Selfish wankery and other age-defying feats

Today smacking: The assumption of adulthood

For the last six years or so, every single time I have told someone my age, the response has invariably been something along the lines of: “No way! I thought you were a lot older than that!” Since I was young when this started, I thought it was cool to be older. But now? Not so much. Now it’s verging on insulting. So recently I have begun to ask people if what makes them think I am older has anything to do with the fine wrinkles around my eyes brought on by a long youth under a southern sun without sunglasses or semblance of an effective ozone layer. “No,” is always the response I get, and while I know that this is obligatory politeness, I cannot ignore the many responses which go on to say, “It’s nothing to do with your face and how you look; it’s the way you present yourself and the way you speak.”

These days it’s generally agreed – certain religious customs notwithstanding – that there is no set age at which one can decide, “Yes, now I am an adult.” To earn the title you have to act like one, and to keep the title you must continue to act like one, all your life. But far too many adults think that by virtue of being older than 21, 31, 41 – whatever age determines it for them – they are certifiably responsible, card-carrying ‘adults’ whose word is now wiser and more informed than that of people who are younger. This seems to give people license to be the biggest fuck-knuckles on earth; they feel they’ve earned that right by reaching an arbitrary age. Yeah, congratulations; you didn’t die yet. Just like it is cakewalk to conceive a child (for Pete’s sake, you can even do it by accident) but a mammoth undertaking to be a parent, it similarly takes no intelligence at all to grow older, but an enormous amount of self-checking and introspection to be an ‘adult’.

I have a friend, let’s call her Vivica because, well, Vivica is a pretty cool and unusual name – and why do I have to justify my friends’ aliases anyway? – who right now is suffering the kind of mistreatment that makes me righteously indignant. Her suffering is all in the name of, “I’m an adult so I can say and do what I want.” I’ve talked before about good parenting, most notably that a good parent should not be afraid to stand up to their offspring. I guess what I forgot is that a good parent should also act like they were born well before MC Hammer was crab-shuffling across the stage in ballooning pants and Baby had not yet stammered to Johnny Castle that she carried a watermelon.

My friend Vivica is under a lot of stress right now because her mother is, in one particular respect, acting more like an adolescent than her twenty-something daughter. You see, Vivica’s parents divorced about a year ago now. The reasons for the divorce were pretty horrible: apart from her parents not having gotten along for many years, Vivica’s father is an alcoholic, and the emotional and financial strain this was having on the family and the parental relationship finally caused it to break. When the divorce was finalised, Vivica’s parents sold the family home, her mother bought a house not far away, and her father moved back to his home country on the other side of the world.

Understandably Vivica’s mother harbours a lot of anger towards the man who, in her view, broke the family apart and gave her some twenty years of frustration and pain. But equally as understandably, Vivica’s father is still Vivica’s father, and she still wants and needs to be in contact with him. Every woman is, after all, still just a little girl who needs her daddy. But Vivica’s mother’s bitterness towards him and emotional fragility over the whole issue makes it impossible for Vivica to have any semblance of a relationship with her father, even from 17000 kilometres away. Vivica cannot talk about her father, and is forced to call him in secret. This is because at the mere mention of him, Vivica’s mother either spews unresolved rage about him or regresses into emotional infancy, unable to accept the things that have happened.

I realise that divorce is a horrible, horrible thing to happen to anyone and that it takes great emotional toll on all involved. And I also have great, heaping piles of respect for anyone who does make the decision to divorce, knowing that to stay in an unhealthy relationship does nothing but harm to parents and children alike. But when the dust settles, there is still a parent-child relationship here, and despite the fact that both Vivica and her mother are adults, it is still Vivica’s mother’s responsibility – nay, obligation – to show her children that their father is still a man to be respected and remembered. He was, after all, always a loving father to them, and he should not have stripped from him the right to continue to be that loving father.

Vivica’s mother has every right to still be bitter, angry and not-even-close-to-over-it. But to inflict this upon her children is immature, impulsive and a touch selfish. She has not considered that it’s not her daughter’s role to listen while she reflects on how much she both loves and hates her ex-husband. That’s what her fifty-something, married, divorced and everything-in-between friends are for.

Even the impassioned, wilful, watermelon-carrying Baby in that greatest of eighties movies, Dirty Dancing, learns that adulthood has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with how you act and how you deal. There are many subtle tells which indicate to the world that you are an adult, the least of which are those forehead furrows and the grey shadows in the lines beside your mouth which L’Oreal wants you to banish to the seventh circle of hell. Adulthood comes on with subtlety, but you know when it’s there. And you definitely know when it isn’t, or when it has temporarily lapsed like in Vivica’s mother’s case.

It’s a never-ending struggle, to continue to be an adult, and at times we all want to regress back to the halcyon days of childhood, if halcyon they were. But with age comes obligation, and when our immaturity and selfishness is hurting others, it’s time for most of us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. And a few turns with a good therapist wouldn’t go astray, either.

Just like you boycotted Brokeback Mountain because of 'sheep cruelty issues'

Today smacking: Couched belief

So I bet we've all heard this one before:

“I’m not against gays – I swear I’m not! I just don’t agree with the lifestyle.”

Seems to make sense, doesn't it?

Yeah, right up until you give more than two seconds of thought to it. Fact is, if you don’t agree with the ‘lifestyle’, then yes, you are in fact against gay people and what it means to be gay. Deal with it.

The above buzz phrase is often used to espouse a not-entirely-PC viewpoint whilst at the same time excusing a not-entirely-PC viewpoint. Most people are aware that now more than ever there is a move towards acceptance of formerly taboo issues, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. Consequently most people are aware that to openly oppose gay people and the gay ‘lifestyle’ (whatever that is) in public is considered, well, a bit off – especially here in Britain. So we come up with all these wishy-washy ways of essentially saying, “I don’t agree with homosexuality,” but not actually saying that, and coming off sounding all magnanimous towards Those Gays. Patronising, much? Sure, people who use the buzz phrase may not actively oppose gay people, but if they oppose what gay people do and everything that it is to be gay, how is that any different?

There’s no point maintaining a belief if you’re not going to be honest about it, even if it is unpopular. Next thing you know Christians will be saying that they think God, you know, doesn’t necessarily exist. The animal rights demonstrators I walked past on my lunch break will start explaining to me that maybe animals don’t have feelings or anything, and that nobody knows really, since they can’t talk to us, and how do we compare a cockroach to an elephant anyway, man? Without honest belief, Tom Cruise would actually sit on a couch and stay sat, and be all, “Actually, L. Ron Hubbard really might have just been taking the piss.”

OK, so maybe Cruise kind of negates my point, since few people would oppose to the man having his lips sewn shut with thread woven from concentrated cholera and depression, but anyway.

No-one likes a pocket-pisser who nods their head to a different speed depending on who they’re talking to. No-one likes a liar. No-one likes disingenuousness. If you don’t agree with what gay people do in their spare and not-so-spare time, then don’t say you don’t have a problem with it, because you damn well do. Stand up and be counted among the vocal homophobes, since underneath the belief is the same. Underneath it’s all the same xenophobia and hatred, and you might as well be honest about it.

That way when you run for government I’ll know who to spread gay orgy rumours about.

Because vaginas are offended by polyester

Today smacking: Tampon and pad advertising.

I don’t know about you, but when I’ve got my period, I don’t secretly long for the comforting sensation of silk to caress my nether bits. They do not need to be nursed and reassured that everything is okay; that this will all be over soon, and then we can have a nice, long bath and a hot cup of cocoa. My vulva is really never going to care that much.

Which is why my face seizes up into a teeth-bared sneer when I see ads on TV touting the latest improvements to tampons and pads (or ‘napkins’, as the Brits like to call them, but that puts me far too much in mind of fine dining, and heartless as I may be, I’m not Nosferatu: I don’t fancy imbibing blood on a regular basis. But I digress). The one that really got me going recently was this ad that proclaimed their newest pad was crafted especially for your delicate ladybits with ‘genuine silk, for greater comfort.’

Say what now?

Okay, two points here:

1.) anyone who has ever worn a pad, for any reason, knows there’s no such thing as a comfortable one. They bunch, they stick, they ride, they sometimes leak, they are not form-fitting – no matter what the manufacturers have deluded themselves into believing – and you certainly cannot just ‘forget’ you’re wearing one. Sure, they come in degrees of inconvenience, from ‘surfboard-shaped absorptive brick’ to ‘thin, flexible and cites crack-riding as a favourite pastime’ but no amount of silk cradling your lady-garden is going to change that a menstrual pad is, by nature, hellfire uncomfortable. And;

2.) a menstrual pad is a product designed to absorb a (literally) bloody mess. Great, viscous globules; spongy strings; free-flowing gush: it’s all bloody. Eventually, you throw it out. Isn’t the ‘silk’ content (in single quotes because I believe the silk is about as real as that body wash available just now that claims to contain ‘crushed pearls’) just a tad, you know, wasteful and unnecessary?

So why don’t the advertisers get a bit more frank about it? There seems to be an assumption that someone, somewhere out there, is afraid of actually thinking about what menstrual products are for. That’s why they get saddled with stupid, nonsensical names like ‘feminine protection’ (protection from whom?), ‘feminine hygiene’ (because we’re so ritually unclean), and the dreaded ‘sanitary products’. Someone out there is afraid to admit what these products are actually for. But who is it? Is it men? Are they really completely squicked out by the notion of blood (and nutrient-rich tissue produced to sustain developing life) coming from 'Down There'? Or is it women? Are we really that afraid, likely even ashamed, of our own bodies and their normal functions?

My answer: c) all of the above.

So in the interests of forcing us to stop being so juvenile about it, I really wish the advertisers would just call a spade a spade, and a blood clot a blood clot. We’re not ever going to get any truth in advertising, I can concede that. But a little frankness would go down well. I remember a tampon ad that was played a lot on TV when I was a kid. It featured a young woman walking down the street when a fire hydrant suddenly erupted, shooting a thirty-foot fountain of water into the air. Passers-by, fun-loving rapscallions they were, thought it was a great idea to go dancing and playing in the fountain of water raining down on the street. Young woman looks vexed for a moment. But then, remembering she’s ‘protected’ (which we know because she gives her trusty tampon packet a little tap so it sinks further down into her back pocket), gives us a grin and goes dancing in the fountain, too. The tagline was something to the effect of, “X brand: giving you the freedom to do whatever you want.”

As a child I was utterly perplexed by this ad that never actually used the words 'tampon' or 'period'. I didn’t understand what this packet in her pocket signified, and why it gave her the freedom to dance in a fountain when she apparently couldn’t do so under some other circumstance. Some explanation would have been nice: “Unlike pads, these tampons will plug you up like a wine barrel so you don’t have to worry about bleeding all over the place should you be submerged in water.” That would have assisted my understanding a fair bit, I should think. I know it’s not TV’s job to educate me, but it could try to be honest with me. How about, “We know pads will never be comfortable to wear, but we’ve tried to make ours a bit smoother so at least you don’t chafe your groin down to the sinew”? Refreshing frankness, and not a mention of the comfort of silk in sight.

Yep, that would work for me.