I had another dream, I had another life
My Monday morning Mormon madness continues with the most recent post for Times And Seasons. Last weeks’ post was pretty dense with margon (Mormon jargon), but this post should be much more accessible to my non-Mormon readers. (Maybe I’ll concoct some kind of metric for Mormon inscrutability to provide in future…)
Anyway, go read it! :-)
(I’m turning off comments here so y’all can post there if you have words to add.)
I like David Edelstein’s film reviews so much that I read them even for movies I know I will never watch, which is why I ended up reading his review of Spring Breakers in the first place.
In the review, Edelstein bravely plunges into the shark-infested waters of feminist politics, by painting the movie Spring Breakers as a textbook example of pervy middle-aged men co-opting feminist liberation. The movie features “three starlets from the Disney entertainment megaverse” (Venessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Selena Gomez), and Edelstein says that all three “are obviously there as a gesture of defiance — an attempt to free themselves from their Mouse patriarch overlord and the shackles of corporate teen celebrity.”
So how does that jailbreak go? Well, here’s the second paragraph of the review:
It’s also among the perviest movies ever made — although by spelling out why, I fear I’ll only make some people want to see it more. Spring Breakers opens with a montage of bouncing bare boobs and buttocks barely squeezed into bikini bottoms, the camera gliding up the lengths of young girls’ thighs — see what I mean? That skeevy guy down the street just grabbed his raincoat and headed for the multiplex. The point is that Korine isn’t a passive voyeur. He moves in-in-in on those hot bods — up, down, all around the town. A friend whispered, “The camera is like a giant tongue.” You can almost hear the slurping.
As I said: these are treacherous waters. One of my favorite stories about the politics of porn (I’m going to use that term broadly in this piece, and Spring Breakers seems to have the spirit of porn confined to a “hard-R” rating) is from the Penny-Arcade Expo. One year, there were a bunch of booth babes (attractive women hired to staff convention booths) and the folks at Penny-Arcade didn’t kick them out. They got a torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for allowing girls to be objectified. The next year they asked a particularly over-the-top booth babe to go inside a school bus (it was part of the display, you can imagine why) to keep the convention floor more family-friendly. They got another torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for treating women’s bodies as something to be hidden. Penny-Arcade artist Mike Krahulik wrote a disgusted post asking feminists of the world to please decide what he’s supposed to do, because no matter what he does someone yells at him for being sexist.
So: does porn exploit women or empower them? I don’t know if it was Edelstein’s intent to make a statement on that general question, but he comes pretty close to it:
I didn’t think about this when I picked Monday for my weekly posts at Times And Seasons, but I realize now that that posting on a Mormon blog on Mondays provides too many opportunities for alliteration to be ignored. I’m thinking “Monday Morning Mormon Madness”. Too much? I’m paralyzed by the overwhelming potential.
In any case, here is my latest offering. It’s called “What the Chruch Is Not For“, and it represents my attempt to find a 3rd way between the TBMs (true-believing Mormons) and liberal/intellectual crowd. Not that I’m the first, of course, but I hope y’all will find my particular take on it interesting.
This video has been making the rounds recently, to almost universal applause. But I’m not quite as in love with it.
Why don’t I like it? Well let me start out with some context: I was bullied as a kid. Since I’m not really sure how to quantify the extent of my bullying (do we have a Richter scale or something I could use?) I’ll just describe it.
I had no problems in elementary school. I had lots of friends and we all got along. But towards the end of 5th grade I remember things started to change. My friends started to get really worried about middle school and making sure they were prepared for it. They all started listening to mainsteam music on the radio, watching Saturday Night Live or late-night talk shows, and caring about their clothes and their language. I had no interest in any of that. I’d heard that they still had dodgeball in middle school, and so I was satisfied that we’d all have a good time. I completely missed out on the sense that I was supposed to be studying hard for the next level of social challenges. I was like the kid who really has no clue how important and hard a final exam is, and doesn’t even really grasp how hard everyone else is studying for it. Before 5th grade was over, the changes were minor, but when middle school started it was like I was from the wrong planet.
All of my closest friends from elementary school successfully made the transition to becoming the cool kids in middle school. I didn’t even know there was a transition to be made. They didn’t want to sit with me in class, eat lunch with me, or be seen in public with me anymore, and I didn’t know why. Not understanding the jokes or what clothes to wear didn’t phase me, but suddenly finding myseld discarded by my friends hurt. I tried to catch up, but I never got it right. I put too much gel in my hair one day, trying to make something of it, and the teacher happened to call me up to the front of the room for some kind of spelling bee practice. For some reason she put her hand on my head and recoiled, “What’s in your hair?” she said loudly. I was mortified as the class erupted into laughter, but not as much as when I realized she actually expected an answer. What happened to my hair? I don’t know, I was trying to look like kids on TV but I had no one to ask about it. I tried to make up a story about the bottle breaking that morning, but she kept inquiring–laughing the whole time–if I got too much stuff in my hair why didn’t I just wipe it back off?
As if I had a good answer for that.
I was the second-shortest boy in middle school, and usually the second-smartest. That’s not a good place to be. The shortest kid, Thomas, was under the constant watchful protection of popular girls who thought he was adorable. No one messed with him. The smartest kids got teased a bit, but they had some ammunition for return fire. I had nothing.
I remember vividly how my eyes would flicker from the floor to the faces around me as I scurried through the halls–head down–trying to avoid being tripped. My constant vigilance meant that I would usually be able to hop over the attempts without even stopping, but not always. Then I would fall, it would hurt, and everyone would laugh. Sometimes people stole my stuff, other times they vandalized it. Once, while I was in gym class, someone pulled small bits of jeans through the air holes in the locker and then cut them off, so that when I got back and changed my pants were basically Swiss cheese. My parents complained to the administration about that one, but were told that only nice kids went to that school, so surely I must have done it myself for attention. Once, in an effort to try hard enough not to be noticed in gym, I dove for the volleyball. We were playing inside, and I missed and then slid a few feet before cracking my head into the wall. The gym teacher, sitting in a tall chair at the height of the net, pointed and led the class laughing at me, tossing in a few quips about “using your head” and such. I even had my own run-in with social services, much like what was described in the video, although thankfully I was never actually taken out of my home.
So how bad does that bullying compare? I don’t know. I figure it was pretty bad, but it’s not like I think about it on a daily basis. It didn’t determine the course of my life.
Part of that is probably because when I found out that I could go to a magnet school for other nerds instead of going on to high school with the folks from my middle school, I leaped at the chance. I didn’t know anything about the magnet school other than that they only took a few kids from the middle school, but that was enought. By that point I would have done pretty much anything to escape from those kids. Luckily, the high school ended up being awesome. Most of the kids had been bullied, I think, and none of us had any interest in perpetuating that kind of social environment. As I remember it, there were no cliques and everyone was free to mingle with everyone else.
I didn’t realize this at first, so when I first started I stuck with the kids who played Magic: The Gathering. Gradually I started playing ultimate frisbee every day during lunch instead and met a new group of friends, but I still viewed the better-dressed kids with suspicion and fear. Eventually the negative reinforcement training from middle school faded, however, and I realized that they were just kids, too. By the time I was a senior I was completely at ease talking to kids who wore kilts or khakis.
As I learned to talk and relate to everyone, I came to learn that although bullying hurts so do a lot of other things in life. Kids get cancer, their parents get divorced, they regret losing their virginity, they have eating disorders, they become alcoholics, their girlfriends have sex with their best friends, they get raped, they are forced to have abortions they don’t want, their parents kill themselves, they go into withdrawal trying to quit cocaine cold-turkey. None of those examples are made up. I saw them all, and a lot of them more than once. I know at least three girls who were raped, for example. I had a friend who used to keep a razor blade in his mouth for self-protection in his neighborhood and a friend who lived out of her car while working full-time and going to high school to try and pay the mortgage for a house she was too busy to ever live in.
One of my close friends–a guy who’d endured a lot of similar bullying with me all the way back to our middle school days–hung himself in his closet a couple of weeks before his birthday. I remember my last conversation with him vividly. We were on the bus on the way home, and we were debating (as we often did) and I was happy because he had seemed so depressed for such a long time, and he seemed his usual, animated self that day. At least he did until the end of the conversation.
I don’t remember how we got there, but I remember that I felt like I had some kind of insight into what had changed i him over the months and years. “The thing about you,” I said, “Is that it’s not that you lack passion for things. It’s that the only thing you’re passionate about is nothing.” He stopped laughing then, and paused before he responded. Then he told me that I was right. It was a low note, and I was a little worried, but the bus had arrived at the local high school. We got off and went to the individual buses that would take us home and I didn’t think much more of it until I got a call later that evening that he had committed suicide. As far as I know, I was the last person to talk to him. I went to school the next day thinking I’d be OK, but when they announced it in my first class I lost control and started sobbing. There were kids just huddled together in the halls all day, and I can’t tell you how many new prescriptions for anti-depressants my friends got over the next few months.
Bullying hurts, but so does a lot of life. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking that getting tripped in the halls was such a bad thing. I’m not saying that that is all bullying ever is, of course, and I’m not claiming to have suffered worse bullying than anyone else. I’m just saying that I don’t really like the idea of defining yourself around it. Does bullying scar kids for life? It probably does. So do a lot of things. While we’re at it–and this won’t make me a lot of friends–I think that the kids who do the bullying are doing it because they, too, hurt. Everyone hurts. Not just sometimes, but most of the time. What’s worse, a lot of the time we don’t know why it is that we’re in pain. Loss, disappointment, loneliness, fatigue, fear… all the varieties of pain are compounded by confusion.
If you were bullied as a kid and it hurt: I’m sorry. That sucks. But don’t go around thinking that your life is miserable and everyone else is carefree and happy. For as long as I let them, a lot of the kids in my high school seemed to want to confide in me. My parents would often hand me the phone (before there were cell phones) with a weary, “Another patient is on the line.” Finally I sort of stopped making myself available because it was more than I could take, but as long as I was willing to listen the one constant thing was this: everyone has a tragedy. No exceptions.
I don’t want kids who are bullied to think that what is happening to them makes their lives somehow surprisingly worse than others. It reminds me of the importance in not showing fear when a little child comes to you with a playground injury. Part of your job, in comforting them, is to remain calm. If they see the adult freak out at the sight of blood, then of course they will be terrified. I’m worried that turning bullying into some national cause is going to end up doing the same thing. I don’t want the pain and hurt of being bullied compounded by confusion or some terrible myth that people who aren’t bullied lead happy, carefree lives. They don’t. Some folks have it worse and some have it better, but getting bullied really has nothing to do with how bad your life is. There are so many other things that cause people to suffer. Bullying is just one variety, and it’s not anything special.
Throughout Western history, literature has been dominated by men. Obviously some women have succeeded despite the odds, from the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen to J. K. Rowling, but as these charts show the disparity remains quite stark.
This Monday’s piece for Times And Seasons is live: Authentic Religion, Authentic Science. It’s my second in a series of posts (probably 3 total) about viewing modern secularism as a religion.
I’m turning comments off here so folks can comment there if they feel inclined to do so.
I’ve heard wildly divergent perspectives on Joanna Brooks memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, including one convert who lives on the East Coast and is convinced that Joanna actually grew up in a cult, not vanilla Mormonism. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have been impressed by Joanna’s reasonable and kind tone in blog posts and interviews.
This review from award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart makes me even more curious to read the book.
Anne and I consider ourselves devout Mormons. We connect deeply with and believe in Mormon scripture and theology… Despite that heartfelt and abiding faith, however, there have been times when we have felt like we were foreigners in our own religion… It is here that works like Joanna Brooks’ The Book of Mormon Girl have given me and my wife hope.
I know that I don’t agree with everything that Joanna believes, and so I probably won’t agree with every word in the book. And that, actually, is part of why I want to read the book.
DR commenter and fellow Mormon blogger WalkerW wrote an excellent piece about the importance of listening for the sacred in “profane” music.
Suffering, as I noted in my last post, is an intrinsic part of reality. We are expected to mourn with those who mourn. Confronting suffering, pain, and sin head-on is the life of Christian. If our example is Jesus Christ, a man who “loved people in great misery who were taken from Him and did not understand Him” and was then “beaten and executed for espionage and treason,”[3] how then can we as disciples not look misery in the face? We can shy away from music that is filled with angst, despair, and sadness. We can look at it as “unworthy.” But we might miss out on something beautiful. As philosopher Roger Scruton noted, “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in anunlimited variety of ways…[I]t speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend.”
There are lots of great songs in that post. Song full of loss and longing. Here is just one.
Today I published my first post there as a permablogger: Mormonism and the New Religion of Secularism. This is the post that I had mentioned I was writing in the Faith Is Rational post from last week. Give it a read!
There’s been a great deal of research on the connection between religiosity and happiness, and the consensus finding is that religious people tend to be happier and to suffer less from anxiety, depression and stress. (Summary via Wikpedia.) I don’t think this necessarily tells the whole story. A study by the Council for Secular Humanism argued, essentially, that if you looked at “resolute atheists” (instead of merely non-religious people) that finding disappears. That seems reasonable, and in my mind the simplest explanation is that people with extreme beliefs are happier because they experience less cognitive dissonance.
But every now and then you’ll find some particularly militant atheist who simply cannot abide the scientific evidence connecting religiosity and happiness. The most recent such eruption occurred on AlterNet a couple of days ago. The basic thesis is this: states with high religiosity have higher anti-depressant use, ergo religion makes people sad. This isn’t a new theory, it goes back to at least the 1990s when Cherrill Crosby wrote an article for the Salt Lake Tribune called “The Ups and Downs of Prozac” in which she implicated Mormonism for making Utah women unhappy. Unfortunately for the decades-old thesis, the doctors that Crosby interviewed wrote a rebuttal stating, in part, that Crosby had decided to:
ignore one of my most important observations: the fact that Prozac is widely used in Utah may be evidence that [psychiatric] treatment in Utah is superior to other parts of the United States which might benefit from increased prescriptions of antidepressants. Epidemiologic studies clearly show that depression is markedly under-diagnosed and under-treated in the United States. How different the article would have been had the author used this point as her underlying assumption!
So, to recap, militant atheists for the last 20 years have chosen to ignore solid, direct evidence that religiosity makes people happier. Instead, they prefer to rely rely on shaky, indirect evidence and unreasonable assumptions to believe the opposite. So much for science, eh?
What’s really telling to me, however, is that this is a win-win proposition for atheist. If religion makes people happy, it’s the opiate of the masses, and atheist depression shows that they are suffering for their integrity. It religion makes people depressed, it’s an oppressive institution and atheist joy shows they are enjoying their liberation from captivity.
If there’s one thing that human beings are good at it, it’s finding a narrative to fit the data that protects their preconceptions. It’s not surprising that religious people do this (after all: isn’t religion just one big story to shield us from our fear of mortality?) but it’s a bit richer in irony to the see the scientific skeptics engaging so brazenly in the same sort of inventions.
(The story about the Salt Lake Tribune and the rebuttal quotes come from the article “Religiosity and Life Satisfaction among LDS Women“.)