{"id":2748,"date":"2008-06-23T06:32:23","date_gmt":"2008-06-23T11:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2748"},"modified":"2008-06-23T09:14:02","modified_gmt":"2008-06-23T14:14:02","slug":"its-all-never-about-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2748","title":{"rendered":"It’s All<\/strike> Never About Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was out biking on the new Midtown Greenway yesterday.\u00a0 Let’s leave aside for a moment the free-marketeer objections to the project (an old rail-bed through South Minneapolis has been converted, essentially, to a bike superhighway from the Mississippi all the way to Saint Louis Park, connecting to trails that’ll take you all the way out to Lake Minnetonka.\u00a0 It wasn’t the first gorgeous weekend of the year – but it was the first hot <\/em>weekend.<\/p>\n

And as you get closer to Uptown Minneapolis, you see that key sign that it’s summer in the city; women skating, biking and running in the sort of clothes that make the jihadis<\/em> want to blow us up.\u00a0 The kind of thing that makes cultural conservatives shake their heads – or, in some cases, turn them.<\/p>\n

What was I thinking about?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The damn headwind.<\/li>\n
  2. All those babes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And somewhere near the bottom of the list – in the six billions, somewhere – I wondered “what does Susan Lenfestey think about all this?”<\/p>\n

    But sometimes it just comes to you.\u00a0 Like, when you open the Strib<\/em>. Susan Lenfestey is always good for inducing head-slapping cognitive mal-de-mer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    Never moreso than when she “tackles” the popular culture problems that are a direct result of her generation’s overweening self-absorption by bleating “well, wait a minute…”, as in yesterday’s column in the Strib<\/em><\/a>, in which she tries to mix the cultural mores of the libertine boomers of her youth, and the cultural imams that many of the most doctrinaire boomers have become.
    \nIt got hot, y’see…<\/p>\n

    \n
    And they took off their clothes.Not entirely, mind you — this remains a fairly modest and Lutheran kind of place — but they took off more than anyone my age might have once imagined. We used to blush at the sight of women’s undies hanging on the line, and now grown women jog and cycle and power-walk in what looks to me like the spandex long-line girdles and cross-your-heart bras that we rejected decades ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    And, being Minnesotans with a lot of sugar, corn and dairy in our past, and a lot of fast food in our present, there’s more flesh being squeezed out of these girdles than into them. Victoria’s Secret it’s not.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Tangentially – have you ever noticed how quick the supposedly caring lefties are to ding on peoples’ appearances<\/a>?\u00a0\u00a0 Lenfestey herself<\/a> has a record in this area…\u00a0<\/p>\n

    I digress:<\/p><\/div>\n

    \n
    There’s a part of me that thinks this is great — no one cares anymore about body image, and they’re free to, well, let it all hang out. And surely there’s a sort of gender equality in this recreational neonudity. If men can whip off their shirts and let the summer breeze riffle through the hair on their chests, why can’t women do the same? OK, through their breasts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    The other half of me thinks that this is a culture gone amok. Somebody somewhere is going to point out that this excessive dermal display is the fault of narcissistic baby-boomin’ feminists like me, who liberated our bosoms in the ’60s from the Wagnerian cone breasts of the ’50s. Trust me, like so much of what we did then, jogging in spandex girdles is not where we thought this was going. (But hey, think about all that organic food.)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Well, Susan, you seem to be spending more time kvetching about where all that organic food is going.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Again, I digress:<\/p><\/div>\n

    \n
    Nor did we who believe in gender equality intend this to be a license to the fashion industry to market slutwear to prepubescent girls, and bondagewear to their big sisters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Susan Lenfestey is speaking for the collective “we” – the entire baby boom (or at least that part of it that is only now (if we accept Lenfestey as that collective “we”, and why not?) discovering the law of unintended consequences?<\/p>\n

    Or to put it another way – discovering that we – the conservatives – were right<\/em>?<\/p>\n

    If geezers like bicycling in padded crotch spandex, so be it. Mick Jagger looks silly now, too. It’s the sleazewear being marketed to girls and young women, and the women who buy into it, that makes me sorry for how far we’ve come — and how backwards we’ve gone. I have no quibble with joyous nudity and the impulse to undress in the balmy air. In Seattle there’s a naked bicycle parade on the summer solstice, and hundreds of men, women and children paint their bodies, yes, naked bodies, in the most creative and clownish ways, and it’s about as sexually stimulating as, well, watching grannies’ bloomers blowing on the line. But it sure is fun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    (IT BUUUUUURNS US!)<\/p>\n

    It’s the coy couture of faux-sexuality, the contrived message of availability printed, literally, across the behinds and breasts of young women that makes me wonder how we wound up so far off the mark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    In other words, “we” are going to eat this cake, and still have it.\u00a0 “We” are going to commoditize sexuality, trivialize or medicalize its consequences – but don’t you dare<\/em> offend my feminist sensibilities when the inevitable <\/em>consequences come home to roost?”\u00a0 And they were <\/em>inevitable – as everyone who knows jack about economics knows that all other things being equal, if you make something cheaper, you make it more ubiquitous – and the demand for sex and sexuality is <\/em>infinite and inelastic.<\/p>\n

    But just to show you we’ve come full circle:<\/p>\n

    And it’s the baring of so much of our intimate body parts that makes more modest countries regard us as a culture run amok.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    So “Susan Lenfestey’s generation” has gone from tittering at the social mores and concerns of conservative clergy…<\/p>\n

    …to furrowing their brows and nodding at the cultural critique of people who force women to wear burquas<\/em>, and whose hands are spattered with the blood of the gays they’ve stoned and the pregnant teenagers they’ve lynched?<\/p>\n

    “You’ve” come a long way, Susan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was out biking on the new Midtown Greenway yesterday.\u00a0 Let’s leave aside for a moment the free-marketeer objections to the project (an old rail-bed through South Minneapolis has been converted, essentially, to a bike superhighway from the Mississippi all the way to Saint Louis Park, connecting to trails that’ll take you all the way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}