Young and Lesbian: An Epidemiology?

Photo from article: "Why Are So Many Girls Lesbian or Bisexual?"
From: Psychology Today, April 3, 2010
By: Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D.
These look just like the "college best friends" I write about below

Camille Paglia would be intrigued, and horrified, at this epidemiology of young lesbians, cheerfully "coming out."

Ellen Page

A few days ago, a young and pretty Canadian actress, Ellen Page, declared herself to be a closeted lesbian, that is until that moment when she dramatically announced to whomever bothered to listen: I am gay. She's twenty-six years old at this announcement, but according to her testimony, had been "gay" for years.

I found her video on New York Post's online magazine. It was hard to miss on the side column, with a large photo of her, and the headline: Tired of Hiding: Actress Ellen Page Comes Out as Gay.

Page is claiming that her "coming out" is "a personal obligation and a social responsibility [direct quote from the Youtube video here around the 6:15 minute point]", and is otherwise a "traumatic event."

It is interesting to see that "coming out" in the 21st century is such a traumatic event. I thought we had taken care of stigmatizing gays and had built such a "gay-friendly" world that people were declaring their "true selves" left and right.

Well, not so, apparently. Page tearfully declares: "I suffered for years because I was scared to be 'out'." Didn't Ellen DeGeneres, pernicious model for this young Ellen, present us with her "secret" in a similarly tearful declaration seventeen years ago? Her career hasn't diminished one bit, and in fact has climbed since then.


Page with "girlfriend"

Page was brought up in Eastern Canada, in Nova Scotia. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her father remarried. She lived with her mother. At about fifteen, Page enrolled herself into a "Buddhist" school, with no academic structure, which emphasized "the arts." And her parents let her do this! Divorce is hard on any child, but a structureless one must be harsh. And worse, letting a young teenager decide on her intellectual and spiritual development is bizarre and cruel.


This is the best I could find of Page with her father.
Notice the impish quality of the father, who looks like he's out with his young son.
But then, what young boy would cling to his father like that?
Such is the ambiguous world of tomboys.


Page with her mother, looking dishevelled and tomboyish.
It looks like they were both out at some film premier,
where Page should be the star, but is upstaged
by her glamorous mother instead.

But homosexuality is still a social stigma, if "celebrities" have to make such a spectacle about their revelations. Normal, ordinary people, those that pay the films and shows to keep DeGeneres and Page in the business, will momentarily forget a gay person his abnormality as long as he entertains well. And if homosexuality is still a social stigma, despite all these efforts to normalize it, then it will always remain a social stigma.

And just in time for Obama's homosexual agenda of equality, the PBS program To The Contrary "for women, by women, about women" (my quotations), recently included on its panel an articulate black women, Danielle Moodie-Mills. I wondered who she was, with her caked make-up and twisted stringy hair.


Moodie on the PBS program To The Contrary, which aired a couple of weeks ago

I found her profile all over the internet, since then. She is a black lesbian, whose "marriage" to another black woman was profiled in the black magazine Essence. They "married" in 2010, Mills at 32 and Moodie 31, and had "been together" for six years before that, which means they started this "relationship" when they were in their early twenties.


Danielle Moodie, on the right, is:
Advisor, LGBT Policy and Racial Justice
Center for American Progress
Nonprofit; 201-500 employees; Think Tanks industry
(LinkedIn Profile)

and Ayisha Millis is:
...a Senior Fellow and Director of the FIRE - Fighting Injustice to Reach Equality - Initiative at the Center for American Progress, where her work explores the intersections of race, class, and sexuality.
(Center for American Progress profile)

They both have those fluffy jobs just right for the Obama administration.

There must be dozens around of these "lesbians" around. Girls walking around the mall, chattering and laughing: are they "young lesbians"? Two young women eating in a restaurant, fancily dressed: are they on a date? A couple, women, picking up a young child at school or at a day care: are they "two mommies"? And so on.

I won't go into the pshychological, sociological, cultural, School of Camille Paglia, analyses of what I'm seeing here, so here's my take, at least on Page, Moodie and Mills.

There is very little information forthcoming from Moodie or Mills. I've gleaned what there is available from various websites and their limited profiles in their professional biographies.

Danielle Moodie

Danielle Moodie's only reference to her parentage (from searches around the web) is a photo of hers which appeared on Essence magazine's profile of her "marriage" to Mills. Here, she is standing with a white man, named as Michael Newton, with the caption:

Dance with my father:
Danielle’s dad Michael Newton was close to tears as he danced with his daughter on her momentous day.

Below is the photograph:


(Source: Essence)

I can only assume that she is adopted. Where is the mother (adoptee)? Why isn't she included in this wedding photograph? Is she white, black, other? What kind of life does Moodie live where she has to call a white man as her father? How hard was this for her as a young girl (assuming she was adopted young)? How much harder did it get as she became conscious of her surroundings? How did the "black identity" culture affect her identity? How does she relate to whites, and to the ominous White Male?

Aisha Mills


Mills posted this photo collage on her Twitter page

Mills was raised by her grandmother. She says: "My entire life, I have been a variety of 'others'." According to this post, her mother had "Asian" roots, but she was raised by her Black Southern Baptist grandparents, as the photos above indicate. The young, light-skinned boy in the photo collage could be her brother. Or is it her dressed in a suit and tie (as a young boy)? Yes! It is her, dressed as a young boy! So there you have it.

And here below, she is with her MIU (Missing in Upbringing) father at her "wedding."


Source: Essence
Caption reads:

Proud Father
Aisha's father James Mills kisses his baby girl and wishes her well on her big day

The Mills-Moodie "elegant affair" of a wedding included baskets of chopsticks. The ominous absence of her Asian mother must make even the most mundane of Chinese objects into bouquets of roses.


Chopstick elegance: Reaching for some ephemeral roots
Chopsticks, from the wedding album by Essence
The caption reads:
Cocktail Hour:
"The entire wedding was an elegant cocktail affair," Aisha explained.

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So what is it with these young women?

- A chaotic home life?
- A dearth of masculine young men?
- Feminism pushing young women into competitive and masculine roles, where they clash with young men, both the feminized ones, and those standing their ground and refusing to give in easily to a woman-centric environment?
- Black men, unavailable, either through their dropping out of society, their criminality, or their immaturity?
- Men refusing marriage, for fear of repercussions by feminism, and feminist women and wives?
- Men refusing to mature, and instead delaying marriage and family?
- The culture pushing, through mass media, that marriage is not necessary?
- Divorce rates, and divorce costs, high, especially (uniquely?) for men, so many opting out of marriage?
The "otherness" of the other becoming too much to deal with for young people these days, who are not used to natural competitions, and eventually some awe for differences.
- The desire by contemporary people to make everyone the same, to avoid this natural alienness or otherness of people?
- The desire to make everything "nice" and non-combative?

In any case, this "best friend" type of coupling is well suited for girls in college and high school. Under normal conditions, these girls will find staunch mothers or grandmothers who will diminish that seductive environment, give them the education they need, and place them in situations where they can lead a normal life, including building their future families.

The women I've described above are traumatized orphans, both in society and in family. They have been dealt with difficult beginnings. Since their families didn't come through for them, then it should have been up to the larger society to see that they didn't normalize their ambiguities and abnormalities. Now, as adults, they are seeped in their iniquities, and will only further terrorize society. Our job now is to see that they don't do that, and that they don't amass more vulnerable innocents along their way.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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In Vogue, and Out

Vogue Magazine Cover from the 1950s
They don't make them like this anymore

I got the latest Vogue for "free" because of my accumulated Chapters/Indigo points. I do like going through the magazine's glossy pages, although I'm always disappointed at the non-fashionable fashion that makes the cut these days. We have come a long way from the heyday of Vogue, when glamorous models and women fronted the magazine (and its interior, too).

The front cover of the September 2013 issue has a pouty actress, one of the new breed that's taking over the media scene (television, magazines, movies, gossip columns). For what it's worth, it is Jennifer Lawrence (I doubt that she'll stick around long enough to be a memorable cultural icon).



Besides her pouty presence, the magazine has crowded the front cover which so many headlines that it looks exactly like the gossip/fashion magazine Cosmopolitan, which I haven't bought in years.


Salacious and crowded cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine
for September 2013


Farah Fawcette on the Vogue cover of July 1978.
Much less crowded.

I suspect I will continue to avoid buying Vogue in the future (except to redeem my card points).

In this September's issue of Vogue, I skipped through a mannequin-like pose of what I thought was a model. "Another emaciated, dead-looking fashion shot for an uninteresting dress," I thought, as I turned the page.

I found out, as correspondent David J., at Laura Wood's The Thinking Housewife writes:

Good day! While perusing the CNN website recently, I came upon a nearly cheesecake photograph of Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo! The picture, intended for this spread in Vogue magazine, immediately reminded me of the following maxim by the late Lawrence Auster.

David J. quotes Lawrence Auster's maxim:

When men occupy a high office, it is for the purpose of doing a job. The job comes first. When women occupy a high office, it is for their self and their vanity. Public boasting about their “power” comes first, along with displays of themselves.

And he continues:

what amazes me about Ms. Mayer is that, despite her reputable academic accomplishments and immense merits in Silicon Valley, she still apparently places her sexual beauty at center stage.

Laura relies:

Well, what would you expect her to do? Of course, she’s using her attractiveness and the novelty of her position to seek attention. She is doing her job. I am sure that’s partly why she was hired though, of course, it would never be openly stated. She would be remiss in not fulfilling these expectations. She is doing her job.

The rest of the interaction is here, with other comments added.

Women may still want to look feminine and men may still want feminine (and pretty) women around, but the image of the pretty woman has changed.

We now have skinny, sculptural women who look like the manequins that pose in store windows. They have dead, expressionless eyes, and stiff wooden bodies. I suppose men are going for this since it shows some kind of prestige. After all, in this feminist world, a working woman, who can also pose for glamour magazines like Vogue, is a big catch. And her skinniness and quasi-inhumanness is a small price to pay for the prestige.

Still, I wonder how long it will be before men outright refuse to be around women like Mayer, who can probably be charming and feminine in her interactions, but who at some point will have to behave like the business woman she has to be in order not to run her company to the ground.

Or, she might assume a subsidiary, but superficially glossy position, and give the real meat of the running of a company to a ruthless male. They can call him all the names, while she gets all the praise.

Again, this is temporary. There is no guarantee that the "ruthless" male won't run her down, or out, while she's busy arranging child-care schedules and fashion shoots with ladies' magazines. Actually, I think that there is ample guarantee that a male colleague will do just that.


Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, posing in a rubber-like dress for the prestigious fashion magazine Vogue,
in the September 2013 issue.

She is wearing a Michael Kors Sheath (that's how the magazine describes the dress) for $1,896

Wikipedia describes a sheath dress as:

...a type of dress designed to fit close to the body, relatively unadorned [which] typically falls around the knees or lower thighs.

The dress looks like its made out of rubber (and that is probably the intended effect), but a closer look in the magazine photo shows that it is wool. Strange, on many counts. Mayer looks like she's lounging on some kind of pool-side chair. And wearing wool? The dress is short-sleeved. Wool dresses are meant for keeping one warm, but Kors and Mayer are not after practicality, but glamour. And finally, this rubber effect gives an S&M quality to the image. Is that how a CEO wants to portray herself? Apparently so.

Here are some hilarious Vogue 2009 shots titled "Pregnant in Prada" of Mayer in maternity wear, and the various Vogue selections to enhance her pregnancy wardrobe:


"Pregnant in Prada"
Mayer in 2009 Vogue

Here is the 2009 Vogue "Tuesday" ensemble, for the pregnant CEO, from a select group of designers:


Clockwise from left:
Boy. by Band of Outsiders leather-trim blazer, $1,395
lagarconne.com

J Brand 340 leggings-style maternity jeans, $195
net-a-porter.com

Proenza Schouler PS1 iPad case, $685
barneys.com

Reed Krakoff oxford leather loafers, $625
net-a-porter.com

Stylish, they are not. But practical and comfortable, for the busy pregnant lady, with the huge pocket book.

Women have come a long way. Actually, not so long. Look at Jennifer Lawrence's Vogue pose from above, a twenty-three-year-old woman who is pouting like Nabokov's pre-adolescent Lolita.


Left: Sue Lyon as Lolita, in Stanley Kubrik's 1962 film Lolita (after Nabokov's 1955 book, Lolita)
Right: Jennifer Lawrence on Vogue's 2013 cover

Women will be women, and girls will be girls. If left to their own devices, they will simply start to pout, or arrange day-care schedules from their top-floor, glass offices.

And back to CEO Mayer.

Paul, at the Thinking Housewife, writes, referring to a 2013 photograph of Mayer:

And she is not even beautiful. She might have been at one time, but no more. She needs to cut her hair.

This may be a harsh, but Mayer asked for it. She is so busy scheduling executive meetings and nanny pick-ups, that her glamour shots of previous years have gone down the tube.

Hers is the look of the veteran do-it-all female of our era.

Here is the 2013 photograph:



The caption to the photograph reads:

Pictured in 2013, Mayer has often been named one of the most powerful women in business. "I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies," she told Vogue magazine. "I'm just geeky and shy and I like to code. ... It's not like I had a grand plan where I weighed all the pros and cons of what I wanted to do—it just sort of happened."

Good excuse: she's just geeky and shy, with a million-dollar wardrobe budget.

Here is Mayer, a few years ago, in 2008 (left), pretty and smiling, and the toll on her "it just sort of happened" face in 2013:



As Paul said: "And she is not even beautiful. She might have been at one time, but no more. She needs to cut her hair."

Of course, she had to upgrade (re-upgrade, I wonder how long it took to make her look that good) her look for the September 2013 Vogue article, but its back to business when she gets back to business.

Back to the Vogue issue. The eccentric photographer Annie Leibovitz has done a great job of portraying the Irish landscape, with her series of photographs. The clothes, as is usual in the 21st century depiction of style and beauty, are atrocious, but the scenery is stunningly beautiful. Here's one:



But this is its only redeeming quality.

More dead mannequins in the September 2013 Vogue:


The caption reads:

Tripping The Light Fantastic

Built for women who seem to be really, really going places: practical, everyday chic—no fidgety patterns or trims to muck up travel, intergalactic or otherwise.

The models have names:

Raquel (standing on the right) is wearing:
- Narciso Rodriguez tangerine shift, $1,895
neimanmarcus.com. Céline necklace. Michael Kors heels.

Toni:
- Balenciaga wool-mohair sweater with plaster effect ($1,545)
- Balenciaga Crepe pants ($1,235)
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Royal Baby: George Alexander Louis

The only thing I fault Kate and William with is that they could have waited until they
got to the palace before showing the baby, and that they dress less casual. But, they
probably wanted to show that Kate was doing fine as she left the hospital.

I've cricicized Kate Middleton in previous blogs. I only commented on what I saw: Kate in Islamic headscarf while visiting a Muslim country. In retrospect, to be fair, she probably had to wear the scarf to avoid inflamatory response, in this world of Muslim terror. And Queen Elizabeth had done the same, although as a monarch, she can decide that what she wears anywhere is appropriate to her own culture and traditions. Instead she chose to catapult to Muslims' aggressive demands.

As I wrote in this post:

Queen Elizabeth also went barefoot, and diligently covered her head when she went to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi in 2010, and at the Green Mosque in Turkey in 2008.

Kate Middleton has had her share of minor scandals, from vacationing topless in some Caribbean Island (hasn't she learned from her predecessors that cameramen are everywhere) to hot-pants photos surfacing from her college years. She also "co-habited" with Prince William while they were students in Edinburgh, and after. Still, I don't fault them, in this confusing world of moral ambiguities.

But, I've always maintained that William is serious, and takes his role seriously. He has decided to live up to higher standards than what his father passed on to him. I think, in a sad way, it is his memory of his mother that gives him that strength. Despite her many errors, Diana loved and respected the monarchy, and gave that sense of correctness to her son.

I wrote here about Kate and William:

But, still, I like [Kate's] style and she's somewhat demure in this age of all-exposure. I think she's trying to bring some decorum back into the scandal-filled British monarchy, and with her husband, the quiet and serious Prince William, I think she may just do so.

As she quietly adjusted to royal life, her demeanour, and her wardrobe, started changing. She was in Canada for St. Patrick's Day, in 2012, where I wrote:

I've always liked Kate. She seems quiet, smart and has adjusted remarkably well to royal life, unlike her sad mother-in-law Diana and her aunt Sarah. Perhaps she learned from their sad mistakes. I've got a few blog posts I've meaning to do on her, and her modest but elegant style, which I'll get to.

I don't know about the future of the monarchy. The British people clearly still see it positively, from their joyful reaction to the new royal member, Kate's and William's son. As I was watching the various news coverage, I could see how serious William is, and how supportively subordinate Kate is (she is no Diana). If there is anyone who will salvage the tainted image of British royalty, it is Kate and William.

Monarchies may come and go, but people will always need leaders, or a hierarchy of leaders, who decisively guide their people and nation. These leaders are symbolic as well as actual. They may perform their functions, but they also have deep symbolic importance. If the right leader is not in view, then the wrong one will usurp the position. Look at what happened in Germany with Hitler, who was submissively followed by leader-hungry Germans.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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"Traditionalist political efforts should promote changes in general principles, possibly small in immediate effect"

Yesterday, I was reading excerpts from Jim Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism, and I found this:

Public Life
Complementary efforts must extend beyond local communities into politics and public life generally. Those efforts would include practical measures to protect particular traditionalist interests from attack...

More fundamentally, traditionalist political efforts should promote changes in general principles, possibly small in immediate effect, that open a door out of liberalism and make a better world possible. We start where we are: immediate radical change is hard to bring about and never works as intended. Final objectives should nonetheless go to the root of the matter. What is needed is not a new system built to order, which will never come into being anyway, but new fundamental principles that can work out their implications over time just as liberalism did. It took three hundred years to progress from John Locke to John Rawls. Something similar may be needed for the renewal of tradition (p. 269).

I was saying the same thing when I wrote in my post: Reclaiming Beauty: Winning Back Our Civilization (which is the proposed title of my book):

Reclaiming beauty is not just an intellectual effort, but it is also an activist's endeavor. There are many activities I envision, such as: Setting up conferences for group discussions and meetings; Providing a forum for writers; Establishing definitions for words such as "beauty" and "reclaim"; Having a voice in political and cultural decisions that affect beauty in our environment (for example, objecting to the building of glass tower sky-scrapers in our neighborhoods); Providing guidelines for every-day beauty, such as dress, etiquette, language; Providing resources for people to learn about beauty's role in our civilization; Alerting people into the ways that beauty is being desecrated and maligned.

Finding Excellence

Hardy Geranium
Watercolor by Kidist P. Asrat
2008


Below is what I posted in my art and culture blog Camera Lucida on November 2009 (five years ago!) about conservatives and conservatism:

Doing Things: And finding excellence

I post this with some trepidation, since I don't want it to be misconstrued as an unnecessary focus on myself. But, I have no one else that I can use for this particular kind of example, so here goes.

I've talked extensively about various conservative groups and individuals in the past few months. I've also become aware that some who call themselves conservative are only so in a few (of their favorite) points. Some are outright libertarians, others have crossed the other side to liberalism

I think we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about, berating, criticising and moaning about liberals. Many conservatives have made this their mission (see Michelle Malkin here, who has a new book out on Obama).

I've always refrained from using my blogs as my sounding boards against liberals. I think it is far more important to put conservatives on track, or to point out their errors. This way, a real conservative body can be built. If we blatantly follow every conservative, just because he is not a liberal, then we have short-changed ourselves and the movement too.

But, one important thing is to DO things, as I wrote in a previous post on traditionalism, where small steps a movement make. This is where each individual behaves like a conservative, and not just talks about it. And since this world is a liberal world, that becomes much more difficult than it sounds. But, therein lies the challenge, and not only that, our very survival.

If I can use myself as an example:

I started out in experimental film. I loved handling celluloid. I would shoot, process and edit all my (very short) films myself. But, I found "art" film to be a dead-end. Rather than glorify art, it has become a hotbed for self-expression of the worst sort. Many (the majority) of the films I watched were, well, unwatchable. Aggressively so.

So, I left, rather than fight the failing system. I found textile design, which ironically attracted me because of the same hands-on, textural effect that I liked about film. Then I encountered another problem. I had very little drawing and painting background, and to my great surprise, our design instructors were just not willing (or able) to teach us those fundamentals. I started taking courses at various school boards, where I discovered a hidden gem of true artists, who I believe have been pushed out of the non-art culture prevalent in colleges and universities.

But what about design? Again, I found a vindictive hate of non-weird, non-edgy designs. Also, anything that looked like it had not been done using the much-touted photocopier or computer graphics, was frowned upon. It is too “old-fashioned” was the phrase. And all we want to be is modern, no?

In the end, I even left that group – psychologically, at least. Ordinary people seem to appreciate my efforts. Women like birds and flowers on their furniture fabric. Color and texture are always welcome. I hardly get a “what is that” when I show my work. I think that is the biggest compliment. My colleagues would beg to differ, of course.

My point is that all this is not a matter of perseverance; it is also a matter of pursuing excellence. If we give up on that, no matter how stubborn and persistent we may be, it will all come out wrong. We have to keep these traditions going strong, we have to learn them and learn how to use them. And then use them.

The funny thing about tradition is that it changes subtly through time. Innovations happen by building the new from the old; by adapting the past into our own present environments. This is what modern artists just don’t get. They are stuck in a rut with their experimentations and self-expression. The true inspiration and, paradoxically, change comes by pursuing tradition.