Wyzga On Words

Personal Transformation Is Slow Going.

So there I was feeling quite serene and peaceful.  I had enjoyed a walk along the sea, watched a perfect autumn sunset, and was headed to the grocery store listening to Pema Chodrin, my favorite Buddhist nun, talk about cultivating loving kindness toward oneself during the daily practice of meditation as a means to reaching compassion for others.

Whether you follow Buddhist teachings or not, there is something about Pema's authentic voice and her honest wisdom.   Her teachings remind me that I can "Fall down 7 - Get up 8" and I'm doing pretty well.

As I turned into the parking lot of the shopping center I was feeling pleased with myself that maybe I was getting the hang of this personal transformation thing after all.  And that's when I went headlight-to-headlight with a brand spanking new black Escalade trying to exit the narrow parking lot the wrong way.  Never mind that the ingress and egress is clearly marked.  The chick at the wheel was either an idiot, clueless or so self-absorbed on her cell phone that "In" and "Out" looked the same to her. 

For a brief and shining (righteous) moment I considered standing my ground to force her to reverse course and exit the right way, especially since there was now a line of cars backing up behind me.  It would not have worked.  There is a sense of self-entitlement that pervades TheOC.  Some folks just do what they want regardless.

Right then I could feel myself let go of all my loving kindness and I sighed much like my favorite married couple, Raymond and Deborah.

I slid past her and that great big black hulking luxury SUV allowing her the space to leave.  I realized again that as much as I try to be an easy-going, live and let live type, I guess I can't always stop trying to burst people into flames with my mind.

This personal transformation thing is slow going and seems to require steadfastness and patience.

Pregnancy, Abortion, Vibrators, and the Law.

It all started innocently enough. 

I was reading Gail Collins' editorial in the NYTimes, "The New Anti-Abortion Math."  According to Collins, Texas Governor Perry is blaming President Obama for a financial megacrisis in his state.  That's not news.  But what makes Texas' problems news to us is that...

"Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:

• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.

• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.

And naturally, when times got tough at the State Capitol, one of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.

“It’s in total danger,” said Fran Hagerty, who leads the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.

One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.

The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year. But when a budget expert told the Texas House Committee on Human Services that the program saved money, he was laced into by Representative Jodie Laubenberg for using “government math.”"  [Emphasis added.]

Now I don't want to get in the middle of Texas and it problems.  Heaven knows we have our share out here on the Left Coast in California. But doesn't it make sense to spend some time, money and effort to help educate our girls and women to "avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place"? If we can stop the horse from getting out of the barn we won't have to worry about chasing it across the field.

Query:  What holds us back from talking about sex, if not reproduction?  Is it fear, fiscal conservatives, resistance to government involvement in the contraceptive business, social issues, religious issues, political issues, squeamish issues, or all of the above?  What makes sex and reproduction such a non-topic of reasonable, rational, informed discussion?  I think Collins nailed it on the head here, "We are currently stuck with a politics of reproduction in which emotion is so strong that actual information becomes irrelevant."

Query: Can you see how the law and lawyers get involved? One can look to just about any aspect of our society and see the crisis of failing to address unwanted pregnancies with information and education: juvenile concerns, marriage and family counseling, landlord-tenant disputes, domestic violence, health, legislation, school drop-out rates, crime, and so on.  It's all connected.  When actual information is irrelevant the actual conditions in which we live also become irrelevant.

So, how do vibrators come in to the mix?  Hilary Howard had the journalistic chutzpah to write an article, "Vibrators On a Shelf Near You," and the NYTimes editor carried it on the front page of the "Fashion & Style" section as if someone really wanted you to read it.  How could I not? 

Rather than bore you with the details of personal massage devices, self-stimulation, and a "Sex in the City" episode - you can read it all in the privacy of your own time - let me point out what caught my ear: Dr. Laura Berman and her advice to mothers of young girls.

Dr. Laura Berman of “In the Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman,” on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, is a prominent sex and relationship expert:

"Dr. Berman.... has a line of sex toys (drlauraberman.com), which she said grossed $5 million in 2010, up from $100,000 in 2005. After one appearance on “Oprah” that focused on adult women who had problems climaxing, one of her top-selling products, the Aphrodite, “was back-ordered forever,” she said. And in 2006 she sparked a national debate when she encouraged mothers to buy vibrators for their teenage daughters. “If she gets hot and bothered on a date,” Dr. Berman said about the daughter, “she can go home and self-stimulate, instead of getting pregnant.”

In light of Collins' editorial, what got me thinking was that Dr. Berman's advice rang a bit cavalier.  Is it really as easy all that?  Go home and self stimulate?  Perhaps it is one solution.  Although, as Howard notes, "(Of course, a plastic battery-powered device is not needed for self-stimulation, but there is no market potential in that idea.)"

I believe that the discussions about reproduction are considerably more nuanced.  For me, the reasons we human beings "hook up" seem to be as many and as varied as the humans doing the 'hooking up', if you will: comfort, bragging rights, affection, bullying, expression, release, procreation, acceptance, belonging, and mis-information - to name only a very few.  

Here's what I would like to see happen as part of the growing discussion on sex, reproduction, our rights, and our responsibilites:

1. We will begin to infuse the politics of sex and reproduction with a spirit of actual, reasonable, accurate information and education;
2. Men and women, boys and girls will involve themselves in anti-bullying efforts at home, in the community, and in cybersexspace;
3. Human beings will be dignified and respected for who they are as people, not sexual objects to be exploited in a marketplace;
4. [Fill in the blank with what you want to see happen]; and,
5. [Fill in another].

Missionary Experience & Storytelling Point of View: Theater & Religion

Maybe they are in your neighborhood.  I know they are in mine.  Pairs of young men dressed alike: white, short-sleeved, button down shirts, black trousers, sturdy shoes, a backpack slung over their shoulders.  Up and down the streets they walk - for two years - urban missionaries looking to say hello, tell you about their beliefs, maybe hope you will not curse or turn them away.

What I know of Mormon missionaries is recently obtained.  Two fellows, one from the Deep South and the other from the Midwest, an unlikely pair of accents but brimming with fervor, stopped me in my driveway to talk.  I was being polite - it's how I was raised.  And then one thing led to another & I was carrying a gift from them: a Book of Mormon to read.  My gift to them was a paper sack of organic apples and carrots from my local farm.  And I thought that was the end of my introduction to the folks from Utah.   

Not so fast.  The NYTimes added a perspective to my experience. 

Much like a missionary himself Samuel G. Freedman recently explored the new Broadway musical, "The Book of Mormon," in his column "On Religion."  Who knew that amidst the profane, weird, jokey play from the pair behind "South Park" are real live characters, risk, heroism, martyrs, religious arrogance, challenge, truth, lies, and the  Human Narrative - in short, a story we can recognize no matter how (or if) we worship.  Excerpt.

"Midway through the first act of “The Book of Mormon,” the acclaimed new Broadway musical, a warlord swaggers into a Ugandan village. Bedecked in ammo belts, brandishing an assault rifle, he demands surrender and announces his intent to sexually mutilate all the local women.

One husband, emboldened by a pair of Mormon missionaries from Utah, shouts in response, “My wife’s body is none of your business. And you are no general.” Whereupon the warlord shoots him in the head, spattering blood over one of the missionaries, Elder Price. When the lights come up in the next scene, the elder can say only, “Africa is nothing like ‘The Lion King.’ I think that movie took a lot of artistic license.”

In those few moments, careering between the lethally serious and the cheekily comic, “The Book of Mormon” does something more profound than grip its audience. It provides a sophisticated insight, one of many in the show, into the missionary experience.

For all of its lewd jokes and potty-mouth banter, “The Book of Mormon” commingles the profane and the sacred, dramatizing the culture shock, the physical danger and the theological doubts that infuse what one might call the missionary narrative. That narrative has been lived out for centuries by Western missionaries in a range of denominations, and it has been expressed in recent decades in a spectrum of art and literature."

So what makes this story different than the usual religious missionary genre?  Trey Parker and Matt Stone worked to tell the story as one we could recognize because the characters and major events linked to our life experiences.  It is a courageous stance: mingling the religious with the comic. Excerpt.

"Viewed only in their vanilla innocence, Mormon missionaries can be “an easy bunch to laugh at, especially to a cynical adult audience,” Mr. Stone wrote in an e-mail.

He continued, “We thought if we could tell the story from inside their experience, then those cynical laughs could be harnessed for greater power.”

In its wiggy way, “The Book of Mormon” also depicts the faith crisis that strikes missionaries when their theological commonplaces prove irrelevant to the problems at hand: civil war, AIDS, poverty, genital disfigurement of women."

Who among us does not pause and wonder about faith?  I am reminded of a prayer, "I believe - help my unbelief."  When we participate in a story from the inside, it matters to us in a way that might not otherwise be possible or even meaningful if we were spectators.

What do I believe?  Could I leave home and walk for two years to tell strangers about my belief?  What crisis of faith creeps up on me in the middle of the night?  How does the presence of those two young earnest men in trademark garb talking with me in full faith and innocence inform my life on a bright sunlit day?