ANNIE writes in response to the postThe Cheapest Babysitter in Town:
Do you think that any TV at all is bad for a two-year-old? I am really wondering what your personal opinion is. I was in agony when my little boy started watching TV around the time he turned one! I wanted to fight my husband on this to the bitter end. He was raised watching LOTS of TV which I believe is what caused his habitual drug use as a teenager. He thought I was crazy until we did a little experiment; no TV for the baby for a whole week. And what results! He went from being an aggressive, mean, crying baby to a happy, sweet, easily contented baby, like the one I knew before the TV watching began.
A TREE is movement that never quite moves. Its roots protruding from the ground, an oak seems as if it is just about to take a step. Its limbs bare of leaves, the tulip poplar reaches and points and gesticulates. A row of old Japanese maples near where I live is effeminate and expressive. It is as if a choreographer had once come by and said, "Okay, girls. Arms up! That's right. Now wave. Wave as if you were billowing sails!" When the choreographer left, the trees held their billowing sails in place, awaiting his return. A tree is movement frozen in place, even when its limbs sway in the wind. But that is not all. A tree is wisdom. I was raised by human beings, but I was also raised by trees: oak mothers and fathers; poplar siblings; maple aunts and hemlock uncles; pine and spruce cousins, plus a host of extended arboreal relatives whom I cannot classify. I consider them family because they have that essential feature of all relatives. There is always the mysterious feeling that they know me. I was tree-taught and tree-tutored. I have gone to tree school, leaning against the windowsill on winter nights when there was a full moon and the ancient oaks beyond by window were clarified by the light; walking through their blazing hallways as they dropped their leaves on my head in fall; and resting on spring days against their rough and tender bark. They taught me their alphabet. They taught me tree arithmetic and tree geography, tree philosophy and…
Children between the ages of 2 and 5 spend more than four hours a day watching TV and playing video games, according to a New York Times article on the latest surveys by Nielsen. This is the highest figure ever. Electronic entertainment is the cheapest and easiest way to entertain young children. As neighborhod life declines, families grow smaller, and adults grow busier, the electronic babysitter seems a virtual necessity. What's wrong with that? The mind of the child is the father of the future. Visual entertainment stunts the imagination. It weakens the will and creates hostility to word and thought.
Lydia Sherman continues to explore traditionalist clothing and home decorating at her blog, Home Living. She writes on these subjects within the larger context of the spiritual mission of home. Unlike Martha Stewart, who recommends that women meditate and eat chickpeas to attain enlightenment, Lydia hearkens to the Bible and the traditions of the West. This painting by Charles Edouard Boutibonne of 19th century women mountaineers in comely, modest attire is one of many she has posted. Women, as Lydia often states, can do physically challenging tasks and look feminine at the same time. But, we've come a long way since then. Fashion has been revolutionized and we've been liberated. Now we can look like this:
Grief is like a garden made of rocks and sand. We enter its lonely recesses upon the death of someone we love. We go there day after day to weed and to dig, to pick through the same rocks, to pray for a few drops of rain. The soil is poor and the climate is worse. It seems nothing will grow. In a world in which there are few rituals for the dead, no sacred fires burning and few public commemorations, this garden is the only place where our memories can be sustained. After a time, things do grow, but not always to our satisfaction. The dead are always with us. From the lifeless earth, out of rock and regrets, our love for them brings forth new life.
You could have gone to college and become a human resources director. You could have gotten an MBA too. You could have refused to sweep or toss the cinders. You could have tried on another shoe. O Cinderella, what were you thinking? As a role model, you just won't do. .
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Housewives and plumbers are natural comrades in arms. They have something very basic in common and that is, they are always and everywhere needed. They address the most fundamental and routine needs of human existence. Civilization cannot function well without them, and yet so rarely acknowledges its dependence upon them. There is something shameful about both the housewife and the plumber because of this dependence. They point to the most trivial of human weaknesses. No day proceeds without clean dishes, swept floors, cooked meals, laundered clothes and unclogged plumbing.
I have a friend who is a plumber. He never goes to social events and limits all casual interaction with anyone but his customers. He lives in perpetual anxiety that harmless interactions with neighbor or friend will lead to requests for his services. I once invited him to our home for dinner and the event was ruined by his suspicion that at any moment we were going to ask for his professional expertise in pipes, drains or septic systems.
So it is with the housewife. People are often eager to create an informal tie with her. She cooks. She cleans. She takes care of young and old. Compared to the average adult today, she seems to possess an eternity of time. She has absolutely nothing to do.
The truth is she has far too much to do. The world is overflowing with need of her services and for the order, tranquility and health these services provide. A neighborhood boy used to show up at our door everyday at 7 a.m. His mother never asked if he could come over before school started. She just assumed because there was a mother at home, her services were there for the taking. The housewife is often veiwed as a de facto employee of the public school and it continually invents the most petty of projects to indenture her.
Of course, the housewife is glad to aid the world. The very best thing about her vocation is that she can meet the spontaneous needs of friend and relative as these needs arise. She can help others without the burdensome scheduling and impersonal interaction that characterizes the commercial world. She is glad to help. The spirit of charity runs thick in her veins. But, the need for the plumber is about as infinite as any basic need in this finite world. So it is with the need for the housewife. She must exercise some discretion. I believe many women have fled to the relative predictability of offices because they could not manage this demand for their time. It’s so much easier to say, “I have to go to work,” than, “No, I can’t do that today.” This demand would be less pressing if the housewife weren’t such a rarity and if more organizations respected her privacy. As it is, she must be like the plumber. She is entitled to her privacy and some leisure. If she’s not cautious, she may be draining pipes night and day.
The eroticism of this photograph of Finnish soprano Karita Mattila in the title role of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Puccini's Tosca, one of the most beloved of Italian operas, gives you some idea of what it's like when one of today's hip nihilists takes over a traditional art form. This production was booed by Met fans on its opening night in September and after seeing it in a movie theater last night, I understood why. The sets are dark, sterile and chilling. The characters depart from the text and the whole thing is perversely sexual. It sneers at the famous romance of Tosca with pornographic embellishments. In Act I, Cavadorossi, the painter played here by Marcelo Álvarez, works on a towering canvas of Mary Magdalene that sits on scaffolding and dominates the church scene. In contrast to the previous production's historically faithful rendering of the sanctuary of an ornate Roman cathedral, the interior here resembles a bleak Soho warehouse, perhaps awaiting a few abstract paintings for decor. One of Mary Magdalene's breasts is fully bared. As the painter and his lover Tosca perform their sumptuous arias, an enormous looming nipple is visible in the background. Tosca, who takes a knife at one point to the canvas, seems mentally unhinged and sexually coarse (for a moment, she grips her lover between her legs). There is another blatant swipe at Christianity when the evil Scarpia takes a statue of the Virgin Mary in his hands and lewdly embraces it. Three whores are featured in Act II, characters who never appear in the libretto. One has…
Natalie writes in response to the previous post on interior design:
I was interested in your thoughts on current interior design trends and the rise in minimalism. First, minimalism is a very masculine style, and one could say that the more androgynous the feminine ideal becomes (the ideal female figure and personality becoming increasingly boyish) the more our homes reflect the change. Also, like extreme thinness, minimalism is a class-based aspiration, the more people have the less they want to show, any kind of opulence is seen as bad taste. Why is this so? Perhaps there is a strong bias against femininity in design circles: a bias against the opulence of the traditional female form and against the female home. [Laura: That had never occurred to me! Fascinating.]
Secondly, I think there is a link between increased consumerism over the past decade and the rise of minimalism. There is a strange dissonance between the “patriotism” of buying more stuff and our minimalistic homes – we buy and then we chuck it out to make room and space. I also think it is important to note that the rise of minimalism coincided with the rise in esoteric spirituality in the West – many disciples of minimalism believe themselves to be cleansing their spirits in some unfathomable way. [Again, this is an excellent observation.]
Thirdly, minimalism is not a style conducive to successful family life, no matter how it has been sold to us. It is not comfortable; it requires extreme effort to maintain; you cannot close doors on mess if your house is on an open plan; and most importantly it is not child-friendly. [Amen!] It is a style which celebrates the rise of the consuming individual, an individualistic style and not one which can function at a family level. We have lost the sense that our homes are places of comfort, hospitality and nurture; they are simply reflections of individual taste and our monetary worth, homes are assets.
However, it is my belief that minimalism is on the wane, particularly in Europe. The UK has seen the rise of the new domestic style, and a concurrent rise of many articles on “high flying” women choosing the domestic sphere over commerce. However, the new domestic style is very much sold to us a kind of vintage make-believe, a style which plunders a more domestic past for its inspiration, and as someone interested in design (it’s in my blood – a family business) I find this to be a little cowardly, and too tongue in cheek to be taken seriously. [Yes, this trend toward retro-chic is unserious and cynical.] The only way forward is to bravely ignore trends and follow William Morris’ advice and buy only things which we consider to be either beautiful or useful.
Modern design and fashion are characterized by a love of uniformity, monotone colors, and visual barrenness. In clothes, this means grays and browns for women with few embellishments or frills. In interior design, this translates into an absence of pattern, vibrancy, texture and warmth. It’s egalitarian chic and deliberately plays down luxury. Only the trained eye can see the expense.
Kidist Paulos Asrat, of the blog Camera Lucida, recently traveled to the New York Design Center’s trade showrooms in Manhattan and commented on this phenomenon. Designers, she notes, are more caught up in self-expression than the creation of beautiful and liveable homes. She writes:
“So, if artist/designers don’t really care about their public and the real world, and they are much more interested in experimentation and self-expression, what happens to the products? As I’ve discovered, they suffer a great deal.”
In the following exchange, Kidist, an artist and textile designer, shares more of her thoughts on the subject.
It is a standard rhetorical device of feminists to always and unfailingly make token nods to the domestic woman, as if to say, "I'm not against domesticity. I only want women to have the freedom to choose." This is a lie. They do not want freedom, but the transformation of female nature. A perfect example of this is Joanne Lipman's recent editorial in the New York Times. Lipman, former deputy managing muckety-muck at the Wall Street Journal, expresses outrage that women's progress has stalled because women overall are not making as much money as men; boasts at length of her career triumphs; and states that the authentic woman is one who demands a raise or a promotion. She argues that women "need to take risks" and, in what is suppposedly an essay on the general position of women in society, only mentions motherhood or marriage when bragging about her ability to fit them in around a high-powered schedule. There is not a single positive reference to them. But, Lipman then remembers the obligatory gesture. She remembers that she must not appear to be saying what she is in fact saying: that the highest goods a woman can achieve are power and money for herself. And, so she makes the standard acknowledgement. She says, "Women define success differently; for some it may be a career, for others the ability to stay home with children." When feminists say they want "balance" for women or they want the freedom for all to define themselves as they choose, they are…
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There are two kinds of women in this world: women who divorce and those who stand by and passively watch. The first kind of women wreck the lives of their children and husbands. The second kind say, “We cannot judge.”
I am sorry to be grim. I have witnessed many divorces. Sometimes I feel as if my family lives amid the rubble of a ruined village. As I walk through this town, I see the place where the post office used to stand and the old bank and that church with the white steeple. All gone. They were decent structures. Each could have lasted for many years. With a few exceptions, they were destroyed by women, capricious women for whom divorce is the most romantic project of their lives.
It’s not true that men are the principal losers. So many women ruin their own happiness and the happiness of invisible communities formed by couples. I cannot help but come to this inescapable conclusion: Women cannot handle freedom.
For more reflections on why women divorce, see my recent post, The Unfaithful Wife.
You’ve heard of ADD, ADHD, OCD and the like, and you’ve perhaps seen the children lined up at school infirmaries for their chemical supplements. Now, word is just in from The Onion of a new psycho-neurological condition afflicting the nation’s youth. This should have been discovered ages ago. Millions have gone untreated.
The band of deciduous forest which extends roughly from the Blue Ridge Mountains to northern Quebec is unusual in the world for its autumnal color. The only other extensive swathe of forest that rivals it stretches across parts of East Asia. Deciduous trees elsewhere do not exhibit the spectacular mixture of reds and yellows. In Europe and midwestern United States, trees typically turn only yellow. The reason for this geographic difference remains a mystery to scientists, though there are intriguing theories. The appearance of yellow leaves is understood. With the diminished light of fall, the green chlorophyll in leaves departs, allowing existing yellow pigment to appear. Red autum leaves are the consequence of a different process. With the drop in chlorophyll, anthocyanin, a red pigment, is produced in the leaf. This is a relatively new discovery and has led to several theories about why trees use energy to create red pigment when they are shedding their leaves. According to an hypothesis published recently in the journal New Phytologist and discussed in this ScienceDaily article, the different climatic conditions during ice ages 35 million years ago are responsible. The bands of forest in North America and Asia developed red pigments to ward off insects that were unable to survive the harsher conditions in Europe and other parts of the world where deciduous trees also evolved. A recent headline in a Vermont newspaper said, They Came, They Peeped, They Left. As the "leaf peepers" who crowd New England's backroads know, these trees are beautiful in panorama. But the greatest effect is from inside,…
In your piece on men and housework, you remark apropos of another subject altogether, “The average woman wants control over her domestic realm and she doesn’t like the way men… manage the children.” Perhaps the operative word here is “average,” but nonetheless could you find time to expand on this point? In my experience the male-female conflict over children is the cause of much tension in marriages, and, when the results become manifest in terms of spoiled, ill-behaved, ungrateful offspring, profound grief.
It appears to be the case that if a society gives equal political rights to women, then over time there will inevitably be an expectation of equal political outcomes for women. How is this dynamic to be forestalled? By stating up front, by establishing it as a fundamental principle of the society, that the sexes are different, that women naturally have different social functions from men, and that the exercise of political power, including the franchise, is not for women. Only the stoutest bulwarks against women’s procedural equality can stop the ultimate devolution of society into gender socialism and the spiritual death and loss of freedom it brings. If liberty is limited, then liberty can be maintained.
But if I’m wrong,–if it’s not possible to contain liberty and equality within strict bounds where they do not ultimate turn into socialism–then the American experiment in government is a failure, its principle are void, and we must start over again on an entirely new basis.
I don’t believe that to be true. I devoutly hope that it is not true. But I’m saying that it might be true.
That was a thought-provoking article. Maybe I’m taking it the wrong way, but it seems like you’re being much harder on women than men. Men have been having and getting away with having affairs for millenniums. And a lot of women have sucked it up and dealt with it, often for the sake of their children. I’m certainly not condoning affairs or divorce but it’s nothing that men haven’t done. Men have discarded their wives, potential wives and children for decades on the altars of sex and excitement.
I am running myself ragged, dear reader, trying to keep up with the latest lies in our preeminent newspapers. According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, men will have more sex with their wives if they (the men) do more housework. Is this the ultimate form of feminist blackmail, or what?
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