My first Frieda Kahlo inspired painting was about a decade ago when I found a cute little Mexican dress at the thrift store, so I posed and painted my little granddaughter as baby Frieda. More recently I caught my daughter wearing flowers in her hair and it inspired me to pose her for a Frieda inspired portrait. We couldn’t find any monkeys, but I thought her little dog Pumpernickel could fill that role. Why is it that Frieda is so iconic in art? It seems to me that suggesting Frieda is a good way to represent women’s inner strength and a certain amount of staying true to yourself. Both portraits are below.
One of my niblings wrote not too long ago that the word of the year was the singular “they”. They didn’t say if this was their own nomination, or if they were reporting on the designation by Merriam-Webster of “they”, used in the singular, gender-neutral sense, as its 2019 Word of the Year.
source: Wiktionary
The American Dialect Society, which holds an annual popular vote for its Word of the Year, beat Merriam-Webster by several years, designating “they” as their Word of the Year in 2015 (link). According to the American Dialect society, singular “they” has been a part of the English language for hundreds of years:
The use of singular they builds on centuries of usage, appearing in the work of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. In 2015, singular “they” was embraced by the Washington Post style guide. Bill Walsh, copy editor for the Post, described it as “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.” ... voters in the [2015] Word of the Year proceedings singled out its newer usage as an identifier for someone who may identify as “non-binary” in gender terms.
This newer usage of “they”, to designate a person who identifies their gender as non-binary is, of course, why the word is currently famous. Prieviously, use of the singular “they” was mainly for when the gender of the person to which the pronoun referred was unknown or irrelevant.
A couple of decades ago I was writing regulations for EPA during a campaign to reduce the amount of bureaucrat-ese used in official writing intended for the public (I know, good luck with that). They had an official name for the plain English that was supposed to replace the bureaucrat-ese: “Plain English”. (Yes, it was treated as if it was capitalized, and a new invention of government management. Bureaucrats work that way.)
Singular “they” didn’t make the cut. Plain English said to replace “he/she” (the popular bureaucrat-ese gender neutral singular pronoun at the time) with the slightly longer but more conversational “he or she”, as in, “if an employee wishes, he or she may…”.
I can remember even further back in my career, when linguistically and politically it was acceptable, even mandatory, to use the pronoun “he” as the singular gender-nonspecific pronoun. The official reason was that the tacit “or she” was easily understood. The unofficial reason, which I never heard voiced but I’m sure was widespread, was that these business communications were probably going to be read almost entirely by men anyway, so the “she” was unnecessary.
Back then, such assumptions about the gender of anyone involved in certain lines of work were so universal that they weren’t even recognized as assumptions—that was just the way the world was. Back then, not just pronouns, but the nouns themselves that described professions, were highly genderized: seamstress, stewardess, actress, governess, empress, professoressa, influenceress.
And this wasn’t just a linguistic reality—jobs themselves, and the expected qualifications and characteristics of job candidates, each had a default gender. I am old enough to remember when job vacancy announcements were segregated by sex. “Male” jobs required competence and ambition, “female” jobs called for attractiveness and congeniality.
The New Republic had a recent thought piece that described some of the more egregious sexist liberties taken with job announcements in the past: Help wanted—female. My sister Lona provided her perspective on gender-based job expectations in a blog post that is more efficient and eloquent than I can match.
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This type of workplace discrimination continues today. After all, many of today’s business and government decision makers are as old as I am, and grew up with the same influences. But at least most people now know that this type of pigeonholing people into certain occupations based on their gender is wrong (or if not that, at least they know that it is CONSIDERED wrong, and if they do it, they have to hide their intentions).
Today’s battleground involves attempts to pigeonhole people’s social, interpersonal, or sexual tastes and behaviors based on their biological gender. While not all of society has recognized the errors of doing this, I’m encouraged that at least there is now an open public debate as to whether this kind of pigeonholing is acceptable. The public prominence of the singular “they” is evidence of this.
Will tolerance of personal behavior choices outside of a gender-based norm become generally accepted, as tolerance of choice of career has? Time will tell, and maybe before that, science fiction will.
Science fiction is well known to push forward the boundaries of the status quo. The best science fiction imagines a situation, sometimes separated from our own by time or vast distances of space, where different rules of reality (physical, technological, biological, or social) apply, and explores the personal and societal responses to that reality by human or human-like characters.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 classic sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness explored these questions beautifully. The story imagines a world like ours in many ways, but where the inhabitants had no fixed gender, but flowed regularly between male and female personas. The protagonist of the book was a human male who had come to the planet as an envoy, and the story concerns his struggles to understand the inhabitants. His attitudes were much like those of American males in 1969; for example, he spoke and thought of these gender-fluid people as all “he”s.
At the time the book was written, the hero might have been intended to reflect the reading audience in general. Today, though, he comes off as sexist, even misogynistic. Still, it’s a good, thought-provoking book, providing even more things to think about now that it has aged 50 years.
I just finished a space opera trilogy by Ann Leckie that starts with Ancillary Justice (2013). It had a completely different treatment of the issue of gender identification: in this imagined universe, a person’s gender has become so irrelevant to their work, social, or sexual expectations that gender-specific pronouns have dropped completely from the language.
The author uses “she” as the gender-neutral pronoun for all the characters. They still fall in love, have sex, and engage in sexual politics, but you don’t know if they are straight, gay, gender-fluid, or if binary, what sex they are.
I spent a lot of time trying to guess the genders of the characters, until I accepted that it wasn’t relevant to the narrative, just as it wasn’t relevant in the universe of the story itself. It’s a stimulating concept to think about, even though it had very little to do with the plot. Good books!
I tried to mimic the conceit in Ancillary Justice by not giving the name of the nibling who started the conversation about gender pronouns at the beginning of the post, or any clues to their gender. Did you notice? Did knowing, guessing, or not knowing their gender indentification make any difference to you in how you read the post? There you go!
he 1950s and 60s were in many ways a simpler and more sentimental time to grow up in than today, or at least it seems so to me. But I remember a certain movie that even back then I found too schmaltzy to stomach. It was Pollyanna, a live-action 1960 Disney movie about a young orphan who comes to town and wins the hearts of all the embittered townspeople with her unstoppable optimism. Oh ugh. Even as a kid, I agreed with the movie’s screenwriter David Swift, who is quoted as saying that “Pollyanna was so filled with happiness and light that I wanted to kick her.”
The movie was an adaptation of the book by Eleanor H. Porter. It was the first of her “Glad books”, published in 1913 when the children in books were angelic, optimistic, and dutiful, and in the end were always rewarded for their goodness. With this as the norm, it’s small wonder that subversive stories like A High Wind in Jamaica(I raved about it here) met with such simultaneous outrage and acclaim.
One of the ways Pollyanna accomplished this optimism was to play what she called “The Glad Game”. One plays it by imagining all of the good things that have come about because your dog died, or whatever situation you find yourself in.
As a kid, I would be mortified at anyone accusing me of being a Pollyanna, or (shudder) indulging in The Glad Game. But I confess I recently found myself doing it, and not just once but on three separate occasions. As with many of the Things of Importance in a Third-Ager’s life, they all had to do with my health.
The third incident happened just the other day. I had completed my required endoscopy to find the source of my internal bleeding (chronicled here). The doctor had told me before-hand that they would be looking for the cause of the problem, and upon identifying it, they would zap it, snip it, clip it, or take a piece for a biopsy, depending on what they found. (I told my doc that “biopsy” sounds like cancer, and asked had she avoided ever mentioning that possibility because it was so unlikely, or just because it was so scary? She said they—doctors—don’t like to talk about it because it’s scary. That answer in itself is kind of scary.)
Well anyway, as I mentioned in my previous report, my upper GI tract inspection showed no serious problems of any kind. The goal of the procedure, at which it completely failed, was to find and fix the problem causing my bleeding, but I couldn’t help thinking, “This is good news! No cancer in the upper GI tract, and when they do the other half of the procedure, I’ll have a complete clean bill of health for the entire food tube!”
My second example was last year when I was recovering from a knee injury. The scans showed something that was “probably nothing, but you should check it out”, which is doc-speak for “don’t sue me if you ignore it and it turns out to be cancer.”
So I arranged a bone scan, although I was pretty confident that I didn’t have cancer (the main cancer indicator was knee pain, and I already knew where that pain was coming from—I BUSTED IT!), and I thought to myself, “what a stroke of luck! This bone scan covers my entire body, so now I’ll get a complete skeleton cancer scan, all free-like!” And I did!
My first example stems from a cardiac incident many years ago, that started me on a cycle of regular tests with my cardiologist. Every test came back fine since that first incident, and after a few nervous years, I finally decided that with all this testing, I’ve probably lowered my risk of being surprised by a heart attack! “Good thing I had that thing that sent me to the cardiac ward!”
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I actually had those thoughts. The true offense of The Glad Game is, of course, not to think it, but to tell others about it, preferably with personal examples, so that they will learn how wrong they were to feel bad when their house burned down. I am telling you about it now, it’s true, but not to encourage you to adopt the approach. Far from it! But if your subconscious points out some silver lining in a storm cloud, you might as well take it—you’ll need it when the real disaster hits!
To balance out the cosmic glad scale just a little bit, I’ll play a little of the misère version of The Glad Game. The misère version, I’ve decided, is like the misère version of Hearts, or Sprouts, or a number of other games where you are allowed to turn the rules upside down, so that if you can force your opponent to “win” by the normal rules of the game, he or she loses, and you win! Plus I think a word like misère is especially apt to apply to The Glad Game. Serves it right, so to speak.
So here goes. Ever since I got my new hearing aids (here), I’ve been a nervous wreck. I’ve gotten much clumsier—every time I put a glass down on a table, I can tell from the sound that I’ve hit it so hard that I’m sure it will explode in my hands. And my car and most of my home appliances with moving parts are all on the verge of total collapse, judging by the racket they make whenever you turn them on. I know I can just hear better now, but it’s no comfort to realize you were constantly teetering on the edge of mechanical disaster before and didn’t even know it!
The way I use The Glad Game to bolster my own health self-image (I wrote all about unrealistic optimism here) reminds me of a famous quote by Nietzche: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger”. That was the opening quote of a movie I’m proud to be a fan of, that 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Conan the Barbarian. Now if you ask Conan what makes him glad, he’s got a ready answer for you: “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentation of the women”. What a guy!
Here’s wishing you get whatever makes you glad in the coming year, with much thanks for listening,
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to visit New Grange in Ireland and experience their simulated solstice experience of the shaft of light that comes into that great Neolithic bunker on exactly the solstice. It was very powerful to experience that in the same way our 5000-year-old ancestors did. I felt like trying to recapture a little of that, so this year I looked around to find a solstice ceremony to go to. The ceremony I found was nice – but a little disappointing to me. I thought it would be more elemental! But we were in a cozy heated room, seated on comfortable chairs, and when it came time to light our flames, we fumbled for the little switch at the bottom of our electronic candles. In the ceremony we completed a dispacho, which is a little ritual offering that, according to The Four Winds website, is “a gift for the organizing principles of the Universe”. From that website I also learned that traditionally, in the Andes, this despacho ceremony is performed after each earth cycle to renew and re-imprint the powers of nature on our luminous body, to connect with the Universe and accomplish perfect balance and reciprocity – not for us personally, but for the wellbeing of our group. So, group, I was happy to do what I could to help all of us maintain our wellbeing.
Thinking of the solstice also made we want to add an elemental touch to my latest portrait, so granddaughter #4 gets to be a solstice girl and wear antlers.
– in which Dorn comes to his senses. One of them, anyway.
will always remember the day I came home with the results of my first audiogram that showed I was starting to lose my hearing. Some gentle readers (especially those who are married) will find this hard to believe, but Kathleen had said to me, and more than once, “You’re not listening to me!”.
That day I came home too excited even to take my coat off first, and I told her proudly, “AHA! I AM listening to you, I just can’t hear you! Here’s proof! BUSTED!”.
And I showed her the audiogram, that clearly showed this drop in acuity especially around a certain mid-high frequency (which I call “the Kathleen frequency”). The odd shape of the graph, the audiologist told me, indicated that the deafness was probably hereditary. My dad was hard of hearing then, so I blamed him for it (as I do for the fact that I’m tottering ever on the verge of baldness).
Back then, my hearing wasn’t bad enough to take any action; it just gave me a ready excuse whenever Kathleen accused me of not listening. I remember exactly when I realized that my hearing had gotten so bad as to need intervention. I was at work, at one of those innumerable and interminable meetings that all Federal bureaucrats must attend. My friend and boss Leon leaned over and whispered something in my ear.
Now, everyone who has ever been subjected to these things knows that the most important parts of any meeting are the things whispered to you while you’re pretending to pay attention to the Powerpoint. But I found to my horror that it was impossible to make out anything he said! I couldn’t pull out a single word or phrase from which I could fake a vague but meaningful-sounding response! I had lost one of the most fundamental tools of any functioning bureaucrat.
So I sprang for some hearings aids. My health insurance covered the testing, but didn’t pay anything for the hearing aids themselves. And they weren’t cheap! They cost several thousand dollars, easily the most expensive (per pound) thing I owned.
They served me well over the next few years. They occasionally they had to be adjusted upward (though they have been at their maximum setting for a few years now).
They’ve been lost and found many times, survived a hot shower and, amazingly, a full-cycle trip through the washing machine. Their engines finally gave out and had to be rebuilt about five years ago, so I knew they were probably coming to the end of their useful lives.
A month or two ago I learned that some hearing aid manufacturers had cut deals with my insurance company, so that new hearings aids, and all the hearing tests, would be be absolutely free to me.
I knew that hearing aids had gotten much more sophisticated in the years since I had bought mine. They could be controlled and fine tuned by a smart phone app, rather than having to tote them back to the audiologist. The hearing aids could interact with each other via Bluetooth, they could stream sounds from phone calls or other devices directly into your ears, and even tell you where you lost them. My old hearing aids weren’t dead yet, but this seemed like a deal too good to pass up, so I decided to upgrade my oto-tech.
I talked my Dad into getting new ones too. He’s deafer than I am (did I mention that my deafness is HIS FAULT?), and he’s also more of a social butterfly, so he needs his hearing even more than I do. But he rarely wears his current hearing aids because they’re cumbersome and don’t work that well. They’re over 20 years old, so he’s certainly due for some new ones—especially as his insurance has the same deals that make them free to him too!
We went together to the hearing aid store, where an attractive young audiologist* gave us each hearing tests, took measurements and asked our preferences, and recommended which hearing aids to order. (*Full disclosure: I’m 65 and my dad is over 90, so to us virtually every woman is young. And attractive.)
My Dad has an iPhone, which all the modern hearing aids are compatible with, but I had a cheap old Samsung phone that didn’t work with most of them. After a some searching for hearing aids that worked with my phone, I realized I was basing my selection of four- or five-thousand-dollar hearing aids on compatibility with my $99 phone, which was completely backwards. So I resolved to go out and buy a more modern phone, and selected a hearing aid model based solely its features and quality (cost not being an object).
In a couple of weeks we went back and got our new hearing aids. Or I did, anyway; my Dad’s were not set up right and had to go back to the factory. “I’m sorry”, she said, “for some reason I forgot to check the box for iphone compatibility.”
(I know the reason she forgot. She was being age-ist: my dad is a nonagenarian, and she just assumed the most advanced thing he could possibly own was a flip phone, or more likely just a rotary-dial phone on the wall at home. (For the record, my Dad DOES have a rotary phone on his wall in addition to the iPhone in his pocket; in fact, he also has a hand-crank phone on his wall, but that’s a story for another day.))
So I got my new bionic ears yesterday, in time for Christmas. What a difference! Before when I had my old ones tweaked, I would notice for a few days how sounds were just a little bit sharper (like when you first put on glasses with a new prescription). But with these, I could suddenly hear everything! She assured me I was just hearing what normal-sounded people always hear, but to me it was like everything was clear, and understandable, and way too loud.
We had friends over last night, and I had to ask Kathleen if everyone (including me) was shouting, because it seemed so loud to me. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I was peeing, it sounded like I was clanging a cow bell in there! My first thought was that everyone must be able to hear me!
My second thought was, don’t worry, it just seems so loud to you because of your new hearing aids. You’re not peeing any louder than you were before.
My third thought was, but now you have normal hearing, and before you were deaf, so this is how loud you really are, and for all these years you were making this big racket in the bathroom and didn’t even know it. Now I know why people talk so loud at dinner parties!
I’m sure I’ll get used to the hearing aids soon, both the sounds, and the social implications, and it is really nice to be able to hear at what I imagine must be a normal level (it’s been so long, I can’t really tell from memory). And Kathleen is certainly looking forward to being able to address me in a normal tone of voice. So this has been a great present for me, and that doesn’t even count the cool phone app to play with that lets me adjust the hearing aids while I’m wearing them! What a Christmas!
