PUTTING THE PETALS BACK ON THE ROSE.
ABC NEWS.COM: WOMEN HAVE SURGERY TO "RESTORE" VIRGINITY.
I ought to be outraged at the very notion, but I can't help feeling that men who think that a woman's virginity is a deal-breaker---or worse--- deserve what they get.
"You tell him, "If you break it, you've bought it," the father of one of my friends used to say to her. As if she had no more say in her fate than a vase or a can opener.
Of course, there is this:
[beginning of quote from article at ABC news.com]
Fatima, 20 or so, is from the Middle East and came to the Toronto area with her family as a teenager. A Muslim, she says her family is not observant, but is very traditional. So every time she met with her ex-boyfriend she had to sneak out of the house and lie to her parents.
Her parents also don't know that she's come to Stubbs' clinic. "I could never ever tell them that, never. I would tell them anything, but not this," she said.
Fatima says if she is not a virgin when she gets married she would be humiliated — and maybe killed, perhaps even by her parents.....
Fatima is talking about honor killing … a ghastly, ancient ritual in the Middle East. We traveled to Cairo, Egypt, to learn about the roots of the practice, and were told it rarely happens today, but is always a possibility in a culture where the virginity of a bride belongs to the whole family.
[end of quote]
So it's not a joking matter either. It is one more sign of the extent to which women in the world continue to be viewed as belongings.
Sigh. Having dealt with that, I definitely needed this next:
Given the proliferation of bad news and the state of the world generally, this article at Discover.com is encouraging. Martin Seligman, whose book Learned Optimism I read years ago (without, however, learning optimism) says we are on the verge of an era where people can receive training in happiness and in maintaining a positive frame of mind.
The book was actually quite fascinating and at least explained to me how I had learned to be non-optimistic. While I'm not a "the glass is half empty" sort of person, I am definitely a "the glass is half full AND half empty" person. I would certainly like to cultivate the habits of mind that produce happiness.
This description of Dr. Seligman endears him to me:
[quote begins from "Shiny Happy People" by Brad Lemley at Discover.Com]
Slumped in a webbed lounge chair in the middle of it, wearing shorts and a blue T-shirt and sipping from a plastic tumbler, is a patch of damp weather in this sunny Eden: Seligman himself. He is friendly enough, smiles now and then, and has a sharp wit, but no one, including Seligman himself, would characterize him as ebullient. "Some people are blessed with good genes," he says in a low, rumbling voice, aggravated by a virus. "I am not one of them. I think I am by nature a gloomy, depressive, pessimistic sort of person."
Far from disqualifying him from happiness science, his dour nature makes him ideally suited to the field, Seligman contends. "Happiness is too important a topic to be left to happy people," he says. "A lot of the self-help stuff out there does seem to be written by the genetically gifted." In his view, the fact that he has scrabbled to even a moderately upbeat perch is a victory, and he owes it to the positive psychology interventions he and his colleagues have crafted. "I am someone who takes his own medicine," he says.
[quote from article ends]
The book "Learned Optimism" is far from being the usual "daily affirmations" self-help crap. One of the things I learned from it that has been of help to me in my volunteer work was the concept of "learned helplessness." So many of the people I have dealt with have been people who were stuck in neutral and who truly believed that there was nothing that they could do for themselves.
If Dr. Seligman says that there are "interventions" that can improve my worldview, I am all for them. I can't see life getting much easier as time goes on, you know?
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