Mixed, Muddled, and Shook

Originally Posted Saturday, June 14, 2014

Blogger won't let me post a picture today for some reason.  It won't let me preview, either.  I have tried.  All I will be allowed to do today is write and post.  Come back, though, for when it is working properly, the picture will appear. 

I am finding it difficult to write without an image, though.  It has become routine.  I feel out of my element this morning. 

Selah. 

I read an op ed in the New York times this morning about dress codes.  They are coming back to the public schools.  I grew up with dress codes.  Boys hair couldn't touch ears or collars.  You were required to wear a collared shirt--tucked.  Socks and no tennis shoes.  I was sent home often enough.  Girl's dresses had to be of a certain length.  If it was suspected that their hems were too high, they were required to kneel on the floor and have the hem measured.  I think the assistant principal loved watching that.  Now, it seems, the dress code will be about more skin--short-shorts, sleeves, necklines.  The op ed was not about that as much, though, as it was sexualization, or rather self-sexualization.  Girls have been taught that their sex is their own, that they own it, and that in it there is power.  Bad.  Very bad.  The author wants to code their psyches in a different way.  Studies show--oh--that sexualization leads to low self-esteem whether it is from the self or the other.  Damn.  There is no winning when it comes to sexiness, it seems. 

I'm wondering if anyone has done a study on people with tattoos?  The reason I ask is that a study showed that the population with the highest self-esteem were people in prison.  You think I'm shitting you?  Nope.  They found that prisoners didn't blame themselves for being in prison.  It was always somebody else's fault.  At the time, coincidentally, they were the population with the highest incidence of body ink. 

I'm just saying. 

Shaved heads, baggy pants, and tattoos, I wrote way back in the early nineties when the fashion took hold, was a metaphor for how youth of the day felt.  It was, I called it, Prison Culture. 

It is just sooooo hard to keep people between the narrow lines.  I'm trying to think of the least sexy culture in the world, a place where no sexualization takes place.  Isn't that a great word?  Sexualization. 

It makes me think of a conversation I had with a gay friend at lunch last week.  Why isn't anybody taking on that?  Do you want to talk about a sexualized culture?  Oh, but wait.  I forgot.  Lesbian culture is not a fan of gay culture and its crazy feminization of some members of the cult(ure).  Yes, there are critics after all. 

Is there any sexualization in Sapho?  Is there?  Is there? 

Depends on how you define it, I guess.  Boys in baggy pants with tough looks?  Is crypto-gangsta not a sexualization in itself?  Or the business suit and the republican haircut? 

I get confused.  Isn't the mullet sexualized? 

Those opining pieces are often very convincing when they make you feel guilty.  But never go on the defense, I say.  I like Donald Sterling's decision to investigate the NBA for its own racism.  That's what I'm talking about.  Chutzpah. 

Why didn't God think of all this when he wrote the Ten Commandments? 

Ray Davies had it right.  It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.  It's time to make it right.