Here's a portion of my feminist education.

On an episode in the first season of "TrueBlood," Tara (Rutina Wesley) was acting informally as Jason's legal counsel to negotiate his rights when he was a murder suspect. When he asks how she knew the law, Tara says that she'd read books, and that school was a matter of paying white folks to read to you. She just cut out the middleman and did the reading herself.

Simple, right?

You don't need to be enrolled in university to read and study.

If I were to write a book about the lessons women could learn from film, Sam Raimi's "Drag Me To Hell" would make the list.

Chris (Alison Lohman) wants to prove that she can make the tough decisions as a loan officer at a bank in order to get the promotion up for grabs. There's that awful moment when her boss Mr. Jacks (David Paymer) and the dude who's the leading competition for the new job, Stu (Reggie Lee) ask her to pick them up turkey clubs for lunch. In this exchange, she's not their equal. She's now just the errand girl who serves the big important men. You can see how easily the men initiate this gendered hierarchy and how Chris will be locked into doing shitwork and missing the promotion. It makes perfect sense that she would try to be cut throat in dealing with the old lady, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver). Plenty of women have composed themselves as tougher than the men in the workplace to be taken seriously, to attempt to be "one of the boys" so that they were not get stuck taking lunch orders and getting coffee.

Only being "one of the boys" isn't really possible nor should it be aspirational.

It either designates a woman who keeps her mouth shut while she allows men to behave badly and therefore receives a token status or else it describes a woman who mimics the worst traits of masculinity in the mars and venus mythology. It's the woman who laughs when men trade rape jokes and it's the woman who cruelly throws a sick old lady out of her house to please her boss.

Being "one of the boys" won't actually send you to hell such as in this scary motherfucking movie, but in the end, you'll be miserable.

The horror!

I found this over at The Fashion Police.

This is forty shades of wrong.

As if the strings were just too restrictive.

Tell me how the C string stays on you.

Are there wires in there?

Honestly, you must look like you're sporting a panty liner.

Yack.

Last night, a man I had just met turned to me with earnest wide eyes and said:

"I had this buddy and he took all these courses on feminism in university. And THEN when he graduated, he wasn't even ALLOWED to work as a feminist with his degree. They wouldn't LET him run that rape crisis centre just because he was a man."

Reader, you can imagine the blood rushing to my head and the utter incredulity lodged in my aspect. When I told him that no, his friend could not work as a leader in a rape crisis centre, I could see obvious confirmation that he registered me as "one of them" who would "discriminate" against a man.

What. The. Fuck.

First, no one with a bachelor's degree is an expert in anything.

Four years in university gives you a general education and an introductory peek into your chosen field.

More importantly, just because some dude decides that he's an expert in feminism, it does not give him the right or ability to lecture other women about it. The first thing he should have learned in his course of study is that gender privilege makes it impossible for him to take a role leading women in a rape crisis centre. Plus, the overwhelming majority of rape crisis centres are run by volunteers. I know, because I worked in one for a year after 40 hours in training and the only time I was given a check was for my shift on xmas day. The centre's director alone drew a salary and it wasn't anything to boast about.

People generally don't give a shit about women who've been raped so there's never much money floating around.

Dudes should not come to feminist activism as a way to take fucking charge.

Or did he not read about patriarchy in his vast study of the field?

You know, how for the sum of human civilization it's been all about the menz.

If you want to educate or be a leader, try telling men to stop raping women.

As I said to my shopping companion as we stepped from the free shuttle to the Vaughn Mills outlet mall, many women feel guilty about spending money on themselves.

Not me. Fuck the whole "I don't deserve it" self-effacing ethos.

Life is short and I like clothes.

The Holt Renfrew "Last Call" shop had delightful bargains, including the Catherine Malandrino grape cardigan that I had eyeballed last year in the post-xmas sale, only now it was down to $120 from $320. There was an amazing Versace dress chained to the rack, marked from $3500 to $800. I don't know how you could wear a bra with it though. I wiped the drool and moved along to something less shockingly expensive.

That and the Banana Republic were really my two targets.

Then I stopped by the shop that holds our postal packages and picked up the Nanette Lepore yellow eyelit dress from Bluefly which I wore out to dinner.

The shuttle leaves from Union Station twice daily. If you're in the city, it's worth the trip.

How hot was Jeff Goldblum in "Igby Goes Down"?

Smokin'.

He was a contemporary Don Draper.

Glad to hear he didn't die in New Zealand.

I'm not a big fan of Fintan O'Toole, but I'll take the book recommendation from his recent column.
This looks fab.

Like every other girl, I was fascinated with "Charlie's Angels" when it aired in 1976
Three beauties were kicking ass and having adventures.
It's a given that they had to be shaking ass and scantily clad while doing so since we live in patriarchy.

I admire Farrah nonetheless for having blanched at playing the cheesecake role and thus leaving the show.
She wanted to be more than a sex symbol.
R.I.P.

Shortly after we moved into the first house we bought (the wee cinderblock castle) when Jack was still a young lad, and before we found Isis, we were routinely met by the snuffling Coolio, the Rottweiler puppy from next door. Mr M had yet to build the sturdy wooden fence to enclose the yard, so it was an easy feat for the bouncy pup to wander over for a treat or to visit Jack.

One day we heard him yowling in the family's detached garage.

Just as I was later leaving for one of my many logged shifts serving slabs of prime rib to guests who expected me to stop just short of fellating them for a shitty 15% tip, I met one of the girls from up the block who stood poised with a bag of dog food outside next door's garage.

The family had left town for a week to visit relatives and left the little girl in charge of dumping food in Coolio's makeshift kennel.

There were no windows which was of concern in July.

Coolio was cool with our cats so we took charge of the little beastie for the week.

He was a total sweetie.

Maybe that's why I'm so soft on the Rotties.

At the close of the week, Mr. M importuned on Coolio's behalf to get him secreted into a better home.

No! I cried, he was a gift for the six year-old boy. How could Mr. M want to take the pup away when he had always wanted his own dog as a boy?

The family returned with thanks.

Coolio grew and grew.

No training, no exercise was imparted to match his scope.

By the time he reached a year old, the boy next door was terrified, fearing to be near him loose in the yard.

Coolio was dumped at the local shelter.

Not many folks would cotton to an 80 pound dog without the rudiments of discipline.

I'm sure he was destroyed.

That's why we took in Isis, as she followed Mr. M and Jack on their morning walk one day out of the cramped plastic cage they had penned her in short of food and water.

I consented to keep her because there's no way I could send her back to that hell-for-canines.

Especially after watching her jutting ribs heave as she vomited chicken bones and garbage.

Coolio's warm muzzle came to mind after we passed the fourth dog in the 'hood condemned to spend its life behind the family's fence.

Kids are enculturated to cruelty in so many ways, but few of them are as commonly accepted without a trace of rebuke as much as the fate of dogs who lives among them, denied access to the life pooches are born to expect.

I finally found the trailer for "Welcome to Academia."

Can't wait.
The cast looks fabulous.

Note to self:
Don't wear that terra cotta hued mini dress when you walk the dogs because when they drag you full force towards a cat, you will brace your legs in a wide stance, making that dress ride up and flash your ass.
Not good.

Yesterday a municipal worker's strike began which means no garbage collection.
All the public wastebins have been wrapped up in plastic.
You can see what little regard people have for the PSA telling them not to litter.
Why do these strikes always seem to occur in the summer when the heat makes everything fester and spoil with a tremendous stench?
Tomorrow it's supposed to feel like 37C.
This is going to be the summer of stank.
And rats.

I'd like to think that if I had a middle or upper class background that I would have become a surgeon, so it was with great curiosity that I picked up Gabriel Weston's scrupulous memoir Direct Red: A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession.

It's arranged into 14 chapters topically configured to examine "Sex," "Death", "Voices," "Beauty," Hierarchy," and "Territory" among others. Not only are the stories Weston relates interesting, they're powerfully rendered with the author's gift for literary allusion and figurative language.
Her writing has an artful style which boasts an undergraduate background in English.
There have been so many celebrated writers who were also doctors: Keats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams. Perhaps because taking a medical history and formulating a diagnosis remains a skill that's connected to plotting and narration to a large degree.
Weston offers doses of humour to break up the tragic stuff.

She recalls getting instruction from a doctor dude in order to insert her first catheter in the operating theatre:
"No penis, all foreskin, the task seemed impossible. The slippery prepuce appeared to have no underlying structure to be retracted on so that the end of the foot-long catheter kept popping out of the baggy eye of the man's penis, flicking jelly around with every jaunty boing. Nurses and theatre underlings tittered. Adonis woundingly quipped, 'I thought you might have been better at this. Not your first penis, surely?' 'My first floppy one, yes!' was all I could hotly reply."
Weeks later, she was still being referred to by hospital staff as the doctor "who had declared herself used to handling firmer members."

One story in "Sex" concerns a dude who comes in with 36 fractures after a motorcycle crash, stays for weeks in recovery, and after her daily visits they develop a mutual crush, representing the difficult scenario intimacy creates, and the professional line she cannot cross even if her loins say otherwise.

Her vivid comparison to the corpse in anatomy class to a bar of chocolate offers context for those of us uninitiated with how medical training removes the glamour from human bodies:
"Surprisingly few morbid details remain in my mind from this time, amongst them the way pickled flesh first struck me. When a bar of chocolate melts inside its wrapper and then gets hard again and you take the wrapper off, there are usually creases in the surface which recall its softer form. So it is with the embalmed human. All elasticity is gone, as is the usual colour. In the case of our cadaver, the whole corpse was dun, apart from the hands, which were stained brown by deposits of bilirubin."

Here's a tidy simile used to describe an abdominal surgery:
"Looking down, I peered into the trough of Mr. Cooke's emptied abdomen, and could see it filling with blood so fast that the outline of the gushing source was visible beneath the red meniscus. Like when you fill a paddling pool with a hose and it's half full and you can see a knuckle shape on the surface just above where the hose is."

Or this one to describe a routine tonsillectomy gone wrong:
"Blood was pouring out from the tonsil and every time I tried to grab onto the meat of it, bits broke off and the whole thing bled more and more. I tried to go back to where I had started, to find another point of entry. It's a bit like when you peel a hard-boiled egg. Sometimes the shell skirts off the slippery white underneath in one go. At other times, as you pick the shell off, it sticks and lumps of white come with it and the whole thing is a miserable mess."

Weston's account also includes the shame she felt for capitulating with senior staff's desire to cut down surgical cases, even when it contributed to a patient's physical suffering, such as her case with Mrs. Mbele's distended haemorrhoids. She squeezes the blood from the peach-sized lumps and pushes them back into the poor woman's anus. Grisly.

Troy was a 20 year-old man, a handsome and popular DJ, who came to the London hospital where Weston served her surgical residency complaining of an obstructed bowel. Doctors thought he was merely constipated and sent him home. He returned three days later with exacerbated symptoms. They took an X-ray and learned his bowels were being strangled by a giant tumour. Troy was admitted and died a week later. Weston explains that the rigors of medical training forces the sentiment from you on the whole, yet there are still the cases that shock you with the fragility of the human form.
Highly recommended.

We saw this commercial 15 times while watching the replay of last week's "The Soup."

The sweet old lady's channeling a "where's the beef" moment.

"The Answer Man" with Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham premieres next month.
You could affix the following title in its place: "Dude Who Learns How To Be Human Through the Love and Care of a Devoted Woman."
Or you could go for the much simpler "The Magical Healing Power of Pussy."

It's a film premise which recycles at least once a decade.

We last saw it in its 1997 incarnation, "As Good As it Gets" where Jack Nicholson played an antisocial/fucked in the head/ choked on privilege dude who reforms and learns how to be a better person through Helen Hunt's single mother character.

Single mothers are suitable choices for the needy dudes because they've already proven that they can put someone else's needs first while spending the time nurturing the neurotic, egomaniacal, cantankerous leading man.
Women exist to heal men with supportive and redemptive love.
We live to serve.

Who are these people?

Adult women wearing pigtails, obsessing over getting a man, any man at all, openly eager to date dudes who don't even like them. Because women "love all the drama."

We need to scrutinize every word and gesture from men in order to divine its mystical portent since he'll never be honest with us. Men speak in a super-secret code that only a dude can decipher for those with a vagina. We need just passively wait for him to "make it happen," when he decides that we're sufficiently hot enough to be graced by his presence in a relationship. Then *bam* we issue ultimatums demanding that they marry us so we can devote our time to crushing the poor bastard.

We're pitiable unless married.

And we'll spend our lives doing all the work to keep the relationship alive.

And dudes never, ever want to get married.

Yep. I think all the gender mythology boxes have been checked.

Men are revolutionaries.
Women can only take off their tops and titillate.
Lydia Guevara duped into a cheesecake pose for the misogynist (and racist) PETA.
Yack.

My favourite blouse is a Nanette Lepore.
It fits like it was made for me, which is hard to come by what with my narrow shoulders, frog-like midsection and small boobs.
A bunch of her pieces on sale online at Nordstroms, including this kicky little jacket.
I dig the capped sleeves, large buttons and stitched pockets.
It looks cut to fit perfectly.
Only red's not my colour.
Grrrr.

Out for pizza last night I said I was going to trek to Vaughn Mills before we left for Dublin to get a pair of jeans because you can apparently find them for around a hundred bucks there as opposed to the going rate of two and three hundred.
"You once were my working class wife, right?"
He has no idea what anything costs these days.
Mr. M hasn't been inside a shop that sold anything other than bike or outdoor gear in years.

Posting may be skimpy for the rest of the week.

I've hammered out a chapter for the book I was yammering about writing and then abandoned.

Yeah, big whoop, a chapter, I know, but it's something.

The working title is Reader, I Didn't Marry Him: 25 Life Lessons from Novel Heroines.

It seemed fitting to do the first one on Brontë’s titular lady.

While reading it for the sixth time, I was practically screaming at her.

He locked his wife in the attic for a decade!

Who knows what he's capable of or what he could do to you if he fancied?

The second's going slower.

It focuses on Carrie White.

There's a moment In "Easy Virtue" when Kristen Scott Thomas' Veronica meets her new daughter in law, Larita, played by Jessica Biel, and she stands frozen with a visage that commingles disgust, disapproval and maybe a twinge of envy for the new addition to the family.

Jessica Biel should study it closely so she can understand that acting consists of more than simply smiling and speaking lines.

This could have been so much better if not hampered by her maladroit efforts.

I'd be hard pressed to find a woman who seems more vacant on film.

Don't read this if you care about spoilers for the first episode of the second season of "TrueBlood."

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I like being right.

Lafayette lives!

I said on another blog and this one that the dead body in Andy's car was either the woman who did the woo exorcisms or Tara's mother.

It was Miss Jeanette, the bullshit exorcist.

Maryanne had to be the culprit.

Mr. M has told Omar several times that he's lucky he was born before "TrueBlood" began or else his name would be Lafayette.

Nope.

Three syllables is too long for a pooch's name.

Viewers assume Lafayette's in vampire prison for taking the stapler-dude's blood for profit.

I'm resigned that Lafayette's dead.
Sniff.
Here's a link to four clips from the second season opener.

In Charlaine Harris' series, Jason gets bitten and becomes a werepanther rather than becoming a jeebus freak with those "Fellowship of the Sun" folks.

The dude's so dim that religious fanaticism fits though.

Sunday nights in 1990 meant watching the Fly Girls on "In Living Color."
Oh yes.
I don't remember the dudes being part of the dance routines for long.

There are so many prompts for women to take up only a little public space.
Foremost, social cues and guidelines tell us not to weigh too much to begin with.
Keep your knees together, elbows tucked in, voice down.
The essence of femininity instructs women to be small, dainty, demure.

When I walked into the nearly empty hotel dining room after the lunch rush to grab a bite while Mr. M was in a meeting, the window seats looked cozy.
Instinctively I steered toward the teeny two-top off to the side and then said fuck it.
I took over the four-top next to the window setting my papers down.
Why shouldn't I take the table I want when there's no press for seating?
It's routine to see men doing the same, so why shouldn't I?
Not surprisingly, I had to get up and ask for a menu.
The men and women waiting tables didn't come for my order.
A woman in a suit, a management type did.
Her eyebrow lift while asking if I were waiting for someone was a barely concealed slap on the wrist to let me know I was occupying more space than I should. She wouldn't say that outright, but her disapproval was clear. She gave shitty service, the quiche was gluey and I had to again get up to ask for a cappucino and the check.
I didn't let the gender police shame me out of my spot.
Fuck her, I thought.
There's no way she'd pull this shit if I were a dude.
It felt like a small but satisfying rebellion.

*Spoilers*

In Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, published in 1970, Elizabeth Hardwick offers the icy appraisal of Virginia Woolf's fiction as essentially boring stuff.

Hardwick slices Woolf's novels down to a preoccupation with style over substance:

"The novels are beautiful; the language is rich and pure, and you are always, with her, aware of genius, of gifts extraordinary and original. Our emotions are moved, at least some of our emotions are moved, often powerfully. And yet in a sense her novels aren't interesting. This is the paradox of her work, part of the risk of setting a goal in fiction, of having an idea about it, an abstract idea."

I recalled this pronouncement and reached for the text to reconsider it after having finished Richard B. Wright's novel Clara Callen, because it echoes my impressions of the Giller prize winning work. Set in a largely epistolary design, Wright's novel traces the circumstances of the titular lonely woman in rural Ontario after her father dies and her sister moves to NYC to pursue a career in radio serials during the 1930s. It's well-written and carefully constructed, but I couldn't resist feeling that a more compelling narrative resides in devoting the more than 400 pages to what her sister Nora was up to in Manhattan. Clara's life of deprivation, taciturn resolve, brutal rape and subsequent pregnancy and abortion, later her prolonged affair with a wheedling married man who turns out to be a serious womanizer, and then her decision to secretly have his child seemed too calculated, too predictable. Maybe at another time this novel would have had greater resonance with me, only now I'm not invested in reading about easily victimized doormats.

There's a significant market for this type of story. Oprah's bookclub bursts with selections which explore in detail how limitlessly women are consigned to the margins as ciphers and shades with a poverty of pleasure and experience. The real problem is this avalance of wronged-women in fiction serves at some level as authentication for the real condition of women in patriarchy. These novels say to be a woman is to suffer in silence, to endure, to expect to be shit on, that having a vagina means that you live with invisibility and misery. How many readers internalize this fictionalized state as the norm?

I say to hell with that.

If I'm going to roll with Fat Mammy Cat in Dublin, I have to get my ass in shape.

So I signed up for a Pilates class.

Let the groaning begin.

"So Julia Roberts was in a movie I watched and I didn't hate her. "

"Oh, it was before you learned to hate her?"

"No, it was before she gave me a reason to hate her."

*Spoilers*

I didn't catch "Satisfaction" when it was released in 1988. I was probably too busy memorizing Pedro Almodovar's films or something.

Far from perfect, there are still redeeming qualities that set it apart from how the movie would play out if it were made now.

For instance, Julia Roberts carries 25 more pounds.

She looks better, like a healthy and happy woman.

Justine Bateman's lead character doesn't give up going to university to either play in a band or to stay with her dude. Liam Neeson (the hotness here) plays the love interest who wants the recent high school graduate to have all the life experiences she has coming to her without throwing it away to hang out with him. I know, could he be more yummy?

When Julia Roberts' character is attacked by a preppie dude on a couch who tells her to be quiet for two minutes, she asks, "you want me to lay here and be quiet while you ball me?"

She hits him and calls him an asshole.

In terms of the contemporary celluloid market, "Satisfaction" looks like radical feminism.

And so I say huzzah.

Just picked up Mos Def's "The Ecstatic."

Fucking brilliant.

This will be on constant play for the rest of the day.

We're at that annoying point when we've run out of clear room on the bookshelves.

The picture at the top's our largest case which is now at the double stacking stage.

It's a messy, cluttered look that sets my teeth on edge.

The other cases are looking just as crowded even though we actually gave several stacks to charity before we moved here.

You're going to tell me to use the library instead of buying them.

Can't do it.

At 10 years-old, I was permitted to start taking public transit so I could frequent the library.

I hated giving the books back.

It was borderline "my precious" possessiveness each trip.

Then during the shitty year we lived in Ohio I restrained my reading to a lame book club and the library. My books stayed buried in boxes since we knew we weren't staying.

There are worse things to be greedy about than books.

If we had the room I'd love one of the ornate and stylish cases featured above.

For folks who like looking at their book collection, why not go for something a bit more flash than the standard oak cases we have now?

This is one of my favorite dancing scenes in film.
Love it.
Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are both so young and beautiful.
I'm digging Sheen's head bob with his hands in his pockets

Oh my lawd.
There's a band in St. Paul, Minnesota calling themselves "Dante and the Lobster."
How dare they sully Beckett's name with their hipster-doofus warblings!
I couldn't even get past the two minute mark.
It's excruciatingly awful.

There's pretty much no way that a white dude who's convinced that he's black and operates as such can avoid generating offense. White dudes can hardly eschew racial privilege. Readers should certainly take issue with a white dude who thinks being down in a black community means being poor, unemployed, athletic, with kids who are always hungry.

Aside from that objection, Mishna Wolff's memoir I'm Down casts a trained eye on how brutally tough childhood can be while also hitting notes of hilarity. Publishers are always on the lookout for the next David Sedaris, an author who offers an emotive range folded inside a comedic frame, and Mishna Wolff comes closest to earning the comparison. The cover alone cracks me up. Wolff's father John calls to mind Sedaris' mother Sharon in their equally questionable parenting skills, which are in some measure balanced by the love they have for their children. On the opening page, the author describes her dad who "truly believed that he was a black man. He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol--telling jokes like Redd Foxx, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. He walked like a black man, he talked like a black man, and he played sports like a black man. You couldn't tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried. It wasn't an identity crisis; it who he was. He was 'from the neighborhood'--our neighborhood."

Wolff and her sister Anora grew up in a black community in south Seattle. Anora had effortlessly fit in, but Mishna struggled until she became skilled at "capping," a competitive rhetorical device based on trading insults. Mishna endures caps on her whiteness such as "her ass so flat, it looks like two saltine crackers that done lost they box!" until she invents and practices lobbing verbal slams. Her first is "Am I being talked to by a burnt chocolate chip cookie?" followed by "Your mama's so lazy, Jesus will come back before she finishes your hair" to a girl with only a half-braided head. When she tries to cap her father, he tells her "I'm not about to take it from my daughter in my own home .... I take it from the Man every day." How could you not scream at the Man for bitching about the Man? When Mishna finally feels settled in her school, her mother (who left the family) gets her into a posh school for gifted children, forcing her among rich white kids who throw away the lunches she's grateful to have.

You'll turn the pages so quickly that you'll devour it in one sitting.

I could tell we were in the U.S. today as soon as we entered the lobby, caught site of the television tuned to Faux News and the talking head was underscoring Jon Voight's comments about Obama with unmerited authority. Who gives a fuck what a C-list actor thinks? His own daughter wants nothing to do with him, so he's hardly to be considered a man of integrity or good judgment.
We went to Buffalo to become "landed" through immigration.
We're permanent residents now, all official.
It didn't take nearly as long as it could have.

Buffalo reminded me so much of our time in Lansing, Michigan.
Mr. M said "you'd send the dude from 1992 here?"
More like 1988.
I haven't seen that much crispy hair and non-ironic acid wash denim in ages.
Buffalo has some eye-catching buildings but it has a cool factor of about 2 on a scale of 10.

Don't you love useful accessories?

Sexually repressed politically conscious lonely woman with a cat obsession= Parker Posey's Becky.

Sexually repressed teacher engaged to a gay dude= Rachel Dratch's Judi.

Guide dog trainer who can't even get a blind guy to date her and who craves validation=Amy Poehler's Gayle.

Rachel Dratch's "Spring Breakdown" delivers the patriarchal wink with a humorless thud.

The film opens with a flashback of the trio performing a cover of "True Colors" for a talent show in university in 1992. They're booed for being unattractive geeks we suppose. Fast forward, Becky agrees to go to spring break in South Padre in order to supervise a Senator's (Jane Lynch) daughter because she wants to be chosen the new Vice President and needs to ward off any scandal. Judi and Gayle go along for the experience they never had as students.

Here's some sample dialogue:

Ashley: "he'll see that inside this fair maiden lies a wanton trollop. Then he'll want me back."

Gayle (looking at the shithole hotel they're booked into): "We're gonna get date raped in there."

Judi (eyes widen hopefully) "Hmmmm, you think?"

Gayle: "Men are just dogs with thumbs."

Judi: "I'm gonna be a slut! Who wants to do me?!"

Sorority girl: "If you shake it, he will come."

At the spring break talent show, a cavalcade of barely clothed women bumping and grinding for a screaming crowd with a racialized component (the Hoo-Chi-Min dancers) to further objectify the performers, the film attempts to redeem itself by having the principle characters sing that Wilson Phillips "Hold On" song. Even though Gayle has spent the whole time seeking validation from the the sorority girls and Judi has done the same with some dude who doesn't wear shirts, the film attempts to change course from the binge drinking and sex with strangers as a route to the "empowerful" message by saying that we should just be ourselves.

Yeesh.

Women are either uptight, uncool nerds or else they're vapid sluts who're cruel to other women.

We're so simple like that.

Phyllis Brett Young's novel The Torontonians was first published in 1960 and then floundered in obscurity until being just recently reissued by McGill-Queen's University Press.

We can regard this as a restored gem.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared three full years after Brett Young carefully articulated what Friedan only later came to identify as "the problem with no name" for describing the specific ennui of suburban housewives. The Torontonians is expertly plotted around protagonist Karen Whitney's desperation to escape the tony Rowanwood community, a fictional rendering of neighbourhoods like Forest Hills here on the edges of the city. There are recognizable shades of characterization of women in the era with the familiar Mad Men understanding of traditional gender roles in terms of Karen, her best friend Susan, the neighbours Millicent and Fay. The women in the novel feel real or authentic without seeming cheap or flimsy stereotypes of North American housewives in 1960.

There's an extended flashback about the Whitney's lawn which illustrates the hyper-elevated degree of social expectations firmly in place among homeowners in Rowanwood. Karen and her husband Rick are the second couple to move into the former farming lands next to Susan and Lewis. They scrimp and save to get the old stone house that automatically begins to increase in value once all the bulldozers and developers begin tearing up the land and planting all manner of architechtural varieties. Rowanwood soon becomes the most sought-after location in the city. Since the soil stands in a heavy clay, all the new residents roll out thick carpets of sod on their property along with fancy trees and shubbery. Karen and Rick hold onto the original scutch grass for their first three years in Rowanwood, all the while claiming a penchant for the rustic roots. In no time, the neighbours begin sniffing in disapproval at the Whitney's ungroomed grounds. One dude even plants a quick-growing hedge to obscure their lawn as an aesthetic affront. This segment rings true in how frequently folks make their neighbours' lawns of central concern in suburban enclaves. The problem is that Karen and Rick cannot afford sod, the grass seed won't take in the clay and frustration over communal judgment mushrooms against the otherwise happy couple. Then Karen remembers having read about a buckwheat lawn and isolates it as their only recourse. Brett Young combs through the details involved in the sixth-month laborious nightmare needed to produce a buckwheat lawn. Karen and Nick are required to plant and grow the buckwheat tall, cut the thick stalks by hand down to three inches, till the remainder into the soil, then plant the grass seed. Throughout the back-breaking process, Karen cautions her husband that when they discuss the buckwheat process, they have to insist that they undertake the demanding process as a matter of discretion and taste, because the buckwheat lawn is simply the best. It would thwart their social standing to admit penury. All the neighbours watch the lawn grow with interest. Even Nick's boss stops by to monitor the process. By the following spring, the Whitney's have the best lawn in the community, a mark of status which naturally prompts other couples to suffer the buckwheat process. That's the fucked up nature of a value system based upon appearances, saving face, fitting in. Social codes required Karen to be cagey in their landscaping solution, but then think of the downright misery she forced other women to endure in order to maintain their reputation.

Who would entertain such brutally rigid social expectations these days?

In another flashback, we receive significant insight into the strength of Karen's character when she falls for the "let me show you my etchings" line at a party. A dude seems sweet when talking about his dead sister and pressures Karen to see her photos in order to see how much she resembles the tragic girl. She climbs the dark, deserted staircases to his room in a boarding house when she snatches a glance at the malicious intent peeking out of his face. Karen's explanation for her predicament will register with most women. She was only 17, she explained once to her husband in recollection, and if there's one thing a 17 year-old fears more than anything, it's being called childish. They don't know what it means to be a woman, yet they'll do everything to distance themselves from girlhood. 17 year-olds are not initiated in what traps lay ahead.

Karen maintains her composure and thinks quickly at the top of a long steep set of stairs:

"You're not going to be difficult, are you, baby? I don't like girls who are difficult.

In the silence Karen heard the sharp intake of her own breath, but when she spoke she was perfectly steady. "If you move up one more inch," she said, "I'm going to throw myself down at you so hard that we will both go to hospital, if one or the other of us isn't killed."

"Don't be such a damn little fool."

"I was a fool," Karen said. "I'm not now."

"You can't stand there for the rest of the night."

"I can stand here," Karen told him, "as long as you stand there. I could scream, but I prefer to do it this way. And don't make the mistake of thinking that I don't mean what I say. If you want to take a chance on being killed, come on up. If you don't, you had better start backing down these stairs right away."

She orders the dude to walk down the stairs, open the front door, then cross the street so that she can leave. After a tense interlude, she escapes. Karen's resourcefulness was established at an early age.

Aside from the exploration of custom and manners amidst the bed-hopping, obligatory cocktail parties, BBQs and conspicuous consumption within suburbia, the novel also includes interesting information on life in pre-WW2 Toronto, especially in the liquor regulations. During the Prohibition era, alcohol consumption was limited to residences. The only way to publicly consume booze was in local hotels, which were deemed temporary residences. Folks bought bottles they had to conceal under the table, or else they could take them to hotel rooms and have a party. When she meets a dude during her year of studies abroad in Geneva, he's shocked to learn that "nice girls" had drinks in hotel rooms with men present. It's a regulation that seems strange and yet a typically Canadian response to what the Americans were doing. You can have a drink, just don't make a public show of it.

If you enjoy the current nostalgia for the era in pop culture in shows like Mad Men and films such as Revolutionary Road, then you'll relish The Torontonians.

The sea air at Bray blew my hair into a frenzy hence the clip.

The election polls are closed at this point, but check out the emphatic message on this door we found in Booterstown.

Snerk.

I'm sure they were still bombarded with flyers.

We are exhausted.