Auntie Seraphic & Young NFP Fan

Ah, the things boys say. Here is a very good and useful letter from someone under 25, somewhat edited by me:

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I am one of those readers who is at the age where my brain is not yet fully developed apparently, and so I think I would like to vent to you. I'm not really upset by this event, but I have dwelt on it somewhat so I ... just want you to confirm what I already thought. 

There's this NCB  I have known for a very long time...  He is a person I have a lot of respect for and [recently] we  talked about many different pro-life issues; [this] led into also mentioning NFP and NaPro technology. 

I have been diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), and the only reason I know and am being treated is due to NFP so I'm very grateful. I don't fit the classic profile, so people wouldn't expect it and it would probably take the average doctor much longer to have figured this out. Obviously it's somewhat disconcerting to me but because of my station in life and the fact that I'm pretty young it's not something I worry about a lot. It's also not something I throw around to everyone, mostly because not many people like to hear about people's health issues, but I'm not embarrassed about it and I'm grateful for the knowledge.

So because it fit into the conversation we were having I mentioned my diagnosis and that I was able to know pretty quickly because of Creighton charting and was lucky to have done it. He didn't know what it was, and so I gave a brief explanation and mentioned that infertility is a possible factor. 

His response was jokingly "Maybe this is one more sign you're supposed to be a sister" (There is a running joke among my friends that I am meant to be a religious sister.) It didn't even register at the time but every once in awhile it still pops in my head a month later. 

I'm sure he has no idea it bothered me, but I'm not crazy that it did a little, right? God doesn't work like that even if I somehow do end up a sister. It might be a ways off, but I don't like to think I can't have babies or that this will deter men. Like I said, I'm sure he simply spoke without thinking but maybe you could just tell the eavesdroppers that women--at least a NCG-- doesn't ever like to hear that they would be bad mothers or may not be able to have kids which means God is telling them they should just enter [religious] life. 

I'm sorry because this must hit a bit of a nerve with you. You are in my prayers and you are an amazingly wonderful spiritual mother to us all. 

Blessings,

Young NFP Fan 

Dear NFP Fan,

As this happened a month ago, the NCB probably doesn't remember what he said. In fact, I bet he couldn't have remembered if you asked him about it half an hour later. My guess is that he said whatever just came into his head because he was embarrassed. (You will never know, though, as guaranteed he can't remember.) 

Teenage boys--and maybe boys in their very early 20s--think about sex all day long--they can't help it--sexual thoughts just flow through like a river through a river bed--so it really isn't a good idea to talk to them about your reproductive system. You're a girl. They're guys. You aren't interested in them, and maybe they're not interested in you, but sexy thoughts about you will pop into their heads anyway because they can't help it. And that will embarrass them.   

Meanwhile, the easiest and best way to keep boys from blurting out foolish remarks about what infertility might mean for you is NOT to tell them that you could be infertile. This is not information you should share with anyone except someone who is courting you for marriage [i.e. a boyfriend who loves you]. It is serious TMI.  

Will some boys be deterred if they think you are infertile? Yes, definitely. And as you are not, as far as you know, infertile, you really must not talk to boys or to gossipy girlfriends about your Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

Does the fact that you have PCOS mean God wants you to be a nun? No, definitely not. Religious life is not where women go because they can't [i.e. might not be able to] have babies. Religious life is what women embrace when they are so excited about serving God, and making a whole gift to themselves to God, while living with a community of women who love God as much as they do. Fertility or infertility has nothing to do with it. God is not a eugenicist. 

I hope this is helpful.    

Grace and peace,

Seraphic 

***

By the way, it's not that adolescent brains are undeveloped, it's that they are rewiring themselves for adulthood. When you're a kid you have a really astute kid brain, and hopefully by the time you're an adult, you have an astute adult brain. But getting from kid brain to adult brain is a difficult journey over which teens have little control and can, incidentally, completely screw up with drugs and alcohol.

(I doubt my reader above is using drugs and alcohol, but I'm just throwing that in there because a recent Catholic school graduate back home, a habitual pot smoker, recently flipped out, pulled out his genitals and a knife on some girls on a streetcar, yelled obscenities at an armed policeman who raced to the scene, made a very ill-advised step forward and died in the proverbial hail of bullets.) 

One great life lesson is that young men are usually not as smart as young women about young women's feelings, unless they are gay or unusually manipulative. And, therefore, it is really not a good idea to tell young men super-sensitive stuff about anything--as young men themselves know. When I was in my late twenties, I told a male friend, an ex-boyfriend in fact, that I felt sad that I had never met Mr Right, he joked that I should give up and try women.

It wasn't that he was mean or stupid. In the five seconds before I got enough breath back to start crying, he began to apologize profusely. No, it was because he was a guy, and embarrassed, and to cover his embarrassment he told a joke. Ah ha ha.

Talking to men about super-personal stuff as if they were women opens you up to a world of hurt.  And, meanwhile, since men in the pro-life movement are the men who care most about babies, it is really, really, REALLY a bad idea to involve them in the drama of your own reproductive issues. Men gossip so much, and telling one guy that you have ovarian cysts could mean him telling any guy who asks him about you that you are actually infertile. Would you date a guy who was known for being sterile? Maybe you'd be okay with it at 40. Maybe not so much at 20.  

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.

More on Boundaries

As I was rereading yesterday's post, it occurred to me that I ought to have said something about boundaries. Guarding your heart and, let's face it, your whole self from harm involves the setting and maintaining of boundaries.

When we are kids, we are taught a lot of boundaries. We are allowed to play in these places, and not in others. We aren't supposed to talk to strangers unless our parents prompt us to do so. (A bit confusing.) We can't take candy from strangers--again, not unless our parents prompt us to do so. (Also confusing, like so many parental mixed messages.) Some of these boundaries are about our parents' comfort and ease. But most are about our personal safety.

Civilization is all about human beings--especially weak human beings, like children--surviving, thriving and flourishing in community. It is about training the strong not to hurt but to protect or at least to suffer the weaker to survive and thrive unmolested. Christian civilization stresses that all human beings deserve to survive and thrive unmolested--unless they are hurting others, in which case they must certainly be restrained.

However, human beings are not innately civilized, and human beings are thoughtless or wicked quite a lot of the time. Some human beings dedicate themselves to destroying civilization, rather like  that game where you remove parts of a toy tower (or house of cards), block by block (or card by card), to see how much you can remove without the tower crashing down. For example, how often can a child listen to hateful, misogynist, sexually explicit, rape-culture pop music before he or she starts despising women as whores or, ahem, "ho's"?

When civilization begins to fall apart, those who are weaker are most vulnerable. And, although I'm very sorry to say this, this means women, especially young women.* Not only are most women physically weaker than most men, women--especially young women--care more about what people think of us. In general, women want to be cherished, and men want to be respected. We women want to be thought of "nice," and so we often smile ingratiatingly in even the most outrageous of circumstances. We are more likely than men to be victims of political correctness because to be called racist or homophobe or any other nasty name threatens our status of "nice" faster than it threatens our jobs.

I once knew a teenager who was mentally and emotionally abused and manipulated into doing sexual stuff she didn't want to do by a boyfriend who was confined for life to a wheelchair. Disabled men can be just as gentlemanly or as abusive as other men, that's for sure. And this is where I make my Woman Trumps Everything but Child speech.

You may discover, in life, people trying to break down your boundaries or forcing you to second-guess your instincts by acting or speaking as though you are some kind of privileged tyrant, either because of your colour, your ethnic background, your religion, your sweet demeanour, your education, your nice family, your ability to walk, whatever. I highly recommend that you have nothing to do with such people, or at least tell them that they are making you feel uncomfortable, and then talk about what they said with HR (if at work) or your chaplain (if at college).

What's more, I highly recommend that if you get on an elevator and see a man who makes you feel uncomfortable, get off the elevator, even if he is a different colour from you.  If you are walking down the street and you see a man before or behind you who makes you nervous, cross the street, even if he is a different colour from you. It is very important that you privilege your physical safety over your fear of being called a racist. And if anyone ever, ever tells you that if you don't go out with him or kiss him or anything else with him it's because you are a racist, leave at once. Call your mother. Call a cab. Get the heck out.

Woman trumps race. Woman trumps gay. Woman trumps handicap. Woman trumps poor. Woman trumps ethnic group. Woman trumps everything and everyone except children and babies because most woman are more vulnerable than most men, especially in a crumbling civilization. My ethnics prof back in Canada told students always to consider, in an ethical dilemma, "the most vulnerable person in the situation." When it comes to strangers or near-strangers, the sexual revolution, the darkened street, the drunken party, that would be you, my female readers.

This is not to say you cannot inflict a lot of emotional damage on men because of course you can, and I hope you don't do so deliberately or out of thoughtlessness. But you do have to realize that although the sun is shining and the world is beautiful, there are a lot of men who will say or do absolutely anything to take advantage of you and then, after you are crying in agony of spirit, smugly congratulate themselves on their cleverness. (To such men, any lie that does the job counts as cleverness.)

So boundaries. Now that you aren't a kid anymore, it is up to you--not your parents--to draw up these boundaries and to enforce them. Here are a list of potential boundaries you might have chosen already or might find helpful:

1. You don't allow men in your dwelling unless you have known them for a long time.
2. You don't go on overnight trips/out of town with men you barely know.
3. You do not go behind closed doors with men you barely know.
4. You don't discuss "such personal subjects" (i.e. sex stuff) with men who are not your husband or boyfriend.
5. You don't discuss your marital status.
6. You don't discuss your religious beliefs in a casual way, at work or at parties.
7. You don't accept lifts from strangers.
8. You don't discuss race or politics or [whatever] at work/with strangers/ etc.
9. You don't talk to strangers on the street beyond remarks about the weather or giving directions.
10. You don't talk about your sins, except with the clergyman in whom you have chosen to confide.

To enforce your boundaries, you have to speak up. If you have to preface the stating of a boundary with, "I'm sorry, but," that's fine as long as it's just a polite convention and you are not really sorry for your boundaries and God-given autonomy. If speaking firmly doesn't seem to convince your interlocutor of the inviolability of your boundary, or if he starts calling you names (e.g. racist, prude, selfish), then I recommend walking away. And if he tries to physically restrain you, scream your lungs out. Either way, you must then call a friend or relative to tell them what happened, so that your sense of autonomy is strengthened by someone who loves you.

*Teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to STDS/STIs.

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."

The Narcotics Post

Once upon a time, a young relative left for university. I forget if they asked for advice, or if I just gave it. I may have begun the discussion with "Listen, about clubs..."

I believe the young relation smirked and said something like, "Don't get drunk?"

And I said something distinctly unPauline like, "I don't care if you get drunk, as long as you're with your friends, and you are always with your friends until you get home, and as long as you always keep an eye on your glass. No, I want to say, Don't take club drugs. They're horrible and you never know what's really in them."

So the young relative took that advice with him or her to university, and is still alive and sane today.

I was brought up in an ordinary (if rather old-fashioned and divorce-free) middle-class family, and although I have had economic ups and downs and various social crises and professional disappointments, I have always been okay, and I am sure this has something to do with the fact that I have never touched cocaine, heroin or the various club drugs on offer in the fair streets of Toronto and Boston and presumably in Edinburgh, one-time AIDS capital of the UK (not Europe, that was Barcelona).

This is not to say that I have not drunk too much on occasion, for I certainly have, most memorably at one party when I was 21, although my best friend Trish remembers that incident better than I do. Oh dear, dear, dear. Nor have I left the room in horror when the grass has come out although I must say seeing a 6'2" guy felled by the stuff like a tree was rather scary.

This is merely to say that there seems to be some fearful alchemy in narcotics that removes whatever magical protection lifelong middle-class-ness seems to provide and can send you to an earthly hell, so I have not messed with them.

I also have not messed with them because I always wanted to keep the moral high ground for conversations about drugs with my children, if I had any. The Baby Boom generation looked a bit foolish when it tried to have serious conversations about drugs with its children because of all the stuff it did at college. My mother, however, told us at least five times that she had once been invited to a party where there had been marijuana, but she hadn't gone because she had just washed her hair and it was in curlers.

Hello, whatever, when I was seventeen, I was hearing about coke parties from my fellow barista down at the cafe. And although I had a keen desire to have wonderful adventures, I didn't want to go anywhere near coke parties, thanks all the same. It wasn't just that Regina in the Sweet Valley High books died right after her first wee snort. It was the nasty criminality around it all, plus the fact that coked-up men often get violent. And a priest called "The Junkie Priest" came to my high school to warn us in advance about crack, which (believe it or not) hadn't reached the streets of Toronto yet.

Crack made cocaine affordable and even more addictive than usual. Whereas cocaine was trashy in a decadent evil rich people way, crack was trashy in a one-way-ticket to gutter and brothel way. And, no word of a lie, the only crack users I have ever to my knowledge met, were the extremely jittery shells of human beings who queued up before me at one of my government jobs for their support cheques. Their fingers were dyed black from burnt tinfoil or whatever it was. The cop standing by, apparently to protect me, made wisecracks about them and pointed out the prostitute among them. Have a nice day.

(I contrast in my mind this young Canadian cop with a young Slovak nun who worked with recovering heroin addicts in Europe, and his voyeuristic contempt with her compassionate love.)

Being involved in the Spoken Word scene in the 1990s, it was only a matter of time before Ecstasy (MDMA) came my way, although amusingly, when a poet turned up outside a club with a handful of the pills, he said somewhat apologetically that he hadn't brought me any, for he assumed a devout Catholic wouldn't take Ecstasy.

I don't think Ecstasy is mentioned in the Catechism, but as a matter of fact I had read up on the side effects of Ecstasy, and at the time everyone thought it could make you permanently depressed. ("And it was illegal," points out B.A., to whom I have read this post aloud.) Also, the poet looked so embarrassed, I patted him on the shoulder and said, No, no, that was quite all right, I had no interest in E. What I soon had interest in was ear plugs as, dear me, that rave was LOUD.

As for Edinburgh, I am about to shock local eavesdroppers by linking to the Guardian, but all you really have to do is recall Trainspotting to get an idea of how nasty life in Edinburgh can be if you are dumb or bored or depressed enough to get involved with heroin. Very occasionally I have seen a seriously strung out junkie staggering along Leith Walk or even--heaven help us--early Sunday morning on Heriot Row.

It's interesting how even drug-use has class implications. Alcohol is the most democratic. Cocaine is associated with successful (if louche) professionals like lawyers, film directors and poor Father Corapi. Crack is associated with the homeless, possibly because it generally makes you homeless. Heroin is associated with the formerly-working classes, thieves and prostitutes, possibly because it can make you a thief or prostitute. Marijuana is associated with slackers and students. E is associated with middle-class kids with money for clubs, particularly the ones who die after taking it. Gasoline fumes are associated with the poor, rural Innu.

As an urban Canadian who was in university for a very long time, I don't blink at booze or the occasional use of grass although I would go mental if my niece or nephews touched the first before they were 18 (except wine at home) and the second before they were 25. (And even then I might moan at them about the dangers of chronic use. "And it's illegal," says B.A.) I also think chronic users make lousy boyfriends--at very least for ambitious girls with places to go and people to see and babies to have.

I am not at all blase about the other stuff and, in fact, would not associate with anyone who used them, except in a professional capacity, as indeed I did when I was handing out the welfare cheques or reading funny stories at Spoken Word events. They are just too darned dangerous, they make people dangerous, and they funnel money to dangerous people.

As someone who drinks coffee and wine almost every day, and enjoys the occasional cocktail or glass of vodka, it would be hypocritical to condemn the human fascination with altering consciousness. However, anyone who thinks honestly has to admit that when short-term pleasures inspire long-term damage and human misery, not only to oneself but to society--of which the heroin-fuelled AIDs crisis in Edinburgh is but one example--it is best to give them a miss.

Nota Bene: B.A. keeps pointing out that it is illegal to consume illegal substances, and as Catholics we are obliged to follow just laws. I point out, however, that there are all kinds of substances that the law doesn't in fact cover, and we should avoid them anyway.

Update: Children in Britain are allowed by law to drink alcoholic beverages at home with their parents' consent once they are five. Five?

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.

The Casual Vacancy

Update (Nov 23): Welcome, readers of "The Hog's Head"!

***

The most successful writer in English living today is probably J.K. Rowling, who has a house in Edinburgh and is considered an Edinburgh writer. Edinburgh has three or four superstar writers, which is a cause for celebration for Edinburgh readers but perhaps a source of crippling self-doubt for other Edinburgh writers.

Writers are often an envious lot, and many writers had their knives out when J.K. Rowling dared to change genre and write a novel for adults about ordinary English life in a village that tries to hold itself aloof from the big nasty town nearby. I wasn't going to read it, but I succumbed to temptation when a friend offered to lend it to me.

By the way, conscience compels me to point out that borrowing books instead of buying your own copy is a kind of theft from the poor author. However, J.K. is rolling in money, so I think she is past caring about this kind of thing herself. My guess is she hopes merely that her books inspire people to be nicer to each other, especially to children.

This guess is inspired in part by The Casual Vacancy, which is a very good book (for adults). My biggest problem with the latter Harry Potter books was the pages and pages of very boring description that an editor less terrified of J.K. Rowling would have immediately cut out. Either whoever edited The Casual Vacancy had more guts, or J.K. herself came to him in a spirit of humility.

BTW I never had a moral problem with the Harry Potter stories; they are intensely, if subconsciously or unconsciously, Christian. Again and again they stress love, loyalty, kindness, self-sacrifice and an afterlife for those willing to accept death.

They are very much against trampling on the weak. The World (using that word as St. John the Evangelist uses it) loves stomping on the weak. In real life, the World would side with the Malfoys (rich, beautiful, with a "responsible" number of children) over the Weasleys (poor, ginger, numerous) faster than you can say "the glamour of evil." And yet in Harry Potter poor bumbling little Neville Longbottom (what a name) whose parents are no doubt costing the wizard NHS untold thousands of gold coins becomes a great hero. So does Somebody Else. The end-of-story Somebody Else twist puts me in mind of the great paradox of Gollum. Indeed, even if J.K. Rowling never sees the inside of a church, the Harry Potter stories are Christian in the same way The Lord of the Rings is.

But on to The Casual Vacancy, which is a very rooted-in-reality look at English society today. If you really want to know what England is like, going beyond fantasies born from reading English literature written before 1963, or Royal visits, or stories of immigrant grandparents, or war movies, then read The Casual Vacancy. It will make your hair stand on end, and if you are American, what is very likely to blow your mind is that white people--the native population of a European country--can be that impoverished, miserable and reviled. Their situation cannot be blamed on racism.

The Casual Vacancy shows a community where some women worship and collude with their abusive or self-satisfied husbands, where others seethe against the weakness of the men or children in their lives, and where teenage girls self-harm or live in a self-centered bubble. Some adult men are comfortable bullies, others are doting, easily-awed sons of bullies, one has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and one keeps ending up with the wrong woman. The teenage boys are a mess, either bullies or victims, striking back in devious ways. And that's just the middle-class characters.

The poor people, which is to say those who living on the housing scheme that blighted the village, live in an earthly hell of filth, drugs, sex, violence, rape, indignity, state control, and the constant threat that their children will be taken from them. I recently watched a show about very poor people who make their living from making clay pots by the Ganges. Well, those poor Indian people are about a million times happier than the poor English people in The Casual Vacancy.

The comparison is apt, too, because there is a middle-class Sikh family in The Casual Vacancy, who occasionally feel the sting of the disapproval of the local English, of both provincial middle-class morons and the almost totally demoralized poor. (The wealthy, professional adults can mostly shrug this off; it's not so easy for their kids, who have to go to school with these people.)

The parents, Vikram (a heart surgeon) and Parvinder (a GP) are fascinating to me. Vikram is the only adult whose point-of-view we never see. Parvinder is the only adult who is religious, and although her religion gives her some comfort, it does't teach her how to deal with her anger, which she takes out particularly on her youngest daughter.

So again there is no overt Christianity in The Casual Vacancy, even though the message J.K. Rowling gets across once again is that bullying and violence against the weak is evil, that shared humanity should trump family and class distinctions, that the strong must help the weak, that the weak have gifts to help the strong, and that loving self-sacrifice is transformative.

There is also, by the way, a hint that the trend of people having sex with whoever they want to have sex with, whenever, with very little thought for anyone else, especially their sex-partner, is a root cause of abject misery in any social class.

I am impressed by how well J.K. Rowling draws her characters, showing how their flaws are also their weaknesses. One is a social worker who uproots her life and her daughter's life in London to live in the same village as the man she thinks is her boyfriend. He is not really her boyfriend, and he doesn't even like her that much. He just liked knowing a woman in London he could have sex with occasionally, and he doesn't have the guts to tell her that. Both are to blame for the situation, although one might argue that the woman is even more blameworthy, for she didn't just uproot her home for her deluded fantasy of romance, she uprooted her daughter's, too. And in this she and her heroin-addled client are sisters under the skin.

The one weakness in the book is how J.K. seems to yell "See, see!" when comparing the illicit drug use of the miserable poor to the licit drug use of the middle class. But wine is a good thing and can be used in moderation; heroin is not and cannot.

The drinker in the book is a middle-aged woman whose business is on the rocks, and her husband doesn't really think this important. Always the sexy kind of woman who likes to make risque remarks, her libido goes a bit crazy and fixates on a boy band. Oddly, this is the only funny part of the book, and of course it is also sad although there is a liberating aspect to it, too.

So if you were thinking of reading The Casual Vacancy, go ahead and read it. I will warn you that there are sex scenes--albeit not sexy (in real life sex is not always sexy, which JKR points out)--bad language and a rape scene, which I skipped. It really is not for children.

The author has chosen to highlight the difference between middle-class people and the very poor (in my town they are called "schemies", after "housing scheme") by reproducing the accent of the latter. This may lead you, the reader, to see the schemies as akin to alien creatures, and thus may undercut the author's praiseworthy attempt to present them as hurting human beings. Of course, one might argue that she is presenting their aesthetically horrible way of speaking as just one more degradation they suffer.

"Gentle Raillery" is Just Nagging in Period Costume

I am thinking once again about Pride and Prejudice and the thousands of knock-offs it has inspired. I am thinking also about the different demands of real life and of novel-writing.

Romance in real life usually involves people hitting it off right away, either as friends or as strangers or mere acquaintances mutually attracted to each other. Any massive personality conflict usually comes later, ending or transforming the romance. In the beginning, all is smooth sailing and goofy smiles.

But this does not meet the demands of romantic fiction, which needs conflict right from page 1 to keep the reader interested and the plot going. After a lifetime of being forbidden from reading any but Georgette Heyer's romance novels, I read a whole glut of non-Georgette for Irony class in grad school. And it struck me that they were all the same. They all involved Woman meets Man, Man behaves Rudely, Woman chastizes Man, Man feels amused and intrigued, Woman goes off in huff, Eventually Woman realizes she had Man all wrong, Sex Stuff (or Just Kissing), The End.

Man often had steely grey eyes. All over the world there may be grey-eyed men who wonder why women berate them and then hang around expectantly.

This may be very hard to believe if your primary interaction with men and romance is through romantic novels, films and television programs, but men do not like being mocked, chastized or harangued. Not once in my life, and I dated for over 20 years, weep weep, have I ever heard a real-life man say "Dang, but I like a gal with spirit!" This cannot be because I lack spirit. I have spirit in buckets. I think that this is just a line men use (if they ever do) when they have decided in ADVANCE that they are going to court this particular woman, no matter what she thinks about it.

Beautiful Woman at Buffet Table: Would you mind not breathing down my neck?

Smitten Man: Great buffet, isn't it?

Beautiful Woman: I'd enjoy it more if you didn't breathe down my neck.

Smitten Man: Dang, I like a gal with spirit!

Do you see the distinction? You cannot make a man fall in love with you by teasing or berating him, although you might not necessarily discourage a man who is already interested in you by teasing or berating him. If a man is constantly hanging out around your desk at work and blushing, and you say with a smile, "Gracious sakes, Fred. Why don't you just ask me out for coffee and be done with it?", Fred will probably do just that. But if Fred only acknowledges your existence with an absentminded nod in the photocopy room, such "gentle raillery" will not encourage Fred as much as it will annoy him.

Elizabeth Bennet thought that Mr Darcy was a rude and pompous ass who would leave her community as suddenly as he entered it and, as she was worried that her sister was in danger of losing her heart to his best friend, the sooner they both went, the better. This is why Elizabeth stuck metaphorical pins into Mr Darcy. This is not why Mr Darcy fell in love with Elizabeth.

Darcy fell in love with Elizabeth because she had beautiful, intelligent eyes, a nice figure and amusing conversation (Chapter 6). And of course she was clever and very caring to those she loved. She was also a mystery to the people-watching Mr Darcy because she was so unlike her relations. And she must have been a refreshing change from Caroline Bingley, who did her very best to captivate him, including with "gentle raillery."

Someone quoted me from P & P the other day, thinking Elizabeth quite delightful and her speech hilarious. However, it was clear that my interlocutor had heard or remembered the speech out of context. Context is often what gets dropped from film or TV versions.

Here is the speech within the context, with my bolds to flag what must be flagged:

Chapter 10

...Mrs Hurst sang with [Caroline Bingley], and while they were thus employed Elizabeth could not help observing as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her, was still more strange. She could only imagine at last that she drew his notice because there was something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any other person present. This supposition did not pain her. She liked him too little to care for his approbation.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I love your blog. Mr Darcy is staring at me. Why?

Sincerely,
Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth,

Because he thinks you are the most beautiful woman in the room, you moron. And he's been staring at you since Chapter 6.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

After playing some Italian songs, Miss Bingley varied the charm by a lively Scotch air; and soon after Mr Darcy, drawing near to Elizabeth, said to her--

'Do you not feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an opportunity for dancing a reel?'

She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with some surprise at her silence.

'Oh!' said she,'I heard you before; but I could not immediately determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say "Yes," that you may have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt. I have therefore made up my mind to tell you, that I do not want to dance a reel at all--and now despise me if you dare.'

'Indeed I do not dare.'

Dear Elizabeth,

He was asking you to dance, toots.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness [Uh oh! Jane, that word 'archness' is going to blight countless female lives...] in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.

Miss Bingley saw, or suspected enough to be jealous; and...[s]he often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest by talking of their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in such an alliance.

***
So Elizabeth, who dislikes Mr Darcy, uses raillery to anger him and fails, and Miss Bingley, who has a crush on Mr Darcy, uses raillery to make him dislike Elizabeth and also fails. Truly, raillery is a dangerous thing. If you want a man to like you, don't use it.

And if you are determined, despite my repeated pleas not to do so, to keep Pride and Prejudice as your personal Guide to Life, please remember that Elizabeth didn't have a crush on Mr Darcy, he had a crush on her. For the love of Jane Austen and all she held holy, don't talk to your crush object the way Elizabeth talked to Mr Darcy.

Most Vulnerable

Warning: Post contains discussion of sexual assault and trauma. Sexual assault survivors might wish to avoid it. Comments moderation is on.


The trial of a gang of men who groomed and raped underage girls in Manchester has concluded. The facts that all the men involved were South Asian, usually Pakistani, and that all the girls were white British have not gone unreported.

Possibly not hearing the horrifying implication of his remark, a South Asian man who spoke up against the rapists said, "Asian girls are not available to them so they look to Western girls."

Yeah, 13 year old Asian girls are not available to them. Neither should 13 year old European girls be.

But that's not what he meant. What he meant was what he said next: "They [these South Asian men] think they're [white British women are] easy. They think they're tarts just there to be used."

As the rapists were plying their young victims with vodka, obviously they didn't think they were THAT easy. But, again, that's not exactly what Mr Shafiq meant.

What he meant was that the kind of South Asian man who will rape 13 year old white girls with this pals thinks that white women are promiscuous sluts who don't deserve respect.

Sexual Revolution, meet Racist Misogyny.

"He won't respect you," said countless generations of Western parents, and then--quite rapidly, basically c. 1980--many Western parents stopped saying that. The simultaneous eruption of the Sexual and Feminist revolutions meant that men were supposed to respect women no matter what. And, indeed, countless Western men were delighted that countless Western women were no longer so prudent with their bodies and were willing to share without all the bother and responsibility of marriage. Or payment. And, to their credit, most Western men do seem to understand that they should at least look respectful of women, no matter what the women dress or act like.

The rest of the men in the world did not get the memo. And, hey, not all Westerners did either. I grew up in Toronto, and it was not exactly a secret that some Italian and Portuguese immigrants were yelling at their daughters not to dress and act like those "putanas, Canadian girls." They had left Italy or Portugal in the 1950s or 1960s, and so it never dawned on them that "Canadian girls" (i.e. Canadian girls of every ethnic group but theirs) in the 1980s were dressing and acting no differently than Italian and Portuguese girls back home.

Being a "white woman" and "one of those putanas, Canadian girls", I am not exactly a stranger to racist misogyny, the belief that women outside one's one racial or ethnic group are sluttier and less deserving of basic human kindness and respect than the women of one's own.

Women of every race have had to put up with this crap. I can only speak to my own experience as "a white girl", and I will tentatively add that "white girls" have the added burden of being easy targets for those who resent being fish-out-of-water in countries in which they were not born or in which their ancestors did not originate. We also--and believe me, this makes me ill--carry some kind of "status symbol" value, as women of colour quite justly, I think, resent.

Then there's the whole, disgusting "revenge against the men on the bodies of 'their' women" horror that is such a part of pogroms and war. Nobody tells me the worst, but I have heard some "Fleeing from the Russians" stories that made my hair stand on end.

But you aren't in war zones, dear readers, so let's just shudder and leave that aside. Let's look at our current circumstances: most of us reside in countries where men and women of different races and cultures live and work side-by-side. This includes Poland, although whoever said Edinburgh was the least multicultural capital city he ever saw, had never seen Warsaw.

Now, most women are by nature kind, motherly creatures who want to make strangers feel welcome. And in the West we have been told a million zillion times that we are equal in dignity to men and we have been treated more-or-less equal in dignity to men, so it doesn't often occur to us that strangers might not see us that way. For this reason, it is sometimes better to err on the side of reserve.

I have just erased an illustrative anecdote. Maybe I will publish it later.

It is very sad that what to you and me and most of the men we know is just a happy smile and basic friendliness is evidence of utter slutdom to other men, but that is the way it is. So look out.

Conversely, there are men who will interpret our natural modesty and womanly reserve as racial hatred for them and will say so. Now, this is one of the most important things I can tell you, so listen to your Auntie Seraphic when she says, Some men will say ANYTHING if they think it will get them sex. Really. Anything.

If you are trying to discourage a man's attentions and he says, "What, are you racist or something?", either scream at him, if that is your personality type, or leave. Leave at once. A Cameroonian refugee named Simon Mol managed to infect over a dozen Polish girls with HIV. Apparently this charmer used to tell Polish girls it proved they were racists if they didn't sleep with him. (Male Polish student, uneasily: "How is it that you know about Simon Mol?")

The irony of this is that it isn't prudent women who are racists; it is the men who wish to sexually exploit women who are often racists. Men who wish to sexually exploit women go after targets they think are easiest (i.e. most vulnerable) or somehow "deserve" or welcome it, which very often means "the Other." Think of the men who flock to Thailand in droves. Disgusting.

It is terribly difficult to talk about race, particularly when you are white and therefore belong to a supposedly "dominant" group, which is actually, in terms of the whole wide world, a small minority. In Edinburgh, remarks about female safety in light of South Asian racist misogyny take place on the walls of the ladies' toilets in pubs, the safest bulletin board of womankind.

It is also terribly difficult because one of the racist libels used by men to punish vulnerable men of different races is "They want to rape our women." This has been used as an excuse to beat, jail and kill innocent black men in the USA.

However, it is an unfortunate fact that sometimes men do target women for reasons that are as racial as they are sexual and violent, and it certainly doesn't help women to be ignorant of this. And it also doesn't help a woman to think that it is better to risk rape than to be called a racist by some jerk she barely knows or doesn't know at all.

I don't know if there really is any such thing as "race" or if it just a social construct. But I do know that men of any race are bigger and stronger than women, and if they wanted to, most of them could simply kill most of us with their bare hands.

They have been trained not to, of course, and they almost never want to. But the fact remains that they could. So at the end of the day, when all the gentility of civilization has been stripped away, what we have are two human beings, one of who could rape and kill the other just from sheer strength, even though God has always told him not to, just because he is a man and she is a woman.*

As far as I am concerned, this reality trumps every other consideration--race, handicap, age, whatever. If you feel threatened, cross the street. Get off the elevator. Get out of the cab. Leave the room. Lock the door. Yell. Trust your instincts and don't second guess because you are afraid of being called a racist.


*Update: There is some debate about whether or not a woman should physically fight a would-be rapist. The police officer who came to my high school to talk to us about it said to fight, bite, scratch, scream, pee on the man, do whatever necessary to discourage him. For the police officer the most important thing was that we were never dragged into a car. Once you were in the car, he said, you were dead.

My own thought is that rapists tend to go for those they think look most vulnerable, e.g. elderly women, women with Down Syndrome, teenage girls, the intoxicated, the quiet and shy, the fish-out-of-water. And therefore, in scary situations, it is good to be loud and rude and ready to bite, kick, scratch and slap. In a word, to look strong. But never hit a stranger except as a last and desperate resort. Your first priority should be to get away.

Update 2: The lid is certainly off Pandora's box now. Racist misogyny is simply not acceptable, and it is a crime or cowardice to put up with it.

Hilary Cancer Free

Thanks from a friend of Hilary's to everyone who said a prayer or donated a dollar towards Hilary White's fight against cancer. See Hilary's news here.

Cancer is really a lousy thing to have, as I never really thought about until Hilary got it. I personally have been taking steps to prevent those cancers which can be prevented. For me that means more exercise, more veg, more fruit, more fibre, zero crisps, zero pie shops and much less booze. Also, as all sexually active (or formerly sexually active) women should do, I get regular tests for cervical cancer.

Long-time readers already know how I feel about sunbathing and tanning. Bad, bad, bad. At 40, I have better skin than some friends in their early 30s. And why? Well, it's partly genetic. But it's partly because I shun the sun. In Italy, Hilary and I wore huge floppy hats and long linen skirts as I pushed her wheelchair up and down cheeky little hills to the doctor's office. I only went into the sea once before dusk, and that's when I was there on holiday with that madman B.A. (After 20 minutes I fled for shelter, thus avoiding the nasty sunburn he got.)

Anyway, yay for the good news, boo to cancer, and into the cart with the fruit and veg. I think I will have an eeny glass of wine tonight to celebrate Hilary's cancer-freedom.

The Realities of Marriage

Occasionally I get an email from a nice Catholic girl who has been dating a nice Catholic boy for some months, and she is trying to decide if she wants to marry him or not. She lays out all the good qualities of the nice Catholic boy and his family and asks me what I think.

What I think is that she should marry him only if she wants to have sex with him, wash his socks and sit beside him on the couch as he watches yet another boring episode of yet another boring TV show. Because this is what the daily, domestic reality of marriage largely is, when you get right down to it. 

I'm not talking about the spiritual stuff, obviously. There are dozens of Catholics happy to tell you all about the spiritual stuff, so go read them if you want to find out about it. I think Christopher West has even developed a kind of Catholic tantra or something, so if you want to mix in some ooh-la-la with your theological reading, off you go to Chris.

Meanwhile, if you are younger than me (it seems) there is also getting pregnant, which involves swollen ankles and having a puffy face and staring down at your huge belly moaning "Come onnnnn, new baby! Hurry uuuuuup!" The new baby will usually look like your husband, so it is important to really like or even love your husband so that you love the fact that his baby looks like him. 

Oh yes. Love. I guess I should also talk about love, although now that I live in Britain it is an even more embarrassing word than sex. The problem with love is that we North Americans throw the word around a lot, and tell everyone that we love them. Even North American boys now indulge, as in "I love you, man!" And what you feel when you get a crush on someone can be called love, I suppose, although I prefer the expression "temporary insanity." The British call it "fancying", as in "Do you fancy him?" which sounds suspiciously akin to that other common expression, "Fancy a fish supper?"

For marriage purposes, however, love is not just a feeling of sexual attraction or affection but, in my experience at least, a feeling that you will absolutely die if you cannot marry this person within six  to eight months which morphs, after marriage, into the knowledge that life will really, really suck if this person escapes or dies. 

Of course,  you could argue, that is just me, Auntie Seraphic, over 35 and brimming with natural affections. What of the indecisive young?  

I would say that the indecisive young should just sit tight until they meet a person--of proven good character and appropriate family background, beliefs and education--who truly rocks their world. And this is because marriage is not something tremendously exciting in itself, on the domestic level (on the social level it is crucial to the health of society), but a man and a woman living in one space, trying to keep the space and themselves clean, earning money and spending it on boring things, having sex, arguing and watching boring TV.  That's what the "marriage lifestyle" looks like, so unless you marry someone who rocks your world, you are going to feel seriously ripped off.   

There is a cynical little term that has arisen from people who marry young and soon feel ripped off. It's called "starter marriage." But this is a little term we want to stamp out because divorce should not be an option, and if you're even thinking of divorce as your handy little escape hatch then most definitely you should not be getting married. 

Advent of Pirate, Age 7

If you have read my book, you know all about Pirate. Pirate and his mother have arrived in Scotland for their Christmas holidays. I fixed up the guest room for them; they are now both asleep on the sitting-room couch.

But when they first arrived they were all about cookies and conversation.

Pirate: I want a new cousin.

Auntie S: You can talk to your Auntie [mother-of-2] about that.

Pirate: I want a new SCOTTISH cousin!

Auntie S: Um, er, um, er, um. Sometimes people don't get to decide about that. It is God who decides.

Pirate's Mummy: I know a lady who is 43 and has a really cute 3 month old baby.

Auntie S: That's nice. That's a nice story. I like stories like that.

Pirate's Mummy: In Bulgaria there is no age limit on adopting children.

Auntie S: Goodness!

Sex and Cancer

This is one of those posts in which I have to remind you that I am not a doctor.

When I was a teenager, I read in "Seventeen" magazine that sexually active teenagers and women over 18 were supposed to have regular pap (or cervical) smears, but I never read why that was exactly. The reason why is that vaginal sex can give you a virus called HPV which can go on to give you cervical cancer. If you have a regular pap (or cervical smear) regularly, doctors can see if you have cervical cancer sooner rather than later.

This is probably the tenth time I've written this, but the scientist Natalie Angiers wrote in "Woman: An Intimate Geography" that the very scary thing about HPV and cervical cancer is that condoms don't seem to prevent them. The more men you sleep with, whether or not you use condoms, the more likely you are to get them.

Meanwhile, I know that a teenage girl is especially vulnerable to contracting HPV and other diseases because the walls of her cervix are not very thick yet.

Here is something my friend Hilary recently wrote about sex and cervical cancer. http://anglocath.blogspot.com/2011/12/dear-16-year-old-me.html

(Blogger doesn't seem to be working properly right now, so I can't embed it.)

Please read it and then come back for my following remarks. (By the way, I can't get youtube, either, so I have no idea what video Hilary has up.)

The first thing I have to say is that it is disgraceful that nobody warned my mother's or my or your generation that "free love" was potentially lethal and that even the almighty condom can't stop all venereal diseases. The only excuse for the enablers of the sexual dissolution that I can think of is that they simply didn't know: never before had so many women slept with so many men. I suspect they know now, which is why various public health bodies are so keen to inoculate as many 15 year old girls as possible against HPV.

The second thing I have to say is that a hysterectomy should not signal the end of matrimonial hopes. Not all men long to have children. Some never really think about them, and some have had children in first marriages or earlier relationships, and some discover at the age of 50 that although they'd like to get married, they would be relieved to be married to a woman who, barring a miracle, wasn't going to have children herself, e.g. a woman their own age. That's not selfish; that's just the reality of many men over 50.

Meanwhile, as women over childbearing age marry or remarry, I don't see why a woman with a hysterectomy might not marry or remarry, too.

The third thing I have to say, and this is not in criticism of Hilary, who has written a generous post, from a place of illness, disillusionment, fear and pain, and it is that it is in general a bad idea for an unmarried Catholic woman to write on the internet about her past sexual sins, no matter how far in the past they may be.

Long-time readers will remember how I discourage female readers from revealing whether or not they are virgins to anyone other than their doctor or their date-has-been-set-hall-has-been booked fiances. Your virginity or lack thereof is nobody's business but your own, and for various reasons (freaking out the sensitive, gossipy friends, creepy virgin hunters, "how come you would for him but not for me?", etc.) you should keep it to yourself.

But I will also say, as I have said many times before, that you should also keep a lid on the sexual sins of your past life because they freak out religious men, particularly younger or less sexually experienced religious men. Men's imaginations are on a hair-trigger where sex is concerned anyway, and so if they discover the girl they really like has been with some other guy, their imaginations go wild. They torture themselves wondering who and what and where and when, and they feel competitive and jealous and potentially inadequate and generally awful. And they occasionally (often?) move the Publicly Known to Have Slept Around Girl off the Potential Wife list, no matter how humble and contrite she might now be.

And so another lie of the sexual revolution is revealed. Not only can sleeping around end up in cancer, a lot of good young men still feel uncomfortable knowing that women they might bring home to their mothers have slept around. Yes, never-married girls do have to tell their fiances whether they are virgins or not and if they have an incurable sexual disease, but I cannot think of any man not your doctor or your very trusted confessor who needs to hear about your past sexual actions.

And if you and/or your fiance has been sexually active, make sure you both/he gets checked out for HPV* and any other sexually transmitted disease before you get married. After that, it's a regular pap (cervical) smear for you. Life is hard, and in many ways the sexual dissolution made it harder. As Sister Wilfreda said back in Grade 9 religion, "Sin has its own built-in punishment."

Update: Actually, it seems that men cannot be tested for HPV. This is not good news.

Update 2: A handy article from Uncle Sam. Read all the words.

Live Every Day

Today I greeted B.A., who went to work. Then I walked to the nearest grocery store, which is through a lightly wooded area and network of paths, and bought coffee and little doughnuts. I tidied the sitting-room and set out the coffee and doughnuts. My Polish teacher arrived at 11. We had a nice long Polish lesson. The fact that in Polish, as in Latin, the neuter nominative is the same as the neuter accusative delighted us. Yay, Indo-European!

I started this post, and then my brother called me on Skype. I saw him and his two children, and we had a brief chat. Then I called my father on Skype, and we too had a video chat.

This morning I also read my friend Hilary's update about her health. The news is not good. Hilary's cancer is not gone, and she may be ill for the rest of her life. Her life may very well be shorter than it would have been, had she not got cancer. She has agreed to have a hysterectomy, anticipates early, violent menopause, and predicts that she will never get married.

She is now thinking about what she should do for the rest of her, possibly shortened, life.

Myself, I do not know when I am going to die. And I don't know when B.A. is going to die either, so I don't know how much longer I am going to be married. I know a woman who married in her late twenties to a man in his mid-twenties, who suddenly died of a heart-attack less than a year later. Nobody knew until the autopsy that he had had a series of minor heart attacks; he seemed a perfectly healthy young man.

Essentially, we are all going to die, and the question that confronts us all is "How do we live, knowing that we are going to die?" We do not know what we are going to be doing, so what do you hope you will be doing? Will you go when you are creeping here and there bitterly, having resented not getting what others have got, or will you be striding joyfully through the life you have when you are called suddenly into the next room?

"The Innocents"

I always have Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner and Hallowe'en on the same night. This year it was not on actual Hallowe'en but on All Hallows Night, so I was very tired this morning, let me tell you. I made all the food my family has for Thanksgiving, except for pumpkin pie, because I couldn't find anything pumpkin in Tesco, and the roast turkey was actually twin chickens. Plus I was dressed as "Dorothy" in The Wizard of Oz. I trotted around the kitchen in ruby slippers. Was I glad to finally sit down and have a glass of wine! Whoo!

After supper, the party settled down in the sitting-room to watch The Innocents, a film adaptation of Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw. It stars Deborah Kerr, is very scary and is very interesting from a psychological point of view. Are there really ghosts, or is the heroine imagining it all?

This question was of particular interest for me because I am a very imaginative person and I have found it very, very important in my life to sort out what really is true from what I imagine to be true. But at the same time, I have discovered that sometimes I am absolutely right when others think I am just imagining things.

In matters of the heart, this can be particularly difficult to sort out. There's the problem of thinking Johnnie has a massive crush on me, and then discovering that maybe Johnnie doesn't have a massive crush on me, and then feeling disappointed because, actually, it wasn't that Johnnie had a crush on me but that I had a crush on Johnnie. How humiliating.

Unrequited love is one of the most humiliating aspects of everyday life that I can think of. And I am thinking about it today because recently I got a letter from a woman who chased a guy, without realizing/admitting that's what she was doing, and when he broke up with her, she was devastated. The break-up seemed to come out of nowhere. She was so sure they were meant for each other.

When "Volker" of my book (plot spoiler!) broke up with me, my friends and I were so shocked that we called all such surprise break-ups "Volkers" ever after. Volker would no doubt be horrified to know that, so let's hope he's not still reading. But after some years' distance from that humiliating and surprising event, I can admit that it was not so surprising after all. Although I tried reeeeeealllieeee hard not to pursue Volker, there was some serious Volker-pursuing behaviour in there. Boo. Left to his own devices, Volker would not have asked me out in the first place.

(For those who are new here, a cornerstone of my overarching theory of male psychology is that men don't stay interested very long in women who pursue them and therefore are easy to win. [Exception: much older men will fall for the happy-go-lucky girls crazy enough to flirt with them.] Despite massive social engineering, all but the laziest men want to woo and win the princess in the tower, taking a manhood-proving risks to do so. Being given everything on a plate makes boys bored, cranky and infantile. Polish guy over here agrees with me.)

Anyway, my correspondent described the courtship/dating period in great detail, so even if she could not see where she had been "the (courting) man" and her ex had been "the (courted) woman" (complete with early explanations that he had been hurt and needed time to reflect, etc.), I could. So I gritted my teeth and pointed them out. I felt rather awful about this because, really, facing up to one's mistakes when it comes to courtship is sooooo painful. If someone points them out to you, you don't feel like thanking them. You feel like killing them.

However, it is better to live in reality than in a fantasy world, which is what I think every time I sit down before Confession and force myself to do an examination of conscience. Bleah!

Auntie Seraphic & Stopping Someone Else from Sex

This was one of those emails that made me ponder the usefulness of being a married lady. Married ladies can talk about sex as if they know something about it without anyone thinking, "Hey! How come she knows so much?"

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

A not-especially-close friend of mine recently asked for my help in coming back to the faith. She was raised Catholic, but hasn't been practicing recently. Now she wants to return to the Church, and I'm excited for her.

The problem is that she has been dating an agnostic for about three years, and they are sexually active (although I hate using that phrase). She recognizes that coming back to the Church would mean not having sex with her boyfriend any more, which I think is a good first step. The problem is that she, as a recent revert, is struggling with how to explain to him their need to stop; she isn't too familiar with Catholic teachings on these sorts of things. In the meantime, he doesn't seem to perceive any problem with the situation, and wants to continue sleeping with her. Apparently, he has also said that he wants to marry her someday, and I think this is making it harder for her to stop.

My question is twofold: how should I approach the topic with her, and are there any good resources to which I could direct her?

Thank you!

Sincerely yours,

Reversion Resource Guide

Dear Reversion Resource Guide,

I'm going radically revise my initial reponse to be even less dismissive of the agnostic boyfriend. Somehow my teenage-era horror of agnostic boyfriends who talk their girlfriends into having sex with them clouded the sun of my middle-aged married lady charity. Men who enjoy having consensual sex with their girlfriends of three years are not actually the scum of the earth. They are just ordinary guys. A guy who tries to go out and bed a new woman every night is doing it for a cheap and nasty thrill. A guy who cuddles up to the same woman for three years is doing it to feel loved and to express love. So I'm going to rewrite my response to take into consideration that Mr Agnostic is most likely not a douche bag but a guy who loves his girlfriend and will feel really hurt if she turns off the sex tap.

Okay, it's nice that this girl wishes to become a more authentic Catholic. Although her serious sins have cut her off from Grace, she never really left the Church, of course, unless she publicly repudiated her. I don't quite understand why she needs your help, however. Are there no priests around? She needs to talk to a priest.

She needs to talk to a priest because a priest is going to understand a lot more about where she and her boyfriend are coming from than a Nice Catholic Girl who thinks the first step to becoming a better Catholic is to stop having sex. Yes, pre-marital sex is pretty bad. It is a serious sin. But Christianity does not begin and end with sexual purity but with the Blessed Trinity. Christianity is not a set of rules but a relationship with Almighty God in His three Persons. Christianity is a relationship with God in light of His revelatory Incarnation, Mission, Death and Resurrection. Frankly, I'd start with prayer. Does she pray? Does she read Scripture? Does she think about, read about and talk to Jesus of Nazareth?

The problem isn't that this girl is having sex. The problem is that this girl is having sex with someone to whom she isn't married. The solution to the problem has absolutely nothing to do with you. The solution is for her to say to her boyfriend, "Look. I believe in and love Almighty God, and Almighty God wants me to be fully committed to the man with whom I share my bed. It's time we got married, baby."

This may very well surprise Mr. Agnostic Boyfriend if your acquaintance has hitherto shown absolutely no reluctance in the past three years to sleep with him outside of marriage. And Mr. Agnostic Boyfriend, upon hearing that his girlfriend wishes now to become a better Catholic, might be afraid that this means she wants to dump him. She should assure him that she doesn't want to dump him, she just wants to please Almighty God.

Of course--and forgive me for my cynicism here--it may be that she is bored with her boyfriend and wants an excuse to stop sleeping with him. If this is so, you need to be so far from the situation, you will be in another zip code entirely.

This girl didn't write to me. You did. And, therefore, you are my first concern. You sound like a very nice girl, and I know very well that it is thrilling and flattering to feel like the Holy Spirit is using you to bring about the salvation of another. However, I suspect (and this is in no way shameful, really, considering your age and state in life) that you don't understand how sexual relationships between men and women work. You don't seem to understand that even very nice (if disobedient-to-God) women like to have sex and aren't just tricked into it (especially after the first year) by vague promises of marriage.

It is absolutely impossible for you to convince another woman not to have sex when she wants to have sex. Three years of sex is a hard habit to break, and frankly, only falling in love with another man (or simply falling out of love with this one) is likely to make this girl break it. That man may very well be Our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, it should be. If she does love her boyfriend, only knowing and loving Our Lord better than she does now will make her choose His will over her current set-up.

One of the most important things we were told in ministry school was that, when we were out of our depth,we acknowledge it and refer our friend/client/sheep (whoever)to someone better informed. When an undergrad under my care told me of his/her Sister Faustina-like visions, I sent him/her straight to a famous priest-professor of spiritual direction.

In your case, unless you do have an understanding of what it means to be in a long-term sexually active relationship (which I doubt), I think you are out of your depth. Think of the best, smartest priest you know and suggest your friend and her boyfriend talk to him.

Yes, the boyfriend. He, too, has an immortal soul. He is not just the potential roadblock to the reversion of your non-practising Catholic pal. He is a real person with feelings and a soul Christ died to save.

If you include the boyfriend in your suggestions, and she recoils, that may mean that she doesn't want to include him in her journey and a growing relationship with Christ and, therefore, that she doesn't love him anymore. And if this is the case, once again you need to distance yourself from a seriously toxic situation that has nothing to do with you. If she doesn't love the man, she should dump him. If she loves him and he is otherwise a man of character, then she should marry him. End of story.

End of THEIR story. It's not your story. Say "Why don't you get married?", maybe give the girl a copy of "Mulieris Dignitatem" and something on marriage, refer her to a good priest and pray for her. But for heaven's sake do not get involved in the psychodrama of Her and Him and God.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

The Saddest Emails

I get a lot of emails, kids. There's a lot of drama out there beyond my 17th century Scottish attic.

Women love men who don't love them back, and men pursue women who are alarmed by their attentions. Men and women have great hopes, based on not very much, about other men and women who eventually dash those hopes. Men and women struggle to be chaste in a world that laughs at chastity but merely says "Sucks to be you" to those who suffer the age-old hurts that accompany vice.

The saddest email I ever got, which appeared in my in-box as a no-reply comment, was from an anonymous young woman who said she had "slipped" only once and now had HIV.

I am reminded of this today by an email from a Catholic woman whose lukewarm love interest has just told her he has herpes. She doesn't yet know if she does.

"Go to the doctor" I wrote.

Before the spectre of venereal disease, that's all I can say. Break it off with the jerk. Go to the doctor. Get tested. Find out. I'm really sorry you are suffering.

It shouldn't take an incurable disease to make a woman see that the man who won't commit to her but still hangs around is clear and present danger to her happiness. Sometimes, however, it does.

The sickness of our age is that we privilege the will over the intellect. We prefer to think the world is what we want it to be, not what it is. Perhaps the most extreme and visible example of this is the man who has his genitals surgically removed, swallows umpteen hormones, dons huge high-heel shoes and tells everyone around that he is now a woman. Thanks to the sickness of the age, some governments and societies choose to humour him. It is unlikely that they will be woken up by some child shouting "The Empress has no vagina!" Children don't usually know exactly what is wrong with the man dressed as a woman, though they may certainly shrink away in fear and confusion. They have not yet learned how to lie politely.

We also prefer to believe that pre- or extramarital sex won't hurt us. Although individual Catholics profess to be--and often are--well-versed in the Gospel of Life, part of us is troubled and convinced by the siren song of the chattering classes that says there is nothing wrong with pre- or even extramarital sex. After all, we all know very nice people who got or get "away with it." The thing is, though, very, very, very few people will admit to ever having contracted a venereal disease or anal cancer, or of having had a problematic secret pregnancy that just ... miraculously went away.

Sometimes I think our age is floating on an oil slick of dreams over the ocean of reality.

Thanks to the extended adolescence of people in the West and the stultifying effects of political correctness, it is harder and harder to do this, but we must all be rooted in reality. Christians are mocked by a herd of horoscope-readers for believing the Gospel, but the Gospel is based in the historical realities of a community in relationship with Reality Himself. In order to live in correct relationship to Truth, we must be rooted in the truth. We must constantly demand of ourselves the truth. And one of the truths, the very hard truths, is that we are sinners and we screw up.

It is not a good idea to tell others far and wide that your sexuality is troubled by sinful desires and actions. To do so shows a lack of laudable decorum and dignity. But you must, must, MUST tell yourself. Even if your sexual sins are minor, you must keep an eye on them and yourself.

Being beset with sexual temptations and even giving in to the least of them does not make you a bad, worthless person. It makes you a person in search of God's mercy like everybody else. To give into sexual temptations--for whatever reason--while pretending to yourself that you are not is simply irrational. If you sin, for God's sake know that you are sinning. Admit it to yourself if to nobody else. Give up your idea of yourself as a special, pure, sexless being, superior to so many other people you know, and try to do better. Don't just give it up as a bad job and do worse, or rationalize what you are doing as just fine and "at least I'm not a slut like So-and-so."

Satan is the Father of Lies. We are lied to all the time. But, worse, we lie to ourselves. We don't want to believe that sex makes us vulnerable to disease, or that condoms don't always work--especially in frantic, hurried, under-the-bushes situations--but it does, and they don't.

There's an HIV awareness poster in my local medical centre that shows a hot gay guy with his head on the chest of another hot, presumably gay, guy. The one visible face glowers at the camera in a smirky, sexy way. It strikes me as crazy to fight HIV among gay men by showing them erotic images, but there you go.

This particular poster says "Relationships don't protect you from AIDS. Condoms protect you from AIDS."

This is the stupidest thing I have read in a medical office in my life. Surely what protects multitudes of people from AIDS--and a host of other STDs--is the dread, not only of getting it, but of giving it to the people one loves, or of having to tell loved ones that one has it and why. Next to the sexual abstinence of chaste Single people, the best protection against I know against AIDS is a marriage between a man and a woman who love each other devotedly. Love is not the same thing as sexual attraction. Love is love, not sexual desire, and any adult you want to be around knows the difference.

The greatest relationship on earth is the relationship between you and Truth. If you remain firmly rooted in reality, you will be a hundred times safer than if you live in dreams.

The truth will set you free of lies, and it can also keep you safe.