Author: Inthegazeoftheother

Posted on

A Woman’s Soul is in Her Vagina

2015/01/img_0332-0.jpg

A woman’s soul is in her vagina. That’s what Naomi Wolf intimates in her book Vagina, a New Biography, according to Maria Popova’s review in Brain Pickings’ “The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness.” The article is a pastiche of excerpts underscoring the salient points: the vagina and brain are interconnected in complex and delicate ways in women, which connection can lead to healthy, happy, sexual experience and overall contentment or, under bad stress, can lead to lasting biological and psycho-emotional changes that debilitate a woman’s ability to experience joy.

To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but is also, essentially, part of the female soul.

A woman’s “confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence” is contained in this continuum that is the vagina to the brain, Wolf claims.

Popova explains the essential science behind that brain-vagina connection: the pelvic nerve governs sexual response as it connects the brain to the cervix not in a direct linear way but in a mazy labyrinth. Its construction is unique to each woman so that arousal sources vary from woman to woman. The structure of the male is far more focused and concentric from the central point of direct stimulation points around the penis. As such, sexual intercourse that focuses on male arousal without locating the specific arousal source(s) of the woman will greatly affect her pleasure and her ability to achieve orgasm.

According to Wolf, the autonomic nervous system which controls and contains the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, is key to arousal. Women have the mind-body connection that feed one off the other: women need to be relaxed and in a good mental state to physically experience orgasm and orgasm affects that state, to be relaxed and released.

For women, sexual response involves entering an altered state of consciousness. … In women, the biology of arousal is more delicate than most of us understand, and it depends significantly on this sensitive, magical, slowly calmed, and easily inhibited system.

Emotional security, Popova summarizes, is directly linked to arousal. Stressors such as safety threats whether physical violence or emotional abuse, inhibit the autonomic nervous system, and if prolonged, may cause physiological changes in the vagina, thereby eliminating the ability to experience orgasm or pleasure. It may even lead to symptoms unrelated to sexual pleasure such as vertigo, excessive startle response, diabetes and heart disease, to name a few.

If you sexually stress a woman enough, over time, other parts of her life are likely to go awry; she will have difficulty relaxing in bed eventually, as well as in the classroom or in the office. This in turn will inhibit the dopamine boost she might otherwise receive, which would in turn prevent the release of the chemicals in her brain that otherwise would make her confident, creative, hopeful, focused — and effective, especially relevant if she is competing academically or professionally with you. With this dynamic in mind, the phrase “fuck her up” takes on new meaning.

Wolf describes how a woman can still have a stimulus response during rape but not the blissful response that occurs in the concordance of physical stimulation and mental safety relaxation. In fact, if the threat of violence or other insecurity persists, physiological changes will be permanent, in some cases.

The vagina responds to the sense of female safety, in that circulation expands, including to the vagina, when a woman feels she is safe; but the blood vessels to the vagina constrict when she feels threatened. This may happen before the woman consciously interprets her setting as threatening. So if you continually verbally threaten or demean the vagina in the university or in the workplace, you continually signal to the woman’s brain and body that she is not safe. “Bad” stress is daily raising her heart rate, pumping adrenaline through her system, circulating catecholamines, and so on. This verbal abuse actually makes it more difficult for her to attend to the professional or academic tasks before her.

The concluding remark underscores the conclusion from Wolf’s biography: the respect afforded to woman’s happiness, her way of achieving it, is integrally tied to her biological and emotional health, which is dependent upon not being threatened or treated disrespectfully, that her body, her vagina is not targeted, exploited or mistreated but treasured and valued.

The way in which any given culture treats the vagina — whether with respect or disrespect, caringly or disparagingly — is a metaphor for how women in general in that place and time are treated.

Posted on

Doubting Women’s Sexuality

2015/01/img_0330.jpg

And in a world where women’s narratives about their sexual experiences are routinely called into question, the debate over female ejaculation serves as a reminder that, when it comes to sex, we still don’t believe women. Even when they’re literally wetting the bedsheets with proof.

Lux Aulptraum, a self-proclaimed squirter, questions in The question isn’t if female ejaculation is real. It’s why you don’t trust women to tell you the attitudes toward women’s perceived sexual experience and women sexuality overall. She claims women’s sexual pleasure is suspect because it is hidden, imperceptible to her partner and herself.

What miffed me a tad was learning that Australia has a ban on female ejaculation in pornography on the chance that the ejaculatory substance might be urine and so obscene. Meanwhile, there is no scientific confirmation, according to this article, that female ejaculation is merely urination. Just goes to show you how much there is still a need for feminism.

Posted on

Flash of Stillness: Playing Patience at the DMV

2015/01/img_0329.jpg

Some virtues are beyond me. Patience, for instance, ever the teacher, lover and nemesis, eludes me today. As I sit in the hard plastic chair in the DMV, watching the screen to confirm the number announced courteously by the subtly enthusiastic electronic female voice, “Now serving number G095 at Window 13”, I sigh in exasperation. My number is G0172. It’s the second time in a month and a half that I have lost my driver’s license, and apparently the punishment is laid before me.

I want to pluck my eyeballs right out of my head at the thought of this wait in the stupefyingly catatonic government issue slate blues and grays of this Kafka-esque muffled, stifling prison. Too many dull civil servants shuffling paper among chair slumpers and leg shifters, all emitting muted boredom, disgust and defeat. No one appears to be content–merely a large aggregation of bodies connected only by will to the call of the numbers.

My daily practice of late has been precisely about this: finding contentment wherever I am. But not just the ordinary contentment of gratitude for a life lived in relative comfort and safety. For example, this may not be the best experience a late Friday afternoon has to offer, but at least I am not being held hostage in a bank. I will eventually leave this drone of hushed activity, having completed the exercise in obedient compliance with temporary license in hand.

And it is not mere at-oneness, presence within the space I am led to by attention to breath. That place is familiar to me as I have beckoned that presence to practice yoga on particularly distractible days, to preserve my sanity in extreme adversity, situations beyond my control such as waiting in a hospital room for test results, and to create–writing within the clasp of close observational sensation and thought.

No, the kind of contentment found in voluntary partial confinement among these resigned soldiers of complicity is not mere surrender; it is much more focused, pinpoint. It is the kind of contentment that comes in very small packages, minute actually, perhaps down to the cellular level. This cellular ease is squeezed out of a stillness and silence within that can hear the seduction of the computerized voice tapping into specific sensors in my brain, sliding across synapses that fire the corresponding response: chill. I hear the voice, calm, soothing, and yet infused with the transparency of its purpose. It’s experiencing and knowing all at once, an ultra alert moment of bathing light.

These moments of hyper awareness, like visualizing sound vibrations traveling across cilia in my ear canal to produce tones, reactions and information, store savory bits of future antidote to the haze of an overslept day just like today. They entertain and calm me when bored or anxious.

There are seemingly insignificant moments I can remember as mere hair’s breath of time and movement recorded so finely to capillary’s considered caress. I close my eyes in the echo of “Now serving…G108…” and summon one such scene of long ago to the black screen of my eyelids and I am there:

Walking out the door in a hurry, late for work, I don’t even notice as I rush past him. Evan near misses but manages to clasp my elbow on the fly. “Hey,” he says huskily. He has just awakened and struggles slightly with sleep-shorn disarray, a waver in his stance. Stopped, the momentum of my intention and determined pace is still rushing on ahead of me as my body is stilled before his eyes. “Hey,” he says again still clasping my elbow, my attention now filling my eyes that have been locked into his by the soft insistence of his gaze. He raises his free hand to my face and rests his four fingers, thumb-less, palm down, under my chin lightly. I feel the warmth of his morning hand and his embracing time. “Have a fine day.” The sound of his touch lingers. My racing pulse of wheeling stepped-to thought slowed in the honeyed silk of stilled breath and moment, somehow I sense I will.

I open my eyes, once again to the dimmed fluorescent daylight of the room. The 90s throw-back television screen flicks to G112 as I recover the speed of my breath, regulate it to the pace of the room’s still life painting of humans in suspended animation. Leaving behind the image on a slo-mo memory reel, I feel the filmy residue coating my mood–a clear outlook reset. The furrows in my brow have smoothed out, not merely caved into my face. The tension lines around my mouth are slightly faded.

Returning to the room, I imagine the civil space of 10 inches between my loudly sighing, glum neighbor and me, hitched to the same row of five chairs connected respectably, tolerably separated to allow both detached misery and connected commiseration in accordance with the building’s function. I will myself to blanket that distance with warmth like the heat of Evan’s hand emanating an atomic wave of empathic static connection.

Can he feel it? I have tuned out all voices, human or electronic, and squinch my sight with open eyes, twisting the last drop of intention from the tube of my will to touch him with an invisible hand. I turn to look at him, retreating from my straight-ahead-vision of the shaved head and neck of the body in front of me, but I only catch his departing blurred frame. His number, G118, is up.

Fortunate for him. Fifty-four more numbers to go. Twenty-five numbers in 90 minutes. Lots of time to practice patience and play at staking the heart of the energy vampire in this room. Luckily, I have a full flash drive of micro memory moments to fuel my efforts. Heck, I have time enough to remember where I lost my driver’s license in the first place.

Posted on

Windowed Away

2015/01/img_0327.jpg
Credit: i2.wp.com

Some people alight upon my life and walk apace awhile.
Others come and plant seeds that root belong-with-me,
even if merely for that moment, those days, those years.
I met just such a woman who came upon me suddenly,
though it was obvious I was asking her, “Come find me?”
And she did set foot upon the soil of my soddened lands.

We had nothing and everything in common: music, play,
hopes, dreams, fears, and all the unspoken known things.
She liked all the teams I couldn’t and ate what I wouldn’t,
like meat-burgers and fries for lunch on every other day.
From the south was she and I the north; she was waves,
I lines, but neither size nor shape moved us, not our taste.

We mattered to one another in most ways, assured ones.
She had the same window in her house, though we lived
in two different worlds facing polar ends of the same earth.
Our windows opened to onlookers peering in on mimicry
as if an ex ray technician looked down the bony guts of us.
We let the air open space flow alike in each our breaths.

But I have never visited her house, so have not looked in,
only glimpsed shots, yet she has walked under my window.
She has eyed me pacing the kitchen floor and mumbling;
she knows how I fold my clothes in too hurried an un-care
so that corners are not crisp and the shirts are not square.
She has spied the crackled walls of sun bleached golden.

Too, eyes witnessed my children laugh and fall to the floor,
her sight-following the line of their dance or pitched glares.
And I memorized photos of her children, callows and cars.
Though I have never stood, and may never glance there
not in front nor from any angle un-before her open window
where others tread her sandy yard on tippy toe’d high view.

She keeps the keys and I the lock but only in third space
where bespoken desire kept in cranial play, hands sleight,
strong caressing visions malleable as clay in divine heat
baking dust forming bodies from sleeping nudes raw lie.
Or not she but the neighbors circumscribe ruled borders
that walk the metes and bounds writ in maps and books.

In a dream, I am a-wing to her window open wide waiting
and through it I can see soft cornered shirts un-squared
and foot traces of trails paced fretting the kitchen tile floor.
Where acne’d stares beam dull, disillusioned indifference
among feline’d fallows, howling chuckled comforted glee,
and rosemary floating breezes clung to seamless walls.

Posted on

“What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”

2015/01/img_0325.jpg

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, interviews Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and asks “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”, also the title of the article. He opens the discussion of race in light of recent demonstrations in the wake of black deaths and police brutality where slogans of ‘Black Lives Matter’ were extended by non-Blacks to “All Lives Matter.”

The article is a keen exposé of Butler’s views about how bodies–black, white, gendered, or monied, all kinds of bodies–matter, though some bodies do not matter. Specifically, black bodies do not matter by reason of the continued exposure to behaviors and preconceptions about their bodies– the black body as threat, and not only to police. She says we make assumptions about people, and those assumptions affect how we act toward others, whether we avoid interaction or find them a threat.

Sometimes a mode of address is quite simply a way of speaking to or about someone. But a mode of address may also describe a general way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other is, even the meaning and value of their existence. We address each other with gesture, signs and movement, but also through media and technology. We make such assumptions all the time about who that other is when we hail someone on the street (or we do not hail them). That is someone I greet; the other is someone I avoid. That other may well be someone whose very existence makes me cross to the other side of the road.

And not only is the black body as threat assumption institutionalized and reiterated through the disproportionate incarceration numbers of blacks to whites, arrests, relegation to poverty, etc., but concomitantly, whiteness, which is not a color so much as a predisposition of privilege, is normalized.

Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.” But just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time. This is why there must be a collective reflection on, and opposition to, the way whiteness takes hold of our ideas about whose lives matter. The norm of whiteness that supports both violence and inequality insinuates itself into the normal and the obvious. Understood as the sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit power to define the boundaries of kinship, community and nation, whiteness inflects all those frameworks within which certain lives are made to matter less than others.

The challenge to whiteness normativity is to saturate the culture (and thus reformulate preconceptions about race) with other conceptions of what is normal: Black Lives Matter. By insisting on that concept through persistent public demonstrations and exploitation of media, black lives can be seen first in the very insistence–that they have not mattered. To say that all lives matter, though true, is to ignore this first recognition–that certain lives do not.

She is right. We cannot just sweep up the protests in good feeling and treat everyone the same–because that is not how all people are in fact treated. The article is well worth reading for mapping the deliberate process of her thinking, how she moves through her thoughts to conclusion.

Posted on

Naked Bodies on Herself.com: Pornography or Powerful?

2015/01/img_0324.jpg

So, is this pornography or a good idea? Herself.com, copyright dated 2015, claims to be dedicated to women, about women for women, according to their manifesto:

“Herself is a gesture to women for women by women; a chance to witness the female form in all its honesty without the burden of the male gaze, without the burden of appealing to anyone. These women are simply & courageously existing, immortalized within these photos. Within their words, their experiences and stories are offered on Herself in the hopes of encouraging solidarity – that maybe we as women will take comfort in the triumphs of others rather than revelling in each other’s defeats. Let us reclaim our bodies. Let us take them back from those who seek to profit from our insecurity.” -Caitlin Stasey

At first glance (lots of bodies to glance at, that being what hits the viewer first), the idea struck me as disingenuous, maybe a marketing ploy. After all, there are seven or so women featured naked with their stories interspersed between nude photos–on the Internet. The metaphor is supposed to be something like the naked truth, but how exactly are these women avoiding the male gaze and pornographic objectification on this public space?

However, after reading the interview questions that each woman responds to, I changed my mind a little, thought more about it. Women respond to many questions ranging on topics from first time sexual experiences, body image, marriage, monogamy, and polyamory, to name just a smattering of the content. The questions are rather blunt and aim for honesty. Few touched on the political such as those about reproductive rights and contraception. The rest are personal.

So what makes this anything more than a sociology graduate school project/case study? Well, the attempt to disseminate ordinary, non-Photoshopped, random, high quality, well-photographed bodies that are not merely categorized in the usual culturally accepted genres of naked or partially clad female bodies, i.e., models, actresses, erotica, pornography, or cadavers, is to challenge culturally acceptable notions of female nudity imposed on the public with other versions of the story of the naked female body. Potentially, it is a direct challenge to the media by ordinary women maintaining control of the deployed-into-society imagery that undergirds bias and affinity, dictates social norms and relegates some bodies to lesser or more valuable against usual criteria, i.e., commercial, aesthetic or familial.

If Herself.com’s game is to infuse media with naked bodies owned and thereby controlled by those throwing their bodies out to the public and not an advertising agency or other commercial enterprise, then I think it is a good idea. However, they will need a great many more bodies to display spanning all demographics: age, race, ethnicity, shape, identity. I will be curious to see where this site goes.

Posted on

“An Open Letter to My Ex-Husband’s New Girlfriend”

2015/01/img_0323.jpg

A refreshingly mature, well-composed letter that reads like a how-to manual in its full cognizance of the nuanced trials that await complex family dynamics post-divorce with children, Tina Plantamura’s open letter to the newcomer to her expanding family (she is remarried) is sensible, sensitive and rational. One passage stands out as particularly the hallmark of all three aforementioned adjectives:

This might sound weird, but I’m so excited about you. My sons will see a side of their father that they don’t even know they missed. They’ll witness the kind of happiness that blooms from the excitement, joy and mystery that comes with a new relationship. They’ll see their father beaming with hope. They’ll hear him laugh (too much and too loud, as they’ve reported to us) and speak with a new charm in his voice. And because they love and admire him, all of these things will make them happier, too.

A healthier response about relationship healing and moving on I have never seen in over twenty years of divorces I’ve navigated; although, I did not often get to see the aftermath, the farther down the road recovery phase of my clients. Most divorces with new significant others, especially those who were part of the divorce causes–and there are always multiple causes–were complicated by yet another person’s agenda and sensibilities to consider. Generally, the path from conclusion to fresh start was far more difficult with outsiders to the divorcing family.

While Plantamura is optimistic about the relationship her sons will develop with the addressee of this letter and attempts to reassure her that the connection she and her ex (the new boyfriend) have is solely the children, both of those emotional and potentially volatile components of the newly emerging “family” are often insurmountably difficult to surrender.

Most mothers jealously guard their possessory interests in their children, emotional, behavioral, and instructional, interests that could easily be threatened by an outsider/insider mothering figure. For instance, being their father’s girlfriend, she inevitably will require, may even demand, a modicum of respect from her lover’s children. She may imagine a future with this family and want to establish and ensure her place as adult and potential permanent roommate. If she lives with him even part time, that demand may be even more insistent. And the longer the relationship persists, the likelier the intrusion on the mother’s coveted role as advisor, consoler, and role model. Disagreements are likely to surface.

Also, the connection two people have with respect to their children is unique, something the girlfriend will never have regarding those children who affect her life, individually and with her husband. Jealousy and friction are foreseeable no matter how warm the welcome and sincere the assurance and encouragement by an ex.

All in all, skepticism aside, I enjoyed the idyllic embrace of this letter and even if only a stated intention of good will and hope, it serves as inspiration for those willing to accept responsibility for raising healthy children as well as for their own happiness.

Posted on

Mistress Gone Ballistic

2015/01/img_0322-0.jpg

I have written of the lure and power of confession before, the cost and benefit to confessor and hearer. Clearly some confess to atone, to bring on the flogging. That is what must be going on in this short advice column Q & A in elle.com, “Ask E. Jean: The Other Woman Etiquette.”

Surely there is a plea to be judged and condemned by the inquirer and E. Jean the advice columnist is only too happy to do so. Why else would a woman expose herself so when she could have easily kept it to herself or sought less public advice, like the therapist E. Jean suggests? I have to wonder at the authenticity of this piece. If not for self-flagellation, what motivates someone to seek an advice columnist, exposing herself publicly to disdain, being judged as someone so crazed or callous as to have committed the act for which she seeks atonement? Maybe it’s made up.

I am not judging (though it sure seems like it). Crimes of passion happen and are treated differently in the law from murder by reason of just that sort of mindlessness that negates intent to do harm, the lack of premeditative hurt and the acknowledgement that this state of mind is part of being human all too often. Some acts are far too provocative–say, catching your wife in bed with another–so that collateral damage is if not excusable then predictable at least.

But I always pause when I read about passion disasters, ponderous at those reported burns so deep that the blacked out mind ceases to direct the body’s actions any longer. Don’t get me wrong. I have suffered blind rage and mindless ecstasy. Perhaps I have been fortunate not to have utterly destroyed anyone or anything in my wake of near total obliteration, not that I know of anyhow.

Only near total obliteration. Somehow the little cricket conscience has chirped audibly enough for me to catch my breath, effect a re-set. The thought of destroying someone else in rage has no doubt occurred to me, but the gear shift from thought to action is sobering. Because sometimes it is just too late and too tragic to say I am sorry. That is what E. Jean and I believe about this mistress story. I have copied the entire short advice piece below.

Dear E. Jean: I have a question about the etiquette of being “the other woman.” The married man with whom I’d been having an affair told me I was “too needy” and that his “shoulders are not for [my] problems.” I was so angry that I texted his wife and ratted him out. I also called his sister and mother-in-law and told them I was pregnant with his child.

It was a lie. I was not pregnant. But I had reached the end of my rope when he ignored an important text I’d sent him. I was not only furious about being ignored, but I was hurt because he was emotionally unavailable to me. Now I feel terrible about what I’ve done. This is not the kind of person I am. How can I clear my conscience and move on from this? —Wronged Woman

Woman—Please: The man is a scoundrel. He was unfaithful to his wife. But you? What you did was so cruel, so half-witted, so dirty, so over the top, causing so much pain to so many people—and if any children suffer the slightest anguish because of your lie (if the man has kids and you cause a divorce)—I don’t want you to “clear your conscience.” Actually, I want you to go to a therapist.

WE RECOMMEND
Ask E. Jean: How Do I Make Peace With His Ex?
The shrink will help you understand that a married man is by definition “unavailable.” (I have the sickening feeling that you’re one of those sparkling Paula Broadwell–esque hotheads for whom “uproar’s your only music,” as Keats said. Hence, I’m not going to yammer all day about therapy. I just want you to give it a whirl and see if you can grok what’s going on and come to a deeper, truer understanding of your life.)

For your own honor, you must now write three letters. The man’s wife, his mother-in-law, and his sister should each receive one—handwritten in ink, on serious cream-colored stationery. Apologize for your heinous lies, take full blame for the affair, and say you led him into it. Yes, we know he’s a bastard. Yes, we know you’re not the Dalai Lama. But make this your one great, selfless act. Your remorse and honesty will restore your dignity, help three people deal with a catastrophe, and show what “kind of person” you are, really.

Posted on

Big Week in Mistress News

2015/01/img_0321.jpg

Sunday is pandering to the public’s need to know day, apparently, because I am about to update readers on the latest in mistress news. But seriously, there is more motivation to critique the reporting of these events than to merely report these “compelling” mistress happenings.

First up is this eye-catching headliner from gawker.com: “60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft Guzzled Champagne from Mistress’ Ass: Report”. Here the big news is a celebrity newscaster had a three year affair with a Manhattan lawyer for which he was sorry and is quoted as apologizing to his wife with whom he has a kid. Of course, that in itself is not big news. No, to make this story newsworthy, piquing the public’s prurient interests, the gawker publication had to include copies of the illicit couple’s sexting, brought to everyone courtesy of the infamous National Enquirer. Thus the titled headline grabber.

Note that had the cited behaviors or sexting occurred between Kroft and his wife, even the National Enquirer would not have escaped criticism–or worse–as most readers would have been offended with such an outlandish invasion of privacy. But when it comes to affairs and celebrities, all bets are off. I got the distinct impression that the story was way too common place as a mere celebrity with a mistress report, so the piece had to be beefed up with something juicy. Thus the sexts.

In other less than stellar news reporting, the late Sammy Davis Jr.’s avowed ex-mistress became the latest in a long line of accusers, 24 or more, to step up in remembrance of being raped by Bill Cosby in USAToday’s report of a couple of weeks ago.

She describes the surprise attack, which occurred in the early 70s when she went to Cosby’s hotel room with barbecued ribs in hand, as one that left her stunned, particularly since she knew Cosby as a friend to Davis. Her stated reasons for not reporting the attack earlier were the prevailing attitudes about rape 45 years ago, her confusion about a friend rather than stranger in a dark alley rape and the awakening of her long ago repressed memory by the recent revelations of Cosby’s other alleged attacks.

It seems the writers did not pursue the going-to-Cosby’s-hotel-room-alone- bearing-ribs line of questioning. How many will read this article and think she is suspect merely by virtue of her being a professed ex-mistress? I would be surprised if there were no more than a handful.

Cosby himself has been the subject of many articles in the past year, all of them increasingly cognizant of his fall from a pretty high pedestal. Six months ago, the indulgences apparently went to him, the celebrity of notable clean, comic wholesome fun with family values. For example, uk’s dailymail ran an article about him in August of 2014, headlined with Bill Cosby’s dumped mistress and her mom having dinner with him. That is apparently the lead-in lure, but the story is a rather warm-ish more than critical story about Bill Cosby, ending with his heh, heh, heh parting remark on the Jimmy Fallon show that he got “some” from his wife on his 77th birthday and alluding to the trials and tribulations of an aging sexual guy with husbandly duties.

However, prior to that, the article matter of factly outlines the sexual abuse accusations, the long term affair and breakup with the subject mistress, as well as the lawsuit by a former lover claiming she raised his love child, the latter having gone to jail for extortion after she threatened Cosby with going to the tabloids. The most interesting part of the article is this excerpt from Cosby’s wife explaining how they were weathering the storm, discussing a time when the Cosbys had focused on ‘selfish needs’:

‘We were both young. We had to go through a lot. It’s difficult to learn to live with somebody, to be unselfish and to be responsible for your behavior – and even to think how you hurt others if you do certain things.’
‘You go through a transition, if you are committed to each other. You cleanse yourself of all of that baggage, and you look at each other and determine whether the relationship is worth salvaging, whether you really love each other and want to be together.’
‘Then you realize, ‘Wait a minute. I might have been doing this because I just didn’t want to think about how this would affect the other person or to allow myself to love someone with emotional intimacy’.’

She claims, I think, that Cosby’s ‘dalliances’ are the result of avoidance behavior, fear of emotional intimacy with a spouse or denial behaviors. Camille Cosby, a PhD in education, appears to be a very smart woman, and she is standing by her man. After all, what does she gain in vilifying him? She is not running for public office and is probably financially secure. Apparently she knew he was a philanderer, perhaps just not the extent of his behavior. And of course he is innocent until proven guilty though it is tough to overlook so many accusations. Defending her husband of 40 something years, a private and personal duty, surely trumps her civil duty to the female victims. Or does it?

Finally, there is the latest and greatest on an old mistress scandal, this one the most logically troublesome. Former CIA director and General, David Petraeus, is accused of having leaked classified information to his then mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, which could lead to felony charges.

The businessinsider article acknowledges that Petraeus’ affair was not so much the big deal (imagine that: a politician with a mistress) as the potential threat of blackmail or leaks, such as those he is accused of having made, that skewered his personal life publicly–clearly an exclusion from the wink wink exemption of the age old good ol’ boys’ mistressing practices.

So four different journals, from gossip to news, cover four different mistress stories from four different subjects: an unknown, two television celebrities and a high-ranking government official. Each is accorded the credibility afforded by society’s attitudes. The unknown mistress gets a salutary news spot in a daily gossip riding on a bashed celebrity’s coattails. The two celebrities get the usual free pass of a double sided nod playing up the public’s interests in illicit affairs of stars with intent to tarnish–or further tarnish–their reputations even while exploiting those celebrity reputations for the hook. That’s because journalists know the public both adores and excoriates celebrities, most likely due to the fame-lust that elicits both adoration and envy of those who have acquired it.

Fame is a shield, almost magical; it makes people turn away in disinterest or in wary suspicion of accusers assumed to be extorting from a monied star. Bill Cosby may still be riding that magic carpet ride: old stories, why didn’t they come forward sooner, paid off, wanting more money or attention, etc. Of course, the jury is not only not still out, it may never assemble. The play in the public sphere for sympathy and the power of fame and money may be the only “justice” on display here. And where there is power, fame, and money, there will be mistresses, adored and abhorred.

But the real power is in the consumers. The public are mostly predictable, sometimes quirky judges. They are a mix of salacious salivators, moralistic finger waggers and jealous girlfriends hooked on fantasy and soaps stories. And when they turn, as quickly as a rising star, public figure, or complete unknown can float the wave of notoriety or popularity, is as deep as they can drown and disappear. Power to the people.

Posted on

“Women Hold the Key to Marital Bliss”

2015/01/img_0320.jpg
Photo: Andrea Obzerova/Shutterstock

Well of course they do. Generally speaking, parents foster emotional intelligence in little girls, at least in Western cultures, so women are better at identifying and naming specific items of redress in an emotional domain such as marriage, love relationships. They can speak the language of emotional discourse and are less likely to lose their balance when the dizzying frays of discord strain individual temperament, patience and understanding.

Though the study is not new, from September 2014, the findings not startling, it was curious that the Journal of Marriage and Family just recently studied and concluded the above-titled findings. But I like an article such as this one that appears in NY Magazine because it details the source of the study and the methodology, thus lending credibility to the information and affording the reader an opportunity to assess the value of the conclusions. Sociologists at play. The writers are also respectful and cognizant of the dangers of stereotypical gendered assumptions–like the ones I made above.

It’s a short read. The authors conclude that women are better at talking about their feelings, which may be the reason for their holding the happy marriage card, but I can think of other reasons historical, biological, cultural and sociological.

What’s your take?

Blog at WordPress.com.