Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.

Things I would like to do (including George)

Faugh, frick and frack, and other bad words: I just finished writing a tasty little commentary to go with this WONDERFUL essay (or shussshhhh-ay, or whatever sound the Hawaiian surf makes) which Shelley Fralic wrote, all about returning to Hawaii after 40 years. Somehow as I sought to attach the piece, my commentary appeared in a little box that scrolled down, but would only display about a paragraph at a time. Not exactly deleted, but completely inaccessible. It was hiding behind something, and it would not come out. 

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

So I gave up, and (as I have had to do so many times in my life) started over.

Husband and I have been slugging it out over Where we're Going to Go This Year, that is, if we "go" at all, if we even have sufficient bucks scraped up. But haven't we been to Hawaii six times already? Five, only five! But we've seen everything already, haven't we? Besides, what IS there to see? How many mangos can you eat in a week?

Oh, but Hawaii stirs you so much more deeply than that. Along with the jolly jiggling passionate Polynesian papaya and the matrons letting it all hang out in two-piece bathing suits because after all, THIS IS HAWAII AND IT'S ALL RIGHT, there is that whispering low of nearly-extinct tradition. The remnant is in the music, the crazy guys with the ukeleles singing the songs with all those syllables. The less-jolly ones are full of mourning and a loss we can't ever know about. And there was that movie, that gorgeous movie with George Clooney in it - what was it called? 

As if George Clooney weren't breathtaking enough, we had Hawaii towering and crashing in the background, and music which was simply hypnotic.  It's a spooky place: once on my first trip, which was not 40 but closer to 30 years ago, I glimpsed a young Polynesian woman with long, flower-garlanded blue-black hair and forever Island eyes, and thought to myself: that's the most beautiful human being I will ever see.

I don't know. I ramble, I digress. I've been all over the place lately, writing shittily or not at all because I was preoccupied with health concerns that, as usual, have turned out to be groundless, footless, bootless, artless and pennyless. (I told you I was writing shit.) In other words, like everyone else in my family it looks as if I'm going to live to be 90. I am mostly OK with that, though I do wish I had more control over the circumstances.

So NOW can I go to Hawaii? Now can I flip-flap along the beach, eat hot batter-dipped mahimahi with my fingers (standing up, wearing my beach coverup for a dress, my beach coverup that is all covered with lemon juice and grease and I don't care), now can I listen to that severely soft ssssssssssssss-ssssssssssss of wind combing through brittle palm fronds, now can I - I wonder, if all this tastiness and sensual beauty is peeled back, if there isn't something else here, some sense of an Eden we lost, but can magically return to. If we have the $15,000.00

Shelley Fralic: Coming home to memories of paradise

A holiday romance with Hawaii lingers long after the scent of hibiscus is gone

By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun columnistMarch 25, 2013

Vancouver Sun columnist Shelley Fralic in Maui.

Photograph by: Shelley Fralic , PNG

It has been 40 years, and you don’t remember much, except the wide swath of pineapple plantations clinging to the rich red earth sweeping up to the edges of the Jurassic-like volcanic ravines as you drove a rickety rental to the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina because, back then, it was pretty much the only place to stay on the west coast of Maui when you were barely 20 and hadn’t thought to make reservations.

You remember, too, the naked hippies camping to the south on Makena Beach, a motley crew that caused much controversy with the locals but have since grown up to return decades later to same spot as moneyed tourists, clad in the capitalist regalia of polo shirts and spiked Nikes to play 18 holes where they once smoked grass instead of riding on it in shaded golf carts.

And, despite the time away, you have never forgotten the smell of the air, the heat and humidity that warms your face the minute you step off the plane, the dense fragrance of lush decay and the flowery heaviness of plumeria, hibiscus and jasmine floating on the trade winds.

You are surprised that so little has changed on the island. Oh, there’s a Costco now, and a clutch of strip malls and fast food joints near the airport, and the wild west coastline that was once so bare of settlement is now often obscured by the hotels and condo developments lining the gold-sand beaches.

But there are still aren’t many dogs, or traffic jams, or people for that matter, and much of the island is still open-faced land. Out in the sea, the magnificent humpbacks still beguile on their age-old migration, breaching and slapping their flukes as if they know they are the greatest show on earth. The reefs remain natural snorkelling aquariums, and the berry-brown locals still stick their boards in the strong surf in the mid-day sun, mindful of the sharks below and the big sea turtles above.

It isn’t long before you find yourself truly on vacation, reading by the pool, bobbing in the waves, tucking into macadamia nut pancakes topped with fresh-picked bananas for breakfast, pineapple upside cake served with warm ripe papaya for lunch and anything fresh-grilled for dinner. Early in the evening, you sit on the beach-front lanai, the ocean breezes cooling the heat as you work on a bag of chewy sugar cane.

You know you are truly on vacation because the cockroaches, which are the size of the average spinster’s brooch and roam freely about your seaside complex, are less a bother than the discovery that the coconut vodka you stashed in the freezer is just about gone.

You know you are truly on vacation because you are virtually unplugged, your hand-helds mostly gathering dust on their chargers, manual dexterity required only for the zoom function on your camera and the slippery neck of a cold bottle of Corona spiked with a slice of lime.

You know you are truly on vacation because the modest amount of poundage you had purposely shed to avoid looking both pasty and pudgy in public, like a beluga stuffed in a bathing suit, returns to your backside within hours of discovering a gourmet coffee shop that makes fresh coconut macaroons the size of baseballs. Dipped in chocolate.

You know you are truly on vacation because you don’t care about much of anything, except whether or not your grandchildren need a bigger boogie board or more sunscreen on their cheeks, or if you’ll ever get the sand out of their ears.

And even though you are really, truly relaxing for the first time in a long time, there comes the moment when the invigorating feel of warm sand under your feet and this most charming of vacations give way to yearning for your own house and your own bed, and so you gladly head back to the land of the cold.

And you know you have truly been on vacation because when you return, the pile of newspapers that awaits reveals that, as you suspected, nothing much has really happened. There’s a local dust up over whale bone porn and a stolen meat shop sign, and the world is feting a humble new pope (aren’t they all humble?). Tiger Woods is seeking redemption with a reinvigorated swing and a new blond. One famous Justin has shorn his thatch of luscious locks in a quest for crowning, another is reclaiming his throne atop the pop music charts and yet another, the youngest of the triad, is dog-paddling through the quicksand of the celebrity meltdowns. The hockey team still sucks, and social media is still irksome, and it’s still getting easier/harder to buy a house in Vancouver.

As for you, your nose is still peeling and the soothing sound of Hawaii’s rhythmic crashing waves still echoes in your ears, all of it a lovely reminder that no matter the enticements of a far-off paradise, there really is no place like home.

P. S. The movie is called The Descendents and I must see it again. On a big screen, if possible, the bigger the better. Raging, rushing, sighing Hawaii, that crazy music you can't get enough of, and. . . George Clooney.

GIFs from Hell: or, My Visit to the Doctor

Sick

I am one of those people who never gets sick. Almost.

Or should I say: I am almost never one of those people, or I am one of those people who almost, or – never, or -

I don’t know what happened on March 12. It felt like a cold. Just a nuisancy thing, a premature summer cold (like the viral bout of what-I-was-sure-was-flu last July). One of those gummy-throated, slightly raw, uneasily sneezy – but you already know what I mean.

I don’t know when it pounced. Maybe the next day. Suddenly a lightning bolt slashed across my chest, my throat became so raw I couldn’t swallow, my eyes were sealed nearly shut, I shivered, I sweated, I ached, I couldn’t breathe, and I came to the conclusion that I had one of those nice little summer colds I had last July.

How do I know? My doctor told me so.

It doesn’t matter what you “have” now. Your doctor listens to your back (never your chest), then, even if it’s pleurisy or pneumonia or bubonic plague, says “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

This thing has been “going away on its own” for ten days now. I won’t get into the digestive problems. Oh yes I will. I have abdominal cramps, gas, diarrhea and it takes days to digest anything. (I am totting up all these “symptoms” just as I think of them.) Last night, trying to sleep while listening to a rhythmic bubbling, creaking groan in my chest, a sudden freshet of blood shot all over my pillowcase, presumably a nosebleed, the first one I have ever had in my life.

Nice little summer cold.

I have had the aches and the shakes. Bizarre gushing sweats alternate with freezing shivers. And twitches, very strange ones, quite violent, almost like little seizures. I get six or seven of them, one right after the other. Why? I couldn’t eat and couldn’t throw up and suffered one of those migraines that should have its own postal code.

It was the usual thing, where it would seem to get a little bit better. One day I went for a drive, came home, lay down for a moment, and lifted my head 90 minutes later, my face stuck to the pillow with God knows what.

I don’t know what got me onto the cough syrup, because I hate the stuff. Maybe it was the groany deep quivering vibrations in my chest that seemed almost like whales talking. Maybe it was coughing up all that unspeakable “stuff”. I took a shot of it once, I swear, just to put myself under. It didn’t work, because cough syrup has all sorts of stuff in it that causes a frightening rebound effect. You lie there in the dark with jangling alarm-bells going off in your head, sure you will never feel any better. Ever.

Funny sounds began to issue from my body. The first funny sound seemed to be coming from my larynx, which was as swollen as a golf ball and almost wouldn’t let me swallow. When I tried to sleep, I heard a noise like an old rope being sawed back and forth on one of those ships, you know, like on Popeye. Then, to my horror, I heard a little “hoo, hoo!” sound, as if something were alive and swimming around in there. It was the first time my larynx has ever talked back to me.

It’s a choir, of sorts, a chorus of mucus and phlegm and other disgusting fluids no one would want. My sinuses crackle and make a sound like a balloon being squeezed. When I sit up in the morning, a huge windy wheeze gusts up out of my windpipe, sounding like an old pedal organ or air brakes on a bus. It scares the shit out of me.

“You HAVE to go to the doctor,” my husband says. “What did the doctor say?” my friend asks me. She must come from the school who still believes “going to the doctor” actually has a point. I have come to believe that doctors do absolutely dick-all these days except listen to your back and push the little button on the machine that says, “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

I know that for a long time, doctors prescribed too many antibiotics. These same doctors would have us believe that this was all the fault of the patients, because they refused to leave the office without that little piece of paper.  After moaning and groaning and begging and pleading, they went home gaily waving a prescription, feeling oh-so-much-better-already. And eventually, when these drugs stopped working from overprescribing, GUESS WHOSE FAULT IT WAS?

The doctor’s? Don’t be ridiculous! Doctors are fountainheads of Wisdom and Truth. They would NEVER prescribe anything unless the patient absolutely needed it, or else got them down in a choke-hold on the floor and refused to release them until they had that little piece of paper.

The patients, self-indulgent, weak and soft in the head, DEMANDED these prescriptions. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that doctors wanted to process patients in and out of the office at light speed, and the best way to do that – the best way to get rid of them fast – was to hand them that little piece of paper.

NEXT!

As with most things, the situation has swung wildly from one stupid extreme to the other. From handing EVERYONE a prescription for banana-flavored Amoxicillin or whatever it's called just to get them out that revolving door as fast as possible, doctors now Do Not Prescribe Antibiotics. EVER. For anything. Antibiotics no longer work, you see. The reason they no longer work is that YOU asked for them all the time, you self-indulgent little whiner! You spoiled it for everyone, so now we can't prescribe them at all, or we'll Look Bad. Some big doctor, some high-up doctor, some Great Agency in the Sky that tells doctors what to do, has now told doctors Not To Prescribe Antibiotics.

EVER.

Which is why I will clearly die, rather than disgrace myself by crawling in to the doctor's office and asking please, please, PLEASE may I have some of that banana-flavored goo with the capacity to save my life.  It's been a privilege whining to you.

Best role models for kids in the '60s

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Duelling dulcimers

For reasons unknown, I can no longer post a YouTube video in the usual way. I have to do back-flips and stuff (i. e. I can't browse, but already have to know the name of it in order to find it!). This however is worth any kerfuffle. I'm not a mountain music fan, but this stuff! Mountain dulcimer can be excruciating, like playing stretched wires (which I guess it is), but these two make it sound golden. She's a tad sedate and he's really groovin' (holding his instrument aslant as if it will soon tip right off his lap). But when they look at each other at the end. . . it's the sweetest moment.

I'm always digging around for the wacky 78 rpm recordings of my childhood, especially the Children's Record Guild collection, a sort of record-of-the-month club that mailed you a new recording for something like $2. We didn't subscribe to this, but were given a whole whack of recordings, 50 or 60 of them maybe, by someone whose kids must either have never played them, or were so careful they didn't even leave a scratch on them.

Within a couple of months, Davy Crockett sounded like, "king of the wild frontier. . .tier. . . tier. . . tier. . . tier" (etc.)  The background ambience soon resembled World War 3, but the records were well-loved and constantly played.

Some records represented the force-feeding of classical music, with Cinderella accompanied by music from Prokofiev's ballet and Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn's incidental music. This was all part of a general indoctrination I suffered through: almost everything I heard, saw, smelled or touched (or tasted?) had to be oriented towards "good" music. No other music (not even "that rock 'n roll music" I later came to love) existed in our tiny stifling universe.

Thus came various musical punishments: Victor Borge narrating some sort of swill about "Piccolo, Saxie and Company"; Rusty in Orchestraville, a morality tale about what happens to little boys who don't practice the piano; Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met (already covered in a previous post, so let's not go there again). And something about the history of the orchestra which, I remember, began with a smarmy narrator saying, "Well, well, well! Here is an orchesta!" And here I thought it was a cheese blintz.

It really was a narrowing education, not a broadening one. We should have known something about mountain music, about jazz and blues, but my father looked down on these renegade forms as if they didn't exist. I think it came from his background of dire poverty, his ignorance of any music except for the excruciatingly bad English music-hall stuff he grew up with. He was always terrified of being found out and even deliberately erased his Cockney accent on arriving in Canada.

I remember (and even found on YouTube once) a Children's Record Guild 78 rpm recording - might have been by the Weavers, in fact - of a song called Round and Round the Christmas Tree, which is the same tune as this dulcimer duet. I think of the fluidity of this kind of music, passed along by memory and never written down. The fact that Appalachian music has echoed through the generations with its integrity intact fascinates me. No Children's Record Guild required: they had memories then, and ears to hear.

Kiddie Records Weekly

http://www.kiddierecords.com/2006/archive/week_05.htm

OLLA! Caitlin and Ryan in Mexico

Chow-chow-chow! Talented cats

Hello, Matt!

Compare and contrast!

Bad Girls in College: has anything changed?

While jazzing around the topic of college girls and morality, I came across an antique ad poster which is unintentionally hilarious (see yesterday's post). Written in 1905, it warned young girls - and their parents - of the evils of college life, implying (with a sledge hammer) that higher education turns virtuous young women into raving sluts, ruined for all prospects of marriage and respectability.

Then I found this astonishing (contemporary) treatise online. I cannot even imagine a college girl, tasting personal freedom for the first time, soberly reading this thing and saying to herself, "Well then, I guess I had better stay away from  parties and remain chaste, saving myself for the holy bonds of wedlock."

Between the lines, beyond the supposed candour and up-to-date medical viewpoint, this thing is as antiquated, as repressive and condescending as that poster depicting the smoking slut in the slip. I will attempt some up-to-the-minute commentary in between a few choice excerpts.

Sense and Sexuality  

The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world.

By Miriam Grossman, M.D. (Note that it's written by a doctor!)

Intimacy promotes attachment and trust


Intimate behavior floods your brain with a chemical that fuels attachment. Cuddling, kissing, and sexual contact releases oxytocin, a hormone that announces: I’m with someone special now. Time to switch love on, and caution off.


Gentle reader: knowest thou whether thy lower nature is inclining thee towards base behaviour? Knowest thou not that the impulses of Eve are as seductive now as when she first handed Adam the apple?

When oxytocin levels are high, you’re more likely to overlook your partner’s faults, and to take risks you otherwise wouldn’t. So you certainly do not want your brain drenched in this hormone when making critical decisions like, What do I think of him? How far do I want this to go? When it comes to sex, oxytocin, like alcohol, turns red lights green. It plays a major role in what’s called “the biochemistry of attachment.” Because of it, you could develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you. You might think of him all day, but he can’t remember your name.

Maidens! Thinkest thou that he be of good family, of peerless reputation? Prithee, reconsider. The merest hint of oxytocin in thy innocent veins may stimulate a flood of reprehensible behaviour. Beware the Biochemistry of Attachment! Consider it before ever accepting a date with one of these beasts! Warn him in advance, "I won't kiss you tonight. My oxytocin levels are too high."

Science confirms: alcohol makes him hot ... when he’s not.

Did you hear? Science has confirmed the existence of “beer goggles”—when a person seems more attractive to you after you’ve had a few drinks. Enjoy a glass of wine or a couple of beers at a party, and the guy hitting on you  begins to look better than when you arrived. It works the other way too: guys will find your face prettier after they’ve had a few.

Dost thou believe that a single sip of beer or a few jello shots can never ruin thy reputation? Get real, maidens! It takes but one taste, especially if thine drink be spiked with the Date Rape drug. Do thine homework before taking that first slug!

In a British study, 80 college students rated photos of unfamiliar faces of men and women their age; alcohol consumption significantly raised the scores given to photos of the opposite sex. Drinking affects the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain used to determine facial attractiveness. It’s probably one of several reasons that casual, high risk sex is often preceded by alcohol consumption. In the morning, you both look different.

Recognizeth thou the face of thy seducer? I thought not, any more than he recognizeth thee. Be-eth he as ugly as the back end of an elephant? Didst  thou not receive warning before indulging in  this debauchery? Take heed to the nucleus accumbens! When discussing sex with thy girl friends, make sure you bring up the nucleus accumbens! When talking to a prospective suitor, let the nucleus accumbens be thy first order of business!

A younger cervix is more vulnerable to infection.

Your cervix, the entrance to your uterus, has a vulnerable area one cell thick, called the transformation zone. It’s easy for HPV (the human papillomavirus, which can cause genital warts, and even cervical cancer) to settle in there. That’s why most teen girls are infected from one of their first sexual partners. By adulthood the transformation zone is replaced with a thicker, tougher surface. So it’s wise to delay sexual activity, or, if you’ve already started, to stop.

Stop, young maidens, stop! Stop thy beating heart! Stop thy throbbing, oh, whatever. Is it not worth the price of death to retain thy virtue?

Even though these infections are common, and usually disappear with time, learning you have one can be devastating. Natural reactions are shock, anger, and confusion. Who did I get this from, and when? Was he unfaithful? Who should I tell? And hardest of all: Who will want me now?

Ah, the price of wantonness. Ruined, ruined! Will any man look upon thee now without seeing a raving slut? "Oh, how I wish I had paid heed to my nucleus accumbens!"

These concerns can affect your mood, concentration, and sleep. They can deal a serious blow to your self esteem. And to your GPA.

Though thou art attending college to snag a husband, not to attain a degree, a careless slide in your GPA may lead to sliding in other areas, such as morality. It doth be a slippery, nay, a well-lubricated slope.

The HPV vaccine is a major achievement, but the protection it provides is limited. You are still vulnerable to other infections like herpes, chlamydia, HIV, and non-covered strains of HPV.

And of course no vaccine prevents a broken heart.

Take heed, gentle maidens. Thou mayest have a broken heart along with a ruptured hymen (not to mention a cervix flooded with oxytocin). Is this merely the inevitable price of higher education. . . or the wages of wanton moral abandon? Ask thy doctor to explain all this to you before you make that "other" visit in a couple of months.

The Post-Blog Afterglow:

Since posting all that early-19th-century-via-2013 stuff above (in about 6 different fonts, but that's just how it came out), I found out a little bit more about this Miriam Grossman. To put it bluntly, she's something to the right of Atilla the Hun and would rather young girls not have sex at all. I can't quote everything in her lovely little pamphlet (which lacks the slutty cover, but otherwise is pretty much the same), but I did find this "nugget" which I had to pass along:



The rectum is an exit, not an entrance.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

And about those other sexual activities ...
Having more than five oral sex
partners has been associated with throat cancer.
Turns out that HPV can cause malignant tumors in
the throat, just like it does in the cervix.
In a study of sexually active college men, HPV
was found both where you’d expect—the genital
area—and where you wouldn’t: under fingernails.

Yes, you read that right. Researchers now speculate
whether the virus can be shared during activities
considered “safe,” like mutual masturbation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control,
approximately 30% of all women will have had
anal intercourse by the age of 24. Even with
condoms, this behavior places them at increased
risk of infection with HIV and other STDs. For
example, the risk for HIV transmission during anal
intercourse is at least 20 times higher than with
vaginal intercourse.

The government website, www.fda.gov, provides
no-nonsense advice about avoiding HIV: “Condoms
provide some protection, but anal intercourse is
simply too dangerous to practice.”
The rectum is an exit, not an entrance. Anal
penetration is hazardous. Don’t do it.

Your fertility is a window of opportunity that will close.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Seventy-five percent of college freshmen
say that raising a family is an “essential or
very important goal.” But 55% of younger highachieving
women are childless at 35. And 89% of
them think they’ll be able to get pregnant into
their forties.

OK, time out. It’s easiest for a woman to
conceive and deliver a healthy child in her
twenties. Fertility declines slightly at 30, and
more dramatically at 35. You may imagine that
the waiting rooms of fertility clinics are packed
with obese women smoking cigarettes. If so,
you’re wrong: they are filled with health-conscious
women who work out and count calories. They are
there because they’re forty.

If having children is one of your dreams, it
won’t hurt to keep these facts in mind as you
make decisions about careers and relationships.
Remember that motherhood doesn’t always happen
when the time is right for you; there’s a window of
opportunity, then the window closes.
For some women, just as this window is
closing, they feel an unexpected longing for a child.

It saddens me each time a patient describes this—
typically a student who always put career first, and
is finally getting a Ph.D. at 38 or 40. She’s thrilled
to reach that milestone, but aches for another: to
feel a new life inside her, to give birth.
The rewards of sexuality—with the right guy,
at the right time—are immense. Ask an older
woman you respect who waited and chose
the right man; you might be surprised to hear
her describe love and passion that has lasted for
decades—and k

ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH! What IS this Clare Booth Luce Policy thingie, anyway? Why not just tie her legs together, for God's sake, or take out the whatever-gland, what it is that makes young women horny in the first place.

I gather this is pretty far-right-wing stuff, at least from the criticisms of it I've found on the net. Dr. Grossman may be Jewish, but she burns with Republican fervor as surely as those right-wing fundamentalist jackasses on phone-in radio. Read between the lines, and we're talking chastity, the kind of thing Southern Bab-tist girls make vows about while wearing gauzy white dresses and dancing with their fathers.