Random question. When children deface school textbooks, why do they always have to draw penises? I mean, I get the occasional swastika, (purely for shock value, my school district is low on neo-Nazis, thank God), but for the most part, all dicks.
One of the more interesting aspects of having a blog is seeing the “search engine terms” that lead people here. Today was a new one. “Sucking boobies.” Somehow, Google in all of its wisdom directed this person to my blog and the trials and tribulations of weaning. I mean really, can’t you just picture the giggling nine year-old boys, sitting at the computer? “Dude, type ‘sucking boobies,'” followed by Beavis and Butthead-style guffaws. Ah, kids.
Since the theme here is random today, I recently read Portia de Rossi’s memoir of her anorexia titled, Unbearable Lightness. It was an easy read. I finished it in a day while my sick Toddler V slept either in my arms or in my bed. As a teenager, I was obsessed with eating disorders. This actually continued into my twenties. In junior college, I would go to the eating disorders section of the library, check out a few titles and sit in a study cubicle, devouring every calorie-free word. I worshipped anorexics. Our culture still does. Not the Karen Carpenter ones, but the painfully thin actresses and models that populate our gossip magazines and websites. Angelina Jolie with her ropey blue veins popping out of her arms and hands, for example. In a country of overconsumption and every type of gluttony, self-discipline and self-denial are held up as saintly qualities. This is underscored poignantly in a part of de Rossi’s book where she takes a fourteen hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia and eats nothing. Refuses the nuts, turns down the lunch, rejects the free first class cookies, pretends to sleep through dinner. You know what the flight attendant says to her? “You’re being so good!” Toward the end of the book, de Rossi finally includes some photographs of herself taken during the time she writes about where her weight fluctuated between 130 and 82 pounds. We’re supposed to be horrified by that latter number, but I cannot help detecting a tone of pride and accomplishment in the writer. As I was reading, I thought, “Good for her not including photographs to make this anorexia porn.” But then she does. You just have to wait until the end. This is the ideal of American society: to starve oneself to razor thinness in the midst of plenty. To exercise vigorously while most people can barely get in a twenty-minute walk every day. We admire these people, even as we scoff and say “they’re too thin.”
Somewhere in the world, it’s bikini season right now, and rich people are on beaches. Star Magazine publishes a best and worst bikini body issue several times a year, reminding all of us that there is a very slim margin where celebrities are allowed to exist. You dare not be TOO thin (or, God help you, too OLD) or they will call you out for that. But there is no bigger sin than being too fat. They will print a picture of the offending person’s giant lumpy behind with a circle covering her identity over which is written something like, “You’ll never guess who this porker is!” Public shaming is alive and well in post-Puritan America.
In this climate, de Rossi’s book reads like a success story. She details her 300 calorie-a-day diet and her obsessive exercise regime that had her pulling over her car on her way to work in order to run around the block. Even though she includes all of the unhappiness she felt and the “You’re killing yourself!” tears of her family, she cannot avoid the truth that her career soared while she was starving herself. It made her famous. It got her a book deal. She’s careful to include an Epilogue where her wife Ellen assures her that her book will help people. I don’t agree. As a former diet-obsessed person, if I had gotten my hands on this book at age 19, it would have become my Bible. It beats the hell out of The Golden Cage or The Best Little Girl in the World for pure, instructive how-to-be-anorexic reading. Not to mention the clear rewards: fame, wealth, THINNESS!
I don’t know if de Rossi’s weight was never an issue on the set of Ally McBeal, or if she just didn’t bring that up in her book. Her only mention of it is in the context of her costume fittings. She is passive-aggressively criticised for being a size 8 at the beginning of her tenure on the show, and praised for losing weight. She is careful to mention that the costume director is overweight. Anorexics are always very careful to notice the flaws of others. My point is, in the world of Hollywood, losing tons of weight is probably never going to be a negative for the producers and directors unless the insurance becomes an issue. If magazines write about it, free publicity for the show. When I worked on a television show in the nineties, part of my job was ordering the catered lunch for the table reading every week. This was the meeting where the actors sat around a table with the writers, producers, and director to read aloud the new script for the following week’s show. After the read-through, the writers went back to their offices to change what didn’t work, happily munching on sandwiches and freshly baked cookies, and the actors went back to work on the current show they were filming. The production assistants and I would then take the sandwiches, fresh fruit, and cookies I’d had catered for the event (barely touched by the actors who don’t eat) to the stage where the platters would be devoured by the crew. Every week without fail, one of the actresses would eat her two or three slices of melon with a can of tuna mixed with mustard. She was the one who got to be in People Magazine for “recovering” from her eating disorder. So, Portia de Rossi is just the industry standard for a television series actress.
Not that I think her book will do anyone any harm either. Actresses and “the media” don’t cause eating disorders, no matter what you hear on television or read in, well, the media. An eating disorder is like any other addiction, caused by a genetic predisposition coupled with childhood trauma. It isn’t caused by reading Portia de Rossi’s book any more than alcoholism is caused by the pure irresistible deliciousness of alcohol. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic of celebrity anorexia.
Just don’t draw dicks in it.
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
Homewrecking Sluts
Reading the comments on a blog gives me far more insight into people than reading the blogs themselves. Sometimes during sustained silent reading time in my classes, I’ll browse CNN’s website because I don’t have enough things to depress me. I need to seek out tragedies in the world that I am neither part of nor can do anything about. People never fail to use this forum to attack and insult each other and the subjects of the articles. And of course, blame President Obama for everything. People really internalize and personalize what they read on the internet. There’s also the anonymity that often causes not only shocking lapses in grammar, but also manners.
I am a blog commenter as well as a blogger. In cyberspace, as in life, I rarely make the mistake of endeavoring to change someone’s mind about something, especially not through logic. Belief has nothing to do with logic, and whether you believe Angelina Jolie is a homewrecker or a saint, you are not going to have your belief altered by the well-chosen words of another commenter.
That sure doesn’t stop other people from trying though! Today, I was reading some comments on www.celebitchy.com about Angelina Jolie. Johnny Depp compared her to Elizabeth Taylor in an interview. I wonder if the comparison to a famous celebrity homewrecker was intentional. According to the comments, I wasn’t the only one who noticed. What got me to thinking were the comments that vehemently defended Angie against insinuations of homewrecking and attacked the commenters who brought it up. One person even wrote that the news of Angie’s homewrecking was “so old.”
I don’t think that’s why Ms. Angelina Voight escapes the homewrecker moniker. I’m not sure why or how she does it. It’s been way longer since Julia Roberts started dating a still-married Danny Moder, and blog commenters still throw the homewrecker slur at her, despite the fact that she and Moder have been married for years and have three children together (even boy-girl twins like the sainted Angelina). Do NOT bring up Alicia Keys or Leann Rimes on certain celeb gossip sites or you will be howled out of the room by the shrieking of “whore!” Some women, though, escape the stigma. Clare Danes, for example. Billy Crudup left seven months pregnant Mary Louise Parker for Danes, and nobody cares. It hasn’t hurt her career a smidge. I’m assuming she does the eyelash commercials because she loves the product, not because she needs the money. Or because that company has YouTube footage of her playing Scrabble with Satan.
Tori Spelling’s books always make the bestseller list. See my blog titled “Bitches I Hate” if you want to know how I feel about that. Her irresistible platinum good looks had Dean McDermott leaving his wife, son and infant daughter inside of a month. It actually revived her career. Not just revived it, because she really was never that big of a star.
And let’s talk about Elizabeth Taylor. She’s an icon almost as famous for her failed marriages as for her body of work in film. But she’s also Hollywood Royalty, and no one would dare call her a homewrecking slut (although I suspect Debbie Reynolds probably has on numerous occasions). What makes a woman who has had an affair with a married man either a Jolie/Taylor or a Keyes/Rimes? Is it beauty? Bankability? Does it have something to do with the man? Eddie Fisher was as big a star as her, so people accepted the pairing, perhaps. Many people considered Brad Pitt way too pretty for Jennifer Aniston, not to mention too big a star. Maybe it was more pleasing to the public’s sensibilities to have him matched with Jolie. Undoubtedly, everyone bought the tabloid crap that Aniston was denying Pitt the joys of fatherhood because of her selfish MANLY ambition. All the poor guy wanted was a baby, you harpy! He cried about it on Oprah! Jolie made him a father of six in four years flat. Hell, she was pregnant with his child before the divorce was even final. And wives still buy magazines with her on the cover, take her picture to their plastic surgeons, and see her movies.
All wives are fearful and suspicious of the vixen we believe will slink into our husbands’ lives and seduce him away from us and our children. She’ll be younger than us, prettier than us, thinner than us, and sexier than us. She’ll cast a spell over our husbands that we have no power to undo. I spend a lot of time around married men. Most male teachers are married. For some reason, the profession seems to attract family men. Some married men put out a vibe that they are available. Most do not. Sure, they flirt. Yes, they absolutely look. And I’m not saying that there aren’t Rachel Uchitels out there, trolling for other women’s husbands, but most women want single men. If they end up snaring a husband on their line, it’s because he was looking to be caught. The myth of the maneater persists, however.
Another myth that I get sick of reading on gossip blogs is “once a cheater, always a cheater.” I will concede that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and that if a man has cheated on you, he is likely to cheat on you again. But I do not believe that if a person, male or female, has cheated in a relationship, that person is destined to cheat in every relationship in the future. People do change and grow. People do regret their mistakes and endeavor to avoid making them again. The platitudes are so predictable. “If he’ll do it with you, he’ll do it to you.” “Karma’s a bitch.” “What goes around comes around.” All of these sayings have truth in them, but again, I think human behavior cannot be simplified like this. If we were all destined to repeat our mistakes forever, there would be no hope for addicts of any kind. Women who leave abusive relationships would have no hope of ever finding a loving, kind man. People who make mistakes would be lost causes and no one would deserve second chances.
And we all deserve a second chance.
Everyone except that Angelina Jolie tramp.
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