Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 319 Editor's Choice: 34
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self-regulation
[Read the article: Loving the "freshman 15"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It’s not about 15 pounds. It’s about what the letters are telling us it’s about. Stereotyped male: “I only value you skinny.” Empowered female: “Oh yeah? I’ll show you who’s in control. Take a look. I’ll put on pounds even if it jeopardizes my health.” Reaction confirms control by stimulus. The ability to transcend the male – female reactive power dynamic is what makes freedom and choice (true empowerment) possible, ostensibly what both men and women desire.
For the college freshmen (female and male) it’s less about pounds than about learning critical life skills of true empowerment (vs. reaction) and emotional self-regulation. Self-regulation allows freedom from learned dependence on potentially harmful substances like food (‘really comforting” as one writer described) or others (“Sure I have a few drinks to relax. Everybody does.”).
I’m glad when writers like Jerigonza overcome earlier compulsive use of potentially harmful substances (like food, nicotine, or alcohol) and can then retrospectively view the behavior as “extremely unhealthy”. The fact is that many don’t overcome it, and the costs can be huge – look around.
How frequently the 15 pounds eventually get shed or supplemented may be far less important than the enduring patterns of behavior developed, as writer Always Anon attested (“Self-indulgence”). And less important than underlying questions. Why is the university environment possibly more stressful for young women? Of the coping strategies potentially available to them, which are we reinforcing and why? What are the long term consequences for their health and lives?
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self and parenthood
[Read the article: The ones who weren't]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Joyce, you seem to be living largely through your offspring and your identification with them. I suggest sincerely and respectfully that you consider finding a good Rogerian therapist with whom you might explore your childhood, family of origin, and the meanings of self and parenthood for you.
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respect for the artists
[Read the article: "Everybody needs an honest shake"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon, I found nothing in Barbara Kopple’s remarks on the Dixie Chicks to correspond to the “why she [Kopple] hopes their fans will forgive them” in your headline. What I did find is that writer Stephanie Zacharek’s questions point to how this sentiment about a presumed slight to their fans by the Chicks became projected onto Ms. Kopple.
Tellingly, Ms. Zacharek has some norms built into her questions: “Pop music…is supposed to be inclusive – it’s supposed to dissolve boundaries rather than harden them….do you think there’s any way the Dixie Chicks can reclaim the audience they lost?” And that the band’s publicist would suggest the American public is unperceptive bothered Ms. Zacharek, leading her to lament that the filmmaker couldn’t “control” the reaction of the audience to that comment. Zacharek then characterizes the band’s male manager Simon Renshaw as “trying to do damage control” with the impulsive Natalie Maines who “will blurt out” something that “cannot be repressed”.
Wow. This interview is about whom?
If someone at Salon believes the Dixie Chicks have done something to merit forgiveness by anyone, we should expect that writer to take responsibility for and clarify the thought, rather than project it onto the interviewee.
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Camille's intellectualism
[Read the article: Salon Interview: Camille Paglia]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Camille’s utterances seem to have generated a great deal of confusion and appreciative identification. After some 200 posts, Anonymous says, “I don’t understand the hatred of Camille Paglia.” Neither apparently does Salon, else Camille would not be, to her own harm, enabled by Salon’s editors.
The trouble comes from confusing symptomatology with discourse. Intellectualism, so greatly admired, is a psychological defense mechanism which allows avoidance of inner experience: of those fears, worries and discomforts that otherwise would adaptively nag at us that (painful) change is in order. Intellectualism shields from that. It’s a verbal smokescreen for the psyche, and the more abstract and dense the vocabulary and allusions, the better – the farther the mind is distanced from threatening signals.
Coherent substance may be (as readers have noted) lacking, because language is being used not to create meaning and coherence, but to avoid, evade, and to unleash anger, with the result, as illustrated by Camille’s statements, of distorting reality to absurdity, e.g. equating Foley’s actions to Clinton’s, admiring as a “president” a disturbed child, or characterizing a sociopathic war criminal like Condi Rice as a “brilliant woman”.
What is Camille protecting herself from? She’s telling us that it’s tied to gender/sexuality and power. A clue is her identification with Rice: "we are so man-like and intelligent and so very, very powerful – we are invulnerable". That is: "I feel vulnerable and scared and powerless and that makes me mad as hell."
The din that Salon helped Camille elicit is a reward for the anger, but it’s not the kind of attention she needs. Give her some peace and space; maybe she’ll start hearing herself.
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when men are like carnivores
[Read the article: When are women like "uncovered meat"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Writers are astutely noting that it’s less about Islam than about religion, which evolved as a system for males to control the sexual behavior of females. That is, less about religion than about biology, even about molecules like testosterone, clinically known as the “Fuck-‘N-Fight” hormone. Check out Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”. Men are wired to aggressively take control of resources from each other (hence capitalism), and one of the most important is the reproductive resource, i.e. women. Fuck-‘N-Fight. The more regressive the level of behavior, such as in war, the less differentiated the sexual and aggressive drives.
What the impulsive Hilaly free associated is really everywhere – the hijab, female genital mutilation, the institution of marriage, the everyday observable behavior of men and women, the sexualization of (always) female children (the younger the reproductive resource is commanded, the more likely the commanding male will have been the first there), etc. Men driven unreflectively by their biology to control and command the sexual behavior of women. How do we free ourselves from these maladaptive, restricting, harmful patterns of behavior? By first understanding, then transcending our own biology. Like Steinbeck said.