Sir J.M. Barrie was something of a Lost Boy himself and had no daughters, which may explain why the power of story in “Peter Pan” is Lost Boys afraid of growing up to be independent, not Lost Girls whose daddies are afraid they might do the same thing if allowed to flower outside the hot house, even in their imagination.
But it seems in this century, Lost Girls too are a looming concern for civilized humankind. Not just their technical, physical purity as in ancient cultures, but also their relationship rituals and stories and dreams and knowledge and attitudes all must be carefully climate-controlled now — if not hermetically sealed.
Conservative men protect girls and women from our coarse culture, fighting for female purity and passing it from man to man throughout a daughter’s life. Purity balls are back in the news this week — just in time to juxtapose with liberal moms sounding much too much like those conservative dads, fearing Hillary Clinton’s flower of womanhood hasn’t been similarly protected and that they and their daughters will suffer for it, that it shows our coarse culture to be hostile to the Feminine.
Oh, but for the sake of today’s argument, just IGNORE this story about using the modern world’s coarseness to lure kids to church, or tell yourself it applies only to boys. 👿
“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting
our hooks.”
. . .The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.
Where were we then, before antisocial church-sponsored video games as proper patriarch training distracted us? Oh yes. . .
Is this rare agreement across the political (and sexual) spectrum, that the best answer is an elaborate separate-but-equal system of special social protections for female flowers, shielding them from a culture hostile to womanhood?
Daryl discusses the online feminist vitriol here, and the NYT Sunday Magazine takes it very seriously in “The Hillary Factor.”
I really need to think more about this.
First, the power of story that never-never leaves my own mind, is the cultural ravaging of Terri Schiavo, that eerily media-perfect symbol of helpless, infantalized girl-womanhood. Men — her father and husband and some exceedingly creepy spokesmonk in a rope-belted robe and sandals — fought publicly and pretty coarsely against each other and the paternalistic courts (and Governor) to control her very life and death, all while her mother wept bitter tears that helped no one and saved nothing, and while her grown and married daughter never said a word, just smiled that passive, vacant smile.
Another way to tell this Lost Girl story is to remember the culture’s real disservice to Terri Schiavo started by distorting her self-image as a girl and woman who had to physically conform to public standards of girlish beauty to be loved, leading to her bulimia-inspired “ice tea diet” that caused her own story to (mercifully?) end long before the Men’s protracted battle to write her epilogue-epitaph.
Second, Hillary Clinton married a Lost Boy and did have a daughter, now well-educated and self-possessed yet still unmarried and under Momma Clinton’s fierce purity protection program in word and deed, prohibited from choosing even to speak for herself while making political speeches, even to cute little girls in public much less Men with Pens Phallic or Otherwise, and even though she’s pushing 30!
Is it still paternalism when Mom (rather than Dad) Avenger wields the sword to keep the culture and public from your daughter’s purity, or is it the same old paternalistic pantsuit just cut way wider in the hips?
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HBO Recount Not One Movie But Neverending Series?
26 05 2008Finally the movie version of the real recount aired last night.
Saw it, liked it, found it pretty accurate but as it “ended” I did wonder why there were no previews shown for the continuing story? And why just call it “Recount” when “Schrodinger’s Cat” would have been much better!
After all, it’s been eight years of escalation since then, with no end in sight. Contesting which votes count more (or less) and where and why, and fiddling the numbers before, during and after every trip to the polls so there’s never a clear “winner” and “loser” has become serial psychodrama. Every campaign and candidate is both winner and loser in the past, present and future, never a clear end to the story, no satisfying power of knowing how the story ends at last, when the ballot box is actually opened and the fate of all is sealed-revealed. Read the rest of this entry »
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