Let Mom Do It For You

When people talk about "helicopter parents" they're not usually talking about parents whose "kids" are in their 30s, and when people talk about "mama's boys" they're not usually talking about 30-ish women who look like boys. But in this post I am.

And while it's currently fashionable to lob disrespect at helicopter parents and mama's boys, it's not fashionable to defend Lindsay Lohan. But then being unfashionable never bothered me in the past so in this post it won't either.

I'm referring, as those who follow celebrity gossip the least bit already know, to Samantha Ronson's mommy trumpeting to the Daily Mail about how she broke up Sam & Lindsay's headline-grabbing relationship a while back, of course after Ms. Ronson had benefited greatly from all the publicity both in her professional career as a trendy DJ and in her personal career as a B-list lesbian. And now that Samantha Ronson once again became "Sam who?" and since Lindsay is once again newsworthy to a public that would rather not think and a Establishment media that would rather keep them that way, we now get to find out that Sammy's mommy is Ann Dexter-Jones and, upon Googling her, that she designs jewelry; in the Daily Mail article itself we're told that she used to be married to somebody named Mick Jones who is apparently still playing in the ancient rock band Foreigner. (But who is apparently not Sam Ronson's daddy, nor that of Sammy's non-identical twin sister Charlotte who designs fashions, not that anybody should care about either.) These people are in the "news" now only because Lindsay Lohan still is, which unless you're impervious to sledgehammer sarcasm, is clearly one of my points.

The other is, as you might have discerned, the real grownups don't allow their mothers to do their lover-ditching for them nor to dictate which lovers get ditched. Most of us settle this when we're 16, or most of us in my generation did, though things might have changed a bit since the year the Ronson Twins were born (the same year I officially lost my virginity at age 14); it's a bit sad to find that an "edgy" record-spinner was letting her mommy do one or the other when she was twice 16 (i.e. 32). 

However, almost 3 years ago Ms. Ronson herself told The Times Magazine (in an article they won't let me have but that's referred to here) that she's really not gay but in fact a switch-hitter (as is yours truly, though I don't get my panties bunched when people call me gay) and that she's "pretty feminine at the end of the day" (unlike yours truly, really) ; and, more to the point here, in that interview she herself said that she broke up with Ms. Lohan because all the attention from the paparazzi got to be too much. Indeed, to quote that article quoting the Times interviewer quoting her, "To be honest, being with her was more of a headache than anything else. Everything I was doing I was already doing. It just meant there were paparazzi pictures documenting it. It sucked, because I’m a pretty private person and I managed to stay under the radar for so long.” Uh-huh. That must explain how she managed to avoid being seen for over a year with her much more famous then-paramour at several dozen trendy hotspots where ordinary snapshooters were sure to be, let alone professional shutterbugs who finance their expensive habits stalking "people who are famous for being famous." 

Don't get me wrong, I claim to be a pretty private person myself, but I restrict that to not publishing photos of my ugly mug all over the Web and to not including my home address in my White Pages listing, though under one guise or another I've held myself out to be an Internet Personality since 1994, though of course my presence remains totally obscure to anybody with anything better to do (or at least it should for your sake, really). You might say I'm really a pretty private person because I haven't gone all out to encourage stalkers, and because in my repeated requests for Glock-sent euthanasia I have also failed to include my mug shot and the easiest places to find me: this is because (unlike Ms. Sammy) I'm naturally hideous no matter what I do and (also unlike Mlle. Ronson) Lindaay Lohan has never heard of me and would probably care nothing if she ever does (dammit dammit).

As for my mother, my sister and my (late) father, I'm such a pretty private person that unless you're weird enough to spend money on a search you'll have to take my word for it that I have any relatives at all.

To get to defending "LiLo" specifically, i.e. to opinionate myself on the character of someone I know only 5th or 6th hand (and whose movies I've never seen), I will say this: it's not that I don't think she's fucked up, indeed I'm tempted to believe that she might have some "substance abuse problems" and "personality disorders," it's that these things strike me as perfectly ordinary (as in fact they are) and that under the glamour and fake tan spray Lindsay Lohan is a real human being. Indeed to me she's more human than most celebrities because she's one of the few Famous People who remind me of people I used to know pretty well and care a lot for (even if some didn't look nearly so smashing in an ankle bracelet). Furthermore I'm sure that many of those millions of "edgy" people who are on the Dissing Lindsay bandwagon are themselves far from sober and not overly sane, and one thing that is guaranteed to piss me the fuck off is blatant hypocrisy (even when I haven't been guzzling Cafe Zinfandel). Come the fuck off it, fools.

In short, I much prefer the little I know about Lindsay Lohan to the too much I know about the people who "discreetly confess" to having criticized her. In fact this subject illustrates why I'd much rather sit here late at night boozing alone while "surfing the net":  the common run of humanity makes me sick to think much about let alone have to deal with on a daily basis. (Unlike Lindsay Lohan, who might be fun to know.)

"Let s/he who is without sin cast the first stone," and the only people I want to hear from who are offended by something Lindsay Lohan did are those to whom she did something personally: if the only reason you know who she is is because you heard or read gossip about her you don't fall into either category. Kindly get the fuck over yourselves, or at least have the decency to keep your hypocrisy pretty private.

Ya got that? 

(Oh and Lindsay, if you ever want to hang out with a funny-looking old welfare queen I'm not too hard to find if you've somehow found this.)

On Female Feticide

This morning I found a post on Metafilter concerning an editorial by interim Editor-in-Chief Rajendra Kale (PDF link) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal she edits, where she argues that sex-selective abortion should cease. Specifically Dr. Kale would like practitioners in Canada (and presumably elsewhere) to cease revealing the sex of the fetus to the woman who's carrying it in time for a safe, legal and uncomplicated abortion. She cites an entry in the Resource Manual of The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia declaring that "fetal gender determination for non‐medical purposes is unethical" (PDF). This practice, says Dr. Kale, is not only unethical but "repugnant," in certain immigrant communities in Canada and in their original societies in east and south Asia (China, India, and countries near to them).

Unfortunately for Dr. Kale and her moralizing colleagues the Earth is already overpopulated and that the most overpopulated countries include those where sex-selective abortion is practiced. Considering "the big picture" I can't help thinking that "female feticide" is an ultimately beneficial practice, keeping the steadily-increasing population from increasing faster. Note that the original countries where this is common are already among the world's most crowded places, which might be why so many people from those countries are moving elsewhere. Both practices, abortion and immigration, are among these countries' least repugnant "safety valves" to slow down the rate of population increase thereby keeping the quality of life from degenerating even further.

My second objection is that forbidding women the option of aborting female fetuses impinges on their natural right to terminate pregnancy, forcing them to carry a fetus and birth a child that they don't want. Keep in mind that in many of these countries contraception is hard to get and is frowned upon when one can find it, which reinforces women's subjection by denying them control over whether they will get pregnant; indeed in many parts of these countries a woman is likely to be beaten if she tries to control whether she'll have sex in the first place. That is, in these societies where women are disempowered they are disempowered because they are women. Such sexism is repugnant, which makes Dr. Kale's opinion even more repugnant: she'd rather reinforce women's subjugation than diminish it by those means the society's customs provide.

I'm sure Dr. Kale agrees that Canada and "the West" in general are far better for women in that our cultural beliefs and practices, including our codes of law, protect women better than their home countries do. For one thing in our countries a husband who beats or rapes his wife is likelier to be prosecuted for it and the wife likelier to find safe refuge from further rapes and beatings. How odd that these Canadian physicians insist that a woman should continue a pregnancy they don't want, finding the alternative -- letting women control their own bodies -- somehow immoral. Furthermore, because the physcians practice according to a "multicultural" ideology they would deny control over their own bodies not only to Asian immigrants but to all Canadian women. Reproductive sexism: what a grand moral and ethical idea that is!

Thirdly, let us not forget that in these cases a female fetus is aborted because a girl child is not wanted. I.e. that child is not wanted. For whatever reason her birth might well be unwelcome and her life, even in Canada, less safe, secure and free than a boy's. Have these learned doctors no concern for the child once its born? Must the world's population of unwanted and abused children increase apace with its general numbers?

I understand that one of the objections to sex-selective abortion is to prevent "reproductive collapse" in these ethnic groups, and yes I'm as much against racism as sexism. The problem with these doctor's particular application of principle is that each and every ethnic group is comprised of human beings and that all human beings reside on one planet. Our planet is already overburdened with people, especially the home countries of the ethnic groups we're discussing. Must we favor the ability of some ethnic groups to further crowd and wreck our planet at everyone's expense? Is that not racism against those who are not of these ethnicities?

It would be far better for these Canadian physicians to concern themselves with the condition of the women of Canada in general and immigrant women in particular, that everyone who agrees that the position of women in these ethnic groups should be raised should use less directly intrusive means to do so. It would be far better for Canadian society to teach immigrant men (and all men) that women are just as human as they are and to teach immigrant women (and all women) to value and stand up for themselves. We in "the West" have little ability to get rid of sexism where these women immigrated from; let us at least ensure that their lives among us be better than they were at home. If that includes letting them abort female fetuses then so be it, along with working to further improve the lives of immigrant women and girls (and all women and girls) in our "more advanced" societies.

However objectionable one might find sex-selective abortion the alternative is just as bad -- and likelier to be worse. Let's not let our "enlightened" ethical sensibilities be twisted to degrade the quality of life.