Training bras are a soft way to introduce women to the world of having their bodies examined in public. The funny part about that any man walking around without a cup on will also have his parts examined in public. The less funny parts about these actual parts of being human grew to an offensible posture. Susan Sontag made evil out of the male gaze. It is not that her work was without merit; for many bodies benefited from being able to speak up for how they feel objectified but body language and physical communication owes at least a two-way dynamic.
Anyone who has survived a less than friendly, and perhaps abusive relationship can understand how unproductive blame and blame-shifting tends to go. The lines or boundaries around what constitutes healthy relating can be found in pretty highly agreeable quotients. That last statement, I am pretty sure Microsoft Word would have underlined as a “passive voice.” That was something that happened a lot throughout my work in copywriting, editorial, and frankly in my everyday life.
That passive voice seemed to open up an experience of behavior that I was responsible for creating. However, questionable as I found bra burning to be, because I remember being ecstatic about training bras, I found myself puzzled. Why burn a bra when the option to not buy one at all was always there. Setting things on fire, somehow became socially more acceptable than abstaining from buying the thing set on fire in the first place really puzzled me.
In the last decade I feel like I stepped into one of those spirit mazes in Ojai, California, to realize I don’t have to walk on a prepared stone round to get to the center. All along that route, you are there right there with you. Those spiritual mazes are often only wide enough for one person too, such that I found it quite obvious ancient spiritual practices would service the separating of people.
Maya Angelou is often quoted for the saying (paraphrase here): those who know better, do better. What better actually implies or means is perhaps at the poetic heart of any beloved phrase. I’m not sure what can be said for setting things on fire outside of the context of serving an ecological growth process. Was bra burning really a fair activity or did it scrape the surface of something deeper?
If you recall last week’s cookie touched on the Nobel Prize for Physiology was describing something most people I’ve met consider common sense. The article in the media barely scraped upon the surface of what the innovations were about or could be deployed for. Humans are social creatures; we need touch. And while people are parading for the rights of animals and humans, there are a great lot of people not raising noise and raising their families instead. But we don’t hear about the good news. Again most people I meet agree. So why is good news still regarded as sentiment (low value) and inflammatory news regarded as progressive (high? value)?
The aggression towards traditions and structures humans has relied upon is understandable, particularly when trauma is involved. But a fight happens when people enter the ring. And bodies separated from each other have to gain more self reliance than interdependence. Try as humans might believe, outsmarting ourselves isn’t that easy; and it might not be a great idea.
The list of things that did not go how I thought they would seems to grow with every birthday, so no wonder the nostalgia for days past grows. Everything that gave us the comforts today could not have been THAT terrible ALL the time. This kind of cultural hissy-fit has always fit as well as a training bra. Not that well. So what are we in training for? I want to write more on the human relating situation, touch, and how expectation for closeness can face cognitive dissonance when the idea of independence is unfounded in reality. But I think this medium week was needed first.
Stay tuned for next week’s cookie because there I want to bring up more of the ways human relating hurts or benefits from ideas, and what it can mean in the technological today to develop healthy trust and respect for each other. No fires or manipulation required. For now, a few ways to look through the prairie:
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