1 in 3 Campaign and the Happy Gap

Choice Sells

Buyers like choice. Optional colors, for instance, make the item more appealing, offering not just itself, but a choice.  The same pet bed in red, blue, or in a print or even a custom option. Because choice. Yet, women are reporting less happiness than in the past, and this is referred to as the "Happy Gap."  The question is "Why?" Those reporting on the study are nonplussed, since opportunities for women have increased over the years.  Women have more choices than ever before for academic and career fulfillment.

Sixties Happiness Shift

While we  tend to think of the Sixties as all about fashion and the Beatles, the ground shifted. Thomas Kuhn famously wrote about the impact of a paradigm shift, such as happened in the watch-making business.  Swiss watch makers failed to switch over to the digital model--they were literally "stuck" in the past, in the old ways of doing things.  Likewise, it seems our cultural clock is stuck in the Sixties.  Although we do not see people advocating getting naked in quite the same way they did during the Sixties, we are still living the hangover of that free love era.  Not just a passing trend in bell bottoms and peasant blouses, the Sixties left a huge ideological mark that persistently nudged us toward a paradigm shift every bit as vital as that when the wrist watch went digital.

"Reproductive freedom" was the watch word for this shift. Women seized on abortion as the means to freedom over her own biology as the pivotal right, and gradually the feminist-political complex joined to the medical establishment.  And it was all about abortion advocacy, sold as choice.  Options are lovely--who wouldn't want them?  Let  "sister" become a doctor, lawyer, astronaut--whatever she wants to be.  

The Shelf Life for Choice

Yet, when it comes to family matters, it's not really just a cost/ benefit analysis as women are led to think. Should I have a child now or later?  Should I settle with this man or wait and see if a better one comes along? Women have chosen to delay childbearing, even avoiding childbearing through contraception and when that failed, abortion.  Choosing reproductive freedom was the great escape from history.  Yet, for a woman to forfeit the opportunity of childbearing is not automatically to secure happiness.She can choose to abort her child but she cannot so readily evade experiencing the consequences of that choice any more than she can choose to fly.

Choice itself is not making women happy--that's because it's a false choice.  It's a choice often set up as between her emotions and her body, her boyfriend or her baby, or to give birth or abort the baby. In a TED talk called "The Paradox of Choice," Barry Schwartz notes that freedom stands in for and is equated with choice.   

So, choice begins to stand in for or substitute for real freedom.  Even when a choice is made, however, there are nagging doubts, given other options, as to whether this was the best choice.  Happiness is undermined, in other words, by a women's "liberation" that amounted to expanded choice. Should I start my family now or pursue my ambitions?  Kate Spicer tells her story of adhering to the current feminist abortion advocacy.   She is not alone in expressing regret for a decision to abort a child only to recognize later that she missed out on giving life.  


Stacking the Question toward Choice

Should I have a child or fail to prosper by placing a big wrench in my own career path and potential? The way questions are formulated, in other words, tends to guarantee a particular response.Would you like this brand new car?  Or would you prefer to walk everywhere?  Feminism continues to offer women a false choice: an either/ or: give birth or abort--rarely is any other option mentioned, let alone examined in full.

As evidenced by the 26 abortion stories featured recently in New York Magazine, abortion has not empowered women.  In fact, the best that can be said is perhaps that some women found consolation, for instance, in control over their lives.  One woman remarks that after her abortion, she immediately began planning a European vacation.  But does such compensation ever really make up for the missed years of motherhood?

Surprised By Parenthood

A video that has gone viral in the last week speaks powerfully of the mystery of birth and the beauty of life, too amazingly complicated, unexpected, and too wonderful to comprise in any ready label, such as "planned parenthood."

And, no matter how enjoyable the trip to Spain, it is women who may carry the most regret and grief over abortions; they are not fooled into thinking abortion was the best life had to offer.  Here's how one viewer of the video summed up the astonishing show: 

"This gave me a new appreciation for twins and how crazy birth is in general.  When those elevator doors open everybody gets spit out on whatever floor and you wake up and start        experiencing the universe as this conscious self aware thing taking the bad and the good and    whatever else time throws at you only to go back ot sleep at some yet to be determined time       down the road.  But twins start out together.  Did you see them?  They looked like miners being rescued or refugees clinging to one another, squinting.  They have no idea what's in store.  We all start like that and we all end generally the same way, maybe not in the same clothes and a little worse for wear.
 You'd think those two things we all share in common would be enough to put an end to all the vitriol, loneliness, and apathy and whatever other terrible pains we inflict on each other, but I suppose it's easy to forget. We're always somewhere between the void closer to birth or closer to death and the in between is pretty distracting.  We're strange creatures.  Strange beautiful creatures.   Strange beautiful terrible creatures."    

The fact that we share this existence with others is something splendid.  This video went viral because it gave us a glimpse of baby memory--what the baby experiences in that sheltered inner space during that sublime time in the womb prior to birth.  In fact, this video reveals the baby's consciousness of itself in relation to other; who are we to declare that personhood forms later or to pronounce our inability to recall a memory from a time of preverbal consciousness some kind of proof? In reality, it only attests to an adult's ability to consider a dulled consciousness a superior form of life.   This is life before we came upon it, before we could attach scientific calculations or economic valuations, and it is fantastic, fragile-resilient, and ultimately ineffable.  We are privileged to witness life; parents are allowed in on the magnificent project that is life.  Having witnessed what it entails, who could choose to miss it?

Eyes Wide Shut: Show Me the Flower in the Rifle Barrel

Crosseyed and Painless

What does it take to wake a college student?  They are understandably stressed out, distracted by classes, homework, jobs, and exams.  Students are high energy too, knowing they need to deliver the facts on demand.  There's a  bit of the college student in all of us!


But you know those facts don't always do what you want them to, as the Talking Heads song "Crosseyed and Painless"  reminds us.


"Facts won't do what I want them to"           

In my own life, pulled along in the excitement of ideas and a hectic work life I  floated in a dreamy haze of inaction for Van Winkle years. My generation's 60's style free love sold to us as a social good.... Seriously? 

Now we are told that certain photos must not be shown and it seems cannot be seen. In the interest of women's "good."  
       ......

"Facts are simple and facts are straight"

Images speak.  Sometimes they cry out.  So, here's the image deemed too controversial (notice, the photo's accuracy was not questioned); nonetheless, you were not allowed to "see" it, to look, and to examine the truthfulness of claims regarding the status of the preborn. (The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and the LA Times refused to publish this image, part of an advertisement created by Heroic Media.):

Artist Donna Lee
"Facts are written all over your face"

Rather than undifferentiated cells, this photo shows a medically- accurate fetal model held in a hand.   Science is based on observation, and it isn't just scientists who have eyes or the new eyes provided by ultrasounds-eyes that tell us a 20 week old fetus has separate arms, legs, body, and face.  Science is making it possible for all of us to have eyes to see.

If the photo had shown earlier human development, not an infant able to be nestled in a human hand-- there would appear nothing morally problematic: "if you get the abortion early enough, the fetus doesn't even look like a baby." Yet, already at fertilization, there is human life, looking the way it's supposed to look at that stage of development, increasingly revealed by science, to be rapidly replicating, coordinated human development.

"Facts go out and slam the door"

 The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal ran the original advertisement  while stipulating that the wording make "it clear that it was a paid advertisement."   The Chicago Tribune demanded  a different picture of a live 20-week old baby en utero--was it the 3 dimensionality of the  photo image that was so disturbing?  If so, there are now 3D images of  infants in utero, so we can all see the life of a developing fetus with greater clarity than ever before.  

What's interesting about this is that we are told, on the one hand, that images of abortion victims are too graphic; on that grounds, this clearly sanitized photo of a fetal model should be more acceptable--the infant is not decapitated or bloody--the photo omits the gritty realism of the effects of the abortionist's scalpel.  Yet, the photo does capture in an intimate and personal way, the size and form of the baby.

Yet, this image too was and apparently is too graphic for the general public: You were not allowed to see the real size and anatomy of a fetus that gives lie to the myth that abortion merely rids the woman's body of a "clump of cells."  Could "clump of cells" not describe any member of the human family?

Look for yourself. The miracle of human life developing at an unbelievably rapid pace inside the uterus is nothing less than astonishing.  

 To be politically correct today is to have eyes wide shut. As the image of a 20 week old human embryo shows, there's a third story involved, and it's going unheard. 

Yes, the woman experiences a crisis, but that does not undo the developing life inside her.  Is abortion really a peaceful response to a crisis? Is it really a social good? 

We've now had 40 years to gather in the windfalls the feminists promised: abortion would end  poverty and child abuse.  In reality, both have been perpetuated, if anything, by abortion.  "Make love, not war" we declared, effectively protesting the war by the appeal of sex- as- liberation as peacemaking.   Making love instead of  war sounded good.  Flower children, after all,  handed daisies to soldiers.  

The movement effectively drew on an image of flower child innocence.  "Love, not war" was propped up by "love, don't judge," all played out by "good" flower children.  Creepily, aggression toward the weakest and the most essentially voiceless among us sustains this ongoing "free love" ethic. 

Abbie Hoffman's "Flower Brigade" was accompanied by protests in which college students demanded sexual liberation.  Simultaneously with the idyllic flower power movement we were threatened with economic collapse from a population bomb--prophesied in the Malthusian overtones of Paul Erlich and increasingly articulated by feminists who in effect declared war on our offspring.  

Yet we had to wait for an image as powerful as the daisy threaded into a rifle barrel to understand the impact of our Beetle's generation's particular mode of aggression. Women who took up the liberationist mantra later reported feeling "coerced" into abortion.  No matter that the population explosion never went off.  We all got the memo: curb our actual procreation.  Make love not babies. 

What was inherited from the Summer of Love was a sexuality colonized by social progressives and consistently linked both to the peace movements and the need for contraception and abortion as a means of correction for the sin of human propagation.   The generation after the baby boomers recognize their parents efforts to sustain romanticisation of their youth prior to selling out.                    

 Those who coined the "free love" edict continue to claim: no one gets hurt.  It was left to the generation after the baby boomers to recognize sexual libertinage as a failed project. The wreckage of divorce, single parents, and STDs was all around them, reminders that sexual license and abortion were not unquestionable social goods.  Increasingly clear is the way the current base has echoed the 60s strategy of linking sexuality to political change.  And the body count from peace loving yet uncommitted sexual acts now dwarfs casualties of the Vietnam war.




"Crosseyed and Painless." 

Hooking up, after all, is not the same thing as love--how could genuine love for the other include the fall out we began seeing and continue to see despite our best efforts at a  black out.  The facts are living turned inside out. 

Some people wake up on their own; Most of us need an alarm clock.  Images of the victims--an ever mounting pile-- from our 60's frolic provide a counter balance to the pretty image of the flower child with tangled hair, bared breasts, sweetly sniffing daisies with unfocused eyes.... Victims, even without clearly defined faces, call to us ever louder with the new ultrasound technologies.  And that alarm is getting harder to ignore.

Dissonance, perhaps characterizes modern life...or at least a style that might be characterized as conflicted, disconnected, atrophied...No longer moving forward. but taking charge.

On the personal level, we are perhaps fitting selves to roles that do not really "work"

At one point in Lars and the Real Girl, the doctor uses the term decompensation, which refers to the "functional deterioration of a previously working structure or system." It's a wonderful term, since it can result from a variety of stressors, including fatigue, illness, or even old age.   

 When a system is "compensated", it is able to function despite stressors or defects. Decompensation describes an inability to compensate for these deficiencies. It is a general term commonly used in medicine to describe a variety of situations.

Accepting a person without necessarily endorsing a behavior.  In this scene from Lars and the Real Girl, the church members shuck their supposed uptight prudery and celebrate the appearance of Bianca.  Presumably, they are following along with the doctor's prescription to indulge the delusion "Bianca's in town for a reason" until Bianca will no longer be necessary.  And it is true that the family starts acting like a unit and their caring extends even to the townsfolk who follow their lead.

In a classic scenario of decompensation, Hitchcock's Lifeboat suggests there are unexpected levels in each personality.  Notice what it is that anchors at least one of the characters?

We all need to plant something good, and family life provides a structure for that intimate connection necessary to getting up and facing another new day but also extends out to envision a community potentially based on caring.  Not something the psychologist, government social worker, or bureau of statistics addresses very well.

Family can be stifled by the State. In a clip from a film based on George Orwell's 1984, the propagandist voice intones:  "As we know the biological and social stimulation of the family leads to something outside party needs..." said in a hypnotically scientific monotone.   

Signed,

The Philosopher's Daughter

Host a Vintage Garden Party on the Go!

Host a Vintage Garden Party on the Go!

This is not camping. It’s called “glamping,” and it’s reason for being is to have fun. In this lens, there are reviews, items to take along, and suggestions for celebrating a vintage garden party.


http://www.squidoo.com/host-a-vintage-garden-party-on-the-go

Attention!

How much do you see?  How much is seeing dependant on words, our interactions, distractions, expectations?   How much do our efforts to dialogue get sidetracked by the animus of what might be called a scripted reality of preconceived notions?

The infant who points to every oval shape, chirping "O."   The delight of viewing daily life with a child in hand is the recognition that common reality is not at all common place.  Picking up every leaf, feather, and pebble, the child is entranced.  Pronouncing "O" in excitement when spotting resemblances, the child connects with the parent, and language settles the matter sometimes with a matter of factness that out weighs the initial perspective of inquiry.

Often, we are too preoccupied to notice the disturbing situation that might be in our midst.   There is a famous experiment that has been replicated in a Youtube video:

 In a 1999 study, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed that people focusing on one thing, such as counting bounces, become blind to the unexpected-- even if it is right in front of them.  This effect has been dubbed "inattentional blindness."   This is interesting in light of selective attention to information--humans are much more impressionable than we like to think.

Most of us are preoccupied most of the time.  Distracted by our own preoccupations, we miss what is right before us.  We see only what we are prepared to see.   It might even be said that we see only what is agenda endorsed or prescribed--in effect the language, rhetoric, tone--tells us what to attend to and what to see...unless and until we say "Hey," ask questions, and keep up the line of inquiry.

It's easy to miss something we are not even looking for.  Here's another demonstration, courtesy of You Tube.  The assigned "agenda" is the whodunit line of inquiry. 

But there are visible items we do not attend to --"invisible gorillas" right in front of us, or if you prefer,  "inattentional blindness" (the formal term).  What are the invisible gorillas in our language that do not account for that in experience which is not widely sanctioned, acknowledged, recognized, or easily nameable? Are we who assume ourselves above the habit of stereotyping others, able to see past conventional views and assumptions about people and issues?  What we see and what we attend to are in large part directed, even dictated by language use, tone ridicule, and convention, whether we like it or not.  We do not see a heinous problem because it is not labelled "heinous problem."

If it's politics--and what isn't now--we are manipulated by the politician's outcry and journalist's bullet points.   Quick to ID certain types--those hicks, we say-- we pride ourselves on being "deep" and seeing beyond stereotypes.  Yet we proceed to interact with stereotypes and stock positions.

Polemical pre-suppositions so color our ordinary interactions that it is nearly impossible to carry on a genuine dialogue.  Even if we are not scared off from talking about profound issues, does our discussion lead any where?   Do we ever register what the other is saying or are we stuck so tightly to the image of the old hag that we cannot "fix" on the young woman?

One benefit of engaging in true dialogue with those we are in disagreement is the potential to see the world with an added strangeness and to recognize an element previously missed.


This is an appeal to recognize the world contains stranger aspects than we know.  This is an invitation to talk about that which matters most.  This is unexpected.

signed,

the philosopher's daughter

________________________________________________________________________
Speaking of surprise, adding an element of color and bold geometric design can dress up a plain blouse or t shirt instantly. To see one way of adding interest in color and style--an element that draws the eye, check out this skylarkscarves design:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/119873057/chevron-and-floral-knit-infinity-and?ref=shop_home_active

Creativity is not all fun and games--it's frustration and sweat and tears..  Even the most free spirited romp is not free but comes as the result of sacrifice of something else.  This is the whole concept of cost-benefit analysis; we choose one route only to close off other possibilities.   This is great when the goal is to combine forms in a new fluid art concept.  Freerunners embody that spirit of innovation and self expression.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jXqhAXeDGY

"So many signs and directions telling us what to do and what not to do."  Our spirits rebell at modern life--can't even buy a big gulp in NY....


signed,

the philosopher's daughter

Creative highs are more humble than the rush- past- the- mental barrier high.  In more humble ways, we can delight in a spirit of playfulness.  From the art-etsyian perspective, a high can be found in creating a layered look that turns a plain t shirt something delightful...skylarkscarves@etsy

But what happens when that same outlook is applied ot human relationships? For the longest time, people assumed tradition was a good guide: marriage before sex, love before pregnancy.    In the era of the sixties, what was rejected in the name of the sexual revolution?  Free? love. People pursued that powerful expression of attraction almost as an art form, their bodies the crucible.

Romance is no longer possible--it has to be borrowed from the past...right?  I think it is interesting that romance springs from our connection to the past, to a gentle, sweetness that we find there.

The styles, designs, and patterns of the past look authentic and stable.  


signed,

the philosopher's daughter