Auntie Seraphic: I would like to adopt a teenager, please.
Bernardos Lady: That's very unusual. Why a teenager?
Auntie Seraphic: I feel very much that B.A. and I can offer a teenager a lovely home and stable adoptive parents and he can enrich us with his own perspective.
Bernardos Lady (weeps): That's beautiful.
Auntie Seraphic: For example, how to get songs onto this little doohickey so I can listen to it at the gym instead of being tied to MTV.
For the past few days MTV has been broadcasting nothing but what it calls R&B, which I hate. I hate R&B. I want Euro Dance Party 2012 or whatever it is called. I want techno and whatever Alice DJ is. If Jean-Paul Sartre had said "Hell is other people's music", I would have gotten around to reading his novels.
Being stuck with MTV and R&B while I ran my little run on the treadmill, I was forced to watch a hideous video about a pretty American black girl sitting up in her boyfriend's room as he looked up a plastic surgery business on his computer. A computer graphic grew enormous breasts and it was obvious that the boyfriend thought his girlfriend should get some like that.
I began to feel rather ill. It had not occurred to me that the popularity of silicon implants had trickled down to the messy teenage bedrooms of the nation. Of course, I was never in teenage boys' bedroom when I was a teenager, so who knows what was going on in them in the 1980s. But whatever was going on, I am pretty sure the boys were not saying, "Hey, why don't you get plastic surgery!" Maybe a real jerk would have said, "Why didn't your parents get you braces?"
I am not so good with lyrics, but there were three women singers, so I am guessing they were singing about respect and being yourself, despite the fact that although they may not have had fake breasts, they almost certainly had fake hair. To get hair like the heroine of the video, I would have to spend three hours and at least $100 at ye olde Caribbean hairdresser in Toronto. (Alas, no-one in Edinburgh has ever done as good a job as Dionne. Only Dionne truly understood my white-hair-which-is-strangely-like-black-hair-only-ginger.)
Anyway, to my horror, as I ran nowhere, a captive audience, the heroine goes to the plastic surgery clinic, close to weeping and shielding her chest with her arms. She is so obviously not there of her own free will, it is amazing the clinicians didn't throw her out. However, instead of just sitting there shuddering on her hospital bed, she takes the initiative to prowl around and therefore sees another girl having her breasts sliced open (apparently without anaesthetic) and the implants taken out.
They showed this, right there, on MTV. Honestly. A breast sliced open and a silicon insert slipped out. All for your girl-power entertainment.
Fortunately, I did not throw up. Neither did the heroine of the video, who fled the hospital.
And I reflected that although most Catholic girls I knew generally avoided teenage boys' bedrooms (and later discovered with shock that those girls who frequented them were NOT necessarily RUINED FOR LIFE), those girls who did hang around to satisfy their teenage
And I also reflected that when I was a teenager, there is no way--NO WAY--a rock video could feature a woman's breast being sliced open and her breast implant removed.
I am still in shock, actually. How do you girls cope? In some ways my mum's world was gentler than mine, although there was a lot more sexual harrassment, but in a lot of ways yours is way more... Well, I don't know what to call it. Violent, I think.
Sound off in the combox while I get my smelling salts.
