Category: Glamour

Vocations – true and fancied

“Every time I move to a new place, I’m asked by the locals, “How do you like living here?” I’m never quite sure how to answer that question, and for the longest time I didn’t know why. And then one day it dawned on me, I couldn’t answer the question because I couldn’t figure out what the difference was between one place and the next.” Continue reading “Vocations – true and fancied” →

Faces, Burquas and Decolletage

There’s a bill in France proposing that “no one can wear a garment intended to hide the face in the public space”.

Unless it’s a fashion show, I guess:

Acceptable French face covering
Acceptable French face covering

The good folks over at Mercator.net ask if what’s going on really has to do the dignity of women as persons:

[I]t is difficult to escape the impression that the real issue at stake for the French is not the oppression of Muslim women but the visibility of Muslim culture and the way it challenges feminist and secularist assumptions.

Those assumptions also produce blind spots when it comes to the dignity of women. A person who takes that dignity seriously is more likely to be offended by the dress sense of the crowd rather than of an isolated Muslim in a burqa, for the typical European/American/Australian woman today also goes about with something that obscures her face: the exposed breast cleavage just below it.

As western women cling to fashions that aim to reveal everything about the body, they too are depersonalised. The stranger’s eye is not drawn to the face where they might encounter the person, but to the body as a sexual object. And this leads also to oppression, even if the woman, just like the one in the burqa, does not understand that she is oppressed.

Oppressed or not, Muslim women are fighting back. Some who wear the face veil told a group of reporters in France this week that they would not obey the ban (which is expected to come into force next year) and they would not leave the country. They say it is tantamount to denying freedom to practice one’s religion. They talked about having recourse to the European Court of Human Rights if arrested.

As for their dignity, they say it cannot be dictated by the state. The secularism of the state should guarantee religious freedom, they argue. Also, they ask, if the French are such feminists, why do women make up less than 20 per cent of the 577 members of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament?

Good points, ladies. But the truth that human dignity is not defined by decrees of the state does not mean it is defined by the customs of any particular group, either. For all that some women embrace it willingly, there is something very undignified about hiding the face. The dignity of a woman is the dignity of a person, and the face veil suggests, quite simply, that the wearer is not a person — for her husband and children, maybe, but not for you and me.

This is a sad state of affairs but not one that governments can solve with bans. If anything, these will provoke resentment among Muslims at large and rebellion among the young (watch for more veils appearing, not less). As Muslim leaders themselves say, the answer lies with the education and empowerment of Muslim women.

What would help a lot is a decision by European women to dress and conduct themselves in a style consistent with feminine dignity. Half-bared bosoms and burqa rage are definitely not the way to persuade our Muslim sisters to give up the veil.

Despite all our surface feminism, we really don’t treat women with dignity.

(But do we treat men with dignity, either?)

Porn on my mind

I have pornography on the mind lately.

You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.

Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.

City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.

As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”

Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.

I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.

I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!

Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”

My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.

I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.

I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.

Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.

What iPads Did To My Family – Chuck’s Blog

Departure point: What iPads Did To My Family – Chuck’s Blog.

I’m a gadget guy. I occasionally feel oppressed by how many I have, and I cherish the gadget that can replace multiple other gadgets – such as my iPhone, f’rinstance, which for me pretty much replaced:

  1. Cell phone
  2. PDA or Pocket Calendar
  3. iPod
  4. E-Book reader
  5. Notebook computer (if just e-mail monitoring is needed)

But if a guy as tech-savvy as Chuck Hollis, with his tech-savvy family, can buy an iPad as a toy and then find his whole tech-savvy family waiting turns to use it, then I may have to regress, eventually, to iPhone and iPad instead of just iPhone.

Or maybe I could finally figure out how to use Skype?

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House

I have written before of the very, very serious business of glamor and glamorization. After its blog feed seemingly went dead for a while (it may have been my error – who knows?), Virginia Postrel is back online and, today, on dead tree with a Wall Street Journal review of “Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House,” by Meghan Daum, who has followed the maxim “write what you know” in this book that, as Postrel notes, needs no subtitle.

Postrel helpfully introduces her WSJ essay at her blog as well. Here are the key links:

Watchers of HGTV, Food Channel and such take note.

The high cost of living “simply”

There’s a provocative column and thoughtful responses shaping up at In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, about living simply.

We have been here and done this before:

  • Weekend hippies
  • Limousine liberals
  • Bobos in Paradise

Ah, the human capacity for self-delusion! I do not exempt myself by any means.

In the Orthodox “Trisagion Prayers” we ask:

All-holy Trinity have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy God, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

I think of this not just as repetition, of which Orthodox piety has abundant supply, but of subtle distinctions among sin, iniquity and infirmity.

Our delusional lapses like consumerist simplicity strike me more as sinful (Greek amartia, “missing the mark”) or infirm than as iniquitous. Still, for those we implore cleansing and healing, respectively.