PeaceBang

Speaking Out Against Abuse When You See It

I am walking across Tremont Street from Dunkin Donuts (can’t rally without an iced coffee!) the other day and this big guy is totally cussing out a woman who walks alongside him looking all hangdog and scared. He’s using every vile word in the book and shouting at her. F this and F that as they’re hustling along.

Me, the dumb do-gooder and peacemaker, goes, “Hey Buddy. Whoa!” I figure if I can interrupt his invective maybe he won’t keep escalating into a more dangerous fury.

“Whoa WHAT?? Mind your own f-ing business!” he shouts at me.

“Whoa, watch your mouth and calm down!” I say, fool that I am.

“Shut the F up! It’s none of your f-ing business!” he says. And I say, “Yes it is my business! Keep your foul mouth off my streets!”

So then SHE gets in on it!! “You don’t know what’s going on! Mind your own business!”

Me: “Honey, this is what we call an ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP, okay? And when you bring it onto the streets, it’s definitely everybody’s business!”

Her: (starting to cry) “You don’t know what’s even happening! You have no right!”
Me: I DO know what’s happening — and let me tell you this — this man is a violent nightmare and it doesn’t matter WHAT’s going on — you never, ever deserve to be talked to like this.
Her: (screaming) SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Him: You think I give a F about that cloth around your neck? I don’t give a S—!

Me: (forgetting that I’m even wearing a clerical collar) Well, obviously!
(yelling after the woman) Get help! You’re going to need it!

So hey, that was effective, huh? Because what I managed to do was (1) enflame the violent dude even more (2) put myself in harm’s way and (3) make her feel protective of her may-an. Oh, great.

But then I remember one time eleven years ago when I was eating a sushi dinner in Rochester, NY and reading a book while eavesdropping on the (hetero) couple next to me. I couldn’t help it: they were like 7″ from my table. The man was tearing the young woman apart in the softest, most malevolent of tones, ripping to shreds her every idea and attempt to assert herself. He insulted her family in hypnotic tones, and when she feebly protested, he would lean forward and stare at her as though he was moments from plunging his chopsticks into her throat.

I was so terrified by what I saw that when I got to the theatre I called the restaurant and asked to be put through to Jennifer (I knew that was her name). They brought the phone to her.

This is what I said to her:

“Jennifer? This is the woman who was sitting next to you a few minutes ago reading. Just pretend I’m your uncle calling to let you know of a change in the party for your mom, okay? (she made frightened little sounds, but stayed on the phone) But listen to me: you are in a very abusive relationship and your boyfriend is a very dangerous person. I know you know this: I can see it in your eyes. He is trying to isolate you from your family so that he can tear you down and destroy you, and if you don’t get help, he will. I am really worried about you, and I want you to tell someone exactly how he treats you and talks to you, because I think he’s a master manipulator and no one has any idea how vicious he is to you. But I heard it and I saw it, and I really hope you get away from him. I’m going to let you go now, but I want to tell you that I really care about you.”

“Yes.” she said.
And then,
“Thank you so much, Uncle Barry.”
Me: “Be strong.”
Her: “Okay. (quavering voice) Love you, Uncle Barry.”

I think of her even today.

Fat Thoughts

Well, this is a very interesting article about why Leonard Nimoy started a series of fat nudes. I’d like to see the exhibit out at Northhampton.

I was more than a little bummed by the last sentence but hey, I don’t find Leonard Nimoy sexually attractive, either, so I’ll live. It’s just that most men in this culture have a default setting not to find fat women sexually attractive as a group, with very little sense that they’ve been essentially brainwashed by Madison Avenue and Hollywood to respond that way. I kind of want to say to Lennie, “Hey Lennie… have you met *every* fat woman? Are you *sure* you’re not attracted to any of them?”

I know aesthetics matter, but I think it’s a lot more than that. I’ve talked about this before, but I don’t mind ranting about it on a regular basis because it’s a serious issue. Too many people in this country equate fat with moral inferiority, sloppiness and laziness. I’ve read literally thousands of personals ads in my day and you’d be surprised how many guys stipulate that they want “a woman who takes care of herself” — when what they mean is “a thin woman.” I work out three times a week and eat really well. I don’t smoke or do any drugs except the occasional cocktail. But fat girls are assumed to not be taking care of ourselves.

What really burns me is the hundreds of guys who take the clarification one step further by writing something like, “I don’t want some woman whose [sic] sitting around eating bon-bons all day,” or “Don’t say you’re ‘curvy’ if your [sic] JUST FAT!”

Oh, I just love those gents. What darlings. They’re just so clear about what they want. You can apparently be an uneducated, drug-addicted felon who spent most of her formative years in juvie hall, but that’s okay. Just don’t be FAT!
Yea, dude, we get it. We get it.
Meanwhile, Prince Charming, I’d like to date a guy who can spell. We all have our dreams.

ANYhoo, this book Rethinking Thin has won rave reviews and is basically a debunking of much of the conventional wisdom about fatties and fatness. It’s on my Amazon wish list and I plan to read it this summer. Gina Kolata, I’d like to take you out for sushi, baby!

The Oldest Profession, In A Modern Twist

Right ON, Ms. Palfrey!!

Why should you be punished and impoverished for your “sins” while the Washington moralists and hypocrites sit smugly in their offices, confident in the knowledge that you’re just a woman and can’t touch them?

If she has to go down, let her take her entire clientele down with her. Brava, I say.

Is This How We Talk To Women Now?

Just having endured Don Imus’ dismissal of talented young female athletes as “nappy-headed hos,” I was particularly depressed by Alec Baldwin’s rant against his 11-year old daughter in which he called her a “thoughtless little pig.”

It all seems of one piece to me.

I was talking with my sister yesterday about a friend of ours whose husband is controlling, insulting and hyper-critical. Our friend is considering separation or even divorce. My sister and I were talking about the fact that times have changed a lot, and women no longer feel that they have to be married for social acceptance or for financial survival. Therefore, they are less likely these days to tolerate verbal abuse and constant harping on their imperfections. They want a supportive partner, but here’s the thing… they also want to be treated as a cherished woman, in that specifically romantic hetero-fantasy mode that we’ve all grown up with.

I’m not sure the hetero male world has figured this out yet. But let me explain it. Fellas, it’s not either/or proposition where either you get to be the big macho lug who treats your “little lady” like a fragile, dependent flower OR you get to have an equal partner in life who doesn’t need all that old-fashioned girlie stuff, and with whom you can be sloppy and coarse as you wanna be. The fact is, women — even feminists — still appreciate good manners, and even — I’m giving away a big secret here! — a tiny bit of the princess-on-the-pedestal stuff.

But at the very least, we don’t want to be called pigs, bitches and whores.

Could you all talk amongst yourself about this? Thank you, PB.

Imus Fired

I’m glad he got fired.

I am depressed, however, reading the comments on MSNBC.com, which I have to believe represent the Average American.

There’s the usual trite comments about “free speech” and “double standards,”
the expected vitriol against Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the brilliant analyses about how this is “all about money,” and lots of folks saying Imus went too far but he shouldn’t have been fired.
I’m too tired to write at length about this now, so I hope others of you will. I said my piece earlier and I’m still trying to process why I feel this episode was so particularly ugly and upsetting.

Imus and The Culture of Incivility

One of my guilty pleasures is reading celebrity gossip blogs, but lately I’ve reached my disgust limit with them and I don’t think I’ll be going back again.

The thing is, although the sites are often quite funny, they can also be incredibly vile — and they give really ignorant, decidedly unfunny people a forum for contributing extraordinarily hateful comments about the various celebrities — particularly focusing on their bodies.

On a typical site, photos of Uma Thurman in an ill-fitting bikini generate 106 disgusting meditations on the condition of her breasts, which are apparently committing the crime of not being silicone-filled and immune to the effects of age and child-bearing. A photo of Britney Spears with a stain on her blouse appears on dozens of these blogs and obliges dozens of anonymous posters from all over the country to call her names that should make any decent person blush with shame. Cameron Diaz caught by paparazzi without make-up earns her savage insults, and everyone and anyone is referred to as “slut,” “ho,” “fag” and “pig” and “bitch.”

It seems that merely being an entertainer or celebrity — especially a female one — makes anyone fair game for this sort of insanely vicious attack.
It’s one thing for bloggers to engage in hyperbolic tirades against politicians or world leaders who make offensive policy out of ignorance and arrogance. For instance, I’m not offended by anyone who spews venom at a Rick Santorum or a South Dakota Senator Bill Napoli (have you forgotten? I’ve reproduced below his outrageously misogynistic remarks regarding what he thinks would constitute an acceptable definition of rape for the purposes of allowing abortion — to which my own blogger’s response was that he should be anally impaled on the Statue of Liberty — which I thought had a fine democratic zing to it) as a way of publicizing and puncturing the outrageousness of these guys’ rhetoric.

Blogging is a way that people with no power can hollaback at people with a lot of power. Celebrity blogs, however, aren’t so much confrontational as they are parasitic. The celebs feed the media machine, the bloggers consume it, and the whole thing becomes an ugly, totally unproductive spectacle about beautiful people with way too much money.

Don Imus’ incredibly disgusting, offensive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was, for me, the last straw in wanting to participate in any way in this big media version of “the dozens.” What we seem to have forgotten, culturally, is that the art of doling out extravagant insult is something that can be done within affectionately affiliated peer or family groups, not by outsiders and not by wanna-bes. If my girlfriends and I want to call each other the “B” word, and if African-American folk want to call each other the “N” word, and if Jews want to knock on each other, it’s all in the family. Outsiders may critique the practice, but they can’t participate in it. Period.

Don Imus is most definitely not in any of the cultural “families” who use insult as a way of honing humor and resilience amongst themselves. He can’t claim affectionate affiliation with the talented female athletes he egregiously verbally violated, nor can he claim to be puncturing their power and influence for any good reason. He is simply an overpaid, privileged white man who spews hateful, sexist, racist invective because he has done so before and has gotten away with it under the guise of “entertainment.”

His party is apparently over, and maybe now he can start to bridge the great divide between being the so-called “not a bad man” he claims to be and the harmful, hateful radio talk show host he’s been behaving as. And the rest of us can continue the conversation about how it is that women in our culture are so regularly denigrated in just this way with no public outcry whatsoever.

[Editorial note: I don’t have time to edit this post and I can’t sign into Blogger at home right now, so this will have to stand as is. - PB]

*Said Senator Napoli:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

Testosterone-Drenched Movies

In the past week I’ve seen Scorcese’s celebrated film “The Departed” and David Fincher’s just-released serial killer crime drama “Zodiac.”

“The Departed” was entertaining, but I’m so sorry Scorcese didn’t win the Oscar for “Goodfellas,” which is by far a superior film. I don’t know what to say about “The Departed.” Jack Nicholson works hard for his paycheck, Matt Damon is typically earnest and does his best Bah-stahn accent (he’s one of the only Hollywood actors who gets it right every time– even local son Mark Wahlberg seems to waffle in his), and Leo DiCaprio gives a fantastic performance.

There’s lots of music. Opera, rock-and-roll, very atmospheric, va-va voom. There’s a dull, sexy female character who plays the old gangster’s moll kind of role but dressed up in a modern-girl career mode. The only thing missing was for her to either have to run down an alley in a pair of high heels, sobbing all the while, or slapping her lover across the face and calling him a “big galoot.”
Lordy, I’m tired of movies that have no female characters in them but this type of broad.

Lots of people get shot. The end of the movie is the kind of bloodbath Thomas Kydd would have loved. You turn off the tv, stretch, yawn, and forget you’ve seen the flick by the time you’re brushing your teeth.

“Zodiac” was so much better. I loved Mark Ruffalo, I loved the integrity of the story, the characters, the fact that something mattered, which I was never motivated to feel by “The Departed.”

I’m tired, it’s late, I have to go write a church newsletter column now. Seen any good movies lately?

Brief Oscar Dreams

Remember when Adrien Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor a few years ago for “The Piano?” And when he got to the stage he grabbed presenter Halle Berry and swept her into this amazingly inappropriate back-breaking, long kiss?

When Jennifer Hudson won last night for Best Supporting Actress, I thought it would have been great if she had done the same thing to presenter George Clooney. That would have been the best moment ever in Oscar History.

I think it was the most boring Oscars ever.

Napping Might Be Good For Women’s Hearts, Too, But We’re Not Sure

Here’s an article from the Boston Globe suggesting that napping in the afternoon may be beneficial to heart health:

http://tinyurl.com/2dkllr

But speaking of heart health (!), what really infuriates me is that once again, we don’t know if the results apply to women because so few women were included in the study.

Heart disease kills far, far more women every year than breast and skin cancer combined, and yet the medical research done on coronary health continues to focus almost exclusively on men. This isn’t to downplay the seriousness of breast cancer and the prevalence of other cancers as killers of women (or to downplay any other cause of mortality), but the fact is that the women reading this blog are far more likely to die of plain old heart disease than of anything else.

What’s it going to take to get included in these studies?????

It shocks me that this is still going on.

Just Another Ugly Fat Chick Joke

Wesley Morris writes this about Eddie Murphy’s latest fat-woman-bashing flick, “Norbit:”
http://tinyurl.com/2tg4xl

It’s funny, it’s effective. Right on, Wesley. Thanks from over here.

I did see Mo’nique’s fat-girl-finds-romance film “Phat Girlz” and found it to be embarrassingly bad but also guiltily refreshing. Mo’nique’s take on the tale is that African men just love heavy women and will passionately pursue them no matter how reticent or downright mean and rejecting the big girls are. Which is just replacing one stupid stereotype with another. *sigh*

Queen Latifah is large and in-charge in “Last Holiday,” which was fun fluff.

Other than that, I look in vain for stories starring fat women having real lives.

And now… back to preachin’ prep.