cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
Q&A
Q: I read that you donned a prosthesis for your one-woman show “Man to Man,” in which you played both husband and wife.
A: Actually it was a balled pair of socks, but the idea of it morphing in legend into a penis prosthetic is fantastic, and we should leave it right there.
— Tilda Swinton, interviewed by Andrew Goldman in the NY Times Magazine
GOD
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
— Joseph Campbell
LOVE LANGUAGES
“Adults all have a love tank. If you feel loved by your spouse, the whole world is right. If the love tank is empty, the whole world can begin to look dark.” The problem: individuals fill their tanks in different ways. To illustrate, [Southern Baptist minister and author Gary Chapmn] told the crowd a story of a couple on the verge of divorce who came to see him. The man was dumbfounded. He cooked dinner every night for his wife; afterward he washed the dishes and took out the trash. “I don’t know what else do to,” the man said. “But she still tells me she doesn’t feel loved.” The woman agreed. “He does all those things,” she said. Then she burst into tears. “But Dr. Chapman, we never talk. We haven’t talked in 30 years.” In Dr. Chapman’s analysis, each one spoke a different love language: he liked to perform acts of service for his wife, while she was seeking quality time from him.
“Each of us has a primary love language,” Dr. Chapman said, and often secondary or tertiary ones. To help identify your language, he recommended focusing on the way you most frequently express love. What you give is often what you crave. Challenges in relationships arise because people tend to be attracted to their opposites, he said. “In a marriage, almost never do a husband and wife have the same language. The key is we have to learn to speak the language of the other person.”
He eventually labeled these different ways of expressing love “the five love languages”: words of affirmation; gifts; acts of service; quality time; and physical touch.
— Bruce Feiler, “A Sermon to Save Marriages,” New York Times
MARGARET SANGER
The first birth-control clinic in the United States opened on October 16, 1916, on Amboy Street in Brooklyn. There were two rooms, and three employees: Ethel Byrne, a nurse; Fania Mindell, a receptionist who was fluent in Yiddish; and Byrne’s sister, Margaret Sanger, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse and mother…Between 1912 and 1913, Sanger wrote a twelve-part series for The Call, the socialist daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Because any discussion of venereal matters violated the Comstock law, Sanger’s final essay, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” was banned on the ground of obscenity. By way of protest, The Call ran, in place of the essay, an announcement: “’What Every Girl Should Know’ – NOTHING!”…
In 1914, Sanger began publishing The Woman Rebel, an eight-page feminist monthly, in which she coined the term “birth control”…[The following year she rented a storefront and opened the birth control clinic that eventually became Planned Parenthood.] Nine days later, an undercover policewoman came, posing as a mother of two who couldn’t afford any more children. Mindell sold her a copy of “What Every Girl Should Know.” Byrne discussed contraception with her. The next day, the police arrived, arrested Sanger, confiscated an examination table, and shut down the clinic…
At Sanger’s trial, during which the judge waved a cervical cap from the bench, Sanger hoped to argue that the law preventing the distribution of contraception was unconstitutional; exposing women, against their will, to the danger of dying in childbirth violated a woman’s right t life. But the judge ruled that no woman had “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” In other words, if a woman wasn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger went to Queens County Penitentiary. She was sentenced to thirty days.
— Jill Lepore, “Birthright: what’s next for Planned Parenthood?,” The New Yorker
HOPE
Hope, in this deep and profound sense, is not the same thing as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good.
— Vaclav Havel
another eye opens 