The Crow's Eye: Glamour

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Sep 15, 2010

Glamour

So.

I just finished reading the August, 2010 issue of Glamour, which my wife inexplicably brought into our home. The cover has a twelve year old looking little girl, clutching kittens, sporting a plastic smile and a lot of eye shadow - someone I guess I should recognize, but don't.

I don't have the time or the inclination to go into all the shit that my middle age brain found wrong with what I read, so I'll keep it brief.

I doubt Larry Flynt never hated women as much as the editors and publishers of Glamour do. And, he never tried to sell them paint-on jeans across the seam from an article about taking it easy and letting go of bad habits...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: C'mon, Jack. By the time a girl is 12 she's supposed to have screwed at least two guys and have a varied set of sexual positions she prefers. What's a little makeup when a girl's got such experience? I'm not gonna get creeped out unless they're in the single-digits and wearing makeup. Remember, human sexuality should be celebrated, not stifled. Twelve-year-olds are sexual beings too!; September 15, 2010 at 10:51 AM
Jack Crow said...: Heh.

I'm actually fairly apathetic about "teen sexuality." They do it. I don't care.

My wife, though, works in OB/GYN, and she's positively jaded now.

I know that her view is somewhat skewed, because she sees the people who need/must come in, and not their percentage of the total population.

But, it does seem that some where along the way to fully realized sex ed, someone forgot to mention that herpes doesn't go away and babies are the evolutionary goal line of procreation.

Respect,

Jack; September 15, 2010 at 10:59 AM
Anonymous said...: I will say that the sexualization of 12-year-olds is far advanced now, compared to the days when I was 12. And since I work with kids who have been sexually abused I can say I've seen the ramifications of hyper-sexualization of a child. Not good.

One might make the argument against me that sexual abuse is forced sexuality, whereas left alone experimenting 12-year-olds are engaged in voluntary sexuality. But my point is different. My point is that sexualizing a child is bad because children lack the maturity and experience to handle the complex emotional landscape that arrives with sexual behavior. A 12-year-old can't navigate that terrain, no matter how "precocious" he/she may be otherwise.

I'm not too keen on the coppers or the govt, but there are definitely good reasons for statutory rape laws, with the protection of fragile childhood psyches being a large subset of those reasons. And that's not even getting into the adult predator aspect of the situation.

The more kids get rushed into adulthood, the more fucked-up the general populace is going to be.; September 15, 2010 at 11:23 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.