Happy Fourth!

I’m lazy and it’s a holiday weekend, so I’ll just leave you with this, and my wish for a safe and happy Fourth of July.  God Bless America, even the parts that piss me off.

This just in: Michael Jackson still dead

Gawker recaps some of the sillier articles various news outlets have run in a desperate attempt to keep Michael Jackson’s recent death the top story, including a gripping expose on what kind of books he liked to read (psychology and history) and speculation on whether or not “better CPR” could have saved his life (probably, just as it could have saved anybody else who died of a heart attack).  Traffic at news and gossip websites has skyrocketed in the days following Jackson’s death, it’s not surprising that they’ll keep trying to draw back those millions of visitors with new and salacious details about it, not to mention the life that preceded it.

However, with his will just barely into probate and the specific cause of his death unknown for weeks, it seems that the biggest scoops available right now are not terribly interesting.  A recent “shocking development” was that Jackson apparently didn’t provide for ex-wife Debbie Rowe in his will.  Since I’m fairly certain it’s not standard practice for people to will money to their exes, even if they’re worth millions of dollars, I’m not sure why that’s surprising to anyone, particularly since Rowe herself admitted that, married or not, she was little more to Jackson than the vessel that carried his children and that the two had maintained little contact in recent years.  As an alternative to the “here’s more evidence of what a weirdo he was” stories, there are the “here’s more evidence of what a saint he was” stories, which seem to consist of interviews with or quotes from every celebrity who ever encountered Jackson, even once, from both the relevant to Emmanuel Lewis of Webster.  Even celebrities who are remaining mum on his passing, such as Macaulay Culkin, are worth a mention.  Then, of course, there are the endless “man on the street” interviews with people dropping off teddy bears at Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or holding up signs reading ‘R.I.P. MICHEAL #1,’ asking what his music meant to them.  Rarely do the interviews elicit anything more profound than “It meant a lot to me” or “It was part of my childhood,” but as long as heartbroken fans with a lot of free time on their hands keep camping out at the gates of Neverland Ranch, there will still be news cameras pointing at them, sometimes as proof of the huge impact Michael Jackson had on people, sometimes in derision of what a celebrity obsessed culture we live in today.

When reaching to make something not very interesting seem newsworthy doesn’t work, some news outlets are relying on outright bullshit to draw traffic to their websites.  Major organizations repeated the rumor that Jackson was going to be buried at Neverland, with a public viewing beforehand, as fact without bothering to check with the people most likely to know for certain–his family.  There have been numerous stories about the inevitable custody battle between Debbie Rowe and Jackson’s mother over his two oldest children, though there has been no evidence that Rowe is interested in such a thing.  Now a new “developing story” claims that Jordan Chandler has recanted the child molestation charges that won him a $25 million settlement, saying that he was forced into it by his father.  It’s a story that may be slightly more plausible if not for the fact that it originated on a website that’s accompanied by a popup ad featuring a topless woman saying “hi hot stuff! I like to screw for hours and I’m right here in Brooklyn let’s fuck!”  Well, it read Brooklyn for me, it’ll probably read something different for you, depending on where you live.  Websites that associate themselves with porn sites are probably not reliable sources for news, but you can bet that it won’t be long till the story makes its way to places like TMZ and Perez Hilton, before moving on to actual news organizations.  In the era of the internet, where libel laws don’t seem to apply in quite the same way they do in print, it’s not about getting your stories accurate, it’s about getting them first.

I hate to tell everyone who is tired of reading and hearing the words “Michael Jackson” this, but it ain’t over, not by a long shot.  Soon, I give it a month or so, the books will come out.  A guy who might have once sold Jackson a painting will get his five minutes of fame by association, so we can get an “insider’s look” at Jackson’s demeanor, to see if he really looked that bad in person, if he walked around with a bottle of painkillers in one hand and a stack of kiddie porn in the other, as has been the popular perception in recent years.  Any story about Jackson is going to be weird by default, because he was just a weird fucking guy–even kind, vaguely charming anecdotes from longtime friend Quincy Jones have him being so shy about practicing a song in front of him that he insisted on hiding behind a couch and making Jones turn off the lights before he’d do it.  Because Jackson was incredibly weird and lived much of his adult life shrouded in secrecy, even allegedly planting stories about his inherent weirdness in gossip magazines himself, presumably just for shits and giggles, we’ll have an endless wellspring of new information about him, probably mostly false or at least embellished, but what does it matter? All bets are off.  We’re still hearing supposedly “never before revealed” stories about Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and John Lennon, and they weren’t half the controversial figure Michael Jackson was.  With Michael Jackson, we’ve only just begun.

An open letter to Michael Bay

Dear Michael Bay,

Some years ago Entertainment Weekly, long before it became dedicated solely to Sex and the City and Twilight, ran an article called ‘Is Michael Bay the Devil?’ It suggests that your brainless, bombastic, bigger than life directing style is either the future of filmmaking or a harbinger of its doom.  I don’t know about you, but I think my favorite part is the producer who claimed other directors could have a career as successful as yours if they just learned to not be so artistic.  Yep, that’s pretty much what he said.  Since the article ran you went on to direct Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, Transformers and most recently its sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, all of which have made millions and millions and millions of dollars, and it appears that the only thing that’s changed about your style is that the colors have gotten brighter, the explosions have gotten bigger and the volume has been turned up to eleven.

I don’t think you’re the Devil, Michael.  Oh sure, I did for a little while after seeing Armageddon, which at least temporarily surpassed Showgirls as the worst movie I’ve ever seen.  Have you seen Showgirls? It’s horrible, misogynistic trash, so kudos for you for managing to top it (and what a coup in scoring the worst theme song of all time to go with it!).  Eventually that was surpassed by the remake of The Wicker Man, so I got over thinking that you were the Devil, even though more than once I woke up in a cold sweat after a nightmare in which Nicolas Cage actually replaced Bruce Willis in Armageddon.  While I do not believe you’re the Devil, I do believe that you’re a trickster of some kind, perhaps a mesmerist.  You’ve managed to convince the people who hand over their hard-earned money to you time after time that you love them and make movies they really want to see.  You’ve somehow become a hero to the common man film viewer, who doesn’t go to the movies to think, but to have their eyes melted out of their skulls by CGI effects.

I’m on to you, though, Michael.  You don’t love your audience.  You think they’re morons, and I can picture you cackling in delight while you count your money in a big room like Scrooge McDuck, marveling over how you can just keep smearing movie screens with the same shit over and over again, and people will line up for it at theaters like they’re giving out free tattoos and cheeseburgers.  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is your valentine to them, your love letter.

Now, before I go on, let me clarify that I occasionally like big, dumb movies.  You know what’s a guilty pleasure of mine? Independence Day.  Yeah, you have to accept that aliens from a distant planet use Windows on their computers, and that they can be conveniently knocked out by a punch to the face just like humans.  Really, it’s as dumb as a doorknob.  But I fucking love it, and I will hear no argument that it’s anything less than a lot of fun.  I also greatly enjoyed the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  Hell, I’ll go one step further and admit that I enjoyed the first Transformers.  It wasn’t great.  It wasn’t even good, or at least not by the normal standards of “good.”  It was, however, entertaining, and it looked cool, much like your other movies do, though it’s usually at the expense of a script that seems like it was written in crayon and characters you want to see incinerated alive, their ashes cast away to the four winds.  It was, yes, the ultimate summer movie.

Now comes the inevitable sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  People complain when movies like this get a bad review that we “expected too much” out of it.  Honestly, Michael, is it too much for me to go to a movie and expect to not be treated like a fucking idiot? Because that’s the impression I got while watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, that you and your three (three!) screenwriters deliberately made the stupidest movie imaginable, because you think your audience consists entirely of idiots.  I was barely a half hour into it before I found myself lamenting the sixteen dollars I spent for me and my kid to see it, picturing each dollar bursting into flame with a barely audible shriek of lament.  No, I wasn’t expecting art.  I wasn’t expecting it to be as entertaining as the first one, as sequels so rarely are.  Hell, I wasn’t expecting more than a series of chaotic fight scenes and explosions held together with the barest hint of a plot.  However, I was certainly expecting a little more from that plot than ugly racist and sexist stereotypes, tired, juvenile sight gags and dialogue taken from a checklist of action movie cliches.

You’ve never had strong female characters that do more than fuss over or fuck the hero in your movies, Michael, that much is true.  In fact, it says right on your page at the IMDB that at least three of your films involve the female lead watching the climactic events unfold from inside a control room.  The women in your movies are basically useless, pretty scenery.  Megan Fox, who emotes mostly by parting her moistened lips and nothing more, somehow is given even less to do in Revenge of the Fallen than she was in the last one, if such a thing is possible.  Her purpose is evident from the first moment she appears on screen, straddling a motorcycle while wearing a pair of hot pants.  She spends much of the movie complaining that leading man Sam, played by Shia LeBeouf, has not yet told her he loves her, and has two scenes in which she gets to run in slow motion so that her breasts bounce in an appropriately masturbatory manner.  She also tames a miniature enemy robot by cooing at it in a little girl voice.  That’s the extent of her contribution to the plot, and yet she still comes away from the film with more dignity than the other women in the film.  There’s also Sam’s mother (Julie White), who spends most of the movie shrieking and/or crying, and is so stupid she doesn’t recognize a pot leaf on a bag of brownies she purchases while visiting Sam at college.  The rest of the women in the film are limited to nameless college students walking around campus in either minidresses or just towels wrapped around them, some of them inexplicably swooning over and making “come fuck me” eyes at an officious astronomy professor (played in a pointless cameo by Rainn Wilson).  Oh yeah, and then there’s Alice, another student who forcefully comes on to Sam.  Turns out she’s a Decepticon in disguise, whose identity is revealed thanks to a metal tentacle emerging from between her legs.  Really, Michael? Really? H.R. Giger was more subtle than that.

I don’t even want to know where you were going with Skids and Mudflap, the two gold-toothed, ghetto talking robots who sheepishly confess to not knowing how to read and spend most of their time taunting one of Sam’s friends with vaguely gay slurs.  Surely, Michael, you could have come up with some comic relief that was slightly fresher than that.  Maybe a fat guy stopping in the middle of an explosion to stuff a foot long sandwich in his mouth, that’s something new and different.

I could go on all day with trying to decipher a plot that manages to be both incomprehensible and utterly arbitrary.  Did you know you neglected to mention what the point of all those codes Sam kept seeing was? Or at what point the robots managed to achieve the ability to disguise themselves as humans?  Oh wait, yes, you did, in a throwaway line in which, as part of a robot-human peace agreement, the Autobots didn’t have to reveal advancements in their technology.  Boy, that’s convenient, what a genius explanation! No wonder you’re a billionaire.  So instead of trying to waste any more of my last few precious remaining brain cells figuring it out, I just have a few more questions.  Michael, please tell me, why is there a farting robot? Why is there a robot that humps someone’s leg (the second of two jokes about inappropriate humping, I should point out)? WHY DOES ONE OF THE ROBOTS HAVE TESTICLES, MICHAEL? There is no reason whatsoever for a robot to have testicles except for a lame sight gag, and I know you know this, because you trust that your core audience laughs at shit like that, just like they’ll laugh at a male character baring his ass, also for no reason whatsoever.  What I don’t know is how you managed to resist the urge to have another robot kick that robot in the crotch.  In a film that consists of nothing but excess, how did you not go there as well?

Considering everything that comes out of their mouths is cliche, why did you bother providing your characters with dialogue, Michael? The entire movie could have consisted of robots destroying something followed by silent human reaction shots and it wouldn’t have been any worse.  Instead, you have them say things that real life people would probably never say, yet always seem to say in movies like this.  “I’m not leaving without you!” “We’re in this together!” “You want a piece of me?” “It is your destiny.”  I didn’t hate this movie because it was stupid, racist and sexist.  I hated it because it was lazy.  You know you have a built-in audience, and you didn’t even bother trying to make anything that was close to, in the same neighborhood, in the same galaxy as “good.”  You’ve convinced your audience not to expect more from a movie than a lot of noise and explosions.  So you’re not the Devil, Michael Bay, you’re a fucking genius. While I’m cursing your name I’m tipping my hat to you at the same time.  Well-played, sir, well-played.  I shudder to think how you’re going to top yourself for Transformers 3.

Sincerely,

::GENA::

The king is dead, long live the king

So you may have heard that Michael Jackson died yesterday at the not at all ripe old age of 50.  Or you may not have heard, it’s been kept pretty quiet in the media.  If you haven’t, to clarify, yes, Michael Jackson, one of the biggest stars of all time, alleged child molester and all around odd human being passed away yesterday in California of cardiac arrest, cause undetermined as of yet.  The not terribly funny “he heard little boys’ pants were half off” jokes started almost immediately, as did the insistence that nobody should be mourning the death of a pedophile who got off easy through a starstruck court and the inevitable sneering at people who take celebrity deaths a little closer to heart than perhaps is healthy.

I’ve always tried to avoid getting too emotionally vested in musicians and other celebrities, or at least, anywhere   beyond enjoying their music, lest I become like those screaming, sobbing girls you see in old performance reels of the Beatles, or worse the type of disaffected kid who carved up his arms when Kurt Cobain committed suicide.  It never seemed a good idea to me to convince yourself that a particular singer wrote a song with you in mind, or that you “know” a particular actor somehow.  Ask Robert Pattinson, who nearly got hit by a car trying to run away from fans recently, how much he really enjoys that level of devotion.  However, it’s always a little weird for me when a celebrity, particularly one of the magnitude of Michael Jackson, dies, simply because I assume celebrities can’t die.  When your dog or your grandma dies, you’ll never see them again.  Celebrities never really go away even after they’re dead–we’ll still be talking about Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight for years to come, radio stations will still play ‘Thriller’ every Halloween until radio doesn’t exist anymore.  It’s bizarre to think that they’re not around anymore to continue enjoying the acclaim and the royalties.

Gawker probably mirrored my thoughts on Jackson’s death the most accurately in their end of the week news roundup.

Michael Jackson, quite possibly the weirdest and most talented motherfucker on the planet, died this week. He was 50. And weird. This provided opportunities for more asking-for-it behavior from Perez Hilton, po-faced investigations into the national mood, and, of course, nonstop news coverage of salacious tabloid details. He will be missed, because for some reason everyone kinda thought there was maybe a chance he’d eventually get some small amount of his shit back together enough for him to produce good music, again. It’s all pretty fucking sad. And if you think his music will someday overshadow his bizarre life, we’d just like to ask if you know how Elvis died.

It’s amusing to me to see people complain about the near-constant media coverage of Jackson’s passing and the oft-repeated recaps of his career from cute little black kid to anorexic white woman, as if to suggest that he just wasn’t really all that important of a person.  Hate to tell ya, folks, he probably does warrant that kind of coverage.  Whether you were a fan of his music or not, Michael Jackson was the most successful pop star of all time.  Not for one year, not even for a couple years before fading into obscurity, of all time, named as an influence by pretty much everyone in pop and R&B who followed him.  He was one of the most important, iconic figures of the 1980s.  I know, I was there.  I don’t quite remember when Elvis died, but I have no doubt that that event garnered an equal amount of media coverage, minus Perez Hilton’s catty commentary and Twitter, obvs.  I have a pretty good recollection of John Lennon’s death, the tribute issues from People magazine, the news footage of tearful fans gathered outside the Dakota, other celebrities offering their condolences.  Would anyone claim that either of those performers were undeserving of that kind of coverage?

Whether you think it’s hyperbole or not, it’s true that we’ll never see another star quite like him, not necessarily because of his talent, but because it’s the nature of what the music industry has become.  Today’s pop stars are designed to be disposable, cranking out one or two  hits before moving along and being replaced by the next pop star.  They come and go so fast and are so interchangeable that it’s now possible for someone to be a successful pop star while  more than half the world is only dimly aware of who they are and what they sound like.  It was more than a year after it came out before I finally heard Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab.’  I only just heard Lady GaGa for the first time a couple weeks ago, at a hamburger restaurant, yet she’s on the cover of the Rolling Stone and selling out stadium concerts.  I suppose part of that is my own doing, as I haven’t bothered much with the radio in a long time, but it’s also because the music industry is now almost entirely youth-driven, even though young people are notoriously fickle and disloyal, particularly when it comes to celebrities–read Oh No They Didn’t and note the skewed ratio of negative to positive comments regarding most current “superstars.”  Does anyone seriously think we’re going to be hearing much from Katy Perry or Jeremih in a few years? All I know about Jeremih is that he sings some song called ‘Birthday Sex,’ which I’m sure is catchy but mostly forgettable.

It was pretty much impossible to escape Michael Jackson from 1982 to 1988 or so.  Even children in tiny villages in Zambia were photographed wearing t-shirts with his pre-surgically mutilated face on it.  He had a thoroughly universal appeal, crossing races, genders and age groups.  You know where I heard Thriller the most often?  In my mother’s car.  She loved that album so much she owned two copies of it, one on vinyl to listen to at home and another on cassette to listen to in the car.  Whenever the video for ‘Thriller’ came on MTV, which seemed to be about every fifteen minutes or so, we made a point of watching it as often as possible.  Now there are entire days in which MTV doesn’t play a single music video at all.

It’s understandable that Jackson’s incredibly weird lifestyle and persona, once quirky and amusing before eventually becoming just creepy, would overshadow his contribution to music.  Despite not actually being convicted of child molestation charges, it’s impossible to let that go, simply because it was plausible.  There got to be a point where you couldn’t really put anything past him.  The charges, the from out of left field marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and a frumpy, middle-aged nurse, his three curiously white looking children (two of which have the same first name), keeping up an eternal child/Peter Pan persona well into his thirties and forties, his bizarre claims that he was going to open an amusement park in Poland followed by playing Edgar Allan Poe in a movie, and of course that face, God, that face, was what kept him in the media the past fifteen years, when ideally he should have been in the studio trying to top Thriller and Bad.  Or even better, he could have quit while he was ahead, happily living off the royalties and continuing to influence people like Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, maybe coming out every once in a while to perform his hits, like Stevie Wonder.  Would he have been happy not always trying to make some sort of comeback, with the help of shady Saudi Arabian businessmen or whoever? I don’t know, but I can’t possibly imagine he was happy living the life he had.

The saddest part about Michael Jackson’s death (other than the fact that Entertainment Tonight bragged about having an “exclusive” up close picture of the apparently dead Jackson on his way to the hospital) is that we’ll never really know what drove his bizarre personality, if it was his rumored, certainly quite likely mistreatment by his father, if it was something organic, or if he, like a lot of celebrities, just fell prey to prescription drug use.  Unless he kept a bunch of diaries somewhere, which is unlikely, all we have, all we’ll ever have is speculation, tabloid imagery and bad jokes.  Oh, and the music.  There is that, at least.

Cynthia Davis: “Let them eat cake.”

Found through Think Progress, State Representative Cynthia Davis (R-MO) questions if public school summer meal programs for impoverished children are a good use of state funds.

Is school the only place a child can get a nutritious meal? Parents have good reason to dispute the idea that their children will not receive a nutritious meal if they are not in a government institution.  Who should be the one to pass judgment on what defines a nutritious meal?

Ah, yes, how presumptuous of schools to assume that parents need extra services to feed their children, when all they have to go by is the fact that one out of five Missouri schoolchildren goes hungry?

This is not a discussion of how to handle the public orphanage.  These are children who have parents already providing meals for their children.  This program could have an unintended consequence of diminishing parental involvement.  Why have meals at home with your loved ones if you can go to the government soup kitchen and get one for free?  This could have the effect of breaking apart more families.

Of course! If children are getting supplemental meals from school, it keeps them out of the home for an hour or two a day, which could be damaging to the family unit.  Fuck proper nutrition, maintaining traditional family values is what’s most important, presumably so a strong front can be maintained in the ongoing battle against the gay Socialist uprising.

Davis seems to suggest that parents are being forced to use the summer food programs by bullying bureaucrats who want to stick their nose into everything, when they just should be left alone to provide for their children on their own, even if they’re flat-ass broke.  Who cares if all they’re able to provide is peanut butter sandwiches for dinner? Let these people have their dignity, Big Government, it’ll make their family stronger! Davis has a few “now why didn’t I think of that?” solutions for alleviating the problem, such as suggesting that hungry families should just grow a garden, even though it’s likely a large population of Missouri has neither the facilities or the know-how to grow their own vegetables, or, barring that, buy their food from the local farmer’s market, even though in the very next sentence she mentions that there’s no farmer’s market in her hometown of O’Fallon, one of the biggest cities in the state.  Apparently if you live in, say, Glenwood (pop. 203), you’re just supposed to drive God only knows how far to the nearest farmer’s market to buy your produce, because that’s somehow cheaper than getting it at the local grocery with money you don’t have in the first place.  Just don’t send your kids to school to get reasonably nutritious meals for free! It will tear your family apart!

But wait, you haven’t heard Davis’s “look on the bright side” approach to the issue.

The problem of childhood obesity has been cited as one of the most rapidly growing health problems in America.  People who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem.

People who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem.

People who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem.

People who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem.

Yes, I had to read it a couple times to make sure I was comprehending it too, but it does appear that Cynthia Davis is saying, in not quite as many words “Sure, your kids may be going to bed hungry at night, but at least they don’t have to worry about getting fat!” This is sort of like telling someone who just lost a leg, “Hey, at least you don’t have to worry about buying shoes!” Nevertheless, incredibly, her staggering ignorance goes one step even further when she suggests that teenagers who are going without the proper amount of food should go out and get one of those jobs that are all over the place right now.

Anyone under 18 can be eligible?  Can’t they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16?  Hunger can be a positive motivator.   What is wrong with the idea of getting a job so you can get better meals?

Tip: If you work for McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.

I…just don’t even know where to begin.  “Hunger can be a positive motivator”? Really? This is the message we want to send out to young people? Funny, that sounds like something a dictator would say to get a bunch of peasants to build him a house.  With millions of adults out of work, with even Wal-Mart turning away applicants, her solution is “get a job”? What kind of bubble has this woman been living in for the past two years? And wait a minute, what happened to “if the school feeds children, it will break apart families”? But your kid being forced to work for minimum wage just so he can fucking eat won’t? Finally, “McDonald’s will feed you for free”? Didn’t she just say in the paragraph immediately before that one that hungry people won’t contribute to the obesity problem? Now she’s suggesting that teenagers work at fast food restaurants and rely on the burgers and greasy fries they can get for free? At what point did Davis just give up on trying to say anything comprehensible, still wrong but comprehensible at least? Instead, she seems to be playing a game with herself, “How Ignorant and Hypocritical Can I Get?” It seems to be a game a lot of Republicans enjoy, perhaps they can put out a board version of it, with cards reading stuff like ‘Uh Oh, You Got Caught Sending a Racist E-Mail, Go Back 3 Spaces!” and “Congratulations, You Got Photographed With a Black Person, Advance 2 Spaces!”

You’ll note that on the Think Progress page there’s a picture of Cynthia Davis wearing a cross around her neck.  This is both amusing and maddening.  As much as I genuinely dislike tainting an entire group of people with the same brush, it seems that if someone, particularly a politician, makes “what’s best for the poor” statements that involve cutting funds and taking programs away from them, the more likely they are to identify him or herself as a Christian.  There’s a new breed of Christian, those who seemed to miss the day in Sunday school when they were taught the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy: 1. feed the hungry, 2. give drink to the thirsty, 3. clothe the naked, 4. shelter the homeless, 5. visit the sick, 6. visit the imprisoned, 7. bury the dead.  Those come right from the Bible, that same Bible that conservative Christians like to thump and invoke when they’re speaking out against gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose.  I’m an agnostic and I don’t claim to know more than the most familiar of Bible stories, but even I know that Jesus Christ was a big fan of charity.  That’s also from the Bible, from 1 Corinthians: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”  If Christians are having a hard time figuring out why their numbers are dwindling, they’d do well to take a good, long look at people like Cynthia Davis, who practice a special sort of Christianity, one that allows you to judge and condemn without compensating with compassion.

In defense of introverts

Found through Jezebel, the UK’s The Guardian runs an article by Rachel Denton on her choice to live a life of solitude, with little contact from the outside world.

I moved here in January 2002 and started my life as a hermit, naming my house after St Cuthbert, the patron saint of hermitage. On a typical day, I pray between 6am and 8am. After breakfast, I work on my calligraphy business, perhaps on card designs or wedding invitations, until midday. I eat, nap and read until two, then work in the house or garden until five. Over supper, I listen to the radio for an hour, followed by more prayer. In the evenings I may sit and watch the fire, sew and wander around the garden.

I try to live a simple life. I grow my own fruit and vegetables and, on an income of around £8,000, I have to be careful what I spend. I don’t have a television and I allow myself only an hour of radio each day.

I made an official commitment to be a hermit in November 2006, at a special mass. Before you can take your vows in the Catholic church, you have to put together a “rule of life” agreed by the bishop. My vows were poverty, chastity and obedience, which I have interpreted as simplicity, solitude and silence.

Though the word is never used, it’s clear from Ms. Denton’s oft-mentioned desire to be alone that she’s a classic introvert, which seems to be a dying breed in today’s culture, particularly in Western countries.  I know, because I’m one too, and while reading the comments at the Jezebel article I was genuinely surprised to see how many readers envied Ms. Denton’s quiet, solitary life, where she has no suitors and only sees friends and family a couple times a year.  I was surprised because introverts tend to get a bad rap as being unsociable malcontents.  As someone who has spent most of my life being told by extroverts that I’d be much happier if I just stopped being a wallflower, I’ve come to accept that we’re a largely misunderstood lot, alternately categorized as shy and insecure yet somehow arrogant and snobbish at the same time.

Most introverts aren’t actually shy; in fact they tend to be excellent conversationalists, once they’re comfortable with someone.  They also don’t dislike people in general, but don’t necessarily feel the need to befriend everyone they meet either.  Socializing, particularly on a superficial, going to a party and meeting a bunch of new people at once level, is more stressful to introverts than extroverts, but it doesn’t mean they look to avoid any situation in which they’re forced to make conversation.  We just like our space and our alone time, and people who are constantly on the go from one social event to the other, often while complaining that they have very little time for themselves, baffle us as much as we baffle them.

We’re at a strange impasse, a thoroughly 21st century conundrum, in which, due to the nature of communicating on the internet, it’s not unusual for a person’s closest friends to live hundreds, even thousands of miles away, yet people, particularly women, who spend a lot of time at home with mostly themselves to keep them company, even if that’s their preference, are considered weird and a little sad. While the strong, silent man who doesn’t speak until he has something important to say is a much beloved cliche that will never go away, women are expected to be social butterflies, with an ever-growing circle of friends and acquaintances and a limitless supply of energy to dedicate to every one of them.  Quiet, aloof men are deemed “mysterious” and “sexy,” while quiet women are “mousy” and “timid.”  Though lots of people find shy men appealing, believing them to just need the right partner to open them up, you’d be hard-pressed to find “shy” high on the list of desirable female traits.  Most of the time, we just have to go through the motions of being gregarious and sociable, whether we want to be or not.

Rachel Denton has achieved the introvert’s dream: a quiet, unassuming life where she has total control over how social she chooses to be, seemingly without guilt and without her friends and family giving her a hard time or making assumptions about it.  I love living in New York City, both the worst and best place for an introvert to reside, yet I often fantasize about moving to a farm somewhere and raising goats, not just because I think goats are awesome, but because sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the need to just get away, closing my circle to just a select few friends and family members.  It is, however, at this point at least, a pipe dream, one, because I don’t know the first thing about raising goats, and two, because I’m not sure it’s a decision I could make without worrying about what people would think of it.  A move like that is generally perceived as rejecting the world, removing yourself from the big picture as if to suggest that you might be a little too good for it, and people don’t tend to like that.  All introverts have someone in our lives, a mother, a sibling, a friend, a co-worker who always want to tell us what we’re missing, who want to draw us out, who perceive our distance as a rejection of sorts.  Most of us are continually expected to give in to society’s expectations of what’s “normal,” no matter how exhausting and against our nature it might be.

The monster in the refrigerator

The New York Times, in their all-too-frequent feature I’ve come to call ‘This Week in Wealthy White People,’ profiles MeMe Roth, an uncertified “health counselor,” and her crusade against unhealthy food served in elementary schools.  It’s a noble cause, no doubt, until it’s revealed that Roth’s “crusading” mostly consists of demanding that her kids never eat anything in school other than what’s served for lunch and inundating school personnel and other parents with belligerent, harassing e-mails.

Both parents left feeling they were being pushed out of P.S. 9, which they perceive as exhausted by Ms. Roth’s intense lobbying for, among other things, permission slips for any food not on the official lunch menu. It would not be the first time: The Roths previously lived in Millburn, N.J., where, after Ms. Roth waged war on the bagels and Pringles meal served to kids at lunch, received e-mail from one member of the P.T.A. that said, “Please, consider moving.” That was in 2006, and P.S. 9 has been hearing about its transgressions against healthy eating pretty much ever since.

“The community is very concerned,” the principal, Diane Brady, wrote in an e-mail message. At the meeting with Ms. Moffatt, Ms. Brady said that Ms. Roth “was hostile” and “threw candy onto the table and cursed.” It was not the first time, she added, that Ms. Roth had “displayed this hostile behavior.”

It’s war, you see? War! Because America doesn’t have enough shit to worry about besides kids eating a bagel every now and then.  This isn’t the first time MeMe Roth has been featured in the news.  As president and founder of National Action Against Obesity, an organization in which she appears to be the only member, Roth rather famously spoke out against Jordin Sparks being chosen as a winner of American Idol in 2007, claiming that the size 14 or so Sparks was too heavy for such an honor.  She really hates fat people.  Eating in general, too, but mostly fat people.  She’s claimed that parents of overweight children are abusive, Santa Claus needs to lose weight and that if the Girl Scouts really cared about young women, they’d stop selling cookies.  Most recently, she compared eating to rape, making some sort of bizarre, offensive correlation between the sexual pleasure victims of rape supposedly feel during their attack to the pleasure we feel eating food we know is bad for us.  Bitch is crazy, but she also has occasional periods of lucidity in which she’s been able to turn that crazy into a profitable, publicity garnering career, so good for her, I guess.

In the same “eating is just like rape, no, really, it totally is” article, Roth insists that she doesn’t have an eating disorder, yet later admits that she rarely eats more than one meal a day, and often puts that off as long as possible.  While that may not be full-blown anorexia, it’s definitely an indicator that she has some serious issues with food, and she’s happily pushing those issues onto other people, particularly her own and, if at all possible, other people’s children.  No real nutritionist would be encouraging people to eat just one meal a day, and yet someone who has no training in diet and nutrition is continually given a public platform to express how she thinks people should be feeding their children, when really what she needs is a therapist’s couch to work out her mommy issues.

If childfree people hate people like MeMe Roth, parents hate her more, because she is exactly the type of person that gives other parents a bad name.  She is the archetypal upper class yuppie parent who, out of concern “for the children,” constantly pokes their noses into everyone else’s business, because they don’t have anything else going on in their lives and don’t feel complete if they don’t get to be smug and judgmental.  There’s one of her in every school district, at every PTA meeting, on every parenting message board online, in every town.  They’re constantly “declaring war” on something or other, peanuts, soda, high fructose corn syrup, vaccinations, some book or movie that doesn’t portray the world as a perfect place where nothing bad ever happens, and their favorite tactic to get other parents to see it their way is to insist that if we really cared about our children, we’d fight the good fight with them.  These are people who insist that it’s perfectly reasonable to take the word of Jenny McCarthy when it comes to the now debunked link between vaccinations and autism over that of doctors and scientists, simply because she’s a mother, and mothers have some sort of psychic knowledge about everything.

I’m not disagreeing that there’s an obesity epidemic in this country, although to call it an “epidemic” suggests that it’s somehow contagious, like you can sneeze your fat onto someone else.  I’m also not disagreeing that schools don’t really need soda machines or candy sales.  However, I’m here to tell you that it’s a damn dirty lie that kids eating crappy, overly processed food, both in and out of school, is something new.  Teachers rewarding students with sugary treats, dooming them to a lifetime of wearing nothing but size XXXL jogging pants and tooling around on a motorized scooter isn’t new either.  I started first grade in 1978, and I clearly remember my teacher rewarding students for good behavior with tickets to buy ice cream sandwiches in the cafeteria.  There were also plenty of occasions over the years when we were given candy and other treats for Halloween, Valentine’s Day, someone’s birthday, whatever.  This is hardly a new and troubling phenomenon.  I grew up in the era when the words “organic” and “all natural” were associated only with hippies who didn’t work or send their kids to school.  Regular kids such as myself ate shit like Spaghetti-Os, with its toxic orange sauce.  We drank Tang, which had enough chemicals in it to embalm a squirrel.  We snacked on wax soda bottles, candy that was literally made out of wax and filled with a viscous, colored fluid.  We didn’t know what the fuck was in those things, just that it was sweet and delicious.  I’d hazard a guess that my own child eats considerably better than I did at her age.

So why are kids fatter now than they were a generation ago? Why are people in general fatter now? Undoubtedly it’s because convenience has allowed us to maintain a more sedentary lifestyle–let’s face it, Wall-E’s cynical portrayal of humans devolving into helpless infants who can only get around in hoverchairs might not be too far off the mark.  As for kids, I’m more inclined to believe that it’s because they simply don’t get enough exercise.  Parents have been discouraged from letting their kids go too far from home, playgrounds are now considered potential deathtraps unless every surface is covered in padding, more and more children are mysteriously diagnosed with asthma each year, which further cuts back on physical activity.  Granted, sugary sodas and cupcakes at school aren’t helping, but I doubt that’s the sole reason.  I’m really uncomfortable with people like MeMe Roth, or any other supposedly well-meaning parent, attempting to control what other people’s children eat.  Force your own kids to be neurotic about what they put in their bodies all you want, but don’t assume that you’re the designated “Food Police” for your fellow parents.  In the end, it’s their responsibility to tell their kids not to drink soda or eat chocolate or whatever food you think is the Devil and should be forbidden.  We already don’t mind enough of our own business as it is.

Helping us help ourselves

Found through Jezebel, Kiri Blakeley of Forbes writes an article about the eternal popularity of self-help books for women.

It’s easy to see why the self-help genre, especially the relationship category, might inspire some snickers–or cringes. The titles alone are enough to embarrass: Women Who Love Too Much; Men Like Women Who Like Themselves; Smart Women, Foolish Choices; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them;He’s Just Not That Into You. But 13.5 million of these types of self-help books were sold last year, a 22% increase from the year before, according to Nielsen BookScan. And in 2008, women purchased 74% of books sold in the relationship and family category, according to book consumer trends tracker R.R. Bowker.

What gives? Underneath the powerful confident career woman is there really just a desperate neurotic who hopelessly chases, is married to or is separating from a jerky guy?

While “self-help” books can offer advice for anything from acing job interviews to getting over shyness, the article focuses mostly on dating and relationship advice, which, along with dieting books are the most popular of the genre with female readers.  It asks not just why they’re popular with women, but why they’re equally unpopular with men, and the answer seems pretty clear: because as women we are taught from an early age that there’s some aspect of us that always needs to be improved, whether it be our looks, our weight, the way we dress, how we talk to people, how we present ourselves to our families, our children, our friends, our romantic partners, our co-workers, our bosses.  No matter how well we think we’re doing, there is always room for improvement.  Men, on the other hand, are given a different kind of short shrift: they’re encouraged to be set in their ways and not to change for anyone or anything until they’re damn good and ready.

I must admit to being a little baffled at the continued success of the self-help industry, mainly because it plays into the notion that women are generally incapable of thinking for ourselves.  This is evident when you consider two of the most successful of these books currently on the market: He’s Just Not That Into You, which offers advice that should be patently obvious (”If he doesn’t call you after the first date, he’s probably not interested in a second date”), and Skinny Bitch, a snarky, foul-mouthed manifesto on veganism disguised as a dieting advice book, with weight loss tips that come within a breadstick’s width of promoting anorexia.  Both books suggest that women are daft, oblivious creatures who need everything carefully spelled out to them.  At least He’s Just Not That Into You keeps it relatively simple, as the majority of other relationship advice books make things far more complicated than they need to be, suggesting everything from good old-fashioned passive-aggressive mind games to literally writing out lists and charts with your partner, falling just short of giving him a gold star sticker if he remembers to take out the garbage.  No wonder men don’t want to read this shit, the authors tend to treat their readers as if they’re children who need their hands held through every aspect of their lives.

Dating advice books can be easily boiled down to this: “fuck him.”  That’s what my dating advice book would be called, Fuck Him, by Dr. Gena Radcliffe (joke partially stolen from Denis Leary).  I don’t mean literally have sex with him, I mean if you go out on a date with a guy and don’t hear back from him afterward, fuck him, you’re better off.  If you’re dating someone for a little while and he keeps pulling the hot and cold “I don’t have a grip on my emotions” thing, fuck him.  Unless you get off on that sort of thing, in which case enjoy the inevitable heartache it’ll cause.  Women shouldn’t have to be told these things, they’ve just been conditioned to believe that if a date or potential match doesn’t work out, it’s because of something we did wrong, and it’s up to us to obsess over every little detail of it and figure out what it was.  Again, it’s left up to us to be the instigators of change and improvement, while men are just written off as stubborn, mysterious beings impervious to change.

Once they’re actually involved, the most useful piece of advice anyone can apply to improving their relationship is “talk to your partner.”  An advice book that consists of four words, without any well-meaning but empty platitudes and a chatty “just us girls” tone probably won’t sell much, but it’s true.  You shouldn’t need to “entice” him into doing more around the house or “trick” him into proposing to you.  If your partner needs to step up to the plate and help out more with household chores, you should be able to tell him “Honey, I really need you to help me with this.”  Old-fashioned social standards be damned, if you want to get married, ask your partner “Hey, honey, have you given any thought to our future?”  Who wants to say they tricked or manipulated their partner into marrying them, or that they had to treat him like a third grader to get him to clean the toilet? There’s no victory there.  The real victory is taking control of your own life, without the help of someone shilling a book on Oprah or The View, and treating your partner like an adult.

If the two of you are incapable of just sitting down and talking about the state of your relationship without a bunch of plotting and scheming beforehand, you may already be beyond help, and that seems to be what fans of relationship advice books fear.  It’s that fear that authors like Marianne Williamson and John Gray capitalize on, promoting the idea that their books can “save” a relationship.  I honestly have no idea how many marriages are pulled back from the brink of destruction thanks to books that describe men as being “like rubber bands” and comparing women to waves; perhaps it was mutual eye-rolling over this corny shit that brings couples closer together.  It doesn’t really matter what the end result is, as long as the author profits from it.  Just as we should know that there’s no such thing as a “dating expert,” we should know that dating and relationship advice book authors really aren’t our friends, they don’t know us, and they don’t know what’s best for us.

Dreaming the impossible dream

Double X, Slate’s new “feminist” blog, reinforces its curiously anti-woman tone with Sara Mosle’s blistering screed against Etsy, the wildly popular online marketplace where users can both buy and sell handmade crafts.

For buyers, it’s an easy way to purchase beautiful, one-of-a-kind pieces. And for Etsy investors, who get a cut of every transaction, it’s a user-generated (read: low investment, potentially high revenue) business that still projects a green, anti-corporate image. There’s just one fly in the decoupage: There are virtually no male sellers on Etsy. If the site is such a great way for anyone to market handmade goods online, then why is it such a female ghetto?

After all, the site was founded by three men in Brooklyn, a haven for macho DIY-dom, and was never conceived as female-only. The home page has a minimal, modern look. The colors are not cutesy pink. “They’re orange and blue,” says Adam Brown, the site’s spokesman. “You can’t get more neutral than that.”

As evidenced by her baffling use of the phrase “female ghetto,” Mosle’s first issue with Etsy seems to be that its users are predominantly female, even though the website isn’t pink and sparkly and there aren’t a bunch of cute boys to talk to and send winky emoticons.  How odd that women would be drawn to a website that doesn’t clearly spell out in puffy letters and Hello Kitty gifs that it’s female friendly!

However, a couple paragraphs down, Mosle’s real problem with Etsy becomes clear: it has the nerve to encourage its users to embrace the ridiculous notion that they might stand to make a real profit from their crafting talent.

I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.

Ah, yes, of course! Men, always ambitious and logical, would never waste time on such a frivolous activity as making stuff by hand if they didn’t stand to earn lots of money by doing it.  Naive, impressionable women, on the other hand, have bought into this cruel lie.  Etsy has deceived them into believing that their talent is worth anything more than imaginary money, ladydollars if you will, that dissolve into a puff of glitter and rose-scented air if they actually try to spend it.  They should stick to peddling their wares at church bazaars and school fundraisers, where they belong.

I have to give her credit, Sara Mosle achieves a real coup in managing to insult both women, men and Etsy (and Brooklyn, though it may be just insulting to me, being that I live in Brooklyn and have no idea what she means by describing it as a “haven for macho DIY-dom”).  Men don’t do such ridiculous things as placing hopes and dreams for financial success on an internet-based marketplace?  Who does she think is selling baseball cards and old comic books on eBay? Disguising it as a well-meaning desire to protect other women from the bullshit fantasy Etsy’s male founders have created, Mosle suggests that they’re better off just forgetting any pie in the sky notions of staying home and doing something that brings them joy and getting themselves a real job outside the home instead.  Jeez, Sara, who pissed on your daydreams? I’m not sure there are many women, even those unmarried and without children, who wouldn’t prefer to stay home and make a little money doing something they enjoy, whether that’s making crafts, baking, writing, or here’s a crazy idea, blogging, as opposed to dragging their asses every day to a job they hate.

I make cupcakes.  I’m pretty good at it, and I enjoy doing it.  If I was slightly less lazy (all right, significantly less lazy), it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me to start a small business selling them.  Would I seriously believe that the next natural step after that would be my own show on the Food Network, with wacky employees to go with it? No, but it’d be making some money doing something I enjoy, which is something most of us don’t get to experience.  Our jobs are our jobs and our hobbies are our hobbies, and rarely do the two intersect.  According to Sara Mosle, this is a pipe dream anyway, and shame on places like Etsy for profiting from it.  Her conclusion that they deal in false hopes and empty promises comes from the fact that despite Etsy’s cheerful claims that you can quit your job and live comfortably on the money you’ll earn from selling handmade bottle cap earrings and macrame plant holders, most of the users admit their revenue to cost ratio is very low, if not negligible.  That doesn’t mean that none of Etsy’s artisans are making real money from their work, just that most of them aren’t.

So here lies the question: so fucking what? Is Etsy being dishonest in claiming you can earn a good living by selling your handicrafts through their website? Not really, even if only one in every one thousand sellers or so is making the equivalent of a standard office job salary, while the rest, if making anything at all, are putting it right back into supplies at the local Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, they’re not being deceitful.  You can make a living, but saying you can doesn’t mean that you will, and it’s rather insulting that Mosle believes other women don’t recognize the difference.  Pity the poor widdle jewelry makers and knitting ladies who got conned by the big mean men into thinking they’ll get fat paychecks for their work? Please.  Let’s give a little credit to our own gender, shall we, Sara? I’m fairly certain the majority of Etsy artisans are there because they enjoy what they do, they like getting recognition for their work, even if that recognition comes as a compliment as opposed to a purchase, and they network with other crafters.  Making money probably comes a distant second or third.  This article isn’t championing those who have bought into a lie, it’s a condescending, cynical hatchet job on a website that brings a lot of people joy.  Thanks, but no thanks, Sara, I don’t think they need your “help.”

Interesting note: while doing a bit of my own research, I noticed that today’s featured seller on Etsy’s front page was named Julien Jaborska, who, given the beard and mustache, appears to be a male.  In his interview, when asked what made him want to become an artist, he mentions enjoying the feeling of making things and the sense of accomplishment when he’s completed a project.  He further claims that he believes he could make a living off of his hobby, but hasn’t quit his job yet.  So much for the theory of men not being interested in doing things that won’t make them money, huh?

The sanctity of marriage

This just in: plans are in the works for yet another reality series to stink up American television waves, this one called I Married a Stranger.

The premise of the show is that a woman frustrated by the dating scene agrees to wed a man she’s never met. While she prepares for her blind wedding, friends and family select a spouse from a pool of six eligible suitors offered by the show’s producers. The men are eliminated one by one until only two candidates remain. Both finalists walk down the aisle, but only one makes it to the altar to reveal himself to his new wife.

“She never meets him until the actual moment when they say ‘I do,’” a source close to the project said. “It’s like the big scene that comes after an entire season of ‘The Bachelor,’ only this is in every episode.”

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that the show is produced by FOX, which brought you such other great moments in humanity as Temptation Island, Joe Millionaire, Paradise Hotel, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, Married by America, Love Cruise and, of course, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, in which we discovered that the millionaire in question was not only not a millionaire, but also had a restraining order out against him from a former girlfriend.  It’s not surprising, but it is infuriating in its blatant hypocrisy, being that FOX is affiliated with Fox News, home of conservative blowhards and minions of Satan Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.  While one Fox network offers appalling filth that mocks marriage and relationships, the other network offers appalling filth of a different kind, that which declares that same sex marriage poses a grave danger to the sacredness of traditional heterosexual marriage.

Do you see the irony here? Let me clarify this: FOX runs shows like Joe Millionaire, in which a group of conniving women competed to marry a total douchebag simply because they were led to believe that he was rich (surprise, he was an out of work actor!), while Fox News supports organizations like NOM.  You remember NOM, of course, they ran the ‘Coming Storm’ ads, in which they claimed to be “frightened” of what effect same sex marriage would have on their personal freedom.  They also talk a lot about how gays being allowed to marry would destroy the “sanctity of marriage.”

Dictionary.com defines “sanctity” as “holiness, saintliness, or godliness.”  Applying that word to “marriage” seems to suggest that heterosexuals place a great deal of value on our wedding vows, taking the idea of being married very seriously and treating it with the maturity and respect it deserves.  Let’s review some examples of how us straight folks are acknowledging the sanctity of marriage.

~~Keeping the divorce rate at a solid 45 to 50% over the past forty years.  The more times you get married, the less likely each subsequent marriage will last.  More than half of married men and nearly half of married women will engage in some sort of infidelity, ranging from unconsummated internet relationships to an emotional affair to actual sexual contact with someone else, at some point during their marriages.  And lo and behold, couples who identify themselves as churchgoing Christians have a much higher divorce rate than agnostic or atheist couples.  Whodathunkit?

~~Marrying someone on a whim while drunk and partying in Vegas, reasoning that it’s just as easy to get out of it later.

~~Giving failed first marriages the cutesy nickname “starter marriages.”

~~Encouraging women who are planning to marry to place more importance on the wedding than what happens afterward.

~~Watching shows like The Bachelor, in which someone’s marriageability is determined by hot tub makeout sessions, and insisting that it’s wildly romantic.

~~Following the exploits of Spencer and Heidi Pratt, a fake couple from a fake reality show who apparently really got married in what’s been one long, drawn out publicity stunt.

~~Pulling for people like Pamela Anderson (married three times), Liza Minnelli (married four times), Tony Curtis (married six times) and Elizabeth Taylor (married eight times) to find true love, because they’re “hopeless romantics” who “just haven’t found the right one yet.”  And then there’s this waste of space here.  Yes, you’re reading correctly, she’s been married twenty-three times, yet there are loving, devoted couples who aren’t allowed to marry at all.

~~For the Catholics in the audience, splitting up with your spouse, then having the marriage annulled by the Church, rendering it non-existent.  This not only allows you to pretend you were never married in the first place, but you can get married in a Catholic Church again.  A member of the Kennedy Family somehow managed to get an annulment for his first marriage, even though it lasted for eleven years and produced children! Awesome!

~~Getting married, then immediately declaring yourself to be in an “open marriage,” where you can enjoy all the benefits of married life (love, companionship, part of your spouse’s income) along with the benefits of singlehood (flirting, feeling attractive to people other than your spouse, sex with no attachments), while smugly declaring that monogamy is unnatural for humans and that you’ve “evolved” past such negative emotions as jealousy and possessiveness.

Now, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to divorce, obviously, as that would be absurd.  There are a million different reasons why a marriage may not work out, and nobody should stay in a situation that makes them unhappy.  We also have the freedom to marry someone for whatever reason we want to, whether for love, money or because we like their last name, and that’s fine.  I’m not saying that polyamory, or “open relationships” or whatever you want to call it is wrong either.  If you have the energy and the time management skills required to maintain a full-time relationship with one partner while juggling one or more “secondaries,” good for you, rock on with your bad self.  But let’s not kid ourselves, we straight people are doing a lousy job at this “sanctity of marriage” thing, and we have been for a very long time.  We don’t pay attention to the idea that when we marry someone we make promises to them.  We refuse to acknowledge that it’s supposed to be a life-changing event that you’re not supposed to go into for shits and giggles.  You can’t get a tattoo if you’re visibly intoxicated, yet you can bet you can find someone in a chapel off of Fremont Street who will perform a marriage ceremony for you, just as long as you have the faculties available to sign your name on a piece of paper and take money out of your wallet.  Allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman? We’ve already done a fine job of that ourselves.

I’m likely preaching to the choir here, but it’s time conservatives and same sex marriage opponents got a long, hard look at the state of marriage today.  It seems that gay couples, after such a long, ugly battle to obtain the right to marry, would certainly take it more seriously than the average straight couple.  The majority of those who are currently able to get legally married have been together for many years, and have thus already weathered a great deal of the storms that drive other couples apart.  If anyone can preserve the sanctity of marriage, it would be them.