Category: Columns

Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a Gen-X everygal loves to dish about.

Don't Say 'Vagina'

Published on July 5, 2012

It was the “vagina” heard round the world. Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown was on the House floor, speaking out against a bill that would restrict abortion access, when she uttered these bons mots:

“And finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.”

From that place of interest, a great controversy was born. Republican House leaders barred Brown, a Democrat, from speaking in the state legislature the following day for trouncing on “the decorum of the House of Representatives.” They called into question her “maturity and civility.”

And feminists — as you might imagine — blew a flipping fuse. Brown and other women lawmakers performed The Vagina Monologues on the Capitol steps before 3,000 Michiganites waving signs like “MI-gina” and “I have a vagina, a voice, and a vote.” Their point, and it’s a good one: How can you dare legislate a body part that you can’t even speak of aloud?

Cool or Not Cool?

Published on June 21, 2012

Sometimes my kids ask me questions that rattle my mind like a cold, brass church bell. My skull had only just stopped reverberating from their last confounding query (“Mom, what does nothing look like?”) when my teenager riddled me this: “Why don’t old people at least try to be cool?”

It was an honest question, and it struck me as kind of brilliant — in the way that one often chooses to focus on her children’s refreshing curiosity rather than dwell on their astounding lack of manners or perspective.

I considered telling him that the answer lies in simple physics: Cool is a fast-moving target. And old people are slow. Then it occurred to me that by “old people,” he might very well mean me. I needed more information.

“If they would just put on a pair of skinny jeans and a V-neck T-shirt,” my son said, “they’d be cool.”

“According to whom?” I asked, cautiously. The parenting books say that active listening encourages your kids to speak openly. They also say it’s bad to call them idiots. So I listened.

Fatherly Lessons

Published on May 28, 2012

I suppose they were reasonable things to come from a father’s mouth. Still, they took me by surprise. “Only move one body part at a time,” I overheard my husband saying as he helped our young son up a ladder. “Grab it around the stripe; fingers across the laces,” he explained a few days later on the subject of throwing a spiral. That night, he gave an impromptu lesson in scooping unyielding ice cream from a carton: “Use the fancy spoons,” he said. “They don’t bend.”

The information floored me. I didn’t know these things. How did I not know these things? Was I supposed to have learned them from my dad?

I asked friends what their dads had taught them and was aghast to find that their pops had instructed them in physical feats like surfing and fishing, and practical tasks like changing tires and hammering nails. They’d insisted their kids give firm handshakes and pack only what they could carry. They spouted sensible maxims like “Finish what you start” and “There’s no excuse for being late. Ever.”

Size 10s Need Not Apply

Published on May 17, 2012

I thought I had women all figured out. Thought I understood how they think. Thought I knew what makes chicks tick.

Ladies, I’ve always presupposed, want a man with a certain set of attributes: funny, smart, romantic. Confident, dependable, good listener. Passionate, generous, and possessing a pot to piss in. The list is so predictable, it’s clichéd. Or so I thought.

Turns out there are at least 13 single gals in the greater New York area who find this to be a fetching characteristic in a fella: He requires that his sweetheart fit into clothing between size zero and eight … and that she prove it.

Earlier this month, a baker’s dozen of single-and-searching women paid actual money to attend a Manhattan matchmaking event called Skinny Minny Speed Dating. Hosted by OnSpeedDating.com, the soirée promised to introduce single fellas (of any size) to women three to seven dress sizes smaller than the average American gal.

The photo accompanying the online invitation shows a man stroking the chin of a woman who looks like Skeletor on Atkins. “Guys, no need to worry about meeting a biggie-size chick,” the invitation said. “We’ll be checking labels at the door!”

One Tyke, One Teen

Published on May 10, 2012

It’s the most irksome and indubitable law of the universe: Fate favors The Planner. The gal with the foresight to research preschools while she’s pregnant. Or to begin funding a 529 plan before her child can even gurgle the word “college.” Or to know what the frack she’s serving her family for dinner before she gets home from work at 6:22 p.m. and announces, yet again, “Umm … exciting news, everyone: It’s soup night! Grab your favorite can!”

In life — and in parenting, especially — she who wings it regrets it. But that’s exactly how I wound up having my kids seven years apart. When the other moms in my baby group were plotting their second and even third children, citing anecdotes about brotherly bonding and quoting stats about the effect of sibling spacing on each child’s health, intelligence, and self-esteem … I was busy trying to distinguish Boudreaux’s Butt Paste from Motherlove Nipple Cream, clawing my way out from beneath daily heaps of burp cloths and wondering if I’d accidentally stuffed my once-vigorous mojo into the Diaper Genie during a bleary-eyed late-night changing.

By the time I emerged from the disorienting fog of baby care into the dense haze of toddler care and then, well, into the light but still unpleasantly wet mist of 1st-grader care (okay, I’m easily overwhelmed), it was too late to have children who would ever want to ride the same rides at Disneyland much less be able to attend the same school.

Indecent Exposure

Published on April 26, 2012

I hate things that make me sound like I’m 90 years old. And that’s what online porn is doing. Beckoning our teenagers from their laptops, iPhones, and tablets, X-rated Web sites are causing me to curse technology and pine for the good old days when smut knew its place: on the pages of a shrink-wrapped girlie magazine on the periodicals shelf of your neighborhood 7-Eleven.

Back in my day, we pored over dog-eared Playboys, passed around Penthouse letters, and stared agog at warbly VHS tapes of Deep Throat — all lifted from our parents’ stash. Or our friends’ parents’ stash. Or our parents’ friends’ stash.

We had to work hard to see porn, and I’m not complaining; we had quite the work ethic. But today’s teens have to work hard not to see it. It’s free, it’s abundant, and it’s a single click away. Most of it is explicit, and much of it (what? I conducted a study) is so in-your-face graphic that you have to wonder if it’s intended to turn off the viewer.

Our teens — and, in some cases, ick, our preteens — are looking at this stuff. It’s not a question of if or when. They. Are. Looking. And how can you blame them? It’s a fascinating alien world. A big-box toy store. A freshly stocked cookie jar. I think it’s healthy for teens to explore their sexuality, and at least on-screen you can’t catch anything. Or create anyone.

Coregasm

Published on April 12, 2012

I feel a lot of different things when I exercise: tired, resentful, inflexible. Hungry, gangly, territorial. Sometimes I feel excited about the bowl of Fruit Loops that I will suck down guilt-free when I get home, and occasionally I feel sexy, like a badass backup dancer in a Beyoncé video. Most often — about 15 minutes into any given workout, and again at 24 minutes, and 37 — I feel that I’ve had enough and that it really should be over by now.

Here’s what I never, ever feel when I exercise: toe-curling ecstasy.

Researchers at Indiana University report that some women actually experience orgasms while working out. A study at the school’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion surveyed 124 women who claim to have been sent into paroxysms of pleasure while exercising — during spinning or yoga class, in the weight room or swimming pool, and while climbing poles or ropes (which makes me picture the word “climb-ax,” which makes me giggle stupidly).

The media is calling these episodes “coregasms” because they’re most often brought on by abdominal exercises — especially multiple sets of rigorous crunches. But let’s call them “gymnasms” because it’s crazy fun to say; try it.

Mommy Porn

Published on March 29, 2012

It’s being called “mommy porn” by even the soberest of news media — so naturally I had to check it out. E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction, meaning the characters and a few plot points bear striking similarities to Stephenie Meyer’s girl-meets-vampire love story. But James, a British first-time author, reenvisions the story with a bookish young virgin who falls for a hunky self-made billionaire who’s perfect in every way. Except that he wants — nay, needs — for her to be his kinky sex slave.

Studded with more steamy sex scenes than you can shake a riding crop at, the book’s buzz among undersexed suburban housewives has driven it to the top of Amazon’s “Hot New Releases” list. The Fifty Shades trilogy, including sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, occupies numbers one, two, and three on the New York Times best-seller list for ebook fiction. Hollywood studios are flogging each other for the movie rights.

I read Fifty Shades of Grey to see what all the fuss was about, and here’s what this mommy can tell you unequivocally: It’s a dozen shades of awful.

Good-Bye, Private Parts

Published on March 15, 2012

Have you ever been skinny-dipping? It’s just about the best feeling in the world: fretless, grin-in-your-skin freedom.

I was 11 years old and taking a bare dip in my backyard pool when I heard rustling in the neighbors’ tree and realized their pre-teen son was spying on me. Outraged and embarrassed, I skittered inside to tell my mother. I’ve never forgotten what she said:

“Eh, let him look. Why should he stop you from being at ease in your own yard? Don’t give him that power.”

The notion was radical — that I could simply choose not to feel violated by such an invasion of privacy. That I could disregard the peeping perv and refuse to waste energy guarding the confidential information his little eyeballs were gathering for who-knows-what degenerate purpose.

I’ve summoned that outlook countless times since then — when the tampon drops from my purse during a business lunch, the pharmacy clerk loudly inquires about my rash, and the neighbors hear me yelling at my kids. Eh, I think. Let ’em look.

But it’s harder than it used to be.

From the auto-fill feature in our Web browsers to the cameras installed at stoplights, our privacy is receding faster than a naked girl can scramble from the deep end of an exposed swimming pool into the folds of a blessed towel. And there’s more at stake than just a pre-adolescent fanny flash.

'Om' Em Gee: I Did Naked Yoga

Published on March 1, 2012

I don’t love yoga. But I’m supposed to. Women my age, in my town (and let’s just say it, with my name) are supposed to swear by the practice’s tush-tightening, mind-loosening properties. I’ve been to a dozen yoga classes in as many years — the sweaty kind, the meditative kind, the pregnant kind — hoping to tap into that puzzling peace-through-pain bliss that yoga fans endure, er, adore.

But yoga mostly makes me … uncomfortable. From the hissing ujjayi breath to the groin-punishing poses to the inscrutable, translated-from-Elvish instructions (“release any stale energy and breath through your scalp”), the classes always leave me feeling physically and psychologically awkward.

When I received an invitation recently to view a new DVD called Yoga, Undressed (yogaundressed.com), I realized there was really only one way to make yoga more uncomfortable: Do it naked.

But what if discomfort is sort of the point? What if I’d failed to appreciate yoga because I hadn’t been uncomfortable … enough? Were my unbelievably cute yoga top and super-flattering yoga pants a moisture-wicking but Zen-preventing barrier to yogic understanding? If I stripped away my hold-it-all-in outfit, could I truly let go? Could I blast, birthday-suited, straight through the awkward to bask in the awesome just beyond?