Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 959 Editor's Choice: 127
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Another Kind of Swinger
[Read the article: Sexless and loving it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, Eden was once one or more of the idiots on "Sex and the City." She found, unsurprisingly, that it didn't work for her. As so many uncritical thinkers do, she then took the bathwater and everything in it, threw it out, and swung with the pendulum to the opposite extreme. How's that working for her? Apparently not real well, as it has affected her ability to be resolute about anything, at least from the way she swings wildy from statement to retraction, from pronouncement to apology, from having enjoyed being a libertine to loving the diametrically opposite life of a virtual nun. Swinger.
I don't mean to sound self-righteous (and how could I, married and divorced three times and a whoring,drooling fiend in the in-between periods - except when I wasn't doing that?). No, there are some accidental truths to be found in this interview, primarily that "telling lies with your body" part, which is pretty much what Erich Fromm tried to point out to us in his landmark "The Art of Loving", where he diagrammed for us the desolation that often follows mindless, loveless sexual encounters, the tearing down of the walls only to find nothing much on the other side. This is not to say one cannot have a meaningful sexual relationship with a person one loves -as a friend, a paramour, an long-term committed lover with no involvement by church nor state. These things can be done and done quite satisfactorily. In fact that last may be the best one, based on my most recent experience with church, state and marriage.
But there is so much of the confused adolescent still bleeding through here in Eden's often erratic discourse that I can't help but feel she's simply doing a lot of black-and-white thinking and passing it off on us as found wisdom and enlightenment, when all it really seems to be is a trade of one sort of hidebound religious doctrine for another, with no room for the actual person involved to create a happy life for herself, which would be sacrilige. No, let us by all means find someone else who will give us a solid, if senseless, set of rules to go by from the moment we wake up each morning, so that in the end we will have someone else to blame when we wake up at 80 or so and realize our life really has sucked because we weren't very much involved, having handed over all the good parts to God, Jesus, society, the church, or television.
This interview made me feel profoundly sad for Eden and for countless other "swingers", those riders on the pendulum of black-and-white thinking who commit the ultimate act of abortion on themselves by repeatedly throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Well Chris...
[Read the article: Editor's picks 2006: Life]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it's clearly an article about something, because Salon has invited us to post letters about "this article." And yet, now that you've pointed out the logical clefstick in which it leaves us, I'm not sure I "get" it either.
Maybe it's like a barbershop mirror, where one used to just keep seeing the same thing, smaller and smaller, til it would throw you into a petit mal seizure and you'd jerk your head and nearly be decapitated by the razor-weilding jerk who was used to seeing everything through a fly's eye as he "cut" people's hair.
Or I might just be having a stroke...
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We Don't Need Another Role Model
[Read the article: Running low on role models]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What we need is parents and a society and, perhaps, someday, even a media, who pass along certain wisdom and standards of behavior to their offspring.
The comment "In years past, it was up to our national icons to set examples for us on how to live" is total bullshit. They were just more savvy about playing to the then-overly conservative (read "puritanical") standards imposed on us by parents, society and the media of the day. It was assumed no one would want a slutty Shirley Temple, and rightfully so. But she was no more real than Tara Connor nor any of the other children and young adults we gaze at so pruriently in one moment them look at down our blue noses the next.
Somewhere in the middle, as usual, lies the truth. But that truth has nothing to do with "role models", "self esteem", nor any of the other terms thrown around by armchair sociologists. It has to do with the way we raise our children and the goals toward which we point them. This is nothing more than chickens coming home to roost. It is sad, but the scandal ought not be hung around the necks of the (mostly) young women who have been left swinging in the wind by parents with more money than brains and a notion of importance defined by the marketing mentality that has left this country looking like the biggest bunch of morons since the last swing of our social pendulum.