The Forest and the Trees
I started reading books about memory and brain function following a diagnosis for celiac disease. Eliminating gluten, and the sugar that surrounded that gluten, improved my energy level and ability to focus. I started to recall childhood events. But it wasn’t until I was in my fifties, that I realized I’d suffered severe trauma including a brain injury. I am starting to accept why, in high school, I couldn’t be a candy striper like I wanted to. I’d been labeled.
I learned in a college psychology class that authoritarian ideologies, with their strict gender roles, produce higher rates of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and substance abuse. Such groups protect their members from opportunity and truth. I learned this, regurgitated this textbook information into my blue book for final exam, and forgot about it until, later, when my subconscious/unconscious mind, and self-help books, led me to see certain causal connections.
Current brain research suggests that everything we feel, learn and experience is stored in our bodies and consciousness. When we’re capable of putting words to experiences, we label those experiences with the words we’ve been taught to use. A child who’s mocked and shamed for their looks, including skin tone, facial features, body size, or gender develops some sort of intrinsic shame. I was around six years old when a stern female relative took me aside to explain to me that when boys look at girls in a certain way, the girls get “fat.” To me, “fat” meant overweight, not pregnant. I knew many nice overweight people and some not so nice thin ones; reproductive mechanics were unimaginable to me; and the more I asked questions elsewhere about why being “fat” was “bad,” the more I was scolded for asking “not nice” questions. I felt confused and bad about myself. I tried to figure things out and be “nice.”
Today, I am grateful that in our home, we had access to science and history picture encyclopedias.
Along with being told not to ask hurtful questions about “fat,” I received good guidance about what might seem funny but was not funny. While I sat on the living room floor watching Looney Tunes, one of my parents, or both, told me that Pepe Le Pew was not a nice guy; Penelope the cat didn’t want Pepe on top of her.
Pepe Le Pew is currently in the news because his character has been cut from “Space Jam 2,” amid what some describe as “cancel culture.” At the same time, Pepe Le Pew’s lines were cut from the movie, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would cease publishing six Seuss books that featured ethnic, racial, and cultural caricatures.
And, during the same week Robert Aaron Long killed eight people in massage parlors in Atlanta Georgia, multiple sources sent me a publicly circulated Facebook post featuring a photo of rapper Cardi B. accompanied by the following text, “Dr. Suess’s books and Pepe Le Pew are too offensive, but Cardi B is rapping about her W.A.P. (sic) while swinging on a stripper pole at the Grammys on prime time television. This nation is totally depraved and on the road to Hell.”
Really?
Being neither familiar with Cardi B. nor “W.A.P.,” I did some online research. The “P” in “WAP” stands for a slang term for a female reproductive body part that the 45th President bragged he could grab whenever he wanted to because he was a celebrity. The 45th President said, “they” let him do it. Us/them. We/they. Simple and simplistic.
Power dynamics affect everything, including who can laugh at whom in books, in film, at school, and over dinner. Sexual entertainment objectifies girls and women. And, amid rigid authoritarian religions, the female body, and femininity in general, is framed early on as a source of sin and temptation. Many religious children learn that their bodily feelings are sins. Girls being framed as temptations and occasions of sin leaves them vulnerable to predation, emotional blackmail, and blame.
Amid this negative programming in which neurons that fire together wire together, our senses, brains, and neurochemical responses build consciousness. If there is a road to hell, the notion of inherent bodily sinfulness is certainly one of the onramps.
Cardi B. stated that her Grammy Awards show performance took place at 10 PM on a show rated PG for “Parental Guidance.” True. Standards for TV content rating started in 1997, long after the boys and girls of my generation grew up absorbing cultural caricatures from children’s books and watching the “romantic” Pepe Le Pew force himself on Penelope.
As for the six Asian women, one non-Asian woman and one non-Asian man shot in massage parlors by self-described Bible believing sex addict Robert Aaron Long, there is much disagreement about the exact nature of Long’s “hate.” Did he hate Asians? Did he hate women? Does it matter? It matters.
ATLANTA, GA – MARCH 17: A man walks past a massage parlor where three women were shot and killed on March 17, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. Suspect Robert Aaron Long, 21, was arrested after a series of shootings at three Atlanta-area spas left eight people dead on Tuesday night, including six Asian women. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
I suggest Long hated the sexual part of himself; he projected that hate onto the, in this situation, mostly Asian working women who provided him with the services he hated to want. Robert Aaron Long explained why he did what he did.
It is time to start looking at the forest and the trees. The forest in which we find ourselves has been a long time growing. Is Pogo still around?
