07/01/2010
Help, my skin cells are in trauma
I drove down to the beach for New Years’ Eve and on the way noticed quite a number of billboards including my favourite – a depiction of a young woman’s upper back with the caption; “Tanning is skin cells in trauma”.
Trauma? Really? We’re not getting a little carried away with ourselves? Gravel rash I will grant as ‘trauma’ but a suntan? It seems that tanning and sunburn are the latest bogeymen of the Victorian government. And yet, late in 2007, the press reported that the ‘slip, slop, slap’ campaign might have gone too far, as record numbers of people showed symptoms of vitamin D deficiency, the elderly in particular becoming more vulnerable to osteoporosis and broken bones:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/08/1196813081579.html
State governments, Vic Health, the Cancer Council and similar bodies undermine their own message about skin cancer to the extent that they insist it applies to everyone equally when common sense and our own experience tell us this isn’t so. Instead of giving people comprehensive and accurate information about the way in which skin type affects the likelihood of melanoma, as is done here:
http://www.melanomaawarenessfoundation.org/about/about/about-your-skin.html
we are fed patronisingly simple sound bites, including the ideologically-driven equation that tanning = trauma. For my part, the failure, or downright refusal, to acknowledge that this applies most strongly to those with fair skin and less strongly as you progress along a continuum of skin types from fair to dark, makes it difficult to take the message, or those promoting it, seriously.
Cynically, I suppose, I tend to the view that the bodies behind such campaigns are all about justifying their own existence. But it’s of greater concern that the ideology driving them has the potential to contribute to a wider victim-blaming mentality, in which skin-cancer sufferers (like lung cancer sufferers and AIDS victims before them) are blamed for their own conditions. From there, it’s just a short step to denying free health care to those who may have caused or contributed to their own ill health by a ‘lifestyle choice’, notwithstanding that genetic predisposition and other factors about which we are yet to learn are also factors in whether people fall victim to diseases, including cancers.
And all of that without considering the long term health effects of plastering our skin in sunscreen, about which very little is known.
02/01/2010
Not regrets, exactly …
but things I did in 2009 that I won’t do in 2010.
1. Internet dating
Internet dating seems like a great idea with a much better chance of success than just happening to meet someone in a bar the way we used to when I was young and footloose. We can choose the characteristics we like in a person, from looks and body type, interests in books, movies, sport, occupation or industry and the ‘level’ of their job – not to mention marital status and whether or not they have kids, at home or grown. We can even choose the area they live in or nominate a distance from our home that we’re prepared to travel. Then just hit ‘search’ and see who is delivered into our inbox.
But there are at least two problems with this: first, it suggests that we know what we’re looking for and yet, how often do you hear of people who are very different, getting together, or that opposites attract? Selecting the characteristics we think we want necessarily means leaving out a whole lot of others that wouldn’t necessarily be deal-breakers if we met someone at say, a barbecue. Second, all of the characteristics in a profile are, of course, self-disclosed and many of them are also entirely subjective. For someone better known for the depth of my cynicism, I can apparently also be amazingly naïve because it never occurred to me that people wouldn’t be truthful. Some inconsistencies are revealed by posted pictures, but one can never be quite sure how recent (or not) the pictures are. Even when they seem up to date, photographs aren’t foolproof.
Thus it was that I met one man whose profile had him as 5’ 6’’ in height but into whose eyes I could only gaze if my chin touched my neck – and I’m 5’4’. I ignored my instincts when they protested that if he lied about his height (which was so easily shown to be wrong) then he might well lie about other things. For once, I thought, I’ll try not to be so shallow – after all, he seems to be well read and he certainly writes well, he’s good at word play and if he’s short, well, he seems able to joke about it so he’s probably comfortable with himself. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Without going in to the gory details, he soon revealed his need to be the alpha male, going so far as to reply ‘testosterone’ when I asked him what I could smell and actually strutting a bit, like a bantam rooster. Oh dear.
Bruised but not broken from that encounter, I gave it another shot after about six months. The privacy afforded by talking to someone over the internet or email invites a sort of artificial informality, even intimacy, which can be liberating if you’re a shy sort of person. If you seem to get on well though, there’s no real excuse for not following up these cyber-conversations with an in person meeting. So it was that after chatting in cyberspace with the next fellow and getting on famously, we met for dinner. Is it just me or does ‘average’ body type imply not having a belly that overhangs the trousers and looks like it’s trying hard to reach the floor? I mean, what would ‘a bit overweight’ mean in this guy’s world? Inwardly sighing and trying to hush the inner voice that told me to just get the hell out of there, I sat down, we chatted and ate our meals but having learned my lesson from last time, I left as soon as common courtesy permitted.
Since then I’ve learned that my experiences are far from abnormal. The very fact that it’s possible to scroll through tens (if not hundreds) of profiles invites the belief that internet dating is like shopping and you’re bound to find what you want if you just look for long enough. Apart from that unrealistic expectation, it also fosters the belief that whatever (whoever) you’ve got, there’s a better one out there somewhere. So perhaps it’s not that surprising that when someone creates their profile, they do so with someone’s ‘ideal partner’ in mind and that things go awry when that proves unsustainable.
Not everyone will share my objections but I know for sure now that internet dating isn’t my thing. To me, it seems like another example of the triumph of form over substance and there’s enough of that in life as it is.
30/12/2009
shopping for swimwear
Now that Christmas is over and New Year is *nearly* over, I’ve been mentally taking stock of what I need for my week at the beach. Today that meant coming to the slow realisation that I don’t have any togs. Well, actually I have a pair of worn bikinis, a one piece suit for doing laps and a ‘miracle’ suit that’s supposed to take 5kgs off your body when you put it on. I bought the miracle suit a couple of years ago when I was convinced that I couldn’t possibly reveal my body on holidays in Fiji. But a combination of insights changed my mind: I remembered that no-one knows me in Fiji; that I like to get a tan, however politically incorrect that may be; I also like the sensation of sun and water on my skin and I just don’t feel old enough to be wearing a ‘miracle’ suit. So it has sat at the back of my underwear drawer ever since.
This morning, accepting I wasn’t going to be flouncing around in a flimsy two-piece, I decided to see if I could find a decent bikini top to just wear it with board shorts (which can hide a multitude of sins). Oh boy. One of the disadvantages of having Christmas and the New Year in the summertime is that it’s a time of over-indulgence and also one of taking stock. The time you realise that you’ve been stressed out from work, over-eating and under-exercising is the exact same time that you realise that you will shortly be on your week’s holiday at the beach. There’s enough time to buy some new bathers but not enough time to do anything about looking okay in them. Hence, I suppose, the invention of the miracle suit.
The short version is that I tried on a few things, became increasingly dismayed and left without buying anything. For a second I considered trying another shop but then I woke up to myself, came home and packed the miracle suit. I’m bound to bump into someone I know, at the beach.
29/12/2009
truth in advertising?
After a false start about a year ago, and several occasions of meaning to get around to it, I was inspired to finally start blogging today after reading this: http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/thank-goodness-i-didnt-get-what-i-didnt-want-for-christmas/
Advertisers claim that they don’t create reality, they just reflect it, but that doesn’t explain their persistence in depicting women cooking, serving meals, ministering to sick children and/or husbands and all the rest of that nurturing stuff. On the other side, it is only ever men who are shown mowing lawns or repairing things around the house and when either sex is shown deviating from their prescribed role, they’re invariably messing it up. (Advertisers have finally conceded that women also work outside the home but it’s implicit in their ads that this isn’t their *real* role.) We all know this isn’t how life really is – there are plenty of men who like to cook, who care for their kids and who are capable of housecleaning. And there are plenty of women who mow lawns, clean gutters and do outdoors work – and not only those without a choice.
Which allows me to segue in to the Stepford Wives, which I caught on tv last night. Although it’s the sort of thing that’s right up my alley, I’d never seen it before because (call me un-Australian), I just can’t stomach Nicole Kidman. Bette Midler and Glenn Close though, were just priceless. It was interesting that while the original 1975 movie had the men murdering the women and replacing them with robots, the 2004 version had a woman (Close) as the mastermind of the Stepford community. I understand that the movie suffered from problems and plot changes but the idea that anyone found it credible to suggest that a female (rather than male) character would want to create such a sexist dystopia still seems kind of creepy to me.
