The Tattoo and The Beach

So here it comes….the family beach vacation and a week spent hiding my tattoo. What is wrong with me? I mean really.

Two years ago I got this absolutely rockin’ tattoo. I even wrote a short essay about it during a Davidson College alumni weekend modeled after the NPR “This I Believe” series. Here is an excerpt from that essay:

“I needed permanent representation of bringing my heart and mind to peace with nearly ten consecutive, tumultuous years involving (illness), professional struggle, marital crisis, and infertility. Enough was enough, and my soul hungered for a ritual to mark my moving forward. When the voice of the universe whispered repeatedly the answer was a Eurasian practice of permanent decorative skin marking from Neolithic times, I was stunned. I expected something more like a new sports car.”

As much as I adore this new part of me, I cringe at the idea of sharing it with people I think will judge me. I’m an adult two times over and I still can’t be my full self with my own parents. I have a cousin half my age who floats in the same general familial goo I grew up in who proudly sports her tatt and even had her wedding dress cut to show it off last month. She and I recently reconnected after well over 10 years of no contact, and I’m wondering if there is a higher opportunity there. Maybe she is my bridge to “coming out” with my art. I’m thinking about sending my full “This I Believe” essay to the folks before beach week.

I may need to just bite the bullet and ‘fess up and move on. I’m not really in the mood for hiding anymore. Any thoughts and advice are more than welcome. I’ll post how it goes soon.
(For the record, if you are looking for the real deal in a great tattoo artist and shop, find Robert Ashburn at http://www.liquiddragontattoo.com/.)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

This is a tough topic, but here goes nothing. I’m really struggling with what is going on with product marketing and very young children, especially marketing to girls.

I realize this is not a new topic, but it struck me in a new and disturbing way on a trip to Target with my daughter this week. I despise what they are doing with Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell and her fairy girlfriends (http://disney.go.com/fairies/fairies/fairies.html), but mostly it has been my frustration that the come-hither poses, cleavage, and general body language seemed inappropriate as role models for young children. This week changed all that.

For the first time – and perhaps it was because my daughter was with me – I looked at one particular product that seemed insanely sexed up, and got a cold chill down my spine that still hasn’t gone away. It’s no longer for me what these images say to children about how they should behave. It’s what these images convey to adults about children.

I’ve spent a good portion of my professional life focused on children’s well-being. As part of that work, I made it my business to know as much as I could tolerate about specific threats to kids. There are a lot of things I wish I didn’t know about what our children face out there in the world. Without going into the weeds, I want to state a clearly as possible that little girls being seen attracted to and interacting with the kinds of images Disney is churning out with this fairy money machine is not increasing their safety.

What makes me most angry is that it is Disney. As in Walt Disney -- the alleged magic kingdom where we are all safe and respected and can explore our dreams as kids to our hearts’ content. They are sucking these kids and parents in on a reputation that they simultaneously are sending up in flames to anyone who is paying attention.

Sure, little girls are suckers for pretty. And for cute. And the more you ply them with pretty and cute, the more money you make. Probably no one will notice much if you show more of Tink’s leg, or give her bigger breasts. Probably no one will make a fuss if you add a few more girls to the mix. More girls, more money. It’s basic math. I mean, any adult who complains about this has issues, right? It’s just for fun. It’s for the kids.

Here’s the deal: I know when my spine goes cold with fear. I know when my mind’s eye races at 90 miles an hour down to the image of an innocent kid being perceived as a sex object and where that is headed and who’s to blame. And I know all about how big companies like Disney try to cover up what they are selling for their own profit.

I wish I didn’t but I do.

I’ll try to chill this weekend, and see you next week in a better place.

Eleventh Hour

Mark Twain once said that courage is not the absence of fear. It is the mastery of and resistance to fear.

I started thinking about courage a week ago when I read about a young man in our local county school system. Approaching the end of his senior year in high school, he went to the school board to ask them specifically to name sexual orientation in the anti-bullying policies. This would mean that the well-known playground taunts of “fag, gay, homo, dike, fairy” etc. would be identified as on par with racial slurs and attacks.

When I saw his picture in the paper, standing alone at a podium in the board room, I was overcome with respect and frankly, amazement. He is almost out of the K-12 system. If he and everyone else in his class can hang in there, they will be out of public school all together and on to what, hopefully, will be the commencement of a full and exciting adult life. All of the pathologies of adolescence will be behind them, and they will be free to go on to grow into who they were born to be, not who the crowd tries to force them to be.

And yet here he was, putting himself out there at the eleventh hour for all of those children behind him. Whatever the school system decides to do, he will not benefit directly. If anything, the last days of high school may be a special hell for him, now that he has taken the ultimate public route to talking about his experiences, naming who has tormented him, and how it hurt. Last time I checked, people who to treat others this way don’t exactly turn down the volume when you acknowledge your vulnerabilities.

How many of us would have the courage to do what he did at his age? At any age? Maybe now I could consider it, but at 18 I am pretty sure I would have laid low and tried to just get out. This fellow is a special person, and a young man of true courage.