This is what I grew up with. Back in the 70s and early 80s (when I was little), Sesame Street was pretty progressive. Unlike other kids shows, it was about urban life. It was about the variations that you saw in family life, the realities that little kids in cities might experience. Sure, there were little field trips to the farm or the zoo or the forest sometimes, but the thing that really set Sesame Street apart back in those days was that it related best to city kids, city life, and all the diversities of existence that implies. I think, looking back, that Sesame Street played a pivotal part in my eventual desire to live in cities.

But let’s get back to this clip and talk about the revelation I found myself turning over in my head this morning. This cute little song talks about all the different ways in which a group of people living under one roof can be a family. They care about each other, they take care of each other. Whether it’s a single mom and her kid or a multigenerational mob, they’re a family.

Not so, says the rhetoric of THE FAMILY.

The Family, capital T, capital F, is something that we hear a lot about from self-described social conservatives. They lament its diminishing presence in the American landscape. They claim, until almost literally blue in the face, that The Family is the central and most important unit in our culture, and that every attack on The Family is essentially an attack on America itself.

What I’ve come to really grasp lately is that The American Family that the American Family Association is so desperate to preserve, The Family that James Dobson focuses on, is a highly specific construct that is coded in so many ways to exclude nearly every “family” most Americans find most, well, familiar. The rhetoric of The Family presents a friendly face for the racist, sexist and xenophobic policies of the greater conservative right. Nearly every vile, hateful idea can be somehow justified if it can be executed in defense of The Family, an unquestionably sacred construct central to the Conservative American Identity.

First, it may without saying, The Family is Christian. Even a similarly structured family to the one generally accepted by The Family’s fans is essentially a non-family if they aren’t. The controversy surrounding the TLC show All American Muslim is one example. Christian faith is repeatedly invoked as an essential ingredient to The Family. Though the language is less explicit regarding this, The Family is white. There’s a bit of a chicken/egg thing here: non-white families are more likely to adopt non-nuclear family strucures due to a number of reasons (culture, economics, necessity), which are seen as subversions of the traditional mom-dad-kids unit. Since white folks are more likely to have a nuclear family, the nuclear family is more likely to be white. But while it was once much more explicitly stated that non-whites were not qualified as The Family, the economic factor is now the watermark for who does and does not count. White people who can’t afford to get married (or divorced) are now poor enough to qualify for the collective disdain of people who want to defend “traditional family values.”

What’s more troubling about this, though, isn’t just the inherent racism, classism and sexism that denies familyhood to anything that falls outside this narrow category. The ugliest part of this is that The Family could very well be abusive, oppressive, ignorant, based on lies (i.e., a closeted father or mother, extramarital affairs, hidden addictions). But as long as the structure itself remains intact, it’s the only family worth recognizing, defending or protecting. Unlike our little Sesame Street song, it’s not love that holds The Family together. It’s demographics. Rules. Order. Institutions. And yes, faith, but what good is faith alone when a family doesn’t have love at its core? Nothing about The Family as conservatives define it guarantees love or sharing or concern.

To qualify for the favor of the Religious Right, The Family must feature two married parents, children, and a guiding faith. The Family is somehow less of a Family if the parents are divorced. Certainly not a Family at all if the parents are of the same gender. Not quite a Family if there is a female breadwinner, or if there is a stay-at-home dad. And seriously lacking if the marriage occured after the children were born, or just never happened at all.

Their obsession with The Family has nothing to do with building happy, harmonious or loving families. They may believe that by virtue of simply *being* a family somehow assures happiness and mutual affection, but they do not recognize that love, affection and sharing is actually what makes a family a family worth having.

So all of these calls for a return to “family values,” all of this hand-wringing about the decline of The Family, and, most significantly, all the legislation that punishes anyone who wants to live outside the confines of “traditional family” structures (birth control and abortion restrictions, lack of equal-pay laws, bans on gay marriage, tax credits for being married or having children) are based on a structural idea of a family. It’s based on the idea that there is only one kind of family and that if everyone could build for themselves that one kind of family, that structure can somehow perform sociocultural magic. It can restore the economy. It can eliminate moral transgressions. It can improve our image among other countries. It can lower crime.

Just like most mythical creatures, The Family has special powers.

But if anything has been proven and re-re-reproven over the six millennia or so of moral legislation in the Western world, it’s been that nobody can truly legislate morality. The Lex Julia didn’t stop people from being gay or having illegitimate babies in ancient Rome, and gay marriage bans and abstinence-only education aren’t keeping people from being gay or having illegitimate babies now.  I think after so many thousands of years, it might be time to admit that trying to make every family into The Family isn’t working. And maybe, just maybe, The Family isn’t the magical, foundational, sacred structure some think it is.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

This sentiment used to ring hollow to me. It seemed to me to be a rather simplistic notion tracking back to the idea of bravery. Which, as my sister has explained to me, is often just the dismissal of common sense in favor of impressing others. But I think I finally understand what FDR was so presciently recognizing in this speech (and for God’s sake, go read/listen to the whole thing… it’s beautiful and so, so timelessly relevant). Because right now, far too many of us are acting on fear. Fear of people unlike themselves, fear of ancient grudges and centuries of oppression being taken to task, fear of their own diminishing primacy.

We live in a nation where we are denying individuals basic human rights rather than expanding them. We have denied citizens the right to enjoy the benefits of marriage with the partner they choose. Some states have decided to allow doctors to deny women the right to a complete understanding of their health care options if they happen to be pregnant. In many states, we have enacted policy that keeps the children of new Americans from fully realizing the opportunities this country has to offer.  These are not laws that better our nation. These are not laws that protect people or keep us from harm. These laws do nothing more than constrict liberty and the pursuit of happiness for very specific groups of people. These are fearful laws.

Those who advocate actions like this may not see them as fear-driven, but at the root of it, the denial of human rights to another human being will always stem from the fear of what they would do with such rights. Like the homophobic man, afraid that a gay man would treat him the way he’s always treated women, the straight, white American man is afraid of the consequences of being the minority. This isn’t my fancy graduate school education talking. They say it themselves. You can find it in any given comments forum on The National Review. Even public figures are baldly admitting that the fight here is not for a greater moral reality, but against the diminishing power of the hegemonic group. One of the minds/pocketbooks behind the Arizona immigration laws, John Tanton  (hate group founder and advisor, also, to the Arizona State Senator that Mitt Romney has informally named as who he would look to for immigration policy cues) has made his motivations clear:

“To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?”

The immigrants are taking over, and there is a black man at the helm of the country. If you’re the type of person who thinks that race is a really important indication of one’s intentions, instead of an arbitrary and facile demarcation used by only the smallest of minds to make decisions on who is most fit for what types of leadership or citizenship (I think they call those types of people “racists”), you would be scared, too.

You might think the opposition to gay marriage is motivated simply by homophobia, but it’s not. While there are plenty of people who advocate against gay marriage because they hate homosexuality, this issue actually has deep roots in religion’s need for a high level of procreation. Churches need a steady population of faithful followers and contributors, into perpetuity. The objection to homosexuality is typically just the age-old objection to non-procreative sexuality of any stripe. But in America, we not only fear non-procreative sex for the power it gives people over their own destinies, we also fear being outnumbered. And this dovetails with our other pet fears. So when Senator’s wife and apparently “not political person” Jodie Brunstetter let slip that the North Carolina gay marriage ban was actually designed to “protect Caucasian marriage,” she gave voice to another fear behind such legislation.

And while the anti-woman legislation that seems to be oozing its way through far too many state houses and senates may be easy to characterize as the desperate Bible-thumping of a nation that’s lost its “moral compass,” it is about fear, too. The fear that women in control of their lives will supplant men as the leaders of our culture, our businesses, our political bodies. The fear of a world where the “natural” order of things can no longer be relied upon. The fear that women will some day have the power to denigrate and oppress men the way that women have been oppressed for so long. Sean Hannity’s BFF, the reverend Jesse Peterson has voiced this fear:

“[...]they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men, in the good old days, understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it and they understood that if they let them take over, this is what would happen.”

Emphasis added: because it implies that men are no longer men. Something fundamental has changed. Men are no longer men, women are no longer women (as we used to understand them). So, it’s probably best to try and keep as many of them from controlling their reproduction as we can… the more women in aprons, the less women telling us what to do.

Changes- the kinds worth making, anyway- are never easy. But throughout history, the trend is (eventually) toward the continued expansion of liberties, not the restriction of them. It is difficult to think of a case in which those who have advocated the restriction of liberties for a certain group have been proven to be on the right side of history. I can’t help but think that these are the death throes… this is the beginning of the end.

Yes, fear is a powerful motivator. But change only begets more change. While the fear of a browner nation may motivate some people to the polls, it will not really keep the nation from becoming more brown. While the fear of gay unions somehow diminishing straight marriages or decreasing the white birth rate may spur a few donations, it’s not going to keep people from loving who they love. While the fear of the powerful female might get a few signatures on a petition to intrude on women’s medical decisions, it’s not going to keep women from working hard, succeeding, and changing the face of the American workforce.* Much like global warming is going to continue whether one believes in it or not, these changes are going to keep happening, no matter how much they are feared.

The gays aren’t going back in the closet. The immigrants aren’t going to stop crossing borders. The president isn’t going to stop being black (or awesome). Women aren’t going to go back to their Betty Draper kitchen and decide to stop being secretaries of state or the head of the IMF. Reality marches on. And in the future, we’ll look back on this period and realize that the only thing we truly had to fear was fear itself.

Someday, I'll be able to fully articulate my regret for this haircut.

I was once a 25-year old girl who took herself too seriously.

I know, this is probably hard to believe. No? Oh, OK, then.

Del Rey’s lyrical style makes me think of the many times in my younger years when I would walk right into the slavering maw of bad decisions (shitty jobs that paid less than I’d make wearing a green apron, boys who ride fixed-gear bicycles, a taste for tequila that became an appetite) on the sole rationalization that it would one day make for a good story. And the reason her music speaks to me about these experiences even more is that her lyricism comes from that knowledge that a bad choice either has been made or is hovering temptingly within reach, combined with the lack of experience to fully articulate it. Now that I’m 30 I can look back on my early/mid 20s and the story is well-seasoned, oft-told, tempered by the passage of time. But when you’re in the thick of it and you’re so close to the bad decisions and the pain and lessons of it all, you struggle to put such stories into words. And you wind up with stuff like this:

“Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry
Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough
I don’t know why
Keep making me laugh,
Let’s go get high
The road is long, we carry on
Try to have fun in the meantime

Come and take a walk on the wild side
Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain
You like your girls insane” (From Born 2 Die)

 How many times did I write this kind of blather when I was in my early 20s? Many times.It’s hard to reflect on the fucked-upedness of a situation when you’re kissing in the rain. And sometimes, it’s nice to think about what it’s like- that nagging feeling that something is really stupid and making the choice to ignore it. That’s what being young is about. Anyone who makes all the right decisions in their early 20s isn’t worth listening to, either at a bar or on a record. All the better if they can make it poetic, but if they can’t, there’s something about that, too. Lana Del Rey’s lyrical ineptitude, in my opinion, speaks to the immediacy of the experience she’s trying to sing about. Take this set of lines, for example, from “Video Games:”

“He holds me in his big arms
Drunk and I am seeing stars
This is all I think of

Watching all our friends fall
In and out of Old Paul’s
This is my idea of fun
Playing video games”

Conor Oberst, who is what you might call a *good* songwriter, has a similar tone in “Lua,” fromI’m Wide Awake It’s Morning.” This song also describes the casual self-destruction of youthful addiction:

“I’ve got a flask inside my pocket we can share it on the train
If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same
We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain
But what was normal in the evening, by the morning seems insane.”

Even though Oberst’s lyrics also paint a picture of cavalier alcoholism and recklessness, he seems to come at the story with just enough perspective and experience to judge his past behavior (we sure killed all the pain!). On the other hand, Del Rey’s lyrics demonstrate that she is still swimming in the chaos of the drugs and booze and druggy, boozy “love,” to the point where she can’t see outside of the world it has constructed for her. She doesn’t see it as medication, she doesn’t see it as damaging. It’s “all she thinks of.” And from within it, she sees none of Oberst’s regret or self-reflection. She’s not there yet. And she won’t be, for a while. It may not make her a good songwriter, but to me, anyway, it makes her an evocative one.

Or maybe that song is just really fucking catchy. That could be, too.

Let me make something absolutely clear here: Not even the president of the United States can “end” the operation of a legally operating, private organization, no matter how much you want him to end abortion.

Much like our overall political discourse has been distilled to this false-dichotomatic, simplistic football game of “my team” versus “your team,” the office of the president has been rendered into a bizarre political version of American Idol (Which is especially true of the GOP primary process this year: overlong, with upsets, weirdos, a big dollop of batshit crazy and at the end we’re still stuck with the same autotuned blandness we knew was going to win from the start. Think of Herman Cain as the “Pants on the Ground” guy, it works even better). The president, in the strictest of Constitutional terms, does not really have that large of a role in legislation, amending the constitution or foreign affairs. The president can command the military during congressionally-approved wars (with exceptions for military interventions like Libya, but proceeding militarily without congressional approval is apparently only considered by Congress to be an impeachable offense when the President is black… I digress). He can appoint judges, officers and ambassadors. He can make vacancy appointments, sign treaties, receive visiting ambassadors and issue pardons. And he can veto bills, but not if Congress *really* doesn’t want him to. So there’s like, veto power (which can be overriden), a LOT of HR, management of the process of bombing the shit out of a place (but only with prior congressional approval… mostly) and very little legislative power beyond saying, “hey if you could just, you know, pass this bill, that would be super.”

I don’t know the exact point at which the office of president became something so much more than an administrator and an appointer of officials. Maybe it was FDR’s larger-than-life, saved-the-world presence, maybe Reagan’s movie-star persona, on both sides of the aisle, our celebrity culture has mutated the role of president far beyond its actual job description. Socially-conservative voters expect the president to shine a light of moral righteousness, and exercise faith-based judgements in his work. Progressives want someone who can lead a country away from greed and inequality toward a more just and peaceful world. The presidency has become, on both ends of the political spectrum, much more about who we think the president is or should be as an individual, and much less about what he actually can do. Which is problematic for many reasons, but chief among them has to be the fact that we ignore the things we should pay attention to because we aren’t clear on just what power the president has. 

As a population, we insist on voting for someone who exemplifies ideological ideals and whose rhetoric appeals to us. But we don’t educate ourselves on exactly how “our guy in the race” could actually implement any of the things we hear him tell us about. Or even if he can. And what’s more, we don’t even bother voting for the people who check and balance that power… midterm election turnout averages 15-20% less when the top slot isn’t open, and the demographics show just who is making those midterm choices.

My point is… voters need to understand that the President is not our American Idol, he’s not supposed to represent our greatest moral aspirations or even to resemble our understanding of ourselves. And he’s definitely not in any kind of a position to “get rid of” an organization like Planned Parenthood. Americans need to know all of this not only because it’s basic civics, but because our founding fathers built this system for a reason. They wanted us to be represented by people who understood us and our principles, as only someone locally associated with the radically different regions of this country could. They wanted us to vote for these representatives, so our interests and concerns would be brought to the federal landscape. They wanted the power of that representative body to be checked by a president (Notice they chose the title of “president,” in the spirit of running the nation like you’d run a company… not a theocracy, not a serfdom, not an oligarchy. A company.) not just to prevent mob rule, but to put a face and an individual to administrative tasks like treaties and appointments. And none of this plan works well when we don’t inform ourselves and take an interest in self-representation beyond the presidential mythos.

Here’s what I think. The GOP’s real goal is to make absolutely certain that Obamacare is a failure. Nearly everything about the Obamacare plan threatens corporations that the GOP is tied to, and if the Affordable Care Act is something that garners the favor of the electorate, Obama scores a BIG WIN for anyone with a D after their name. The Republican Party’s corporate and political allegiances require the failure of the Affordable Care Act. But the truth is, the only way to ensure the destruction of a system that so obviously benefits most of the citizenry is to ensure that the citizenry never actually benefits from it. And in order to kill the ACA, its detractors need to keep people from feeling its benefits in their real, everyday lives.

Huge, huge numbers of women use hormonal birth control, or some kind of non-permanent birth control method. The costs for this for uninsured women can be really high. Hell, it can be high if you ARE insured. I was on an individual plan for years that didn’t cover my birth control pills… even though the prescription was for the treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was paying anywhere from $80 to $120 a month for a medication I required. For my health. I enjoyed the not-having-a-baby bonus of taking the pill, but I spent a lot of money on something that my insurance refused to cover. And this was when my finances were TIGHT. Like, doing laundry in a bathtub tight. Like, pretending not to notice the mice at Biglots when I was trying to get a week’s worth of groceries out of $15 tight.

My point? Women are going to NOTICE what they can do when they’re not spending anywhere from $40 to $120 on their birth control. They’re going to care. They’re going to be able to use that money for things they enjoy. They’re going to benefit from this. This is a part of Obama’s health care plan that will resonate with a huge number of people from ALL political backgrounds. This small part of a big bill is going to make a positive financial impact on the daily lives of women everywhere.

I paid good money for these mood swings.

By my own casual calculations, I would estimate that in the seven years that I’ve paid for my own birth control pills, whether a copay or the whole cost, I’ve spent somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand dollars on the pill. There were several months there where I could have really used that $80. And there are plenty of women right now who balance out the choice every month… can I really afford my pills? What if I just take my chances? Besides the cost savings, women will benefit from not having to make those kinds of choices. Again, win for the Affordable Care Act.

The GOP has latched on to the “Religious Freedom” argument because they know that the “what we really need is for women to keep having to pay out the ass for birth control pills so they won’t support Obama” argument won’t win them as many friends and followers. You can almost *always* bet that when the rhetoric turns to fetus-worship, “moral objections” and slut-shaming over a birth control method that almost nobody has a real problem with, there is an ulterior motive at play. And for my money, this is about keeping a giant part of the electorate from experience a tangible, real-world benefit from a piece of legislature that the GOP simply cannot allow people to enjoy.

1. Everyone- well, 97% of everyone there- was white.

2. The crowd was highly self-selected: i.e., everyone who was there looked like the kind of person who would be at an environmental film festival.

3. The films I saw had a heavy “White People to the Rescue!!” spirit, in that the moral of nearly every storyline involved a group of affluent white folks “helping” the underprivileged in some way, mostly by throwing their financial weight around or imbuing their privileged environmental sensibilities on those “less fortunate.”

Allow me to elaborate. This film was one of those featured, and it is by a Colorado filmmaker. The premise is all well and good- there is a nonprofit that aims to increase environmental awareness and promote healthy lifestyles for inner-city children by getting them involved in mountain sports. How could I have a problem with that, you ask?

You underestimate my cynicism. I was born in Boulder. My cynicism is deep, deep within my mitochondrial DNA. You will not underestimate it again.

My issues were actually pretty well articulated by the filmmaker herself (who was present) when she followed up the film with a brief summary of the program and what it does. She told us that inner-city kids, particularly “children of color” sometimes never got to go to the mountains, and that this created what she characterized as a “forest ambivalent electorate.” She proceeded to tell us that the issue most poor children face as a barrier between them and mountain recreation was “the transportation issue.” Finally, she said that technology like cellphones and iPads were keeping children from fully appreciating the mountain environment.

Fair enough, coming from a film professor at a large urban university. But I feel that there is a fundamental ignorance held by the most well-meaning liberal white folks about inner-city life and the priorities other people have. I would argue that no, it’s not cell phones and iPads that keep inner-city kids from going to the mountains. It’s a melange of cultural and societal factors that make the life of an inner-city child of color completely different than that of the kind of kid that usually gets to go on ski trips. But what I want to know is, is it somehow fundamentally, culturally better to go snowboarding on Sunday than to go to church and spend the rest of the day with grandparents, uncles, aunts, home-cooked foods and televised sports? Is the lesson learned on a snowboarding trip really better than the lessons learned at a weekend picnic in Park Hill or Federal Heights? Yes, I know I’m making a stereotypical conclusion here myself and not all inner-city kids necessarily head over to Grandma’s house for chitlins each Sunday, but the director of the film basically implies that the way that inner-city kids live is less valuable, since it does not include the benefits of moutain sport. Further, maybe the inner-city electorate is, indeed, “forest ambivalent” but does that necessarily mean that the electoral priorities of someone from the inner-city are somehow not as important a part of the greater civil fabric we all contribute to?

Sure wish I was shredding a halfpipe, instead of hearing one of Grandpa's stupid stories about our heritage.

Maybe an inner-city kid is forest-ambivalent, but she probably isn’t education-ambivalent, or crime-ambivalent or even environmentally-ambivalent when it comes to the environment she lives in, her parks, her neighborhoods, her school. Additionally, I don’t think that the supposed lack of environmental awareness among the poor and among people of color is a new issue (It may be a growing issue, though with the general growth of environmental awareness in our culture it might very well not be. I don’t know how one would gauge such a thing. I’m guessing that the guy in the film standing in REI talking about forest ambivalence thinks of environmental awareness differently than someone raised by people who used to work in fruit orchards.). But I think this has a LOT more to do with issues of convenience, class, access and even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs than it does the lack of ski/snowboard trips in an inner-city child’s life.

Second of all, the ”transportation issue” the filmmaker addressed got under my skin because she is essentially saying that the poor, by their lack of a vehicle, are less able to fully embrace environmental awareness than someone who drives a 4-Runner to the mountains every weekend. This points to the bigger issue of the environmental impact of mountain sports (deforestation, pollution, road construction, the mushroom-like growth of resorts and lodges), but it got my goat, first and foremost, because it points to the fact that for all their good intentions, affluent white Americans, no matter how environmentally aware, consume far more resources than poor families. A family wedged into a 900-square-foot apartment who share one car or one bus pass and eat mostly beans and rice has a much smaller carbon footprint than a couple with a 2000-square foot house, a Prius (that runs on coal, rare earth metals and gasoline whether you like it or not), the standard array of electronics, any kind of commute or middle-class air travel habits and a penchant for fresh vegetables year-round.

So, is it a bad thing to educate inner-city kids about the environment? No, of course not. Is it a bad thing to get kids active and in the mountains? No, and the obesity issue among poor kids definitely should be addressed in any way possible. But to pretend that making young poor kids strap on snowboards will somehow confer to them the Great White Wisdom of winter sports and earth-consciousness for the betterment of all is a bit much. It bugs me that some people who espouse liberal beliefs so often consider themselves somehow exempt from racial ignorance because of programs like this. Like, because they live in a gentrified neighbrhood or raised awareness of a program that helps black or Latino kids try a sport usually relegated to affluent whites, there is no way they could be considered to have a fundamental lack of understanding about what it means to be poor and black, and obviously, going on a ski trip is better than staying in your tiny city apartment all weekend. I feel that this kind of thing only perpetuates the idea that environmentalism is a privilege, and only certain people can do it right.

One- reasonable expectations, like expecting a man to not:

Cheat, build a fort out of Domino’s Pizza boxes in the living room, buy Xbox Live credits with money that should have paid the heating bill, open a GoDaddy account, try to sell you Amway, make his own salvia YouTube videos, make you watch “Two Girls, One Cup,” force you to take the bus to the hospital because it’s the night Madden comes out and he won’t drive you, etc.

Two- dumb, outdated expectations, like expecting a man to:

Always make more money than you do, never fart or grow/lose hair in an unfortunate way, read your mind (gifts you want, tasks that you’d like done, why you’re mad), have a clearer, more defined career path than you have, sacrifice all the things he enjoys because you want him to, have somehow weathered the recession without taking the same kinds of hits you have, pay more than he can afford for things you want, continually strive toward the goal of making lots of money for you to spend despite what he may actually want.

Women who carry around more expectations from category 2 than category 1 are a generalized group that I call Princesses.

Like the Judd Apatow guy, The Princess is sort of co-constructed by media and commercialism. It doesn’t take more than a casual glance at most magazines or TV shows aimed at 20-something women to see that the rhetoric is all about narcissism, sexual power, and consumption. YOU deserve this. YOU need this. YOU can have all of this. YOU are special. YOU are beautiful. YOU are worth it. Though this is mirrored, in large part, in lad mags like Maxim and, to a certain extent, Playboy, there is a fundamental difference. While the boy versions present the goal of affluent consumption as a reward for hard work and climbing up the corporate ladder (as flawed and fictitious as that construct might be, especially now), the girl versions basically assert that by virtue of being an attractive woman, things are *owed* to you. The sex tips (while always hilarious) are presented alongside ads for diamonds and Louboutins to really drive the message home… do this, and you’ll get jewelry. Do that, and you are owed a Mercedes. This makes for some particularly toxic relationships and some pretty terrible pairings in a dating field that, as I’ve established, tends to have a pretty rough Seth Rogan to JFK Jr. ratio.

Spoiler Alert: literally every "bad girl sex tip:" putting your finger in his butt.

It’s not just Cosmo. A disturbingly large portion of advertisers seem to parrot this same idea… perhaps it says more about the fact that Americans are generally told to let products do the talking for them, but nevertheless, the message every Valentine’s Day  and Christmas season is the same: women use sex as currency, and if you’re not paying up, you’re not holding up your end of the bargain.

But what about all the work that feminism did to bring women into the workplace, attempt a more equitable society, make women aspire to kill the old stereotypes and grow past the idea that they need a man to meet their needs?

Well… the sad thing is, all that happened and is still happening, but Princesses have grown to embrace an entitled attitude not because they can’t do the things that men can do, but because they would like for a man to give them everything they want.

It seemed to be an outgrowth after about the third wave of feminism (the really pissed-off wave) when it looked like things were simply never going to change. Camille Paglia had go flapping her trap about sexual power and before you knew it, an entire generation of girls was raised believing that breaking down barriers and fighting for equality was for ugly chicks. A weird concept of what empowerment truly meant began to bubble up, encouraged by advertisers and a culture that just refuses to grow up about sex.

This endures in what Stephanie Coontz described as “The Hottie Mystique:” the idea that it’s OK to do all the things you want to do, careerwise, lifewise, even pregnancywise… as long as you’re hot. If you’re hot, you can be excused for being female. And if you’re hot, the world owes you a living. Being pretty may no longer be the only thing that a woman can offer to the world… but in many ways, it is still portrayed as the most important thing. I’ve yet to read a single magazine article about Christine Lagarde or Arianna Huffington or Hillary Clinton that does not, in some way, make a pointed evaluation of the subject’s physical appearance. Just as I’ve never read a piece that mentions Mark Zuckerberg’s “sexy smile” or Warren Buffet’s “gracefully aging” face. This may be for several reasons, but one of them is definitely that our society doesn’t think that Warren Buffet’s appearance isn’t important, but Hillary Clinton’s appearance is.

So… let’s talk a little about why I’m calling women who bank on their sexuality “Princesses” instead of, well, any number of choice terms for women who exchange things of financial value for sex. It’s because of just how early on the idea of Pretty=Power is beaten into little girls’ heads.

Belle is the most intellectual one, but even she gets married due to Stockholm Syndrome.

Now, obviously, Disney didn’t invent the idea of the pretty princess who finds a prince and never has to work at a Dress Barn a day in her life. But Disney has packaged it, marketed it, and all but forced it on every girl age 0-16. Just as a diminishing field of expectations has lead to a group of men for whom fully-realized adulthood is entirely optional, an obsessive focus on the Princess storyline has lead to a group of women for whom beauty is understood as a key to success.

And there really isn’t much to discourage this… Our modern day Princesses are everywhere you look. Talentless celebutantes, reality TV stars, pretty-but-bland pop stars. I’m just waiting for the moment I ask a little girl what she wants to be when she grows up, and I’m answered with “A Kardashian.” If it is necessary for even the most successful women in the world to be at least somewhat attractive, it is still completely optional for the most beautiful women in the world to be at least somewhat useful.

And, lest we forget, there are plenty of men for whom the idea of sexual capital has been reinforced to the point where women no longer register as people, but as products themselves. I’ve had experience with men like this. A lot of those “catches” out there, with 250k salaries, postgraduate educations, Audi SUVs, attractive in that “rich douchebag” kind of way… they have no reason at all to believe that women won’t do anything for money, because those are the only women they’ve ever been around. And the women, in turn, have no reason to believe that being beautiful can’t buy them whatever they want. It’s gross.

But here’s the thing. Not all women are gold-digging Princesses, any more than all men are slackass Grandma’s Boys, rich douchebags or Ryan Gosling. The point I tried to make with my previous post, and the point I’m trying to make here, is that men and women live in a world where the old expectations are no longer relevant, but are still tenaciously embedded in our culture. We can all take care of ourselves, none of us “need” a partner to give us what we require on a day-to-day level. It’s time to stop thinking of relationships in terms of who “owes” what to whom. The only thing we should expect our partners to give us is themselves.

That something is this: The ONLY population right now that puts any kinds of expectations on single men ages 20-40 are single women ages 20-40. And as the last vestiges of any kinds of goals or ambitions we impose on the male population fade into history, women’s expectations of these guys only continue to go up.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. Somehow Sex and the Cityand Katherine Heigl movies have convinced a generation of women that Prince Eric and Beast haven’t gone away… they’re just out there, to be found at a coffeeshop scribbling in a moleskin notebook and wearing a peacoat. Meanwhile, an entire generation of men has been raised in a society where they are expected to do little else than buoy the video game and adult entertainment industries. For every single 30-something professional woman out there who is working herself into a Zanax presription with a full-time job, higher education, insane expectations for female aesthetics, a ticking biological clock and a match.com profile, there is a 30-something man (maybe two of them!) with a medical marijuana card, an unemployment check and eight straight hours of Halo spread out before him: a vast mindless horizon of pixelated death and dismemberment. Ladies, it is important to remember this: a huge contingent of single men in their 20s and 30s are essentially Tom Hanks in “Big.” They are a boy in a man suit. The internal dialogue of an 11 year old boy and a 28 year old man are only distinguished by experience and frequency of swear words.

Yes, there are exceptions, and no, you shouldn’t settle. The exceptions, however, are a vanishingly small population. I work for the city, and I see them occasionally: well-dressed, ambitious young urban planners, lawyers, financial professionals. But the thing is, a guy possessed of ambition, drive and career goals like that is basically the supermodel of the man world. They are, almost without fail, married (or gay) or have had girlfriends their entire adult lives. Or, and perhaps this is even more common, they are not that interested in getting into a long-term relationship of any kind because they are married to their jobs or aren’t emotionally mature enough to think in those terms. In this world, that guy in the peacoat with more appointments on his smartphone than games AND a desire for a long-term committed relationship is Heidi Klum. It’s OK to dream big, girls, but it’s also important to understand that this is the reality of our situation. It’s time to reevaluate The Keeper. If you find a guy with a job, no drug addictions, and a reasonably tentacle-free porn collection, you are ahead of the game. And maybe it’s time for all of us to look past the antiquated ideas of the man making more money, the man having more education, or the man needing to be the provider and see that this guy has a lot more to offer than a 401k or a spot on the board of his HOA. These guys aren’t bad, they’re just… constructs of our society.

Hey girl. Let's make some grilled cheese and play Red Dead Redemption.

It’s not the guy’s fault that our nation has basically made adulthood the responsibility of women and people in other countries. Think about it: women are taking on more management roles, women are frequently the heads of households in the absence of a man, and the jobs that used to employ men with limited educations or skill sets are no longer available in this country. The American Man has outsourced adulthood to the Chinese labor force and women in management. Nothing left to do than sit back and smoke a bowl and play Fallout 3.

I am married. I am not married like Zoey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard were married. We don’t play ukelele songs and draw pictures of unicorns and wear fake handlebar mustaches and go for rides on our tandem bicycle (this is basically what I imagine their marriage to be like, and all the while Zoey is singing in that weird June Carter Cash/Morrissey voice of hers about baking cupcakes).

The saddest part was when Ben rode the tandem bike home, alone, from the courthouse.

I am married like we pay the bills and have to make decisions about health insurance and I am past the point where I try to look cute when I’m getting ready for bed and I try not to care when promises go unkept and things go unsaid. I am married because I found someone who loves me and who is a genuinely good person. I am married because I can take care of myself and don’t need someone to do that, but I like coming home to someone who cares about me. I decided to be married and I opted not to hold out for a guy who has a genetic mutation that keeps him from farting or growing back hair. It’s far from perfect. But it’s real. And it’s here, now.

The author here asserts that there are hard-wired, genetic reasons that cause “threat-averse” people to be more conservative-minded, and an “exploratory” nature can be cited for liberal ideologies.

The author here claims that this is an evolutionary mechanism… and I can imagine that the evolutionary payoff for both ideologies would probably be about one-to-one for those who are less likely to make changes and face risks (thereby lessening the chances of being poisoned by new foods, killed by a different clan, or injured/made less desirable by mates by a backfired invention or innovation) and those who are more likely to try new things, and therefore reap rewards in the wild (i.e., biodiversity among tribes, better nutrition through a diverse diet, lives made easier by inventions of their own design).

But here’s my problem. If we are, as the writer here says, genetically more likely to adopt one idea over another, there is no way we can make progress away from conservatism, unless it is simply a matter of those who evolved one way conquering those who evolved the other. To my mind, this simply promotes the notion that liberals and conservatives are opposite football teams, unable to cross over and unable to change their minds. And I really don’t like that idea. I’ll lay out a few reasons here why I think the author may be right, and a few reasons why I think he’s wrong:

I do agree that may of the toughest, most dyed-in-the-wool conservatives I’ve met do, indeed, seem to be almost physically unable to think the way I do. It does seem to bear out that in many cases, liberal parents have liberal children, and conservative families have conservative children (though there are many reasons for this). And many people who are conservative politically vote directly against their own best interests, seemingly out of a fear of change and a risk-averse worldview, wherein political change is seen as very, very frightening. The language of the right does seem to be most effective when fear is used to characterize changes or people on the other side. Was Rove using a biologically-based technique when he constructed the rhetoric around The War on Terror? Perhaps.

But… I’ve also seen many people change their minds. Think Ariana Huffington, the founder of the site the original blog appears on. It is pretty typical for young idealists to become more conservative as they grow up or for progressives to become more conservative as they become wealthier. I have become a hundred times more liberal than I was when I lived in Boulder and was so aggravated by the blind faith everyone there took in liberal ideals and oversimplified progressive concepts. Everyone knows someone whose political mindset has done a 180. And I’ve frequently encountered the 50/50 rule when it comes to children of hard-line ideologues. About half of the children of any politically-aligned family will rebel, and go completely away from the ideologies of their parents.

The 50/50 Rule: It even happens to Mormons.

When I was in a class as an undergrad (a long, long time ago) we discussed the whole “gender as a social construct” thing in the context of feral children. These are, for those unaware, children who had been left to fend for themselves in wild settings for any number of reasons (abuse and neglect, usually), and who developed without society, culture or artificial constraints on behavior. Feral children are a rare glimpse into what it is like when someone lives entirely outside the social constructs we impose on our daily realities. Among the observations made about feral children is that without society’s dictates of gender, the children do not express any kind of sexual identity. Despite the vast body of research that says we are genetically and biologically different as men and women (and all manner of expressions in between), the removal of culture seems to result in an inactivation of these differences. I would argue that although there may be genetic reasons behind risk-averse behaviors and risk-accepting behaviors, just like there are biological differences in the genders, the outward or ideological manifestations of these markers is likely a cultural construction, not a biological mandate. I would tend to believe that if you tested a random sample of persons in a culture like, say, The Netherlands, you would still find risk-averse and risk-accepting invididuals who express themselves politically in much different ways than Americans with the same genetic coding.

Further… I know I’ve experienced the feelings of “disgust” that the writer used as examples of a conservative reaction to “threatening” images of people like Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. They make me angry and inspire feelings of disgust and contempt, even now. I don’t think of myself as a particularly “exploratory” person, political or otherwise. If anything, I would characterize my liberalism more as a fear of or disgust with threats like unchecked Capitalism, government control of my sexual health, the eventual consequences of corporate destruction of the world we live in. I don’t know if my fear of a post-Peak-Oil world is the exact same fear that someone else might have for a world in which gays can marry at will, women are in complete control of their sexual and medical choices, and cultural pluralism is the rule instead of the exception. But I think it might be close.

Lymphoma is a tough bitch. Known treatments more or less fall into a hole when lymphoma is the diagnosis. The doctors said they could treat his symptoms, but that the cancer would not be stopped. He was up for any kind of treatment: chemo, stem cells, transplants, clinical trials. He was going to fight it by any means necessary, and he did. But among the ugly truths about cancer, the one put so eloquently in one of Christopher Hitchen’s last columns for Vanity Fair is that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger. In fact, in the case of cancer treatments, what doesn’t kill you can bring you right up close to death, and what eventually saves you can make you want to die.

Yet, nothing was out of the question for Roy. He wanted to live, at least long enough to do important things like be an important part of his granddaughter’s life, and to learn a little bit more about me, the woman his son married. He wanted to learn more about the man his son had become, with whom he had only recently begun to truly reconcile after a tough childhood and tougher young adulthood. This Tuesday morning, three and a half years after he was given just a half-year to live, he slipped away in his sleep. Quietly and without the complications of breathing machines, ugly decisions, painful and expensive measures to keep him alive. We saw him together for the last time on Saturday evening (Dale had seen him Monday evening, only hours before he passed) and while it was clear he was pleased to see us, he looked depleted in a way I’d never seen before. He was just so tired, so delicate-looking, so small. I didn’t think it was the last time I’d see him alive… but I thought it was going to be one of the last.

Dale and I have been together for about five years, and I think that most of the strength that forms the foundation of our marriage has to do with the fact that for most of our years together, we have held each other up in the face of this awful diagnosis: the trips to the hospital, the treatments, the insane levels of financial and emotional stress it injected into an already-dramatic family dynamic. I truly believe a weaker connection would have been broken by the events of the last three and a half years, but for us, it has brought us closer in ways I don’t think either of us ever anticipated. I wouldn’t wish this kind of situation on my worst enemy’s crab lice, but the truth is, life happens. And when you face life with a partner, both the good parts and the unimaginably bad parts, it is often the bad parts that truly make or break the bonds you share.

I never knew I could be this strong for someone, and the part of Dale I’ve seen in the face of these tragedies is the part of him that I have come to most admire. While it’s ground us both down plenty of times, and while we haven’t gotten here without the occasional aide of a strong cocktail, when the worst times bring out the best in someone, you can’t help but love them even more.

 I already miss Roy. He and I related on a number of things: cars, vintage films (and vintage starlets), food, history. I am sad that I never really got to know him as well as I would have liked. I could have sat in that dusty, tchotchke-filled den and talked about Volkswagens and Stuart Andersons steaks for hours. While Dale and I grew up in vastly different homes and in vastly different ways, Roy and I could always find something to chat about. He spent the last years of his life doing everything he could to raise his granddaughter in an incredibly difficult circumstance, and doing everything he could to make up for the struggles he faced when raising his own family. He wanted to make things right with his son, and I think, in his way, he did.

The way Roy would talk about food was the way I talk about food, and toward the end, he didn’t enjoy eating like he always had. I know that for me, that would be torturous. He was so glad we were there for Christmas, but you could tell he couldn’t enjoy it as much as he wanted to. He was just so tired. His body wasn’t letting him do the things he loved, even on a basic level. I know that if this was the way I had to live, I would only hold on for the really important stuff. I think that he did just that. Thank you for the time we were able to share, Roy. You will be missed.