Going to Gdańsk

I leave for Gdańsk tomorrow, so of course I am pondering my death. I always ponder my death before I travel. Pondering your own death is a good, traditional Catholic thing to do. And it reminds you to update your will, as I did last week by ripping up a codicil.  I am a terrific will-changer. Nobody will ever want to murder me for a legacy.

In the event of death, I will not leave you orphaned, for there are a number of women tilling in the Single Solidarity field.  Some of them are readers, and prominent among you are the Orthogals. who blogister (my portmanteau of blog and minister, get it?) for Single women of the Eastern Christian persuasion, aka the GREEKS. There there's Christian Grace from The Evangelista. On a completely different, and not explicitly Catholic note, there's newcomer Postum Scriptum, who writes about all kinds of traddy and vintage stuff, like the lost art of letter-writing.

Then of course there are the Professional Writers for Singles who are farther afield and either taking money from the Catholic Dating Websites or are just better than me at marketing what I give for free. And I don't have a problem with that. Just because my conscience says "donations, speaker's fees and book sales only" doesn't mean that's what their consciences say. Occasionally my conscience does twinge a bit when I point to the balance of my student loan, but it just really refuses to get involved with Catholic Dating Websites. And, yes, I know they do some good.

Which reminds me. Somehow my name has been attached to the idea of dating websites because I did a fellow freelancer a favour by answering questions about  internet dating and meeting B.A. online.  But I did not meet B.A. through a dating website; I met him through my blog. Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers: it's not that journalists lie, it's that whoever makes up the headlines and the captions doesn't know how to, or just doesn't have time to, read the actual article.

***
I had insomnia last night after watching the Sherlock episode, "A Scandal in Belgravia."  I don't often watch violent or suggestive stuff, and "A Scandal in Belgravia" was both.  Also, I have a deep loathing of sexually sophisticated people who try to take advantage of sexual innocents, so I did not enjoy watching Irene Adler's attempts on Sherlock's virtue. Sherlock is an arrogant twit, but he does not use his intellectual prowess to bamboozle people into bed. The farthest he goes is to flirt mildly with poor Molly in the morgue so that she will let him see the latest corpse or what have you.

The writers depict Sherlock and his brother Mycroft as cold fish without feeling, and seem to say coldness is why Sherlock, at least, is largely proof against sexual temptation. But as a matter of fact, Sherlock is intensely loyal and protective of the few people who are intensely loyal and protective of him. It's a great plot device: when the writers need us to feel pity and fear, they put Watson in danger of certain death and Sherlock's blue eyes positively blaze with rage. In contrast, Watson's angry, jealous girlfriends, with whom he presumably, to quote him, "gets off", are just figures of fun.

Despite themselves, the writers have hammered home the idea that in itself sex means nothing next to chaste, self-sacrificing love. Still, I don't think they would go so far as to extol Sherlock's chastity as normal and another example of his formidable powers of reasoning. But I would.

There is a quality of mercy in Sherlock. As blunt and thoughtless as he can be, and as capable of throwing baddies out the window, he takes pity on people when he realizes that they seem to love him. And this is most unlike the kind of  sociopath who punishes most those who seem to love him.

Because, to move from television to real life, there are indeed men who punish, rather than protect, those who love them because their victims love them. Perhaps there are women like that, too. But I have met at least two men like that. Their own mothers were afraid of them. And although only one of them actually said, "I enjoy making the people who love me suffer", the same was true of both.

These were not seedy gangsters. They did not have criminal records. These were mildly good-looking, charismatic, clever men with intellectual interests who attracted less intelligent but nicer men as loyal friends. Possibly one was much nicer when he was younger; the other was a sadist by 17, and by sadist I don't mean all that silly sexual game-playing so-called "sophisticated" people think so daring. I mean that even at seventeen he enjoyed making the people who loved him suffer agonies of mind and heart. I cannot for the life of me understand why, or if he could have been improved by psychiatric help.  I wonder what a priest would have said to him; I wonder how often parish priests in comfortable countries have to look squarely at evil and see a soul in palpable danger of hell.

I am quite sure that as painful as it is, it is much better to love someone like that and to suffer innocently than to be someone like that and make innocents suffer. So if these were to be my last ever written words, I would want to say, not "Look out for someone like that" but "Don't be someone like that." Satan, handsome, clever, attractive, arrogant Satan, makes a lousy role model.

Sudden Rant Towards Moronic Sexist Headlines

The Duchess of Cambridge, whom the media prefers to call "Kate", as if she were a child personally known to them, not a 31 year old woman and mother of one, did not "show off" her "baby belly." She gave birth and--holy Toledo!--her stomach did not return to its pre-pregnancy flatness by the next day.

I get so angry when the media prints photographs of women looking the way it is normal for women to look, or wearing the kind of clothes it is normal for women to wear, with text claiming that the women are "showing off" in some way.

It makes be particularly angry when the women are said to be "showing off their baby bump." Actually, no. The women just HAVE "baby bumps." It is not the 19th century; pregnant women do not modestly hide themselves at home so that no one has to see for their own eyes that they had have sex. Most women do not cover their abdomens with handbags 24/7.

And it makes me very angry that the media talks about women "showing off" as though it were echoing the Taliban. Women simply ARE, and having bodies is a prerequisite of being human. Unless we are pulling up, or pulling down, pieces of clothing while shouting "Looky here," we are not showing off our bodies. Showing off our bodies is not the same thing as having them.  

Is there any way to disable "Yahoo News" so  I can check my email without having to read their STUPID, IQ-reducing headlines?

Clutching Your Handbag in an Elevator is Not a Hate Crime

I live in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom used to be something like 99.99% people of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish descent. Of course, over the centuries following the Norman Conquest (1066) sailors, soldiers, servants (or slaves), traders and refugees of other ethnic groups would either breeze through or settle, but that was in small numbers. About 40, 000 French Huguenots (Protestants) settled in the UK over a period of two hundred years. And the small, London-based community of Jews was so augmented by Central and Eastern European Jews over the nineteenth century that there were about 250,000 by 1900. That was a significant change from the 20-25,000 Jews in 1800, but this can be explained by massive persecution of European Jewry in the 19th century.

I mention this because when I wrote my "Living in the UK" test, the study guide was very keen that I think of the United Kingdom as a nation of immigrants (like me). But as a matter of fact, until the 20th century, people migrated to the UK in such small numbers, or over such a long period of time, that it was easy for them (or, at any rate, their UK-born children) to blend in and become English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish.. Arguably it was tougher for the Jews, but many of them became absolutely establishment figures, some having become Christians (like Prime Minister Disraeli), but others not (like Lord Rothschild).

Still, there was a lot of anti-Jewish feeling in the UK even before more Central European Jewish refugees turned up in the 1930s, and I suspect this had as much to do with their comparatively large numbers as with plain old anti-Semitism. A good book about this is George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Nowadays a London Jew is as English and as stereotypically "London" as the Tower or a pearly king strutting about.  There are 263, 346 Jews listed on the 2011 census. (Gracious! What a small rise since 1900.)

In contrast, there are 1,200,000 Pakistanis in the UK today, and 521,000 Poles who were actually born in Poland. There were 15,000 Pakistanis in the UK in 1951, and about 162, 339 Poles. Many of these Poles had British-born children who are so indistinguishable from the rest of what is now called the "white British" population, that the claims of the Scot who yelled at me for speaking Polish  that he had a Polish ancestor were not risible.

Ah, you had to have been there. There I was in the local polski sklep, flirting with the nice Polish shopkeeper behind the counter, and a young man who was rather drunk for that hour of the afternoon, popped in and shouted, "You're in Scotland--speak English!"

We turned and stared. I felt rather protective of the Polish shopkeeper, which was stupid, as the Polish shopkeeper was bigger than the drunken youth. Really, the person in most danger of violence from the drunken youth was little me if I talked back. So I didn't talk back. Instead the youth went on about how he was not racist, and had a Polish ancestor, and he eventually admitted he was drunk and took himself off. And, frankly, he seemed to me almost as much a victim of history as a modern-day Mohawk Indian sitting on the corner of Toronto's Bathurst and Queen Streets yelling at "white people."

Which brings me to my next point, which is that post-1950 mass migration has exacerbated old and invented new ethnic and racial tensions in the UK. Migrants come to the UK, and sometimes we are homesick or disillusioned, and sometimes we resent the native population, either because they resent us or because we find their social habits disgusting or amusingly stupid.* Rather in the way some horrible white men in western Canada have exploited and hurt First Nations girls, a newsworthy number of Pakistani and other Muslim men have exploited and hurt "white British" girls. Don't get me started on my inner ideological warfare whenever I look for a cab.

The UK is now in a rather US-like situation when it comes to race, only here "race" means "ethnicity" or even "country of origin" and if some drunken Scotswoman called me a "Canadian cow" I could conceivably report this to the police and they would have to take it seriously. If I ever shoot a German national, I may have to prove in court it was not because he was a German national.

Which brings me to the Zimmerman case, not that Zimmerman is a German national. First of all, he is an American, and second, he apparently self-identifies as Hispanic. His mother was born in Peru, and as far as I know what Peruvian looks like, George Zimmerman looks Peruvian to me. I bet he looks Peruvian to my average American reader because I lived in the USA and I think only apartheid-era South Africa could have been as obsessed with race as the USA. Of course, in Toronto, too, the worst thing you can call someone is a "racist." You can get a lot of power over someone if you can prove he or she is a "racist."

But this is not power like the power in your right arm or, to get to my central point, the right arm of a man who wants to hurt you or steal something from you. When I was in the Polish deli, I may have had a lot of "social privilege", being English-speaking, well-educated and even reasonably well-connected, but I was the weakest person there. The strongest person there, despite being a recent immigrant, was the big Polish shopkeeper. Had the drunken Scottish kid started smashing stuff or me, the Polish immigrant would have jumped over the counter and squashed him. So much for all my social privilege.

The President of the United States identifies as an African-American, and was televised last night speaking with sadness of how often people fear young African-American men. And I can see how this is sad. I would be sad if every time I got on an elevator and everyone smaller and/or weaker than me took a firmer hold of their purse. But it would be sad, not scary. It would not be a patch on the terror of a woman who is afraid, for whatever reason, that a man might hurt her or take her purse away.

In short, I say once again that, when it comes to the politics of victimhood, woman trumps race. Whatever you think of the George Zimmerman trial, I hope my young female readers have not imbibed a message that they must ignore their fears or remain in what seems to them a dangerous situation for fear of seeming racist or making President Obama sad. George Zimmerman is a man; what people have to say about him and what he did has nothing to do with your lives as women.

Men have a lot of physical power. Really, they do. And some of them--of any race or ethnicity--are perfectly willing to use it against you, and at the moment a man does, none of whatever "social privilege" you have will be of any use to you. What will count will be your ability to get away or, if you can, enlist the help of those around you.

*I have a serious problem with grown women being reeling drunk in public. Bridget Jones is not as funny now that I know what a British "High Street" is like at closing time. Being "off your face" is not Girl Power; it's Girl Vulnerability to men who despise Girl Drunkenness and take advantage of Girl Weakness. As an educated colonial woman,  I know perfectly well that not all British women go out to clubs to pick up men or to get smashed. Nor do I think a promiscuous or a reeling drunk woman "deserves" ill-treatment (like rape). However, the minicabs and the chip shops of the UK are not staffed entirely with educated, colonial women who have had "No means No" drummed into their heads their whole lives.

Gut versus Self-Doubt

I've been thinking a lot about my controversial advice to the nineteen year old reader whose first impulse, when approached for friendship by a stranger a few older than she when she was on a family outing, was to ask her father. She was embarrassed that she had done this--and perhaps that her father  had given his opinion not only to her but to the stranger--and wondered what else she might have done.

I said she had done the right thing, and she could do it again in future. But this is not because I am a huge fan of the patriarchy. I do not think adult women should have to consult their fathers every time an adult man asks them on a date. It is because I think women should trust our gut instincts and not second-guess our snap decisions about men.

My usual example is the elevator. You are about to get on an almost-empty elevator. You see a man who instantly makes you feel uncomfortable. He looks at you. You look at him. And then either you get on or you let the elevator doors slide shut. I recommend you let the elevator doors slide shut. Who cares what he thinks? You should care what you think, and so should he, if he wants women not to avoid getting on an elevator with him. ("Wow! Maybe my four-hours-a-night internet porn habit is starting to show on my face!")

I've also been thinking a lot about the Cleveland kidnap victims. A lot. Maybe too much. It creeps me out that Gina DeJesus was the best friend of Ariel Castro's daughter Arlene. Did it ever occur to Gina that Arlene's dad was kind of creepy? And, when he offered her a ride, did she dismiss her feelings that he was kind of creepy by thinking, "Well, you know, he's Arlene's dad, and I don't want to be disrespectful"?

And I think this because once upon a time when I was a kid in Toronto, a bearded stranger in car stopped beside me and offered me a lift. Now, I had been brought up always to be polite to grown-ups, but also never EVER to get into a car with a stranger. So naturally I said, "No, thank you."

The next day at school, one of the boys in my class told me with disgust that his dad had mocked me at their dinner table. He had offered me a lift, and I had looked at him as if he were "some kind of pervert." In short, this boy tried to make me feel deeply ashamed, and no doubt he succeeded for, behold, I still remember this incident thirty years later. (Oh nooos! I had hurt the feelings of a Grown-Up I ought to have RESPECTED!)

But for all I know his dad was a pervert.  Even if I had recognized him, even if I had remembered he was my classmate's father, that would have been absolutely no reason to trust him.

Sadly, we don't need external voices like my classmate's to make us feel dumb about snap decisions we make about our safety. Many of us have an internal voice that says, over and against our gut, "Oh, such-and-such, don't be so silly" or "Oh, such-and-such, how can you be so uncharitable?" I don't know where this voice comes from. It could be the result of an unfortunate psychic accident that occurred when we were four or five and our mothers lost their tempers. "Oh, such-and-such, don't be so SILLY," they said, having no idea this would stick in our heads on a repeating loop for years.

At any rate, this voice needs to be replaced and overcome by a trust in your gut, especially before you become the victim of your own wishful thinking.

As an adult woman, I went on a date with a guy who confused me. I had met him years before when I was a lot more confident about my importance in the world, and barely gave guys like him the time of day. However, I was going through a bad patch of "Why am I Single?" and "Wow, my male religious friends are so much more supported and confident in their futures than I am!" So I went on this date, and the guy behaved in a really weird way. He kept losing his train of thought, and telling me it was because of me. He said I was queenly and that I frightened him. It was kind of flattering but also kind of weird.

It was also kind of Game. The point of Game is to unsettle a woman so that she feels like she will go crazy if she doesn't figure out what is going on and therefore looks to the Gamer for the answer. And that sure worked on me. I sat by the phone for days (at least, I hope it was days), wondering how I had simultaneously attracted and frightened this guy. And why, since he said I had really knocked him for a loop, had he not called me? So, I am sorry to say, I called him.

And so began a particularly nasty relationship featuring a lot of screaming from him and a lot of frightened apology from me. My goodness, I would sit under the phone in the kitchen with tears streaming down my face while an impassioned voice shrieked dramatic and alliterative insults in my ear. What a contrast his screams were to his little gifts, his avowals of love, the candle-lit dinners, etc., etc.

At the time, I had not heard of Game, and indeed I did not find out about it until some time later, when I recognized some of the lines and techniques and the name of one of its local experts, once referenced by Mr Screamer in one of his abusive post-relationship pseudonymous communiques. But Game works on me, which is sad, but I am indeed one of those women who scrambles to make sense of the absurd. As I told my spiritual director, I am attracted to men who behave in crazy ways, and we came up with a deal that from then on that I was going to avoid men who act in crazy ways.

I'm not sure I lived up to that since, you know, I ended up with B.A. But, actually, I never got a "Well, THAT was weird" feeling from B.A.  When B.A. proposed after ten days, it felt happy and hilarious (I giggled all the way through), but never crazy or weird. And since them B.A.'s impulsiveness has mostly manifests itself in unexpected funny remarks and puns. An inherently relaxed individual, having made a huge effort to get what he wants, he lapses back into cheerful plodding along. My gut always knew that B.A. was good.

Icky Female Cancers

If that post title doesn't scare the boys away, nothing will. But those boys should go away anyway, because some serious TMI follows.

This is another public service announcement to all ex-virgins reminding them that they should be checked out for cervical cancer on a regular basis. In Scotland women are recommended to pop into their local medical centre and get tested every two years. And as it has been two years, your poor auntie went in and got tested today.

Actually, the test, though uncomfortable, was not so bad. What is bad is cervical cancer, and I got a ring side seat to how nasty it can be when Hilary White went toe to toe with the horror, and I held her towel and water bottle for a round or two. In the end, Hilary had to have the dreaded major invasive surgery that saved--or has prolonged--her life. And I learned the importance of getting regular checks for cervical cancer.

Here is Cancer Research UK's wonderfully frightening webpage detailing the risk factors for cervical cancer. Note particularly the role of HPV. HPV, as I believe I have mentioned before, cannot be stopped by condoms. You'll notice that, I'm sure, in the link.

The admission that condoms don't stop all STDs always slays me because when I was a teenager AIDS burst onto the scene and the misleading term "safe sex" (later rather more honestly termed "safer sex") was born. "Safe sex" was all about condoms, touted as the solution to all of life's ills, except in the very, very small print. As condoms had no side-effects, the only people I know who cast doubt on condoms as the super-heroes of the Age of Aquarius were in the pro-life, pro-chastity movement.

Now, however, the people paid to take care of public health have started to explain in a little more detail why it is that all ex-virgin women--no matter if they have been wrapped in latex all their lives--are supposed to get checked for cervical cancer. But instead of suggesting a return to the sexual taboos that made some people miserable but kept them and others safe, they have come up with Gardasil. Gardasil may be all very well (and many people have their doubts about it), but maybe a little talk--or several little talks, sitcom episodes and rock songs--about how and why sex is much better left to grown-ups would be just as helpful.

Meanwhile, smoking is also a factor in cervical cancer. Why anyone smokes horrible cigarettes today is a mystery to me. Cigars and pipe tobacco are not great for your health, but at least I can understand why smokers go in for the flavour and buzz of good tobacco. But cigarettes are the low-grade potato chips of the tobacco world, so why women are willing to risk horrible deaths for them really amazes me.

Poor Boston

I feel awful. All those hurt people, and at least three people killed. I feel particularly sad for the man whose 8 year old son rushed to hug him as he approached the finish line and... 

This morning I got a message from Boston Girl, and she and her family are all okay.

That made my day. And compared to the suffering in Boston, all my woes seem pretty small--laughable, even.  I keep thinking about Boston Girl's Facebook photo, which is of her hugging her husband and little baby, and of the two of us--before the husband was met or the baby a glimmer--hanging out, laughing at Talledega Nights until we cried, and of all the little adventures and conversations I wrote about in Seraphic Singles.

What a horrible, cowardly, nasty thing for someone to do: to place bombs--bombs full of ball-bearings--where large crowds of strangers will be gathering to congratulate their loved ones for managing to run 26.5 miles. Such an innocent, happy occasion, and such a tribute to the spirit of self-mastery, a marathon.

But I suppose someone thought his thrill or his cause or his feelings of righteousness or his message was just so much more important than the innocent happiness of ordinary Boston folk. That's what evil looks like: my thrill, my cause, my message is more important than your innocent happiness, than your life, than your loved ones.

Update: Glad I saw this.

Pray for the Holy Father

Girls, I'm very sorry if you hear it first from me. I woke up early and found out from European friends on Facebook, and then woke up poor B.A.

The Holy Father, Benedict XVI, who is very old and, I suspect, growing very ill, is abdicating.

If you are a Catholic, you may be shocked and saddened by this news, and thinking about how John Paul II was a model to us of dying. I certainly did. John Paul II died very publicly, perhaps to show us how illness, old age and death should not be shunned with fear and shame. However, if there is anyone who knows what affect an ill, old and dying pontiff has on the health of the Church, it must be Benedict XVI.

Damian Thompson has sensible commentary.

But, oh dear, what a time to be away from our Extraordinary Form community! Our priest is on holiday , too, so we all have to face this crisis without him. Oh dear!

Update: Feel free to use the combox to emote, although don't scare anybody with St. Malarky or whatever his name is purported to be. Such a shock when I checked Facebook this morning; I woke up early (jetlag continues) so I got the news only about fifty minutes later than friends in Rome.

What a lot has happened in eight years! Personally, I am very grateful for Summorum Pontificum and also for the new Anglican Ordinariate, although don't tell the Eavesdroppers I said that. I am also grateful that Keith Cardinal O'Brien, unlike some other bishops I can think of, took Summorum Pontificum seriously.

Today is a sad day for a lot of Trids because we saw Benedict XVI as our great protector from powerful people who simply cannot understand or appreciate the rich liturgical and theological traditions of the Church and want to sweep of them away to give more oxygen to some new but over-flogged and dying liturgical and theological horses. Many of us might also be a little scared because abdicating is not very trad. Dying in office is trad. Abdicating is not. However, there is nothing we can do but pray and trust that Papa Ratzi knows what he is doing and that he knows best.

You Never Know What's Going On In Other People's...

Single people rarely live with your Married friends, so you very rarely get a ringside seat to what their Married life is really like. In many ways, this is a good thing. There is such a thing as private, family life, and few Married couples want their friends to hear their most personal remarks, e.g. "Your toenails are like daggers!" and "That's not how my mother makes spaghetti" and "Where the **** is my handbag, AAAAAAAAAAH!"

But this means that you see your Married friends most at their absolute personal best, e.g. when they are in their first flush of LOVE (sparkle) and engaged (sparkle, sparkle) and on their wedding day (sparkle, sparkle, sparkle).  After that, you might not see them that much anymore, especially if they have kids. All this may leave you with an idealistic view of what their married life is like.

Adding to the sparkle-sparkle-disappear factor is the loyalty of many Married couples to each other and the shared project (if I may call it that) called their marriage. Where I come from, you never, ever, ever complain about your husband to anyone but--in very trying circumstances--your mother, priest or doctor and--in the most extreme circumstances--the police, your lawyer and the judge. Meanwhile (where I come from) a wife expects her husband to be even more circumspect: not even the police and judge for him, poor man. All this, of course, is the (slightly problematic) IDEAL, from which one (even where I come from) sometimes falls short.

Then there are Married women who out-and-out lie. I once had a friend who was so loyal to her Project Called Marriage that she pretended to me that her life was absolutely perfect. Even sleepless nights with colicky babies were a joy---while they were going on. It was years before she admitted that they had driven her to breaking point. And I was convinced that there never was a happier marriage. I used to think, as I nursed the long hurt of my failed marriage, that at least she was happy, and at least there was one perfect marriage in the world.

"Why don't you have more children?" I asked one day as we met up for a long-awaited lunch. "Your kids are so beautiful."

She laughed. She told me that everything was so perfect right then, she didn't want anything to change.

Within a year she left her husband, and I finally heard the real story.

Well, what can I say? Marriage may be private but it is also public, and one of the building blocks of society. It's not just about a couple and their family; it's about the couple, their family, their friends, their neighbours, their parishes, their societies. Everyone. I put down the phone, rigid with horror and disillusionment. It wasn't just the unhappiness of a family I loved, and it wasn't just that I had been out-and-out lied to by a friend I trusted, it's that a sparkling symbol of my own hopes had just imploded.  

It's a truism that nobody knows how a marriage works, sometimes not even the two people in it. And I think it is salutary to reflect on the traditional sugar-covered almonds served at weddings. The sugar represents the sweetness of marriage, and the almond--which retains its bitter skin--reminds us of its sorrows. A wedding, with its new clothes, delicious food, joy and jollity, does not sum up marriage. It expresses hope for marriage. Very few married women, I think, say to a married couple, "I know you'll be very happy." What we almost always say, with great sincerity and sometimes with tears, is "I hope you'll be very happy."

Rattling the Tin Cup

Alas. Somebody who promised one of my UK editors that I would be paid in January was not, history has shown, telling the truth.

Your auntie is something of a gambling woman--not with games of chance, but with life--so I took a chance that Somebody was not lying and went ahead and put two round-trip tickets to Canada on my credit card. As Somebody's publication employs rather well-known and respected writers, I thought Somebody was probably just leaving payment to the last moment, as businesses often like to do. But now I have spoken to an English solicitor and will soon draft what the English solicitor calls "a letter before action."

Perhaps you can see where I am going with this.  Behold the embarrassing tip jar button.

"Help Auntie Seraphic pay Mr Credit Card for her and her husband's trip to see their Canadian family and friends" does not sound as compelling as "Help Auntie Seraphic get to Rome to nurse colleague with cancer" but the campaign is rather in the forefront of my poor underpaid brain.

So if you think you can spare $5 or $10 (it all converts to Canadian) and get a sense of satisfaction for having paid a fee for your year's worth of ongoing Seraphic Singles reading goodness, than that would be a very nice thing to do.

Meanwhile, I must say that no Catholic publication has ever done this to me, possibly because Catholic publications are well-attuned to the truth that defrauding a worker of her wage is a sin crying out to heaven for justice. I can just imagine myself telling Somebody down in London that. Ha!

And, no, the writing life is not inherently romantic and fulfilling, well worth the chance of never being paid. I should have worked a lot harder as an undergrad and then gone to law school. I mean that.  I feel like a hippy. A hippy with an M.Div. and a vintage hat collection, but still a hippy nonetheless! But every time I say to B.A., "I give up. I want real job. Help me get a real job." he says, "Your job is to write."

P.S. Edinburgh Eavesdroppers are not allowed to donate.

Why Do Girls Give In?

There is an excellent article in the UK Catholic Herald this week about p*rnogr*phy.  The Herald piece is in part a reaction to the following article in the UK Telegraph, which I want to discuss, but I will warn you that some of the remarks in the combox under the Telegraph article are vile.

It’s not often that I unleash my inner Mary Whitehouse, but the way young girls today are expected to conform to a hideous porn culture makes me want to don a pair of glasses with upswept frames and get myself one of those battleaxe perms. A friend’s daughter recently started at a highly regarded boarding school. When her mother asked how she was enjoying the mixed-sex environment, the girl said quietly: “You have to give the boys oral sex or they get cross.” Reeling with shock, the mum protested that her darling daughter did not have to do anything of the sort. “Oh yes you do,” replied the girl. “And you have to shave down there or the boys don’t like it.”

The girl in question is not some brazen, street-smart sixth-former; she is 14 years old. 

Mary Whitehouse was an English Catholic Anglican lady who campaigned against the onslaught of racy conversations and shows over the airwaves in the wake of 1963. She was widely mocked. At the same time she was campaigning, however, an unknown number of pop culture celebrities in Britain were using and abusing teenage girls and children.

I don't know if Mary Whitehouse said anything about the generations of sexual abuse in boys' boarding schools by bigger boys of smaller boys. It's something all men who went to boarding school knew about, and yet they went on to send their own sons to boarding school. And now that women know about this, too, I am amazed that anyone would send their daughters into a co-ed boarding school. What on earth did they think would happen?

It strikes me that there is a bigger problem here than p*rn, no matter how big a problem p*rn may be. The problem is that teenage boys are demanding oral sex from teenage girls, and teenage girls are actually supplying it. Teenage boys are demanding that teenage girls wax their pudenda, and teenage girls are doing it. So much for the feminist revolution--and incidentally, it is illegal for children in Britain to have sex until they are sixteen. Why, I ask, do the girls have no spine?

"So what if the boys get cross?" I would ask this girl if she were my daughter, which she would never be as I would never send my teenage daughter to a co-ed secondary school except as a last resort.  "I mean, SO WHAT?"

In prison, if there were such things as co-ed prisons in the UK, which thank heavens there are not, a girl might worry. If she didn't come across with sexual favours once actually illegal, so disgusting and against women's dignity they were believed to be, well, maybe something even worse might happen to her. But we don't put women into the same prisons as men because we are not stupid. As a society, we don't hate women quite that much.

So it comes as a nasty shock to discover that the threat of  violence hangs over girls in the co-ed schools of the UK, even if that threat is merely "The boys get cross."

As it is illegal for children under 16 to have sex, one solution is to remind children of this every once in awhile and remind them all that soliciting a child under 16 for sex is also illegal. Very rarely does anyone throw the book at a fornicating Romeo-and-Juliet puppy-love pair, but maybe it is time to begin.  At very least something more must be done to protect girls whose parents are naive enough to send them to live under inadequate supervision with a hundred or more teenage boys. Teaching them to value sexual abstinence without apology or embarrassment would be a good start.

Anti-Catholic Bigotry at Huff Po UK

Here's a non-story in the Huffington Post UK.  It makes a snide remark about the "Christian" (Roman Catholic Christian, most likely) youths in St. Peter's Square getting a lesson about "the survival of the fittest" when a seagull attacks a dove. Har, har, har, except that the dove got away.

Actually, the lesson might have been that life is tough and noisy types are likely to attack, if only in the combox of the Huffington Post UK. Even a representative from some British Muslim spokesgroup chimed in to joke that it was not a Muslim seagull. That is one of the milder comments, however. The others make remarks about garbage, "chubby girls," and "I wouldn't let a child near any of them." Nice, eh?

I cannot imagine why Huff Po UK ran this story other than to have a giggle at Roman Catholics who, although a small minority in the UK, make up the largest number of Britons who attend worship services.

Not incidentally, anti-Catholic bigotry has been a fixture in the UK since the 1530s.

Women are Who We Are

Women are who we are and not who men want us to be.

I write this as someone who always finds herself on the Droit of most questions. Over and over again, I find myself going with the more traditional, the more human, and the more rational approach, which puts me on the wrong side, not of history, but of the leading taste-makers of our societies. Some of the most divisive issues of our times, like ab*rtion and women's *rdination, involve women in a particular way, and so we conservative or traditional women find ourselves arguing the issues in a different way from men--or, if not in a different way, from a different and more privileged perspective.

There is a particular heartache in arguing against women when you are a woman because women love consensus and thrive on consensus. And women know how awful it is to be shut out of the women's collective, to have to go the well by ourselves because the other women don't want to be seen with us, unless to be seen mocking us. This is what we risk whenever we take a position unpopular with the majority of women in the room, no matter which side we're on.

This is why it comes as such a hideous disappointment to find ourselves in conflict with those men who agree, in the main, with our ideas, but deep down wish women would shut up and go away or at least conform to their idea of what women should be like. Such men are found all over the political spectrum, of course. No doubt there are men of the Gauche who think all women should be injected with contraceptives from age 13 and be allowed to skip our shots only if we have taken a state-approved parenting course and have not yet had two children. There are most definitely men of the  Gauche who bully the women in their lives, even if that is in a sneaky, passive-aggressive way they may have learned from women.

I expect opposition from the opposite side of the river, so I don't really care what its men throw at me. In fact, I don't mind their arguments because they do not affect me on an emotional level. I don't care if they like me or not. I can argue back with verve and gusto. I once amused myself greatly by overwhelming a smug atheist I met outside a cafe with Lonergan's cognitional theory. (He was one of those unusually naive cafe habitues who think Catholic students of theology must necessarily be stupid.) He was as meek as a mouse when I was done.

However, to this day I do not know how to cope with the knife in the back--the insults and insinuations of male ideological allies, from the weirdos who complain about women's trousers to the hotheads who think femininity is incompatible with intellectual discourse.

Simcha Fischer's solution to the "pants" (always trousers in the UK, girls) problem, was to whip out a card ("pants pass") with one's husband's (or presumably father's) signature, saying the wearer had his permission to wear them. Today I think a better solution is to look angrily at the speaker and demand "Who are you? How DARE you make such personal remarks to me?"

I hope I would remember to do that. Like most women, I don't like confrontation. It just does not come that easily. This is one reason why men should not simply march up to women and start a fight. We're at a terrible psychological disadvantage; it's simply unfair.

As a matter of fact, I understand the "pants (TROUSERS) problem" because I used to sit in the back choir stalls at Mass, and when all the other women at Mass are wearing coats or skirts, the one female rump lovingly outlined by tightly-clinging denim, lycra or cotton shines out like a red lamp on a dark street. It at least momentarily distracts everybody, me, the choir, the tea ladies--everyone, not just angry old men. So, in such situations, wear something over it. Elsewhere, however, where trousers are rather more the rule than the exception, anyone who is angered by your rump in particular has a personality problem, and if he says something, get in his face. "Who are YOU? How DARE you?" Channel your best mother/teacher voice.

But as for the hotheads who think femininity is incompatible with intellectual discourse, I simply do not know what to do.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

There are these guys at Cath Soc who are pretty great. I get along with them most of the time, and we all go to the TLM, and I admire the way they take their (our) ideological/theological opponents' arguments to pieces. But I don't like it when they take my ideas to pieces in a way that seems to be more ad hominem than anything else, particularly when their response is "Oh, how just like a woman." 

When I point that out, they say if I'm going to argue like a man, I should take my lumps like a man.    However, I am not conscious of arguing like a man, per se, but like a rational being. 

Then there are other guys who hold the same ideological/theological positions I hold who talk about educated/pretentious women, as if education and pretension were the same thing. However, if I were to stop talking altogether, or consciously dumb down everything I say or write, wouldn't that make me really pretentious? Sometimes I am tempted to do that, though, because these guys are so nice to the girls who are constantly running down their own intellectual gifts, e.g. "I'm not an intellectual; really, I just want to get married and have babies. Isn't that AW-ful?  Hee hee hee!" However, it's too late. They know I'm smart--or that I think I'm smart, anyway. Sorry.

What am I supposed to do? And please don't tell me just to ignore these guys or have nothing to do with them. These are my theological/ideological allies, and I like them 75% of the time, and if they would just adjust their thinking about women and intellect they would be perfectly perfect. 

Sincerely,
Tearing My Hair Out

Dear Tearing My Hair Out,

Hmm...... Hmm.....

I don't know.  In the end, I've always just given up--long after many other women would--and walked away.

The only thing I can suggest is that, since they expect women to be emotional anyway, is to cut either one off the next time he says "Just like a woman" and tell him you don't think he knows as much about women as he thinks he does.

If he suggests that you are not a "real woman" because you reason "like a man," tell him that powers of reasoning are neither masculine or feminine. What is feminine is a susceptibility to being more badly wounded than men are (if men are) in ad hominem attacks by men one likes.

I'm sorry not to be more helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Worldwide Culture of Death

People will use yesterday's massacre as another stick to beat the USA with, but I live within two hours' drive to Dunblane, so I won't be among them. There are massacres of innocent people in Europe, just as there are in the USA, and just as there have been in Canada. The common denominator is not gun laws but men who somehow think that their wish to kill innocent people is more important than anything. More important than life. More important than children's happiness.

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."

The one good thing about yesterday is that women--teachers--put their bodies between a twenty-year killer and their under-eleven pupils. This is what adult women are supposed to do. Adult women are supposed to protect the very young and the very old. Adult men are supposed to help us and, oh yeah, protect us from men. This could mean from men like themselves. Men who shout "You're not going out dressed like that, young lady" aren't necessarily speaking solely from theoretical contemplation of other men.

I don't know why a twenty-year old boy would shoot his mother with her own guns and then drive to her school to shoot her kindergarten class* and anyone else, woman or child, who got in his way. Jealousy? A sense of entitlement? Anger over his parents' divorce? Entitlement, almost certainly.

I was born in a country with strict gun laws, and I live in a country with strict gun laws, but somehow I cannot blame the guns. (It's too late for the USA to get rid of them now anyway. It is awash with guns, and always has been, and Americans are stuck with them. You might as well try to rid Scotland of alcohol.)

I blame whatever it is that makes a boy or a man think he is justified in killing his neighbour, let alone his own mother, or a child, or several children. Where did he get that idea? Who told him? Was it advertisers constantly appealing to his ego or sex drive, or television constantly appealing to his ego or sex drive, or movies offering up dodgy models for emulation, or video games in which he is the omnipotent slayer of thousands, or music lyrics that encouraged him to feel hard done by and to take out his rage on people around him?

Was it television news showing Palestinians dragging dead Palestinians behind their motorcycles? Was it thousands upon thousands of images of human beings being brutalised in a hundred different ways?

Was it the constant stream of books and shows celebrating the glamour of evil? Vampires, for example, are not exactly hero material.

Was it the culture of easy divorce, of the importance of parents' personal lives at the expense of their children's happiness? Should divorce laws treat married people with kids the same married people without kids? Does anyone pledge to stay together "for the sake of the kids" anymore?

Was it Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins smirking from book jackets, selling thousands upon thousands of their copies of their message that only idiots fear God. There is no God, they claim. Life is short and ultimately meaningless. It doesn't matter what you do, kid, so have a good time. If you make your mark, maybe your name will live on.

Note that I don't name the killer. Please don't name him in the combox. I wish there was some way to prevent him from becoming a hero to other rebels with a cause or clue. Why, oh why, did pop culture ever make a fetish of those people?

Yesterday showed us a failure in civilization. As an aunt of three children under ten I am sickened and terrified that a privileged, educated young man could even think of killing the little children under his mother's care en masse, let alone do it. The only, only thing that keeps me from despairing is the news that women put their bodies between him and children and said "No." Unlike the survivors of their polar opposite, their survivors can hold up their heads at their funerals and say "My loved one lay down her life for another's child."

Update: The news reports have been changing the details daily. Now it seems that the Connecticut killer's mother was not the children's teacher. There are suggestions she once worked as a teacher's aid. And there are declarations that she had no direct links to the school. One lesson we can take home from this is that the media gets a lot of details wrong and when it doesn't know something, it makes it up, and hopes you will forget later.

Victory Counts in Culture Wars

And now for something completely different!

Or is it? Because in almost every post we confront the fact that the sexual revolution of the 1960s changed the social landscape forever, encouraging the naturally modest and the naturally chaste to feel like freaks. Other social trends have discouraged early marriage and encouraged divorce. And other social trends are responsible for the low birthrates in Europe and Canada, and widespread disobedience of Catholics (never mind everyone else) of Humanae Vitae. This is the world in which we live because our spiritual mothers and fathers in the faith lost the culture wars of their times. And woe betide us if our spiritual daughters and sons ask us how we could have landed them in a totalitarian nightmare.

For example, imagine a country where children could be--and are--removed from your home because you support a conservative political party. This shouldn't be difficult because the country I am thinking about is England.

Foster parents 'stigmatised and slandered’ for being members of Ukip

A couple had their three foster children taken away by a council on the grounds that their membership of the UK Independence Party meant that they supported “racist” policies.


Here is the full story.

I should explain for readers who are not British that UKIP is a conservative party that attracts voters and members who feel betrayed by the contemporary Conservative (aka "Tory") party. It dislikes the fact that the UK is now governed, not just by Westminster (and in Scotland also by Holyrood), but by the European Union. It is also the only "respectable" party that wants to stop mass-migration. It is not racist.

It is perfectly possible to object to your country being bossed about by a foreign power whose founder members (Germany, France) were once (twice, etc.) your nation's most dangerous enemies without being "an anti-European racist." (If American, I bet you didn't know white people could be accused of racism against other white people, but this is the UK, where we can and, to be honest, sometimes with justice. But whether it should be actually illegal for Scots to moan about "the English" and for the English to moan about "the Scots" and for both to moan about "the Eastern Europeans" is another question.)

It is also perfectly possible to object to mass-migration without being an anti-"ethnic minority" racist. (If Canadian, I bet you will be astounded to read that as a Canadian living in Britain, I count as an "ethnic minority." My ethnic group is "Canadian"; how nice if we had that sense of Canadian ethnic cohesion in Canada.)

For example, I object to mass-migration, and I am sympathetic to the Eastern Europeans working away like mad and sending money home to their families. (Interestingly, I've heard that Poles living in the UK tend to have more children then Poles in Poland. I would not be at all surprised to discover that Poles living in the UK have more children than ethnic Brits have in the UK. The Poles are the future of Christians in Britain. Take them out and buy them lunch.)

But I'll tell you what I object to even more than mass-migration--totalitarianism. And social workers paid by the government arriving at your house to take away the children that you love and are caring for because you vote for a political party they don't like (and whose policies they obviously haven't read) smacks of totalitarianism. It's extremely alarming.

Incidentally, the council (local government) and social workers of Rotherham have been in the national news before. In the UK, PC ideology trumps the happiness of children, to say nothing of ordinary conservative-minded, old-fashioned British folk, again and again.

Update: Oh my heavenly days. Those children--the foster children taken away from the white British foster parents--are Europeans. And thus white Europeans have been taken from white Europeans on the grounds the the white European adults might be racist against the white European children, despite the facts that the foster parents were learning the children's language, sang their folk songs with them and were prepared to put them in their faith-based school, which probably means that these kids are Roman Catholics.

And that reminds me of another issue.

You know, if I had kids and they were taken from me, I would want them to be fostered by fellow Roman Catholics. But--oh, wait--that's not allowed anymore because--wouldn't you know it--the Catholic adoption agencies were forced to close.

And you know what, I would love to foster Catholic children, but I don't know if I would be allowed to because some jobsworth might need to to make sure I am a-okay with a variety of sexual practices first. It's nuts. The nice couple in Yorkshire were told they couldn't fulfill the cultural needs of the (presumably Catholic) children, and I suspect a Catholic couple wouldn't be able to foster them either, in case the children grow up to be gay.


Update 2: The public outcry has been so loud and furious that it looks like there may be a victory over totalitarianism this time.

Phoenix from the Ashes

I was thinking today about failure, and how afraid people are of failure. Fear of failure is the death of art and creativity and often of social opportunities, too.

I think, for example, of the many men who are too intimidated to introduce themselves to women at parties, and this makes me think of the many men who asked me and my friends to dance at a ceilidh last Friday night.

One great thing about social dancing is that the reason why men ask you to dance is because they want to dance. I think Alisha told me once that it is bad manners to turn down a dance (unless for a very, VERY good reason), so I never did, even though I am shy about my dancing skills. Thank heavens it was an old-fashioned gathering where women were naturally assumed to be the followers. Having been asked to dance so often, and having been competently led, I, loather of dance class, had a very good time at this ceilidh.

I hope it really is a rule that women at public social dances are not supposed to refuse dances because it suggests that here, at last, is a place where men can be relatively sure they can interact socially with women without being shot down. And the better they can dance (especially the better they can lead), the more grateful women will be to dance with them. And the more the men work at it, the better they will be able to dance and lead.

But to start such a new activity does mean overcoming a fear of failure.

The fascinating thing about the relationship between creativity and failure is that both the pay-offs for an experiment that goes right and an experiment that goes wrong can be enormous. The surrealist who first painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa is hailed as a great wit; the woman who satirized Gone with the Wind with The Wind Done Gone was accused of plagiarism. (The book was published, however, and became a bestseller.)

Creativity depends on risk--on formulating new ideas, on doing something new, on taking apart someone's project--like a mobile phone--and putting it together in a whole new way. But risk does indeed imply failure.

Failure hurts. But it is interesting to really look at what in a failure was the real failure.

My two worst failures were giving up my dream of marrying a fellow Catholic (age 25) and not paying attention to the voice in my head that said, You will not be able to make it through a PhD program in this place alone (age 35). The marriage was not a failure; the failure was contracting it. The PhD was not a failure; the failure was not being rooted in the reality of the environment. The first failure came about through fear of being alone; the second failure came about through pride.

The first failure was somewhat resolved by blogging for Single women, and it was completely resolved when I did marry a fellow Catholic (age 38). The second failure is not resolved. Maybe I'll let you know when it is, if it is.

Failing and then persevering. It's the American dream--and the Christian narrative, too. Our Lord's creative work on earth looked like a big failure, one for which He was blamed and mocked and crucified, but His work transformed the world and His very crucifixion led to Easter Sunday.

In today's combox, it would be great if you described a failure from which you recovered and a success that followed it.

I'm taking the guard off the combox because I don't have much internet access today, so please be respectful of the feelings of other readers. Remember that this is a place where vulnerable, often lonely, Single women with unfashionable (e.g. traditionalist) opinions should feel safe.

Crowds of Drunk Men

To be philosophical about it, it could have been worse. The guy at the tail-end of the crowd of eight (or ten or whatever) only grabbed the top of my head as I passed. In that space of time, he could have broken my nose.

However, I didn't get a sense of violence from either this guy or the guy in front of him who had made a grab at my friend and missed: I just felt a wave of disrespect. I am not sure how if it was merely Disrespect for Women or Disrespect for LOCAL Women. All I really know about these guys was that they were all white ("very white" observed my friend) and that they weren't speaking English. I am good at recognizing languages, but I hadn't been paying attention.

I hadn't been paying attention because my friend and I had had a small dinner and cocktails at our favourite cocktail bar before donning our berets and long wool coats (mine tweed) to go back into the dark evening and walk to a ceilidh dance. We were cozy and comfortable and looking forward to the dance, which was only a brisk walk over Edinburgh's South and North Bridges and down Clerk Street, hey presto. We were chatting and although I saw the big group of 20-something men--too old to be language students--coming towards us, it simply did not occur to me to get out of the way.

It has been over fifteen years since a random stranger on a Toronto street suddenly screamed in my ear, and about that since a former-Yugoslavia demonstrator on another Toronto street blew a shrill whistle in my ear. (Idiot--I supported his political opinions and would have said so, had he asked.) But I cannot remember anyone grabbing me in the street, and I always put that down to a certain inner intimidation factor. I have a rapid, don't mess-with-me walk.

And although I have seen way more than my fair share of assaults in Edinburgh, I have not seen men lay hands on women. Solitary men or pairs of men (especially under 30) are at much more risk of attack by men than "lassies" or, in our case, "wifies." The idea that however "hard" a man you are, ye cannae lay hands on a lassie or wifie (especially if unrelated to you by blood or affection) was deeply entrenched in the Scottish male psyche for a long time. Thus, although not as safe as they could be, the Bridges are not Tahrir Square.

My pal thought the men were tourists. I hope they were tourists. Because if they weren't tourists, they live here. And as aggravating as it is to experience a gang of drunken tourists acting as though they owned the streets of your town (like hundreds of "England" fans in Frankfurt in '06), it is way worse to imagine blue-collar continentals working out their resentment of Edinburgh life by grabbing at (they would have presumed) Scottish wifies as they passed.

Or is it? Did the nationality of the idiot who grabbed the top of my head and give it a shove matter one whit? Would it not be fairer to assume that he would have behaved the exact same way in his native country, towards women of his native country? And I am reasonably certain he would be much less likely to behave this way had he not been in a big group of male drinking buddies, which makes the issue of the Group and the Drink rather more important.

One way to avoid harm as a woman in an urban environment, even in elegant little , Edinburgh at 8 PM at night, with a friend, wearing a beret and a tweed coat as if you were your own Edinburgh great-granny, is to avoid crowds of drunk men. As angry as I am this morning at the thuggish way this particular man acted in his crowd towards me, I am also a little angry I allowed myself to be caught unawares. Usually it is easy to avoid crowds of drunk men; all you have to do is back up or speed up and cross the street. But I wasn't paying attention.

However, as I said, it could have been worse.

(Idiots.)