retracing my steps

let's just state the obvious up front: the purity ball ritual is outrageously creepy. it seems like some medieval fantasy on the part of fathers, and of course it reinforces the ever-present double standard that a woman is somehow "worth" more if she is "pure."

to delve deeper, i'm concerned for the emotional well-being young girls duped into this ritual. of course when you're 5-10, you're convinced that you will remain abstinent. hell--at 14, i told everyone that i thought masturbation was a breach of my own abstinence pledge, and i didn't even attend a purity ball. the most damaging repercussion of this ritual is the inevitable guilt young women feel for their natural urges--even for undergoing puberty itself.

i should know. part of me still lives with that guilt.the fathers in the documentary said that they feel that women who don't remain abstinent have been "robbed." but i feel as if it's the other way around.

young girls are tricked into making a pledge to abstain from fulfilling urges they have not yet experienced. thus, as they develop, they begin to view their hormones as intruders of their pure being. it's the same sort of patterns young girls with eating disorders experience. society idealizes the proportions of pre-pubescent girls, so young women begin to resent their developing bodies.

i feel the same way about abstinence that i do about the drinking age; because drinking and pre-marital sex are taboo, young people engage in these activities in ways that are unhealthy--doing them for the sake of rebellion rather than for enjoyment or love.

i want my daughter to love herself at all stages of life, and to understand that the elements of those phases are natural. i want her to understand that sex is serious and to know the ways to protect herself. [one of the "purity girls" in the documentary became pregnant with the boy her parents allowed her to date--after "inspection,"--claiming she had never been educated on how to prevent stds and pregnancy].

i just wonder if those fathers have a hard time with the idea of their daughters as grown women. do they wonder at all the sort of damage their extreme protective measures have on their daughter's psyches? do
"purity girls" consider their own thoughts--their own selves--a sin?

that's what i call being robbed.
 

i really need to work on my writing samples for creative writing mfa programs, but the damn election coverage keeps pulling me back in...and i voted almost a month ago! it's become a sick obsession of mine to read all the vitriolic diatribe on the web and to get all fired up. maybe i'm a masochist?


this time, i think i truly care. i'm not trying to be cool or impress anyone with evidence of being informed (because really, how impressive is it to watch cnn and read blogs all day?) for me, it has been glaringly obvious which candidate would receive my support since before the primaries. call me idealistic and a sucker for rhetoric, but it's a decision i made from the heart.

is that such a bad thing? an election is chance for us to prioritize, to sketch out a definition of what it means to be an american. for me, democracy entails participation of every american. every american--not just the white ones, or the rich ones, or the ones in uniform, or the christian ones. the american dream is that anyone born on american soil should have the opportunity to pursue his or her goal. in my candidate, i see the emodiment of that american dream, and a supporter of true democracy.

it's easy for me to harbor angry feelings towards those who hope to tear him down with false accusations (i don't need to further their cause by listing them). however, some such individuals happen to be people i respect. my mother, for instance. i hear the words out of her mouth and wonder what sort of vile hypnotism provoked them. this is a woman who grew up with a single parent, a woman who made her own clothes and paid off her own loans, a woman who lived "in sin" with her first boyfriend and married a cuban man. the proud mother of three multi-ethnic children. the most sentimental woman i've ever met, and she's part of the anti-obama movement? how?

the answer is so simple; i don't know why i couldn't tell all along. my mother is also a rabid reader of email-forwards. that's all it takes. bill o'reilly and rush limbaugh spout off some sort of nonsense and there it goes into the inboxes of a million empty-nesters between tennis practice and cocktail hour. and it breaks my heart.

i idealized love and hope as the most powerful four-letter words out there, but maybe they truly are fear and hate. and now i fear for our country as well. what was once a notion has gone from possibility to probability; come next year, we will most likely have a bi-racial democrat in the white house. i can only hope that those parties responsible for outraging the right wing in such a hateful way can do something to assuage them.

maybe rush should start drafting that email-forward now: "we're going to be ok. love, rush" might be all it takes to dissuade presidential assasination by hockey moms.

hearing john mccain ranting and raving was a bad way to wake up. in my half-dream state, his voice sounded awful, and an awful lot like sheriff cunningham from robin hood.

to paraphrase what he said: "we shouldn't have to pay taxes! taxes are bad! you work too hard to have to pay taxes! taaaaaaaxes!"

did i miss something? aren't taxes part of our civil responsibility? we all agree to contribute, don't we? since when were rich people entitled to a get-out-of-jail-free card? i mean, the idea that we should get from the have-nots while passing by the haves is absurd to me. so i asked my dad, a doctor, who happens to fall into that high-profile tax bracket. the idea is that, by rewarding those who work hard (if the measuring stick for hard work is income), they then return the favor by creating job opportunities for the little guy.

too bad that doesn't happen. those who are rewarded for "working hard" keep those rewards, invest them in their offspring, and have a nasty propensity to ship those job opportunities overseas. thus, the contributions they make are spoiled heirs and heiresses and a class system that's starting to look like an aristocracy.

(my dad was a registered republican for years and now backs barack 100%. he believes that barack's energy plan will create jobs and provide for our long-term welfare.)

now i'd like to divert the discussion a little, because the whole dogma of "hard workers" versus "lazy people" is extremely unfair. there are rich people who work hard, yes. and there are poor people who are lazy, true. but that's not the entire story, and i think even john mccain knows that.

the cycle of poverty is a vicious one. say you want to become a doctor. that requires a lot of education. you're much more likely to make it if you're born into wealth. now there are opportunities for scholarship (loans--nowadays not so much). however, those are based upon merit. the double whammy is that the education provided to the poor is sub-standard. (i know about this one first-hand from participating in teach for america). that's because the way our education system is set up is inherently flawed. education is funded largely by local property taxes. if you live in a wealty area, you most likely go to a good school. if you live in an area where people primarly rent, your schools most likely have fewer resources. matters get worse when, once students from low-income areas (usually students of color) start to infiltrate reputable schools, the higher-income students begin to move out to private schools or just out the area.

it's a tricky situation, but we can't just look it over and say "that's how it is." because it's not fair. i went to the university of georgia on the hope scholarship (meaning i didn't pay a dime). however, i did have to pay for my rent and food. at the time, i was working two part-time jobs, and guess what? didn't cover it. so, if it weren't for help from my parents, i would not have a college degree today. so let's think about our kid who wants to be a doctor. his family isn't well-off. do you think he's gonna make it? i'd say he's trapped in a minimum wage job.

by the way--minimum wage. not fair. you can't live on that crap. so i don't mind, no matter how rich i get in life, paying taxes for the sake of my fellow man. i don't mind one bit. i agree with joe biden; it's patriotic. i don't want to live in a country where i'm doing fine because my parents did fine but others can barely scrape by and aren't given the chances they deserve to get out of it.

p.s. al-qaida just endorsed mccain.