. This is the child who, at age 10, surpassed my ability to control any automated device in the house. B is my co-pilot and his brothers are in the back seat.
Task One: Change the music station. Now Tesla has something I do love. Slacker Radio. Only problem is my husband, who has been kicked out of such exclusive groups as "Real DJs Against Douchebags" has the radio set to some boring electronic music station. Time for revenge: Slacker Top 40 here I come. In all honesty, 95% of this is total crap, but Slacker allows me to immediately click ahead to the next song, so it's better than regular Top 40 Radio, where you have to listen to the same tunes by Katy Perry, Maroon 5 and John Legend on infinity loop, not to mention the timeless pitch of Tom Shane, "your friend in the diamond business." Thanks to Slacker Top 40, I start to rock out to the latest by Lil Jon, Mary Lambert and Lady Antebellum and relax.
Until. Oh no you don't! Mini (My Husband)'s hand is reaching suspiciously for the radio controls. Time to reassert Vehicular Musical Dominance over the Progeny with The Speech. I have been giving variants of The Speech as soon as my oldest child reached age 10 and started having musical preferences. The Speech goes as following: "When you and I are in the car together, you will have a say in the music we listen to WHEN AND ONLY WHEN when YOU can afford a car, gas and car insurance. When is that going to happen? Not any time soon.... mwah ha ha ha.
On the surface streets, I start to notice pleasant things about the Tesla. It's low and heavy and hugs the road. Not only that, I discover that Tesla has some bitchin' acceleration. It's actually FUN TO DRIVE. When I get to Hwy 85, I am no longer driving like me. I am driving like 17-yr old boy jacked up on testosterone and driving this car is like mainlining adrenaline. All my risk-averse instincts get thrown out the window. I'm changing lanes, passing cars, left and right. The Children are starting to get nervous. I am completely oblivious as I sing along with Iggy Azalea and Charlie XCX:
I'm so fancy You already know I'm in the fast lane From L.A. to Tokyo I'm so fancy Can't you taste this gold? Remember my name 'Bout to blow
Whew ee. This is fun. I've just discovered the acceleration has something like a hyper-drive. I am Han Solo putting the Millenium Falcon into "lightspeed." All the lesser ships fall behind me. I forget to hate on Elon and decide I must find him immediately and have his love-child.
And, no you WON'T have a choice on where to go because only Tesla services and makes parts for Tesla. You think Steve Jobs and Apple's custom interfaces are bad? You haven't even begun to start kow-towing to Elon Musk. Tech geeks love Elon Musk. Elon is the alpha-geek's alpha geek. They even based Iron Man on Elon. How smart is Elon? Well, my guess is that he's so smart, he'll have himself cryogenically frozen so he can extend his dominance to future generations.
Giving a person like me a Tesla or any powerful car to drive is a waste. How bad a driver am I? My father, in trying to teach me to drive stick shift, after I had stalled out for the twentieth time, once famously suggested that I drink a beer...to loosen up. However, like most people who are aware of their shortcomings, my caution serves me well. I have never had any accidents (except those involving curbs or objects placed behind my car, like tree branches). Part of the reason for this is that when I get on the highway, I place myself in the 2nd to right lane and go at a consistent speed of 60-65mph, and don't move because that's EXACTLY the advice they gave me in the Driver's Ed educational movie I watched at age 16.
However, I am stuck driving the Tesla again because my 15-yr old wants to practice driving and feels the immediate need to go to Publix grocery store...to buy air freshener for her room. So, the only thing worse than me driving the Tesla would be our daughter driving the Tesla. Did I mention she's 15 years old. My husband decides to drive with her. And, I find myself driving the Tesla on The Mission: Pick up the three boys from catechism and deliver them to their cousin's house in the ATL suburbs so they can go to his birthday party at SKY HELLZONE.
If you want to lose your religion, try getting out of a large Catholic church parking lot after the 10:30 mass and Sunday School. Every other person drives a Chevy Suburban or GMC Yukon, and it's not because they all have ten children. As I try to navigate around the butt end of some sort of monster 4x4 truck crammed into a parking space that is way too small, I start to experience the first symptom of driving a fuel-efficient vehicle: feeling self-righteous. I can barely restrain myself from leaving a note on the windshield of afore-mentioned monster 4x4. "Buddy, what do you think you are doing? We aren't within 60 miles of a farm, and you are driving this aberration in-town? It's thanks to nimrods like you that American lives are being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention that we're destroying our environment back home with horizontal drilling..." Thankfully before I have time to compose said note, the line moving out of the parking lot moves forward.
The children safely acquired, I now have my husband's Mini Me in the car to help me figure out the Tesla. This is the child who, at age 10, surpassed my ability to control any automated device in the house. B is my co-pilot and his brothers are in the back seat.
Task One: Change the music station. Now Tesla has something I do love. Slacker Radio. Only problem is my husband, who has been kicked out of such exclusive groups as "Real DJs Against Douchebags" has the radio set to some boring electronic music station. Time for revenge: Slacker Top 40 here I come. In all honesty, 95% of this is total crap, but Slacker allows me to immediately click ahead to the next song, so it's better than regular Top 40 Radio, where you have to listen to the same tunes by Katy Perry, Maroon 5 and John Legend on infinity loop, not to mention the timeless pitch of Tom Shane, "your friend in the diamond business." Thanks to Slacker Top 40, I start to rock out to the latest by Lil Jon, Mary Lambert and Lady Antebellum and relax.
Until. Oh no you don't! Mini (My Husband)'s hand is reaching suspiciously for the radio controls. Time to reassert Vehicular Musical Dominance over the Progeny with The Speech. I have been giving variants of The Speech as soon as my oldest child reached age 10 and started having musical preferences. The Speech goes as following: "When you and I are in the car together, you will have a say in the music we listen to WHEN AND ONLY WHEN when YOU can afford a car, gas and car insurance. When is that going to happen? Not any time soon.... mwah ha ha ha.
On the surface streets, I start to notice pleasant things about the Tesla. It's low and heavy and hugs the road. Not only that, I discover that Tesla has some bitchin' acceleration. It's actually FUN TO DRIVE. When I get to Hwy 85, I am no longer driving like me. I am driving like 17-yr old boy jacked up on testosterone and driving this car is like mainlining adrenaline. All my risk-averse instincts get thrown out the window. I'm changing lanes, passing cars, left and right. The Children are starting to get nervous. I am completely oblivious as I sing along with Iggy Azalea and Charlie XCX:
I'm so fancy You already know I'm in the fast lane From L.A. to Tokyo I'm so fancy Can't you taste this gold? Remember my name 'Bout to blow
Whew ee. This is fun. I've just discovered the acceleration has something like a hyper-drive. I am Han Solo putting the Millenium Falcon into "lightspeed." All the lesser ships fall behind me. I forget to hate on Elon and decide I must find him immediately and have his love-child.
Friday, February 17, 2012
True Mom Confessions 1
"My nightmare is for some coach or extra-curricular advisor to tell me that my child has Olympic-potential, which they can only realize through extensive sacrifice and training."
I didn't come up with this, but I can sooo relate. I have four children, all of whom could be "optimized." Why do they need to be optimized? Forget special needs, almost EVERYBODY I know is afraid their child might be "left behind."
Why is that? Well, according to this horrific vision of a future world spewed out by every newspaper, magazine, blog and tweet -- if your child doesn't score 1600 on the SATs, speak three languages, play the piano at Carnegie Hall, achieve national recognition in some sport or artistic endeavor, found a successful entrepreneurial company or heart-warming charitable outreach by age sixteen--you can bet they will be LEFT BEHIND.
Welcome to the future of brutal worldwide competition. Your child is not only competing against "their category" -- every other Wonderbread, middle or upper-middle class kid whose parents are bleeding themselves to provide them with every possible advantage...they really don't look that spectacular compared to the kid in some other part of the world. Rest assured, the other kid, who if they aren't already smarter than your child, is working ten times harder, thanks to their Tiger Mother or has achieved some higher level of sophistication from their laissez-faire Continental Mother...or is that most coveted prize of all for college admission officers -- the touching "up from the ghetto" story.
Current things am not doing to "optimize" my children:
Our health insurance provider is Sanitas --and, please, Spaniards who hate them and Brits who hate their parent company, BUPA, spare me your complaints. Take it from me, they are Heaven compared to American health insurance. Getting ready to re-apply for that. Lucky me. It's going to be REAL fun documenting every hospital visit and doctor our entire family has visited since birth in hopes we'll achieve the privilege of paying $$$ per month--when you know, the whole time, that if push comes to shove and you actually need their coverage, they'll come up with some excuse not to pay for it.
Sanitas, bless their heart keeps calling me to schedule twelve year-old daughter's free "full-health assessment" with a team of specialists. Unfortunately, all I can handle, given her and her brothers long school days and busy after school schedule is the one well-child pediatric vist a year, unless they get sick.
Not only that, Sanitas' pediatricians have also given me "fichas" for full cardiology work-up to check out the heart murmurs, possessed by three out of my four children. I've had a heart murmur my entire life. I'm forty years old and unless I drop dead of a heart-attack tomorrow, it hasn't affected me in the least. My American doctors have never been concerned about my heart murmur; nor have my children's American pediatricians ever mentioned the need to see a specialist, but now I have a new possibility to obsess over.
Daughter's music teacher at the Conservatory is on my case to take her to a "foniatra" because she has a hoarse voice and can't reach certain notes. I had to look up what this. It is some sort of speech therapist, but not the kind you need for a stutter or serious problems. I took her to the Otorino-thingummy specialist last year and all she has are nodes on her vocal chords. They told me it's completely benign, like having callouses on your hands. She's had this since she learned to talk; it has something to do with not projecting her voice properly. If she had ANY problem communicating, I would not be getting reports from half her teachers complaining that she talks TOO MUCH --"very melodramatic child," "needs to make her self noticed in class." Give me a break, she's not going to be an opera singer. How in the hell am I supposed to find time for an aesthetic voice specialist for a child who gets home from school at 5:45, spends 11 hours a week at the Conservatory and gets home at 10pm three nights a week? And no, she doesn't do this because I'm a Tiger Mother or Black Swan smother mother...I'm far too lazy for that, she does it because she wants to...and, now, she's asking to see the "foniatra."
I'm sure an "executive function" coach (or God forbid, Adderol or Ritalin--because it would be so much simpler if there were a pill to "solve" these issues) could help one of the boys with his "focusing" and "organization" issues that cause him to "not perform to his potential." Other twin, seems to get overly "emotionally upset" when confronted with hard challenges and failure--no doubt there's some strategy that could help him. Oh, and my five-year old son hit a girl in class this week. Not only that, he refused to participate in a writing assignment, describing how he felt about the Cosmo Caixa field trip. I asked him about his and he said that he simply "didn't have anything to say."
No doubt this stress is impacting our kids. Half the American moms I know have kids who are "on the spectrum," have dyslexia or ADD. In addition to dubious "executive function," welcome to the world of children with phantom coughs and other tics. You'd think my kids would develop a tic where they could at least get some medical sympathy or helpful drugs. Nope, they develop stealth tics, preferably when they and I are exhausted with their homework. This week, one of the twins decided he couldn't go for one minute without burping...
Meanwhile the diagnosis we'd all love to be getting is "Higher Ivy Potential!" "Gifted and Talented!" "Not sufficiently challenged by their current academic environment!"
I didn't come up with this, but I can sooo relate. I have four children, all of whom could be "optimized." Why do they need to be optimized? Forget special needs, almost EVERYBODY I know is afraid their child might be "left behind."
Why is that? Well, according to this horrific vision of a future world spewed out by every newspaper, magazine, blog and tweet -- if your child doesn't score 1600 on the SATs, speak three languages, play the piano at Carnegie Hall, achieve national recognition in some sport or artistic endeavor, found a successful entrepreneurial company or heart-warming charitable outreach by age sixteen--you can bet they will be LEFT BEHIND.
Welcome to the future of brutal worldwide competition. Your child is not only competing against "their category" -- every other Wonderbread, middle or upper-middle class kid whose parents are bleeding themselves to provide them with every possible advantage...they really don't look that spectacular compared to the kid in some other part of the world. Rest assured, the other kid, who if they aren't already smarter than your child, is working ten times harder, thanks to their Tiger Mother or has achieved some higher level of sophistication from their laissez-faire Continental Mother...or is that most coveted prize of all for college admission officers -- the touching "up from the ghetto" story.
Current things am not doing to "optimize" my children:
Our health insurance provider is Sanitas --and, please, Spaniards who hate them and Brits who hate their parent company, BUPA, spare me your complaints. Take it from me, they are Heaven compared to American health insurance. Getting ready to re-apply for that. Lucky me. It's going to be REAL fun documenting every hospital visit and doctor our entire family has visited since birth in hopes we'll achieve the privilege of paying $$$ per month--when you know, the whole time, that if push comes to shove and you actually need their coverage, they'll come up with some excuse not to pay for it.
Sanitas, bless their heart keeps calling me to schedule twelve year-old daughter's free "full-health assessment" with a team of specialists. Unfortunately, all I can handle, given her and her brothers long school days and busy after school schedule is the one well-child pediatric vist a year, unless they get sick.
Not only that, Sanitas' pediatricians have also given me "fichas" for full cardiology work-up to check out the heart murmurs, possessed by three out of my four children. I've had a heart murmur my entire life. I'm forty years old and unless I drop dead of a heart-attack tomorrow, it hasn't affected me in the least. My American doctors have never been concerned about my heart murmur; nor have my children's American pediatricians ever mentioned the need to see a specialist, but now I have a new possibility to obsess over.
Daughter's music teacher at the Conservatory is on my case to take her to a "foniatra" because she has a hoarse voice and can't reach certain notes. I had to look up what this. It is some sort of speech therapist, but not the kind you need for a stutter or serious problems. I took her to the Otorino-thingummy specialist last year and all she has are nodes on her vocal chords. They told me it's completely benign, like having callouses on your hands. She's had this since she learned to talk; it has something to do with not projecting her voice properly. If she had ANY problem communicating, I would not be getting reports from half her teachers complaining that she talks TOO MUCH --"very melodramatic child," "needs to make her self noticed in class." Give me a break, she's not going to be an opera singer. How in the hell am I supposed to find time for an aesthetic voice specialist for a child who gets home from school at 5:45, spends 11 hours a week at the Conservatory and gets home at 10pm three nights a week? And no, she doesn't do this because I'm a Tiger Mother or Black Swan smother mother...I'm far too lazy for that, she does it because she wants to...and, now, she's asking to see the "foniatra."
I'm sure an "executive function" coach (or God forbid, Adderol or Ritalin--because it would be so much simpler if there were a pill to "solve" these issues) could help one of the boys with his "focusing" and "organization" issues that cause him to "not perform to his potential." Other twin, seems to get overly "emotionally upset" when confronted with hard challenges and failure--no doubt there's some strategy that could help him. Oh, and my five-year old son hit a girl in class this week. Not only that, he refused to participate in a writing assignment, describing how he felt about the Cosmo Caixa field trip. I asked him about his and he said that he simply "didn't have anything to say."
No doubt this stress is impacting our kids. Half the American moms I know have kids who are "on the spectrum," have dyslexia or ADD. In addition to dubious "executive function," welcome to the world of children with phantom coughs and other tics. You'd think my kids would develop a tic where they could at least get some medical sympathy or helpful drugs. Nope, they develop stealth tics, preferably when they and I are exhausted with their homework. This week, one of the twins decided he couldn't go for one minute without burping...
Meanwhile the diagnosis we'd all love to be getting is "Higher Ivy Potential!" "Gifted and Talented!" "Not sufficiently challenged by their current academic environment!"
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Watching “Mean Girls” with my 12-yr Old Daughter
My husband felt that it was highly inappropriate that I watch this movie with my daughter.
“How can you think it might actually help her to watch this movie? You are just imposing your American neuroses about high school and coolness on somebody who has no relation to those neuroses whatsoever.”
Growing up in France shaped my husband’s perspective on high school and what it means to be a geek or cool. The most prestigious schools in France are public and those schools start to select students at age 16. The most nerdy kids are not only guaranteed the best jobs in the public and private sector, but higher pay than non-graduates of the Grandes Ecoles. They can also expect a fast-track career to the top of their chosen company or field. When you no longer interact with the subset of “cool” people in 11th grade and the reason for that is that most those people have been segregated into lesser tracks that prepare them for the second-tier opportunities they can expect in life…it’s easy not to be intimidated or impressed.
My fellow students in my private American preparatory school had other reasons to expect the choicer outcomes in Life.
“That’s alright. That’s ok, you’ll work for us one day,” they would cheer when we inevitably lost football games to the large county public schools. To the school’s chagrin, having the football team with the highest average SAT score in the state of Georgia did not translate into the winning-est football team in the state of Georgia.
Undoubtedly the “John Knox Institute” students behind that sour grapes cheer picked up the Class prejudice and un-sportsmanlike tone from their parents. Officially the school did everything to discourage such behavior. Along with the Protestant religious tenets underlying our education, the centerpiece of the school’s pride in producing morally upstanding young ladies and gentleman was the Honor Code – one of those pacts where you not only swear that you have not cheated on a test or assignment, you swear that you have no knowledge of such behavior on the part of your peers.
Well the TJKNI students weren’t perfect. Some of them did cheat. And, since time immemorial ratting out your peers (or “narking” as we called it) is about the surest path to social suicide -- it didn’t take long for your average student to figure out the Honor Code and the student Prefect System (basically a popularity contest) was a load of crap. If adults weren’t smart enough to figure to out the Honor Code wasn’t compatible with the emotional maturity of your average high school student, they were dumb.
Worse, if they did realize the flaws in these expectations, they were indoctrinating us in moral hypocrisy. The parents were often the administration’s willing partners. If TJKNI demanded that the students exhibit the same behavior off campus that they did on campus – basically don’t drink, do drugs, screw around and do the generally dumb-ass things teenagers do, the parents were often the first to lie on their child’s behalf.
The John Knox Institute kids not only felt superior to the children outside their school, many of them also felt superior to most of their classmates. My first introduction to the other students at The Institute, when I transferred in 7th grade, was a friendly “student ambassador”-type phone call from a girl I had vaguely seen around because her parents lived next door to my grandparents. She only had one question for me: “Are you popular?” My convoluted explanation of how, while I was not exactly popular, I did have a group of friends who didn’t think I was a loser didn’t convince her. I don’t think she ever said another word to me in the six years we went to school together.
Does that sum up my whole experience of TJKI? Of course not, I did make good friends in high school, I had some wonderful teachers and I received an excellent education. However, yes, I can definitely relate to the movie “Mean Girls.” Unlike the movie’s main character, the good girl played by Lindsay Lohan (how ironic is that) I never became close enough to these people for them to 1) notice me 2) think I was important enough to humiliate.
Regardless of how many times I watched “Sixteen Candles” in the hopes that I would come back in the fall and have it be my cool year or how many hours I babysat to buy that bitchin pair of acid-washed Guess jeans with the zipper on the ankles, I did not have what it took to be part of the cool group. They seemed to fall into two categories: DNA or attitude. Under DNA, appearance was most important for the girls and athletic ability was most important for the boys. Attitude was the trait that was more confusing for me to understand at the time. Self-confidence was central. Granted, it’s pretty easy to develop self-confidence as pretty girl or outstanding athlete in high school—people just naturally want to be around you. However, not all the girls in the group were that pretty and not all that boys were sports stars, yet they still managed to dominated people with their attitude. Sometimes, this was with good qualities –they might have had a great sense of humor or who were genuinely nice to everybody; sometimes they dominated with negative attitude.
“Queen Bees and Wannabes” explores the negative strategies girls use to intimidate their peers; often with the perverse outcome that the meaner the dominant individuals are, the more people want to be liked by them. This experience is not limited to high school and junior high girls. My work experience in the online mostly male-dominated, geeky software blogging world had its share Queen Bee and Wannabe behavior too. In "Sixteen Candles”, Anthony Michael Hall’s nerdy character isn’t any nicer to his geeky friends than the cool kids are to him. He humiliates and dominates them in his bid to be “King of the Dipshits” or, better yet, increase his social standing by leaving them behind.
Enough of me, I’ve gone way off course. How did this movie help me communicate with my pre-teen daughter?
She isn’t really acting like my friend.
No kidding. This girl constantly undermines you to make herself feel better. Her only interest in having you around is to have a courtier for her queenly presence.
But she can be so nice.
Yes, they can. It’s known as a “frenemy”. Or sometimes the nice girls in elementary school morph into little snots when they hit Junior high. In that case, she used to be your friend.
She’s so full of herself
Take a preteen girl and have enough adults tell her: “You should be a model” enough times. It’s a miracle if it doesn’t go to her head.
But she told me to do it.
Grow a spine. Evaluate the consequences of your actions. Learn to say no.
Everything about my appearance is wrong.
Let me spell out. There’s a downside to everything you claim you wish had.
Want be taller? Well, so and so is shorter than you and I’m also pretty sure that hasn’t stopped her from being a kick-ass dancer. Try finding a date in high school if most the boys are shorter than you.
Think your hair is too curly; well I’m sure plenty of girls complain that their straight hair is too limp and stringy. You want boobs? Do you really want “that” kind of attention from a bunch of Junior High boys? Want to be a well-endowed adult woman? For you, most the heterosexual “men” will morph back into good old Beavis and Butthead. Oh and do you really want to go jogging with two sports bras and have to worry about back pain?
You look just fine. And, anyway, its not like you can do anything about it, you got all that stuff before you were born, in your DNA. And, don’t dare think about blaming your father and me, because those same genes make you good at Math and a great runner. Stop worrying about how you look. You want people to look at you? Why don’t you DO something worthy of that attention?
The adults around me are less mature than I am.
Mean Girls don’t always happen in a vaccum. In the movie, the Queen Bee’s mother is portrayed as the “I Just Want to Be My Child’s Friend” archetype. We all know this type of woman. She is more invested in her daughter’s popularity than the girl is, herself. This is the kind of woman who boasts about a social life that involves partying like a 19-year old college freshman. Sorry Mrs. “She’s still pre-occupied with 1985,” the rest of us have left the snake-skin mini-skirt and the 80s behind us. You are your child’s parent. By definition you are not cool to them, the fact that you try just makes it worse. They may not be able to express it now, but your kid doesn’t want you to be their “friend” they want you to be their parent.
Some parents simply check out of the child-rearing process altogether or choose to remain willfully clueless. I call them Ostrich Parent. Their child or other parents may try to talk to them, but they just bury their heads in the sand. “Not my child” is their motto.
Thank you Amy Chua. If it hadn’t been for you, the rest of us wouldn’t have a name for the other kind of emotionally immature parent we find so obnoxious (as does your child) – Tiger Mom or Tiger Dad, also known as Helicopter Parent aka that rude parent at some run of the mill kids’ athletic competition who shouts coaching instructions to their child the whole time and then gives the child a 15-minute public critique of their performance…after they win! So often, the person shouting, “You gotta master that back-hand slice” to their child is the person who couldn’t hit a backhand slice if their life depended on it.
Things I didn’t like about “Mean Girls,” the movie:
I love Tina Fey to death, but sometimes the Saturday Night Live humor is out of place in a movie, destined to appeal to teens.
Lots of swearing. I’ve always been a fan of a creative and well-placed swear, but not when it doesn’t add anything, and not in a movie for my children. The girls in the movie call each other “bitch” and “slut” a lot. On one hand, girls really do say these things. On the other hand, the movie barely addresses whether they should and how this might just be reinforcing the images that boys, and later men, use to put them down. I think some women view the word “bitch” like rappers view the n word: it’s ok if we use it among ourselves, but wrong if a man calls us this.
The underlying connotation of “bitch” is a woman who stands up for herself – positive—but does it in an off-putting way – negative. I prefer bitch to slut. At least a bitch does. A slut is done to. The most negative thing about “slut” is not so much the sexual mores of the girl in question, but the fact that she doesn’t respect herself enough to make men respect her. It’s not just a question of her actions but the how and why, behind her actions. Boys in my high school were a lot more creative. They didn’t just call a girl a slut, they said things like “When X gives you a bj you have to pull the sheets out of your ass” or “She’d jump anything, even a whittled stick.”
The sad thing is I can remember those associations if I run into or hear about those girls years after high school.
Not only did the swearing not add anything, but the scene where the football coach gets caught having sex with two different high school girls did not add anything either. It wasn’t particularly funny. The most positive thing I can say is that I don’t think my daughter really caught what was going on, in that part.
Conclusion
In conclusion, did I use Mean Girls to exorcise some of my own memories of high school? My experience at The John Knox Institute did have an impact, even when I use it to define the things I don’t want for myself, or my children. I remember a conversation where The JKNI name came up as it inevitably would in a state where they are the academic reference – send more than 20 kids to the Ivy League a year, etc. My husband got tired of what he calls “people gargling themselves with their moral imperatives” and summed it up: “Yeah, yeah I get it: your mission is for these kids to get a good education like TJKNI, but not be dicks!”
“How can you think it might actually help her to watch this movie? You are just imposing your American neuroses about high school and coolness on somebody who has no relation to those neuroses whatsoever.”
Growing up in France shaped my husband’s perspective on high school and what it means to be a geek or cool. The most prestigious schools in France are public and those schools start to select students at age 16. The most nerdy kids are not only guaranteed the best jobs in the public and private sector, but higher pay than non-graduates of the Grandes Ecoles. They can also expect a fast-track career to the top of their chosen company or field. When you no longer interact with the subset of “cool” people in 11th grade and the reason for that is that most those people have been segregated into lesser tracks that prepare them for the second-tier opportunities they can expect in life…it’s easy not to be intimidated or impressed.
My fellow students in my private American preparatory school had other reasons to expect the choicer outcomes in Life.
“That’s alright. That’s ok, you’ll work for us one day,” they would cheer when we inevitably lost football games to the large county public schools. To the school’s chagrin, having the football team with the highest average SAT score in the state of Georgia did not translate into the winning-est football team in the state of Georgia.
Undoubtedly the “John Knox Institute” students behind that sour grapes cheer picked up the Class prejudice and un-sportsmanlike tone from their parents. Officially the school did everything to discourage such behavior. Along with the Protestant religious tenets underlying our education, the centerpiece of the school’s pride in producing morally upstanding young ladies and gentleman was the Honor Code – one of those pacts where you not only swear that you have not cheated on a test or assignment, you swear that you have no knowledge of such behavior on the part of your peers.
Well the TJKNI students weren’t perfect. Some of them did cheat. And, since time immemorial ratting out your peers (or “narking” as we called it) is about the surest path to social suicide -- it didn’t take long for your average student to figure out the Honor Code and the student Prefect System (basically a popularity contest) was a load of crap. If adults weren’t smart enough to figure to out the Honor Code wasn’t compatible with the emotional maturity of your average high school student, they were dumb.
Worse, if they did realize the flaws in these expectations, they were indoctrinating us in moral hypocrisy. The parents were often the administration’s willing partners. If TJKNI demanded that the students exhibit the same behavior off campus that they did on campus – basically don’t drink, do drugs, screw around and do the generally dumb-ass things teenagers do, the parents were often the first to lie on their child’s behalf.
The John Knox Institute kids not only felt superior to the children outside their school, many of them also felt superior to most of their classmates. My first introduction to the other students at The Institute, when I transferred in 7th grade, was a friendly “student ambassador”-type phone call from a girl I had vaguely seen around because her parents lived next door to my grandparents. She only had one question for me: “Are you popular?” My convoluted explanation of how, while I was not exactly popular, I did have a group of friends who didn’t think I was a loser didn’t convince her. I don’t think she ever said another word to me in the six years we went to school together.
Does that sum up my whole experience of TJKI? Of course not, I did make good friends in high school, I had some wonderful teachers and I received an excellent education. However, yes, I can definitely relate to the movie “Mean Girls.” Unlike the movie’s main character, the good girl played by Lindsay Lohan (how ironic is that) I never became close enough to these people for them to 1) notice me 2) think I was important enough to humiliate.
Regardless of how many times I watched “Sixteen Candles” in the hopes that I would come back in the fall and have it be my cool year or how many hours I babysat to buy that bitchin pair of acid-washed Guess jeans with the zipper on the ankles, I did not have what it took to be part of the cool group. They seemed to fall into two categories: DNA or attitude. Under DNA, appearance was most important for the girls and athletic ability was most important for the boys. Attitude was the trait that was more confusing for me to understand at the time. Self-confidence was central. Granted, it’s pretty easy to develop self-confidence as pretty girl or outstanding athlete in high school—people just naturally want to be around you. However, not all the girls in the group were that pretty and not all that boys were sports stars, yet they still managed to dominated people with their attitude. Sometimes, this was with good qualities –they might have had a great sense of humor or who were genuinely nice to everybody; sometimes they dominated with negative attitude.
“Queen Bees and Wannabes” explores the negative strategies girls use to intimidate their peers; often with the perverse outcome that the meaner the dominant individuals are, the more people want to be liked by them. This experience is not limited to high school and junior high girls. My work experience in the online mostly male-dominated, geeky software blogging world had its share Queen Bee and Wannabe behavior too. In "Sixteen Candles”, Anthony Michael Hall’s nerdy character isn’t any nicer to his geeky friends than the cool kids are to him. He humiliates and dominates them in his bid to be “King of the Dipshits” or, better yet, increase his social standing by leaving them behind.
Enough of me, I’ve gone way off course. How did this movie help me communicate with my pre-teen daughter?
She isn’t really acting like my friend.
No kidding. This girl constantly undermines you to make herself feel better. Her only interest in having you around is to have a courtier for her queenly presence.
But she can be so nice.
Yes, they can. It’s known as a “frenemy”. Or sometimes the nice girls in elementary school morph into little snots when they hit Junior high. In that case, she used to be your friend.
She’s so full of herself
Take a preteen girl and have enough adults tell her: “You should be a model” enough times. It’s a miracle if it doesn’t go to her head.
But she told me to do it.
Grow a spine. Evaluate the consequences of your actions. Learn to say no.
Everything about my appearance is wrong.
Let me spell out. There’s a downside to everything you claim you wish had.
Want be taller? Well, so and so is shorter than you and I’m also pretty sure that hasn’t stopped her from being a kick-ass dancer. Try finding a date in high school if most the boys are shorter than you.
Think your hair is too curly; well I’m sure plenty of girls complain that their straight hair is too limp and stringy. You want boobs? Do you really want “that” kind of attention from a bunch of Junior High boys? Want to be a well-endowed adult woman? For you, most the heterosexual “men” will morph back into good old Beavis and Butthead. Oh and do you really want to go jogging with two sports bras and have to worry about back pain?
You look just fine. And, anyway, its not like you can do anything about it, you got all that stuff before you were born, in your DNA. And, don’t dare think about blaming your father and me, because those same genes make you good at Math and a great runner. Stop worrying about how you look. You want people to look at you? Why don’t you DO something worthy of that attention?
The adults around me are less mature than I am.
Mean Girls don’t always happen in a vaccum. In the movie, the Queen Bee’s mother is portrayed as the “I Just Want to Be My Child’s Friend” archetype. We all know this type of woman. She is more invested in her daughter’s popularity than the girl is, herself. This is the kind of woman who boasts about a social life that involves partying like a 19-year old college freshman. Sorry Mrs. “She’s still pre-occupied with 1985,” the rest of us have left the snake-skin mini-skirt and the 80s behind us. You are your child’s parent. By definition you are not cool to them, the fact that you try just makes it worse. They may not be able to express it now, but your kid doesn’t want you to be their “friend” they want you to be their parent.
Some parents simply check out of the child-rearing process altogether or choose to remain willfully clueless. I call them Ostrich Parent. Their child or other parents may try to talk to them, but they just bury their heads in the sand. “Not my child” is their motto.
Thank you Amy Chua. If it hadn’t been for you, the rest of us wouldn’t have a name for the other kind of emotionally immature parent we find so obnoxious (as does your child) – Tiger Mom or Tiger Dad, also known as Helicopter Parent aka that rude parent at some run of the mill kids’ athletic competition who shouts coaching instructions to their child the whole time and then gives the child a 15-minute public critique of their performance…after they win! So often, the person shouting, “You gotta master that back-hand slice” to their child is the person who couldn’t hit a backhand slice if their life depended on it.
Things I didn’t like about “Mean Girls,” the movie:
I love Tina Fey to death, but sometimes the Saturday Night Live humor is out of place in a movie, destined to appeal to teens.
Lots of swearing. I’ve always been a fan of a creative and well-placed swear, but not when it doesn’t add anything, and not in a movie for my children. The girls in the movie call each other “bitch” and “slut” a lot. On one hand, girls really do say these things. On the other hand, the movie barely addresses whether they should and how this might just be reinforcing the images that boys, and later men, use to put them down. I think some women view the word “bitch” like rappers view the n word: it’s ok if we use it among ourselves, but wrong if a man calls us this.
The underlying connotation of “bitch” is a woman who stands up for herself – positive—but does it in an off-putting way – negative. I prefer bitch to slut. At least a bitch does. A slut is done to. The most negative thing about “slut” is not so much the sexual mores of the girl in question, but the fact that she doesn’t respect herself enough to make men respect her. It’s not just a question of her actions but the how and why, behind her actions. Boys in my high school were a lot more creative. They didn’t just call a girl a slut, they said things like “When X gives you a bj you have to pull the sheets out of your ass” or “She’d jump anything, even a whittled stick.”
The sad thing is I can remember those associations if I run into or hear about those girls years after high school.
Not only did the swearing not add anything, but the scene where the football coach gets caught having sex with two different high school girls did not add anything either. It wasn’t particularly funny. The most positive thing I can say is that I don’t think my daughter really caught what was going on, in that part.
Conclusion
In conclusion, did I use Mean Girls to exorcise some of my own memories of high school? My experience at The John Knox Institute did have an impact, even when I use it to define the things I don’t want for myself, or my children. I remember a conversation where The JKNI name came up as it inevitably would in a state where they are the academic reference – send more than 20 kids to the Ivy League a year, etc. My husband got tired of what he calls “people gargling themselves with their moral imperatives” and summed it up: “Yeah, yeah I get it: your mission is for these kids to get a good education like TJKNI, but not be dicks!”
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Don Raaaaamiiiiiiro
As I wait for my child by the entrance of our apartment building, I notice Don Ramiro walking out. The eighty-year old man in his pressed suit and tie, heads off to whatever pretend job he goes to, the kind where the “girl” fetches him coffee while he does the crossword puzzles and plans his lunch dates with his Franco-era cronies.Is the middle-aged man deferentially following Don Ramiro a new man-servant? Could the old codger be getting more feeble? I discuss it with my husband. He’s doubtful “Nah, the bad ones hang on forever. Their toxic personality acts as a preservative.” I have another theory. “Maybe they’re secretly afraid of Hell?”
Don Ramiro is a machista who thinks he’s a gentleman. He feels immensely superior to women and to foreigners. He hates children. He has neither manners, nor education, nor culture, nor any professional distinction that I’ve heard of. He did, however, have enough common sense to marry the daughter of a president of a national bank. This means that he manages his wife’s inheritance, which includes three apartments in our building. No self-respecting third world dictator presiding over his domains takes himself more seriously than Don Ramiro executing his responsibilities as head of the Building Association of Serrano XX.
In this capacity, he once dragged us to court and tried to kick us out of the building on the grounds that our uncivilized American habits caused us to wake up too early in the morning (7am) and our children made too much noise.
Don Ramiro, if we have to leave this building, I hope the next tenant is an Arab or African soccer player. If it’s a childless Spanish couple. I hope they have lots of parties, smoke crack and play really loud music. I hope the next renter decides to use the apartment as the locale for his thriving Casa Putas. Don Ramiro, when you get older and more infirm, I hope the poor third world woman taking care of you isn’t very nice. I hope she forgets to change your diapers and lets you sit in them. I hope you sit there powerless in your wheelchair while she watches her favorite telenovelas every time there’s a Clasico or Champion’s League soccer game on TV.
And when it’s your time, I hope the chasm of Hell opens up and the demons drag you down while the orchestra plays the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Trebuchet
Dear God,When it comes time for my 8-yr old son to take the SATs, in about nine years from now, could you please do me a favor and make sure it includes the word “trebuchet”? He has not sat down at the piano willingly to practice at any time this year, except for 7:30 the morning…after his 12-year old sister’s sleep-over party…when the girls had gone to bed at 3 am. When this failed to impress the girls, he and his twin moved on to streaking.
However, he has a very impressive knowledge of medieval siege engines due to many school bus hours playing Age of Empires, Age of Kings on the Nintendo DS. I believe this is teaching him some basic notions of cash flow, as well. Recently, he learned that his feudal village rents were not bringing in enough income to support his war-mongering proclivities. He has an impressive smattering of Roman military knowledge (Thank you Astérix! ) and can describe the Siege of Gondor (Lord of the Rings) at length.
Sometimes we non-tiger mothers need a break.
Nathalie
Monday, May 23, 2011
Dear Sexist Media,
Can we please have more photos of these fellows shirtless please?
Cause when you look like this,
and you’re not as smart as him (Dial a hooker)
, then maybe you have to stoop to assaulting the woman who cleans your toilet and changes your bed linens.
In the words of French electropop singer and sometime philosopher Yelle:
…Alors les filles on se promene
Ouais on va aux chippendales
On navait pas prevu de passer la soiree avec des rigolos
On voulait voir des pectoraux, des mecs montes comme des taureaux...
Yelle, Je Veux Te Voir
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Difference in French, American Attitudes comes to forefront in DSK Arrest
It's hard to miss the culture clash in the differing coverage the American, British and French press give the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the French IMF-head who was arrested in New York city after allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel maid.
The French journalists and public are particularly upset about the perceived lack of dignity with which Strauss-Kahn is being treated. They feel the pictures of him, unshaven and unkempt and handcuffed after his night in jail, are degrading to his individual dignity. They proudly point to French laws that forbid photographing suspects before they have been formally convicted of a crime. They feel that allowing journalists in the courtroom, undermines the legal process and turns the proceedings into a media circus.
The Americans, and to a lesser degree the British, feel the French press is to blame for a so-called "conspiracy of silence" that protected a "sexual predator." The French respond that the private sex lives of public figures are not their concern unless this somehow unduly impacts the manner in which those public figures perform the jobs they were elected to fulfill. For instance, not interested that former French president, Mittérand had a long-standing mistress and a love-child. If he had been using public funds to maintain his mistress and love child it would have been another story.
Apparently, DSK's third wife, Anne Sinclair, is not bothered by her husband's reputation for running after women. In public, she proclaims that she is proud of it and that it is "important for a politician to be able to seduce." I agree with the French press' restraint in reporting on this aspect of politician's lives. However, they need to understand that if the US press seems to go too far in the other extreme, it is because American politicians, are held to a different standard. In the US, for better or worse, demonstrating an upstanding personal life is part of how many politicians, especially those of the conservative Republican stripe, sell themselves to the American people. So it does make sense, that if the politician has campaigned on a "family-values" platform, which, in the US, means marital fidelity, or supports a very anti-gay conservative platform, then is revealed in the act of picking up men in airport restrooms, it makes sense to expose them. Meanwhile in the case of US politicians who did not campaign on the conservative "family values" platform or pretend in anyway that their personal life was a mirror for their qualities in government, I feel we should leave their private lives alone. While I did not like his equivocation on a lot of other issues, I never felt Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was a matter of interest for the American people and the American government. His election campaign was based on the economy, not his upstanding private life.
The conservative American argument is that a person's personal life is a reflection of their probable probity in public office. I disagree. While it would be nice to believe that having a reproach-free private life guarantees the ability to successfully govern, it's just impossible to demonstrate this correlation based on historical examples. Presidents like FDR and JFK were arguably successful presidents, and fidelity to their wives was not their strong point. Meanwhile, I have never heard any real reproach on Barack Obama's qualities as a husband and father, yet that doesn't stop American conservatives from lambasting his presidency. On the contrary, they supported John McCain, who emerged from his POW experience to find that his wife who had remained faithful and supported him the whole time of his imprisonment had become handicapped and aged badly. He promptly divorced her to marry a much younger heiress with a politically-connected father...yet this never seemed to bother the "family values" party.
Back to DSK, what does shock me from the French media analysis is their failure to differentiate from consensual sex and sexual aggression. They wash their hands of DSK's past, saying that they never investigated French journalist, Tristane Banon's account that DSK tried to rape her when she met him for an interview almost a decade ago because the alleged victim never formally denounced her aggressor. Apparently they all knew this was DSK, even though his name was deleted from the report. I disagree with their failure to investigate. The most most cursory glance at Miss Banon's profile would suggest that her mother's affiliation with the Socialist party, her family friendship with DSK's daughter, the fact that his second wife was her godmother and her position as a young journalist who did not want to be identified as "the woman who had a problem with a politician" explain why she did not denounce him. Her own mother counseled against it. However, the violence of Ms. Banon's account and the fact that she had so little personally to gain by making the accusation (rather the reverse) should have inspired them to look further into the story. One interesting contradiction I noted is that the American press and legal system is more solicitous in protecting the privacy of the alleged victim. They have not published her name; whereas the French press has.
As far as precedents go, most Americans are resentful that the French failed to extradite film director, Roman Polanski. Way to go France, glad you think the fact that he's a great film director and we're such Puritans who fail to "appreciate the pleasures of the flesh" excuses the fact that a 43-yr old man should have stood trial for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year-old American girl.
Only one journalist I came across in yesterday's Libération suggested that there is something wrong when the entire press corp of a country knows that they cannot send female journalists alone to interview a certain politician. In the same issue of Libé, Anne Sugier, President of the International League of Women's Rights is the only person who seemed to express any sympathy for the alleged victim's dignity and status. Meanwhile, French lawyer, Matthieu Bouchier, says that the physical part of the process of being detained and charged with a crime and the prison conditions in France are very similar to those in the US. The difference is that the French are not aware of it, because the media is not allowed to show it.
Frankly I am not at all sympathetic to those who complain about the humiliation to France of showing DSK in handcuffs. Sufficient evidence compelled the New York police to detain him and investigate him for a crime in the US. There is nothing special about the way DSK is being treated, except for the degree of media interest in covering it. Maybe if this had happened to an American of similar stature in France he would have been given more special treatment. This could not happen in the US. The underpinning of the US democratic ethos is that we CANNOT show that one of the most powerful men in the world gets different treatment from a common perp charged with a sex crime (even if this is not really true, once the wealthy person's expensive legal defense kicks in). Welcome to "Law and Order SVU". Nowhere, do I see any French appreciation of a justice system where an immigrant woman with no friends who works as a hotel maid can charge a wealthy and powerful man of a crime and be taken seriously. In fact, in fact they might take a look at the special immunity they give their elected officials, and their privacy and libel laws because there are plenty of financial(not sexual!) misdeeds that occupants of France's highest elected offices seem to get away with over the years.
Meanwhile, I agree that the American legal system is too much of a media circus with judges, defense lawyers and the prosecution, displaying a rather disgusting theatricality and self-promotion. I also agree that the American press is pretty dismal in its reporting in general, with a hyper-local emphasis and that the more respectable press is chasing ratings by digging deeper and deeper down into the "People" magazine and "National Enquirer" territory.
The US public has an insatiable appetite for police and law and order television dramas, and the formula for success there depends on contrasting the high position of the suspected criminal (international banker, wealthy man, possible next president of France) with the lowly status of his victim (immigrant hotel maid, with few friends and no family in the US). The US loves to build people up, but it also loves to take them down. They are not alone in their appetite for schadenfreude. Regardless of his professional competence, long before this latest incident, Dominique Strauss-Kahn came across as a very arrogant man, with a predatory relationship towards women (even if no proven past of sexual violence - much of this would qualify as harassment), whose taste for the luxury life contrasted with his Socialist party political affiliation - he embodied "la gauche caviar" - the caviar left.
Some of this stuff just doesn't translated literally into English. My favorite lost-in-translation? "Hot rabbit" which comes from the French "chaud lapin". The more Classical allusion: satyr -- too educated a reference for everyday American idiom. Frisky animals in English? Common and low-class: "horn dog" or dated: "randy goat". Admiring French ajectival phrase "The Great Seducer". American, Clinton-years reference: "has a zipper problem". Looking at DSK's personal appearance, tempting to reflect on Kissinger's "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac!" What country does DSK wish this had happened in? Italy!
I grabbed the last copy of Le Canard Enchainé at my news-stand yesterday to see what France's premier satirical paper had to say about the Affair. Here are some sample headlines and clips: "Erection, piège a cons!"Les larmes de Sarko-codile". Cartoon on Sarko's UMP party's real reaction to the news: "We should respect a decent period of reserve (with regard to DSK news). At least until the champagne cools!" Week's featured quote: Bernard Henri-Lévy (rather pretentious media-philosopher), we have these too in the US but none of the mainstream public has heard of them. When was the last time somebody outside academia cared what Noam Chomsky had to say about current events? "Do you think for one moment I would be friends with this man if he was a sexual predator?" "Canard Enchainé" response: "Imagine that DSK's lawyer forgot to present this argument to the American judge.
The French journalists and public are particularly upset about the perceived lack of dignity with which Strauss-Kahn is being treated. They feel the pictures of him, unshaven and unkempt and handcuffed after his night in jail, are degrading to his individual dignity. They proudly point to French laws that forbid photographing suspects before they have been formally convicted of a crime. They feel that allowing journalists in the courtroom, undermines the legal process and turns the proceedings into a media circus.
The Americans, and to a lesser degree the British, feel the French press is to blame for a so-called "conspiracy of silence" that protected a "sexual predator." The French respond that the private sex lives of public figures are not their concern unless this somehow unduly impacts the manner in which those public figures perform the jobs they were elected to fulfill. For instance, not interested that former French president, Mittérand had a long-standing mistress and a love-child. If he had been using public funds to maintain his mistress and love child it would have been another story.
Apparently, DSK's third wife, Anne Sinclair, is not bothered by her husband's reputation for running after women. In public, she proclaims that she is proud of it and that it is "important for a politician to be able to seduce." I agree with the French press' restraint in reporting on this aspect of politician's lives. However, they need to understand that if the US press seems to go too far in the other extreme, it is because American politicians, are held to a different standard. In the US, for better or worse, demonstrating an upstanding personal life is part of how many politicians, especially those of the conservative Republican stripe, sell themselves to the American people. So it does make sense, that if the politician has campaigned on a "family-values" platform, which, in the US, means marital fidelity, or supports a very anti-gay conservative platform, then is revealed in the act of picking up men in airport restrooms, it makes sense to expose them. Meanwhile in the case of US politicians who did not campaign on the conservative "family values" platform or pretend in anyway that their personal life was a mirror for their qualities in government, I feel we should leave their private lives alone. While I did not like his equivocation on a lot of other issues, I never felt Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was a matter of interest for the American people and the American government. His election campaign was based on the economy, not his upstanding private life.
The conservative American argument is that a person's personal life is a reflection of their probable probity in public office. I disagree. While it would be nice to believe that having a reproach-free private life guarantees the ability to successfully govern, it's just impossible to demonstrate this correlation based on historical examples. Presidents like FDR and JFK were arguably successful presidents, and fidelity to their wives was not their strong point. Meanwhile, I have never heard any real reproach on Barack Obama's qualities as a husband and father, yet that doesn't stop American conservatives from lambasting his presidency. On the contrary, they supported John McCain, who emerged from his POW experience to find that his wife who had remained faithful and supported him the whole time of his imprisonment had become handicapped and aged badly. He promptly divorced her to marry a much younger heiress with a politically-connected father...yet this never seemed to bother the "family values" party.
Back to DSK, what does shock me from the French media analysis is their failure to differentiate from consensual sex and sexual aggression. They wash their hands of DSK's past, saying that they never investigated French journalist, Tristane Banon's account that DSK tried to rape her when she met him for an interview almost a decade ago because the alleged victim never formally denounced her aggressor. Apparently they all knew this was DSK, even though his name was deleted from the report. I disagree with their failure to investigate. The most most cursory glance at Miss Banon's profile would suggest that her mother's affiliation with the Socialist party, her family friendship with DSK's daughter, the fact that his second wife was her godmother and her position as a young journalist who did not want to be identified as "the woman who had a problem with a politician" explain why she did not denounce him. Her own mother counseled against it. However, the violence of Ms. Banon's account and the fact that she had so little personally to gain by making the accusation (rather the reverse) should have inspired them to look further into the story. One interesting contradiction I noted is that the American press and legal system is more solicitous in protecting the privacy of the alleged victim. They have not published her name; whereas the French press has.
As far as precedents go, most Americans are resentful that the French failed to extradite film director, Roman Polanski. Way to go France, glad you think the fact that he's a great film director and we're such Puritans who fail to "appreciate the pleasures of the flesh" excuses the fact that a 43-yr old man should have stood trial for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year-old American girl.
Only one journalist I came across in yesterday's Libération suggested that there is something wrong when the entire press corp of a country knows that they cannot send female journalists alone to interview a certain politician. In the same issue of Libé, Anne Sugier, President of the International League of Women's Rights is the only person who seemed to express any sympathy for the alleged victim's dignity and status. Meanwhile, French lawyer, Matthieu Bouchier, says that the physical part of the process of being detained and charged with a crime and the prison conditions in France are very similar to those in the US. The difference is that the French are not aware of it, because the media is not allowed to show it.
Frankly I am not at all sympathetic to those who complain about the humiliation to France of showing DSK in handcuffs. Sufficient evidence compelled the New York police to detain him and investigate him for a crime in the US. There is nothing special about the way DSK is being treated, except for the degree of media interest in covering it. Maybe if this had happened to an American of similar stature in France he would have been given more special treatment. This could not happen in the US. The underpinning of the US democratic ethos is that we CANNOT show that one of the most powerful men in the world gets different treatment from a common perp charged with a sex crime (even if this is not really true, once the wealthy person's expensive legal defense kicks in). Welcome to "Law and Order SVU". Nowhere, do I see any French appreciation of a justice system where an immigrant woman with no friends who works as a hotel maid can charge a wealthy and powerful man of a crime and be taken seriously. In fact, in fact they might take a look at the special immunity they give their elected officials, and their privacy and libel laws because there are plenty of financial(not sexual!) misdeeds that occupants of France's highest elected offices seem to get away with over the years.
Meanwhile, I agree that the American legal system is too much of a media circus with judges, defense lawyers and the prosecution, displaying a rather disgusting theatricality and self-promotion. I also agree that the American press is pretty dismal in its reporting in general, with a hyper-local emphasis and that the more respectable press is chasing ratings by digging deeper and deeper down into the "People" magazine and "National Enquirer" territory.
The US public has an insatiable appetite for police and law and order television dramas, and the formula for success there depends on contrasting the high position of the suspected criminal (international banker, wealthy man, possible next president of France) with the lowly status of his victim (immigrant hotel maid, with few friends and no family in the US). The US loves to build people up, but it also loves to take them down. They are not alone in their appetite for schadenfreude. Regardless of his professional competence, long before this latest incident, Dominique Strauss-Kahn came across as a very arrogant man, with a predatory relationship towards women (even if no proven past of sexual violence - much of this would qualify as harassment), whose taste for the luxury life contrasted with his Socialist party political affiliation - he embodied "la gauche caviar" - the caviar left.
Some of this stuff just doesn't translated literally into English. My favorite lost-in-translation? "Hot rabbit" which comes from the French "chaud lapin". The more Classical allusion: satyr -- too educated a reference for everyday American idiom. Frisky animals in English? Common and low-class: "horn dog" or dated: "randy goat". Admiring French ajectival phrase "The Great Seducer". American, Clinton-years reference: "has a zipper problem". Looking at DSK's personal appearance, tempting to reflect on Kissinger's "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac!" What country does DSK wish this had happened in? Italy!
I grabbed the last copy of Le Canard Enchainé at my news-stand yesterday to see what France's premier satirical paper had to say about the Affair. Here are some sample headlines and clips: "Erection, piège a cons!"Les larmes de Sarko-codile". Cartoon on Sarko's UMP party's real reaction to the news: "We should respect a decent period of reserve (with regard to DSK news). At least until the champagne cools!" Week's featured quote: Bernard Henri-Lévy (rather pretentious media-philosopher), we have these too in the US but none of the mainstream public has heard of them. When was the last time somebody outside academia cared what Noam Chomsky had to say about current events? "Do you think for one moment I would be friends with this man if he was a sexual predator?" "Canard Enchainé" response: "Imagine that DSK's lawyer forgot to present this argument to the American judge.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Day in the Life of Nathalie Mason-Fleury
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Sunday, September 5, 2010
The School of Life
This week and next are back-to-school weeks for my children. They are spread out between two different schools. While the children haven’t changed schools, they have moved to different campuses—in both cases much larger ones. For me this means figuring out new areas of town, new buildings, new bus routes and stops, plus the usual parents’ meetings and the inevitable checklist/scavenger hunt for the items requested by their teachers.
My daughter, especially, is apprehensive about beginning middle school. She went from an elementary campus with two classes per grade to a preschool-through-12th grade facility with 5000 students. Last year she was one of 25 kids in “Valerie” ‘s class. This year, there are 11 homeroom classes in her grade and hers is simply designated by a letter and a number.
I asked her how the first day of school was. It seems she spends a lot of time trying not to get lost. She likes the novelty of having an electronic photo ID for the cafeteria and being able to choose what she eats, she says two out of her 6 teachers seem nice, one teacher is particularly concerned that the children display appropriate manners and respect for authority (which is fine by me, but the form this takes seems excessive to her), another teacher has berated her for fanning herself during class (it is very hot in Spain in September and none of the children’s schools has air conditioning—fans in Spain are a common and useful accessory for women), she describes being separated from friends by a plume of pushy 8th graders on the courtyard. I mentally picture the courtyard in “Prison Break”.
Already I have failed her. I rented her school books from the parents’ association, but did not pay attention to the last-call date for sign up and payment. Because I signed up late I could not pick up the books until the last day when half the books were missing and many of the ones left were in pretty sorry condition. She says her teachers will berate her for not being prepared and not taking care of her school material. Even though the parents’ association lady assures me the teachers are used to this situation and understanding, my daughter doesn’t believe it. I tend to agree with her. I remember my own experiences with secondary school teachers, especially those that reigned like absolute monarchs over their classrooms. Such teachers could be arbitrary and cruel.
One such pedagogue was my fourth grade parochial school teacher. Mr. G. was not unusual in arranging his students’ desks in alphabetical order; he was unusual in that he called his students by their last name. There was no Mr. or Miss in front of it either—simply “Mason” barked out military style, generally in a tone of voice indicating strong disapproval. Mr. G had military affectations—no doubt adopted to inspire terror in and consolidate his power over the child. Only now, as an adult, can I see how unsuited he would have been to any military environment involving interaction with grown-up peers or superiors.
These were the days when nobody seemed to care about children’s fragile egos. When I asked him once about a C grade I received on a science project, he responded with—“Oh, you’re the one who turned in that piece of crap.” If you had any particularity, you had better hide it from the watchful eye of Mr. G. One of his favorite sports was singling out those children for special humiliation. I remember one girl in our class who blushed easily. Mr. G used to stand her up in front of the class and he see how long it would take her to blush. The highlight of Mr. G’s year was a spring project he called “Real Life.” He introduced “Real Life” with gusto: “Now kiddies, you may think life is coming home from school and having your Mommy fix you cupcakes. Well I can assure you, it’s not. What we’re going to learn about next is ‘real life’.” He then explained that our project was to assume that we were getting out as enlisted personnel from the military and that we had no special job skills. We had to look at the want ads in the newspaper and find a job and apartment.”
Even now I have nightmares that I am back in middle or high school and the bell has rung for class and I can’t find the right classroom, or I get to the classroom and everybody else has started a test and I cannot even begin to answer the first question. I remember desperately looking for the familiar face of a friend amid the sea of people in the cafeteria. I remember the excitement of that special Friday in the month that would be “little round pizza day”. I remember the official rules—there is an honor code where you are obligated to report any transgression of your peers and I remember the unofficial rules—people cheat, they often get away with it, if you turn in your peers you might as well move to another school in another state because your name will be social poison. Your teacher may be a cruel, sadistic tyrant but God forbid you go above their head and complain about them to the administration or, worse yet, ask your parents to do this. Maybe receiving negative grades on their papers (according to a system where a certain number of points are deducted for every transgression against English grammar and composition—thus the end game is limitless) is not very morale enhancing for children, but getting the class lecture afterwards about “how little we respect certain students who must not be named who go whining to authority to complain about their teachers” is worse. Oh and those school elementary school projects, those aren’t projects for the children. Those are contests for the parents…not to mention the little girl who will dig up her dead and buried dog and label its bones in order to win an elementary school science fair, that’s the kind of person who will do anything to get ahead later in life.
Like most people, I had some truly wonderful teachers who believed in and nurtured my potential. I had others who prepared me for “real life”…
My daughter, especially, is apprehensive about beginning middle school. She went from an elementary campus with two classes per grade to a preschool-through-12th grade facility with 5000 students. Last year she was one of 25 kids in “Valerie” ‘s class. This year, there are 11 homeroom classes in her grade and hers is simply designated by a letter and a number.
I asked her how the first day of school was. It seems she spends a lot of time trying not to get lost. She likes the novelty of having an electronic photo ID for the cafeteria and being able to choose what she eats, she says two out of her 6 teachers seem nice, one teacher is particularly concerned that the children display appropriate manners and respect for authority (which is fine by me, but the form this takes seems excessive to her), another teacher has berated her for fanning herself during class (it is very hot in Spain in September and none of the children’s schools has air conditioning—fans in Spain are a common and useful accessory for women), she describes being separated from friends by a plume of pushy 8th graders on the courtyard. I mentally picture the courtyard in “Prison Break”.
Already I have failed her. I rented her school books from the parents’ association, but did not pay attention to the last-call date for sign up and payment. Because I signed up late I could not pick up the books until the last day when half the books were missing and many of the ones left were in pretty sorry condition. She says her teachers will berate her for not being prepared and not taking care of her school material. Even though the parents’ association lady assures me the teachers are used to this situation and understanding, my daughter doesn’t believe it. I tend to agree with her. I remember my own experiences with secondary school teachers, especially those that reigned like absolute monarchs over their classrooms. Such teachers could be arbitrary and cruel.
One such pedagogue was my fourth grade parochial school teacher. Mr. G. was not unusual in arranging his students’ desks in alphabetical order; he was unusual in that he called his students by their last name. There was no Mr. or Miss in front of it either—simply “Mason” barked out military style, generally in a tone of voice indicating strong disapproval. Mr. G had military affectations—no doubt adopted to inspire terror in and consolidate his power over the child. Only now, as an adult, can I see how unsuited he would have been to any military environment involving interaction with grown-up peers or superiors.
These were the days when nobody seemed to care about children’s fragile egos. When I asked him once about a C grade I received on a science project, he responded with—“Oh, you’re the one who turned in that piece of crap.” If you had any particularity, you had better hide it from the watchful eye of Mr. G. One of his favorite sports was singling out those children for special humiliation. I remember one girl in our class who blushed easily. Mr. G used to stand her up in front of the class and he see how long it would take her to blush. The highlight of Mr. G’s year was a spring project he called “Real Life.” He introduced “Real Life” with gusto: “Now kiddies, you may think life is coming home from school and having your Mommy fix you cupcakes. Well I can assure you, it’s not. What we’re going to learn about next is ‘real life’.” He then explained that our project was to assume that we were getting out as enlisted personnel from the military and that we had no special job skills. We had to look at the want ads in the newspaper and find a job and apartment.”
Even now I have nightmares that I am back in middle or high school and the bell has rung for class and I can’t find the right classroom, or I get to the classroom and everybody else has started a test and I cannot even begin to answer the first question. I remember desperately looking for the familiar face of a friend amid the sea of people in the cafeteria. I remember the excitement of that special Friday in the month that would be “little round pizza day”. I remember the official rules—there is an honor code where you are obligated to report any transgression of your peers and I remember the unofficial rules—people cheat, they often get away with it, if you turn in your peers you might as well move to another school in another state because your name will be social poison. Your teacher may be a cruel, sadistic tyrant but God forbid you go above their head and complain about them to the administration or, worse yet, ask your parents to do this. Maybe receiving negative grades on their papers (according to a system where a certain number of points are deducted for every transgression against English grammar and composition—thus the end game is limitless) is not very morale enhancing for children, but getting the class lecture afterwards about “how little we respect certain students who must not be named who go whining to authority to complain about their teachers” is worse. Oh and those school elementary school projects, those aren’t projects for the children. Those are contests for the parents…not to mention the little girl who will dig up her dead and buried dog and label its bones in order to win an elementary school science fair, that’s the kind of person who will do anything to get ahead later in life.
Like most people, I had some truly wonderful teachers who believed in and nurtured my potential. I had others who prepared me for “real life”…
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
US Memorial Day, American and European approaches to patriotism
My children asked me what Memorial Day commemorates. Like many Americans of my generation I never gave Memorial Day much thought beyond associating it with a day off work, barbecues and the beginning of summer. While I had a feeling it had something to do with honoring Americans who had died in wars, I didn’t know the exact answer so I looked it up in Wikipedia, where I learned that it was « First enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War – it is celebrated near the day of reunification after the Civil War – it was extended after World War I to honor Americans who have died in all wars. »
The Civil War origin is interesting because, for Americans, this was the most devastating war we have ever fought in terms of American casualties ; the only war since American Independence to have been fought on our own soil and the only war to have significantly impacted American civilians.
I was touched to see many of my American friends on Facebook post pictures of tombstones of their parents or grandparents who had served in the US Armed Forces, kind of exotic too because, in Europe, I have not detected much patriotism or pride in military service among anybody of my generation (children of the Baby Boom). I wonder if this does not have to do with the shadow cast by World War I, World War II or the Spanish Civil War (not to mention the relatively recent independence struggles of many former European colonies). In my children’s British school, two of their required reading books have been about the Blitz and I spent yesterday evening helping my fifth-grade daughter study for a history test on World War I—and was struck by the total of 9 million dead.
I remember an argument with an American boss who was very critical of France’s quick surrender during WWII. I responded that I don’t think they had much will to fight after World War I. Contrary to Germany, the major WWI battles were fought on their own soil. My grandfather, who fought for France in WWII, spent most of the War in German prisoner of war camps, which got progressively worse each time he escaped, marking a progressive descent into Hell. In a perverse way he did not resent the Germans, despite the inhumane living conditions and sadistic practices of the guards in Rawa-Ruska camp in the Ukraine. He felt that they were « just doing their job », whereas he reserved his true ire for his fellow Frenchmen and prisoners of war for their lack of will to fight, for not trying to escape from the POW camps and most of all for turning him in every time he escaped, resulting in various punishments ranging from solitary confinement to having his eye lashes burned off. The most psychologically damaging element of this experience came from witnessing the treatment of people who were far worse off than he. This came about when he and fellow Belgian and French POWs were used to unload train cars, filled with the near-dead occupants being shipped to a nearby concentration camp.
The war ended, my grandfather married my grandmother and they moved to the US, but the memories of his POW experience stayed with him. My uncles describe how he would toss cigarette cartons to the prisoners working along the road in chain gangs in the Rural South of the 1950s. Having been a prisoner himself, he sympathized and knew that cigarettes are their universal currency. My maternal grandfather loved his adopted homeland (he had to reaquire American nationalilty even though his father was American, because he had spent most his life in France and served in the French army during WWII). He became quite the patriotic citizen, inspiring his two older sons to volunteer for military service during the Vietnam war.
To the extent that my grandfather chose to leave France after WWII and immigrate to America and had very ambivalent feelings about his experiences in the French army during WWII, I can see why my experience of patriotism differ drastically from European counterparts whose grandparents lived through World War II or Spanish counterparts, whose grandparents grew up in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.
The European Union has always felt like a pragmatic union to me. Pragmatism works great when « the rising tide is lifting all ships » but is a hard rallying cry in tough times when people are asked to make sacrifices. Then it gets all to easy to focus on differences and who is not « sacrificing enough ».
It has always seemed to me that nationalistic identification with any one of the European countries is something you are or aren’t born into. It has to do with the fact that your ancestors lived in the same place for many hundreds of years, alongside other people who share a common culture and ethnicity (Although this is changing with more recent waves of immigration…)—a real challenge when you try to build a union among countries, who were fighting each other and themselves 70 and 80 years ago.
As far as a pan-European « identity » among people my age, if it exists, I’d be hardpressed to define it. Patriotism is seen as sort of an embarrassing relic of and painful memory from their grandparents’ generations. The social welfare mentality leads to a lot entitlement regarding what the state should be giving them, but (like many of their generational American counterparts) not so much interest when it comes to giving back. Compulsory military service has mostly been abolished and I don’t see any real respect for voluntary military service here—the general idea seems to be that if you are smart, you choose to earn a lot more money in the private sector. On the other hand, in Europe, going into politics and public administration is seen as a more prestigious career choice than in the US…
One way I do not see a major difference with Europe is my (Gen X) and the following, Boomlet (1980 and later), US generations’ tendency to feel like JFK’s « Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country » failed, along with a lot of the other social ideals of the 1960s—and to full-heartedly embrace a much more 1980s Boomer ethos of individualism and consumerism. However, when I see the Memorial Day Facebook posts I can’t help but wonder if the US, as a much younger country whose inhabitants may or may not share a common ethnicity or past cultural heritage, does benefit from the fact that we have a national identity that is based on choosing and being taught to reaffirm a common set of values. As for the economic crisis, having a strong, federal government definitely makes it easier for the US--a federal government whose structure and integrity we had to fight a Civil War to preserve…so all in all, interesting for me to learn that the origin of Memorial Day was US reunification.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Facebook "friendbore"?
It could be you!
As a frequent offender in this category, and parent of a 'tween child and all the drama that entails, I was telling my husband how schools, or preferably parents, ought to introduce their children to the finer points of "How Not to be a Cad on the Internet".
My husband said: That makes me think of something. I used to have 405 Facebook friends two days ago and today I only have 403.
Maybe they really weren't your "friends" in the first place.
Yeah, but to get unfriend-ed by two people in the space of two days?
Well, didn't you accidentally befriend that person who mortally betrayed us in business because you used the Facebook Email Addresses Ap (and you had forgotten they were still there)? They agreed to friend you and then you "unfriended" them within a space of minutes. That was pretty cold.
(Distracted) I'm still wondering what I might have done recently.
Maybe you're one of "those" people.
What people?
"Friedbores," you know the number one most boring person in your Facebook "news" page. The one whose posting frequency is only matched by the inanity of their subject matter.
Noooh!
Who knows. Maybe you tweeted a few floaters recently and that was it. Problem solved, instant erasure! And like that, you're gone.
Of course, I only thought about this because I worried that the same thing was going to happen to me after a few of my status updates...
Ah the age of technology, when you can go from friendwhore to friendbore in a matter of seconds.
As a frequent offender in this category, and parent of a 'tween child and all the drama that entails, I was telling my husband how schools, or preferably parents, ought to introduce their children to the finer points of "How Not to be a Cad on the Internet".
My husband said: That makes me think of something. I used to have 405 Facebook friends two days ago and today I only have 403.
Maybe they really weren't your "friends" in the first place.
Yeah, but to get unfriend-ed by two people in the space of two days?
Well, didn't you accidentally befriend that person who mortally betrayed us in business because you used the Facebook Email Addresses Ap (and you had forgotten they were still there)? They agreed to friend you and then you "unfriended" them within a space of minutes. That was pretty cold.
(Distracted) I'm still wondering what I might have done recently.
Maybe you're one of "those" people.
What people?
"Friedbores," you know the number one most boring person in your Facebook "news" page. The one whose posting frequency is only matched by the inanity of their subject matter.
Noooh!
Who knows. Maybe you tweeted a few floaters recently and that was it. Problem solved, instant erasure! And like that, you're gone.
Of course, I only thought about this because I worried that the same thing was going to happen to me after a few of my status updates...
Ah the age of technology, when you can go from friendwhore to friendbore in a matter of seconds.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Keep the "crazy" under control
I have an (almost) eleven-year old girl and three boys, twins aged 7 and a 3-yr old. Honestly, most the time, I feel like Lynette from Desperate Housewives. Hearing my 3-yr old son sing “I love my mudder” at breakfast in the morning or the evening cuddle and prayers with the children—the one moment of the day when they resemble anything close to angelic--are all too brief. Mostly my day is like this:
Go onto the Internet to see if the crusty raised bumps in a circle on Twin A’s arm are ringworm. Educate myself on what ringworm is and how do you get rid of this. It turns out ringworm is a fungus and an over-the-counter antifungal cream at the pharmacy will take care of this. Of course you have to remember to put it on every morning and night for about 2 weeks to get results, in the meantime, he’s developed a new “ringworm” on his leg. Crap! More weeks of remembering to put the ringworm cream on Twin A, especially now that we are in later Spring, and I have to remember to put sunscreen on my fair-skinned children’s faces, arms and necks every morning.
Two years ago, when I had to take my daughter to the dermatologist to get rid of some pesky warts (that cream had to be applied morning and night for two months!), the posters of little baby with wrinkled granny face and melanomas or the toddler walking on the beach in swim trunks—with a header like “That tan he got at the beach when he was two is something he’ll keep with him for the rest of his life” made a real impression on me. The dermatologist explained to me that the “freckles” on the kids arms and faces are sun damage. My half-Spanish husband thinks my sunscreen obsession is complete horseshit. His mother and sister have never used a drop of sunscreen in their life and laugh about the British tourists in Mallorca—“Look, they come in two colors: Just arrived and just burned!” I would have loved it if our children had come out with more of a Mediterranean complexion, but considering three of them are as Melanin-deprived as I am, there must be some recessive fair skinned Galician Celt or Vosgeian French genes in the woodpile from his side of the family—so I wish he would be more supportive.
Back to the Internet to do more research, this time on impacted splinters. The 3-yr old got a splinter 6 weeks ago and I don’t think we got all the wood out. Meanwhile, he has a thick callous with a pinprick-sized hole on the bottom of his foot. The suggested remedies run the gamut from “put a piece of bacon on this under a Bandaid and leave it overnight. In the morning it will come out.” To a recommended intervention, cutting the callous out with a sterilized exacto knife. A lot of input from professional carpenters on the different reactions you get based on different types of wood splinters. None of this seems relevant or within my skillset. I talk to my husband about the splinter and the fact that my hairdresser almost died from a staph aurea infection he got in his foot and I guess I should probably call the pediatrician to get it out and he says: “You’re not seriously going to bother the pediatrician to remove a splinter. I had a splinter once for three years.” I retort: “You’ll regret this lack of concern when the baby gets deadly ill with a staph infection,” to which he replies: “Do me a favor keep the crazy under control.” Wickedly, I think how low I can go to win the argument: “How do you know you’re not crazy. I mean, truly crazy people never think they are?”
Why Can’t I be More Like…?
Alpha Catholic Mom: The woman at mass with her six beautifully behaved, children in coordinating outfits, politely listening to the sermon. This is the woman with the beautiful embroidered First Communion banner that looks like it was handmade by Belgian nuns, but of course she did it herself, not to mention she’s actually got her hair-brushed and looks well put-together, herself. Meanwhile, I’ve pulled my wet hair back because I haven’t had time to dry it, have screamed at the children three times that morning to get them dressed and out the door to church on-time, overcome the challenge of getting them past my anti-clerical, unreligious husband who asks them if they’d rather play video games Sunday Morning than talk to “Dear Baby Jesus”—ensues “Talladega Nights” Ricky Bobby impersonation. Once in church, my daughter gets up once to go to the bathroom, the boys making paper airplanes out of the hand-outs, tell me they’re thirsty and ask when it will be over at various points.
Or
The Stepford Wife. The Stepford Wife is tall blond, slender and attractive. It would be easy to hate her, but she is also smart, has a cool sense of self-deprecating humor, and is absolutely nice to everybody. The Stepford Wife is very stylish. I bet she never spend the whole day in work out clothes…and then doesn’t even work out. She may have 3 or more children, but they do not seem to stress her out overly much. I never hear her complaining about the children, or if they do, it’s in a light-hearted way. I bet the Stepford Wife is never riding in a minivan (she’d rather be seen dead) and turns to her children who are fighting in the back seat and says something like: “If you don’t stop fighting with your brother right now, I will a) take away your TV and video-gaming privileges for the week b) no dessert or sugary snacks today c) I will slap you! The Stepford Wife is still pinching herself to verify her good luck at being married to her husband—the dear man. I’m sure she’s never screamed at him with vocabulary that would shame a fishwife from the top of a ski slope or had conversations that revolve around whose turn it is to clean up the dog vomit. My husband wonders a la “Jesse’s Girl:” “Why can’t I find a wife like that!”
I think of a Facebook cartoon that somebody once posted:
Male Prostitute (for women!)
You see a housewife driving by in a stationwagon and a man soliciting her: “For $50 I’ll listen to you all night.” Ha, ha, funny in a disturbing way, because it’s so true. The retort would be the old saw about:
The Woman Who Goes to a Fairy Godmother
…and says: “I don’t want to cook any more; I don’t want to grocery shop; I don’t want to be the one who always has to remember the children’s schedules and drive them to doctors, dentists, birthday parties any more, I don’t want to do the dishes or clean house, I want more pay for the same work…” And then the fairy godmother waved her magic arm and the woman turned into a man.
Like everything, this is a gross over-simplification, because I have other Facebook friends who are stay at home dads, who do every task I listed in the fairy godmother joke and others who clearly are doing a lot to participate in running the house and looking after the kids. I think the difference is being the person who has to organize everything in their head and make sure it gets done, even if other people are helping out and the person who can check out of most these responsibilities, confident that everything to run the household and take care of the children will get done, and if you have something to do, someone will remind you to do it, so you can whole-mindedly devote yourself to some creative or professional endeavor for hours at end without having to stop and write a post-it-note saying something like:
“Remember to call the orthodontist” because the dog ate the daughter’s retainer. “Call the drycleaners and schedule a pick-up”. The clothes are piling up and you need to make sure they haven’t fired you as a client because you can never be there in the exact moment in the 4 hour time window they actually show up to pick up the clothes, “Buy birthday present for Twin B’s friend.”
I finally decided to be “cool mom,” which means buying other children the toys they want, but you wouldn’t think of buying for your own children--for very good reason. I was interrupted from whatever I was doing this weekend by Twin B hyperventilating and wailing like a stuck pig because he had taken down the Lego creator set I bought for his best friends’ birthday party from it’s high, safe perch to “look at it.” Then, his baby brother found it and wreaked destruction. Now, for the uninitiated, Lego Creator is your basic parental nightmare. It is a creative toy and if Twin B ever goes to Caltech or MIT, I can feel a touch of pride that he ultimately, inadvertently got the Lego Creator set he always wanted. Why do I hate Lego Creator? It is because the sets come with a quadrillion tiny, unique pieces that a) your child loses within minutes b) the baby brother steals c) the dog eats (hopefully you don’t have take the dog to the vet for the $1000 operation to unblock his intestinal tract afterwards—thankfully baby brother is 3 now and doesn’t try to eat the tiny pieces)…and then you child comes wailing to you: “Waaaaaaaaaah, I cannot build General Grievous because I’m missing blah, blah (miniscule and indescribable) connector piece.”
Deep Thought: Since when do first graders have 2 hours of homework on the weekends? That is such a drag to supervise. It’s like your 38 and back in school. When I was a kid I didn’t have real homework until third grade; I didn’t put any serious effort into “remembering” to do it until fifth grade; and my parents role was limited to occasionally asking if I had done my homework.
These days when your first-grader has homework: “It’s your homework!” Of course you could leave it to the child to take initiative (at age 7) and remember to do it himself—which if you have a normal child--you can forget about. Take into account, that everybody else’s parent is helping them with their homework, so if you just left it up to the child to “learn a lesson in responsibility”—the teacher is clearly going to think your kid is a loser, with slacker, loser parents who will be really sorry when their child graduates from high school without even being able to get into community college.
Mother-of-Four Children-Under-the-Age-of-12 Fantasy
Sleep away Obedience Camp for Children: I see this as a sort of military themed spend-the-night camp run by former army sergeants, with beneficial activities like 6 AM forced marches and runs to wear the little buggers out, and other group activities to teach them the value of team work and discourage whining tendencies. If only there was a place where you could send your kids off for a month and have them shipped back to you as responsible, considerate, self-motivated, empathetic human beings—future responsible citizens, progeny who will do you proud! This is no doubt a Heinlein “Starship Troopers”-inspired fantasy that highlights my inner, Southern conservative, militarist streak.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Thoughts on Health Care--In Between the Extremes
I haven’t been following the recent health care debate very closely, but I’m glad that Health Care Reform has passed. I find it disingenuous that so many staunch Republicans complain about “the way it was passed” considering their tactics, since the Clinton years, of filibustering everything...and then complaining about how things are not done with more consensus.
Living abroad, I am often treated to people’s uninformed opinions about the way “they”—we Americans--all are—overweight, ignorant, gun-toting, polluting, violators of other countries’ national sovereignty--extremists. What is most amusing, or distressing is the way people have of saying these things in front of you, as if you weren’t one of Them and might be insulted or disagree with your interlocutors. It’s not that there isn’t any truth in any of these assertions, it’s that such statements often reflect uninformed (or minimally informed) truth, issued from a very smug outsider perspective.
Let’s take the least polarizing and most personal accusation: “Americans are fat.” Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, but if we have something negative to say about other people, minimal good manners dictate not saying this until “They” are at least out of ear’s reach. I was once told by an otherwise educated-seeming, middle-class French person that “Americans do not eat vegetables.” “Really, I said, have you ever been in the PRODUCE section of a Publix or a Safeway because they happen to be loaded with vegetables, which would be surprising if there was no market for them…”
Sometimes when people do travel abroad, a very curious thing happens: they have preconceived stereotypes of the “other” place they will be visiting (preferably exotic and different from their place, otherwise what’s the interest of traveling), so the purpose of the trip is to confirm these preconceived notions. The international traveler, with such an agenda, can be surprisingly successful. The person who is convinced that the US is a violent and lawless place will inevitably walk into a random Burger King in Los Angeles and witness a shootout. Meanwhile I, the American, have been to Burger King and other fast food joints in my life (and no I don’t and didn’t eat this food on a regular basis) and have never witnessed one gun or shooting.
I don’t know where this foreign visitor went (I’m not familiar with LA), but I assume it was a bad neighborhood. It wouldn’t occur to me to wander around the rougher Parisian “banlieues” (suburbs) as a blithe tourist. And, if I did such a thing, I would be honest enough to qualify where I was instead of identifying this as the “quintessential French experience.” As for the weight issue, I do recognize and am saddened by the fact that, statistically Americans are overweight. However, the conversation is more interesting when people say something like—“weight and making healthy food choices are often a function of education and economics, and weight gain typically accompanies the rise of processed foods and the practice of working outside the house. Society-wide weight gain, while at a more advanced stage in the US, is a phenomenon currently affecting Most developed nations…”
Now back to social security and health care. I am always surprised to hear so many Americans proclaim: “We have the best health care system in the world.” Most of these people have never lived Anywhere Else in the world. They often rely on statistics and articles that support how bad it is Everywhere Else. This is no substitute for actually having lived Somewhere Else and being able to compare.
I am not a statistics person, and I don’t have any political agenda. These are some simple points that have impressed me living both in the US and abroad:
Spain—
We have private health care insurance here that was very easy to sign up for. The only reason its cost is comparable to private (non-employer affiliated) PPO health insurance in the US is because it is a world-wide policy and will reimburse us 80% of any health care expenses incurred elsewhere, but what makes it expensive is the US portion of the coverage….If this policy were limited to Spain, it would be a Whole Lot cheaper. To obtain this policy, I did not have to fill out any questionnaire on pre-existing conditions or list all the medical or hospital visits my family have had in the past five years.
When my children are sick and I go to the children’s emergency room, I give the receptionist my insurance card and my child’s name—punto y basta. I do not need to call up the insurance company to get any approvals if the emergency room doctor recommends the child stay in the hospital.
My children’s pediatrician gives me his cell phone number That He Will Answer and will visit our house (non-emergency house visits by non-network providers are reimbursed up to 80% by the health insurance) when the children are sick.
I haven’t tried this, but my American friends have. You can also get a family practice doctor to visit you at your house if you are sick and don’t feel well enough to go outside. They said the cost of this was around 100 euros and also reimbursable at 80% by their insurance.
We are not eligible for Seguridad Social (social security) because we do not work for a salary in Spain. Illegal immigrants are, however, eligible for Seguridad Social. They are given a card and affiliated doctor and hospitals and can use the system for non-emergency related health-care. Most Spanish people I know, who can afford it, have private health care insurance, either through their employer or for which they pay, privately.
Yes, they all complain about Seguridad Social—the waits and the difficulty of seeing a specialist or getting very individualized attention, but the key point is that it is there. I am sympathetic to the Spaniards’ complaints about Seguridad Social, not so much to the complaints from illegal and recently legalized immigrants. I don’t say it, but what I am thinking is: “You come from a country that could care less if you die in the street like a dog. So no, I don’t give a damn if you had to wait a long time in line behind a bunch of old Spaniards to get your health care. Those people have been paying into this system for years…Suck it up and be grateful for what you get because in my country, nobody gives you shit for free.”
US
Most aspects of healthcare visits take place with the nurses. Any contact with the doctor is very brief. Some practices have an emergency call number where you will first talk with a call center employee or a nurse. If they deem it necessary, a doctor may call you back.
Any stay in the hospital involves and lengthy and often complex pre-approval process with the insurer. You want to make sure you correctly understood this process or you may get stuck with the bill.
If you are checking into the hospital or need to go to the emergency room and are not spewing blood on the spot (in which case the friend or family member who brought you will be doing this), expect to spend 45 minutes just filling out forms explaining who your Primary and Secondary insurers are and all their contact information and absolving the hospital and its personnel of all blame if they should accidentally feed you into a wood chipper and cut you to a million pieces. If you have insurance, expect a bill that can range from the hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on your co-pay and deductible. If you do not have insurance and should need emergency hospitalization and advanced medical care in the US, you can wind up with a bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. To add insult to injury, there is one last step. You must then interact with their “patient care consultant” to “make sure that your hospital processing is going as smoothly as possible.”
Getting Health Insurance when you are self-employed
If you do not have access to insurance through an employer or professional organization, expect to fill out a very lengthy questionnaire and answer questions about every doctor’s visit, hospital-visit and surgical procedure every person in your family has had in the past five years. If they deem that you are too high-risk, they can refuse to insure you and you will find yourself without insurance in the country with the highest cost of health care in the world (see above for the hundred thousand dollar bill).
When we were just starting JBoss, we had family health coverage through my former employer’s COBRA insurance (much higher than what we paid when this was subsidized by my employer—probably about $900 a month for two adults and a child). Three months away from end of the 18-month obligatory COBRA coverage period, I decided to shop around for a health plan that would cover our small company (just my husband and myself at that point). In the meantime, I became pregnant with twins (and no, this was not the result of any fertility treatments for you crack-pots that think that this was interfering with God’s Plan). I was not just a pregnant woman, I was a pregnant woman with twins, which put me into the High Risk pregnancy category because twins are very often born early and can require very expensive NICU (newborn intensive care unit) hospitalization for a few days to several weeks. The insurance broker was doubtful about finding anybody who would cover us.
At that point, I wondered where I had gone wrong in life. I had gotten a higher education; I worked hard. I considered myself a responsible person, I hadn’t even really waited to the last minute to obtain new insurance coverage and here I was--at risk for falling through the (in the US, practically non-existent) mattress that cushions your fall to the bottom of society—potentially with no health insurance or exorbitantly priced health insurance and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical debt. Things worked out for the best and we did find an HMO program that would accept us and the twins were born at a healthy 8 months, with only one of them requiring a two-day stay at NICU…but there were no guarantees things would turn out this way.
I consider the US to be a very favorable place to become an entrepreneur. Until recently, this did not apply to anybody who (they or their immediate family members) may have an existing medical condition that makes you undesirable to private health care insurers. I know talented people who could not ever work for small start-ups for this reason.
The procedure
This is how the free-market health care system works. Two years ago, I had to have a medically necessary procedure. I had private PPO insurance for which we paid quite a bit, I was sure this wasn’t going to be a problem. The first thing I learned is that Those Doctors Who Can Afford It—which is often to say the good ones—do not choose to affiliate with Cigna or Aetna or Blue Cross or whoever your “premium” health insurance provider is. These doctors may not necessarily have gone to medical school and become surgeons just so they could be driving Maseratis and living in multi-million dollar houses. On the other hand, they want do not want a health insurance bureaucrat, who is not a doctor, telling them how much they can charge or dictating what kind of treatment they should be giving to their patients.
The procedure was quite expensive and Cigna paid for far less than 80% of it. When you sign a contract with a US health insurance provider, what that “80% out of network coverage” really means is that they will pay "80% of what they think your procedure should have cost” out of network. Expect to get lots of bills later down the road from the doctor and hospital when they get lesser reimbursement. What I learned? Cigna and I’m sure they are not the only health insurance company that does this, automatically doesn’t pay a chunk of your bill—on principle. I don’t know what the statistics are on this, but I’m sure 50 to 60% people will stop there and not appeal. If you are successful in your appeal, as I was, at that point they will pay half of what they didn’t pay before, but still a lot less than the 80% you were counting on. Maybe more intrepid people successfully go on to a second appeal; I stopped there.
If you think that a lot of doctors don’t want to affiliate with your health insurance carrier, guess what? Many of the good ones, or at least the ones who seemed to have taken the “bedside manner” course in medical school—Really don’t want to affiliate with Medicare…which you will find out if you happen to have parents.
If you need private health insurance and have had any surgery in the past few years for something they considered a risk, even if whatever they operated for turned out to be benign—expect to automatically be denied health coverage.
So don’t tell me that health care reform is going to “break” our marvelous system. As far as I’m concerned—it isn’t exactly that marvelous and it’s already broken….Yes, I know that other systems aren’t perfect and have their faults as well and that there are a million different technical points you can argue. However, considering that the current free-market American system does not provide all my family members with health coverage, and, for most of my life, I was in the position of this being a Major Problem, I’m going to suck it up pay for this.
For all of you people whingeing about the way this bill was passed, you know what? The rest of us are stuck paying for the Iraq war, which we entered under false pretenses, and the ongoing Afghanistan war, which looks like it’s going to be another Vietnam. We’re stuck paying for the bail-out of the financial system, when most of us had nothing to do with the abuses or obscene payouts going on there…so welcome to our world.
Living abroad, I am often treated to people’s uninformed opinions about the way “they”—we Americans--all are—overweight, ignorant, gun-toting, polluting, violators of other countries’ national sovereignty--extremists. What is most amusing, or distressing is the way people have of saying these things in front of you, as if you weren’t one of Them and might be insulted or disagree with your interlocutors. It’s not that there isn’t any truth in any of these assertions, it’s that such statements often reflect uninformed (or minimally informed) truth, issued from a very smug outsider perspective.
Let’s take the least polarizing and most personal accusation: “Americans are fat.” Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, but if we have something negative to say about other people, minimal good manners dictate not saying this until “They” are at least out of ear’s reach. I was once told by an otherwise educated-seeming, middle-class French person that “Americans do not eat vegetables.” “Really, I said, have you ever been in the PRODUCE section of a Publix or a Safeway because they happen to be loaded with vegetables, which would be surprising if there was no market for them…”
Sometimes when people do travel abroad, a very curious thing happens: they have preconceived stereotypes of the “other” place they will be visiting (preferably exotic and different from their place, otherwise what’s the interest of traveling), so the purpose of the trip is to confirm these preconceived notions. The international traveler, with such an agenda, can be surprisingly successful. The person who is convinced that the US is a violent and lawless place will inevitably walk into a random Burger King in Los Angeles and witness a shootout. Meanwhile I, the American, have been to Burger King and other fast food joints in my life (and no I don’t and didn’t eat this food on a regular basis) and have never witnessed one gun or shooting.
I don’t know where this foreign visitor went (I’m not familiar with LA), but I assume it was a bad neighborhood. It wouldn’t occur to me to wander around the rougher Parisian “banlieues” (suburbs) as a blithe tourist. And, if I did such a thing, I would be honest enough to qualify where I was instead of identifying this as the “quintessential French experience.” As for the weight issue, I do recognize and am saddened by the fact that, statistically Americans are overweight. However, the conversation is more interesting when people say something like—“weight and making healthy food choices are often a function of education and economics, and weight gain typically accompanies the rise of processed foods and the practice of working outside the house. Society-wide weight gain, while at a more advanced stage in the US, is a phenomenon currently affecting Most developed nations…”
Now back to social security and health care. I am always surprised to hear so many Americans proclaim: “We have the best health care system in the world.” Most of these people have never lived Anywhere Else in the world. They often rely on statistics and articles that support how bad it is Everywhere Else. This is no substitute for actually having lived Somewhere Else and being able to compare.
I am not a statistics person, and I don’t have any political agenda. These are some simple points that have impressed me living both in the US and abroad:
Spain—
We have private health care insurance here that was very easy to sign up for. The only reason its cost is comparable to private (non-employer affiliated) PPO health insurance in the US is because it is a world-wide policy and will reimburse us 80% of any health care expenses incurred elsewhere, but what makes it expensive is the US portion of the coverage….If this policy were limited to Spain, it would be a Whole Lot cheaper. To obtain this policy, I did not have to fill out any questionnaire on pre-existing conditions or list all the medical or hospital visits my family have had in the past five years.
When my children are sick and I go to the children’s emergency room, I give the receptionist my insurance card and my child’s name—punto y basta. I do not need to call up the insurance company to get any approvals if the emergency room doctor recommends the child stay in the hospital.
My children’s pediatrician gives me his cell phone number That He Will Answer and will visit our house (non-emergency house visits by non-network providers are reimbursed up to 80% by the health insurance) when the children are sick.
I haven’t tried this, but my American friends have. You can also get a family practice doctor to visit you at your house if you are sick and don’t feel well enough to go outside. They said the cost of this was around 100 euros and also reimbursable at 80% by their insurance.
We are not eligible for Seguridad Social (social security) because we do not work for a salary in Spain. Illegal immigrants are, however, eligible for Seguridad Social. They are given a card and affiliated doctor and hospitals and can use the system for non-emergency related health-care. Most Spanish people I know, who can afford it, have private health care insurance, either through their employer or for which they pay, privately.
Yes, they all complain about Seguridad Social—the waits and the difficulty of seeing a specialist or getting very individualized attention, but the key point is that it is there. I am sympathetic to the Spaniards’ complaints about Seguridad Social, not so much to the complaints from illegal and recently legalized immigrants. I don’t say it, but what I am thinking is: “You come from a country that could care less if you die in the street like a dog. So no, I don’t give a damn if you had to wait a long time in line behind a bunch of old Spaniards to get your health care. Those people have been paying into this system for years…Suck it up and be grateful for what you get because in my country, nobody gives you shit for free.”
US
Most aspects of healthcare visits take place with the nurses. Any contact with the doctor is very brief. Some practices have an emergency call number where you will first talk with a call center employee or a nurse. If they deem it necessary, a doctor may call you back.
Any stay in the hospital involves and lengthy and often complex pre-approval process with the insurer. You want to make sure you correctly understood this process or you may get stuck with the bill.
If you are checking into the hospital or need to go to the emergency room and are not spewing blood on the spot (in which case the friend or family member who brought you will be doing this), expect to spend 45 minutes just filling out forms explaining who your Primary and Secondary insurers are and all their contact information and absolving the hospital and its personnel of all blame if they should accidentally feed you into a wood chipper and cut you to a million pieces. If you have insurance, expect a bill that can range from the hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on your co-pay and deductible. If you do not have insurance and should need emergency hospitalization and advanced medical care in the US, you can wind up with a bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. To add insult to injury, there is one last step. You must then interact with their “patient care consultant” to “make sure that your hospital processing is going as smoothly as possible.”
Getting Health Insurance when you are self-employed
If you do not have access to insurance through an employer or professional organization, expect to fill out a very lengthy questionnaire and answer questions about every doctor’s visit, hospital-visit and surgical procedure every person in your family has had in the past five years. If they deem that you are too high-risk, they can refuse to insure you and you will find yourself without insurance in the country with the highest cost of health care in the world (see above for the hundred thousand dollar bill).
When we were just starting JBoss, we had family health coverage through my former employer’s COBRA insurance (much higher than what we paid when this was subsidized by my employer—probably about $900 a month for two adults and a child). Three months away from end of the 18-month obligatory COBRA coverage period, I decided to shop around for a health plan that would cover our small company (just my husband and myself at that point). In the meantime, I became pregnant with twins (and no, this was not the result of any fertility treatments for you crack-pots that think that this was interfering with God’s Plan). I was not just a pregnant woman, I was a pregnant woman with twins, which put me into the High Risk pregnancy category because twins are very often born early and can require very expensive NICU (newborn intensive care unit) hospitalization for a few days to several weeks. The insurance broker was doubtful about finding anybody who would cover us.
At that point, I wondered where I had gone wrong in life. I had gotten a higher education; I worked hard. I considered myself a responsible person, I hadn’t even really waited to the last minute to obtain new insurance coverage and here I was--at risk for falling through the (in the US, practically non-existent) mattress that cushions your fall to the bottom of society—potentially with no health insurance or exorbitantly priced health insurance and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical debt. Things worked out for the best and we did find an HMO program that would accept us and the twins were born at a healthy 8 months, with only one of them requiring a two-day stay at NICU…but there were no guarantees things would turn out this way.
I consider the US to be a very favorable place to become an entrepreneur. Until recently, this did not apply to anybody who (they or their immediate family members) may have an existing medical condition that makes you undesirable to private health care insurers. I know talented people who could not ever work for small start-ups for this reason.
The procedure
This is how the free-market health care system works. Two years ago, I had to have a medically necessary procedure. I had private PPO insurance for which we paid quite a bit, I was sure this wasn’t going to be a problem. The first thing I learned is that Those Doctors Who Can Afford It—which is often to say the good ones—do not choose to affiliate with Cigna or Aetna or Blue Cross or whoever your “premium” health insurance provider is. These doctors may not necessarily have gone to medical school and become surgeons just so they could be driving Maseratis and living in multi-million dollar houses. On the other hand, they want do not want a health insurance bureaucrat, who is not a doctor, telling them how much they can charge or dictating what kind of treatment they should be giving to their patients.
The procedure was quite expensive and Cigna paid for far less than 80% of it. When you sign a contract with a US health insurance provider, what that “80% out of network coverage” really means is that they will pay "80% of what they think your procedure should have cost” out of network. Expect to get lots of bills later down the road from the doctor and hospital when they get lesser reimbursement. What I learned? Cigna and I’m sure they are not the only health insurance company that does this, automatically doesn’t pay a chunk of your bill—on principle. I don’t know what the statistics are on this, but I’m sure 50 to 60% people will stop there and not appeal. If you are successful in your appeal, as I was, at that point they will pay half of what they didn’t pay before, but still a lot less than the 80% you were counting on. Maybe more intrepid people successfully go on to a second appeal; I stopped there.
If you think that a lot of doctors don’t want to affiliate with your health insurance carrier, guess what? Many of the good ones, or at least the ones who seemed to have taken the “bedside manner” course in medical school—Really don’t want to affiliate with Medicare…which you will find out if you happen to have parents.
If you need private health insurance and have had any surgery in the past few years for something they considered a risk, even if whatever they operated for turned out to be benign—expect to automatically be denied health coverage.
So don’t tell me that health care reform is going to “break” our marvelous system. As far as I’m concerned—it isn’t exactly that marvelous and it’s already broken….Yes, I know that other systems aren’t perfect and have their faults as well and that there are a million different technical points you can argue. However, considering that the current free-market American system does not provide all my family members with health coverage, and, for most of my life, I was in the position of this being a Major Problem, I’m going to suck it up pay for this.
For all of you people whingeing about the way this bill was passed, you know what? The rest of us are stuck paying for the Iraq war, which we entered under false pretenses, and the ongoing Afghanistan war, which looks like it’s going to be another Vietnam. We’re stuck paying for the bail-out of the financial system, when most of us had nothing to do with the abuses or obscene payouts going on there…so welcome to our world.
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