Helpful fly-by critics

One amusing thing about Main Street Plaza it the number of fly-by critics we get. By "fly-by" critics, I don't mean people who are intentionally trolling. I mean people who take one look at the site and are incensed -- incensed! -- that non-believers would be discussing Mormonism. We get so many of them that that's our one FAQ.

For a while, I assumed that this is simply because Mormons are taught in church that "apostates" are bitter and hateful. Hence -- if Mormons see any "apostates" on the Internet -- they sometimes post a "Why are you so mean and bitter?" comment without making any attempt to determine whether that criticism applies. I imagined that -- if it weren't for prejudice against former-believers -- they'd have the common courtesy to read the welcome page before criticizing.

The more I thought about it, though, (over the years, as these fly-bys have flown by), the more I asked myself: Is this supposed 'common courtesy' really so common? Do people really read the welcome page and FAQ on other types of sites before posting comments like "I can't believe you people are wasting your time discussing this topic!"

I certainly got my share of that in my few posts on the Hathor Legacy (eg. helpful fly-by: "Why are you wasting your time analyzing a kids' movie? It's just a movie!" me: "Um, because I find the topic interesting. If you don't, then I agree that one of us is wasting time by participating in this discussion. But it's not me.")

Then I thought: Maybe these helpful fly-bys only appear on blogs about touchy topics like feminism or religion -- topics where some people feel threatened by the mere existence of discussions they disagree with. Maybe blogs on topics that really are frivolous [royal wedding watchers, Edward Cullen's hair-care tips] don't get as many "This site is so stoopid, you all need to get a life!" comments.

But what do I know? I'm starting to think that all websites get these. My kids have been watching some (rather ridiculous) YouTube videos reviewing various Lego sets. And even there, one of them spent a good three minutes complaining about all of the negative comments. His advice? "If you don't like these videos, don't watch them." Makes sense to me.

The thing is that the Internet is full of people discussing every topic you could possibly imagine (and plenty of other topics that you would never have thought of in a million years). There are so many interesting discussions to read -- plus an uncountable number of discussions that you personally won't find interesting (but someone else, apparently, does find interesting). That's what I find perplexing. Given the infinite selection and finite amount of time -- why take the time to read the ones you find uninteresting and post comments telling them how uninteresting you find them?

But that what I love about the Internet -- you're exposed to so many new mysteries of human nature to contemplate!! My personal motto is a variant of a famous quote by Spinoza: "I strive not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

Free to be a homemaker...

One point where I feel like the feminist messages of the seventies were fairly effective was in convincing people that men are also responsible for housework and child-rearing -- that it's not automatically the woman's job. There's still a long way to go, but I have the impression that, for men and women of my generation and later, expectations on this front changed noticeably compared to the previous generations.

This is true for child-rearing in particular. Not so long ago, pushing a baby-buggy was equivalent to wearing a dress. I have a vague memory of this being a popular comedy situation, to show the poor man having to take care of his child for an afternoon. The director would even have the poor sap wear a frilly apron over his dapper suit, to emphasize the absurdity of the situation. He's a man and he's trying to take care of a baby -- hahaha!! Now you see men walking down the street carrying babies in pouches or pushing them in strollers, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to see that as strange.

The "Free to Be..." album I discussed the other day had a track about how it's OK for a boy to want a doll because he might want to learn to nurture babies too. (Aside: this track, like the one about boys crying, seemed to portray bullying as inevitable, but basically said the boy shouldn't be bullied for wanting a doll.) Then there was another track that struck me as almost controversial: "Housework".

"Housework" is a poem that says, essentially, that those smiling ladies you see doing housework in TV commercials for detergents -- they're only smiling because they're actresses. Really, nobody likes doing housework, and that's why the mom and dad should share the housework load.

My modern-sensitivity-and-awareness brain immediately makes the connection between that statement and the central tension of feminism: For every role/trait that is seen as feminine and bad, some women will argue "Stop seeing this bad thing as feminine!" and others will argue "Stop seeing this feminine thing as bad!" And often both positions have merit.

It makes me wonder OK, is the above dissing SAHMs? And hence feeding the supposed enmity between career women and SAHMs that is so overhyped?

Then I wonder: Am I just being hypersensitive about this, from reading too much feminist Mormon housewives? I mean, is it really insensitive and un-PC to say that even homemakers don't like housework? Plus, I know that many SAHMs would totally agree with the moral of the poem: that the housework is not just one person's responsibility...

Thoughts?

"Free to Be" -- forty years later...

I remember how old I felt when I first noticed that I could start a sentence with "Twenty years ago..." and speak from first hand experience. Now that I'm on the cusp of forty, I can easily tell you about stuff from thirty years ago, and it's only getting worse...

But, aaaaaaaaaanywaaaay....

Right up there with Schoolhouse Rock, Free to Be... You and Me totally captures (for me) the messages to kids in the '70's. According to the wikipedia article, "Free to Be has become a cult classic across the United States amongst many who were children of New Age parents in the 1970s" -- which I find kind of funny because my parents back in the '70's were pretty far from "New Age" (they were conservative Mormon Republicans). And yet I still think it's a [cult?] classic.

My parents aren't the ones who played it for me -- I don't remember exactly where I first heard it. But I bought a record album of it myself (for fun) as an adolescent in the '80's, and my mom (despite having opposed the ERA like a good Mormon), didn't appear to object to it. I recently found a CD of it, and I've been listening to it to see what I think of it now.

If you're not familiar with the album, it's a collection of clever and fun songs and skits that challenge traditional gender expectations. One central point to keep in mind is that essentially all of the messages in the album were countering other messages that kids were also hearing quite loudly. So every time you hear a song on it whose theme makes you go, "Well, duh, everybody knows that" -- then you've found a point where this album (and other voices from that time) had an impact and changed cultural assumptions.

The song that sounded (to me) the most dated was the one telling boys "It's all right to cry." I have two little boys, I watch tons of media directed at them, I read popular parenting advice, and I talk to lots of other moms in Europe and in the US, online and in person. I haven't done a formal study, but the gendered message I remember from my childhood -- that it's shameful for a boy to cry -- has fallen out of favor, and it's not just Glenn Beck. ;^)

It's my impression that our cultural expectations have changed on at least three fronts: (1) getting your feelings out instead of holding them in is viewed today as healthy and not exclusively feminine, (2) It's somewhat more acceptable for boys to express feminine traits and interests, and (3) Childhood bullying in general is no longer seen as inevitable or acceptable. Keep in mind, folks, that "Free to Be..." came out a mere three years after the popular Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, in which it's presented as a more-or-less reasonable act of love for a father to name his son "Sue" specifically for the purpose of ensuring he'd be bullied, and hence come out a tougher man in the end.

Part of the spoken text says that crying boys aren't "sissies," but instead boys who are afraid to cry (and hence risk being called "sissies") are the "sissies" [implying that being a 'sissy' is still bad]. Naturally, that way of deflecting-yet-reinforcing the label "sissy" wouldn't be considered OK among liberal parents today. That said, I'd be pretty surprised if our gender awareness hadn't improved at all beyond what was on the cutting-edge-of-mainstream forty years ago.

The whole album is quite heteronormative (to anachronistically use a term that has come into ordinary public discourse fairly recently). That is, the album assumes that girls grow up to be mommies, boys grow up to be daddies, and (if they get married) mommies are married to daddies, period. Again, keep in mind that this was a mere three years after Stonewall, so mainstream awareness of LGBT issues was a fair distance in the future. The message that both girls and boys can grow up to be whatever they want to be was already pretty controversial. And teaching one generation of kids not to be limited by gender expectations helped set the stage for them to question gender roles even further -- in ways that many people in the previous generation didn't think of.

A track that hardly seems dated at all is the tale of Princess Atalanta. Female characters in kids' movies and television have sadly made a lot less progress than many parents (like me!) would hope (see, for example, The Hathor Legacy). Most parents of little girls I know are powerless against the lure of the Disney Princess pink ghetto (though I've heard some creative strategies for dealing with it). But I really like the way Atalanta's own autonomy takes center stage in bringing about her "happily ever after". [If you read the wikipedia entry, they explain how "Free to be" took some major liberties compared to the original story, but, really, no worse than Disney does.]

So, which song do I like/remember best after all these years? Probably the title track. Anyone else have memories (fond or otherwise) of this album?