Protecting our children

One of the most ridiculous phrases that's repeated over and over in America is "we need to protect our children."

For the record, I'm all for protecting children from child molesters, violent crime, emotional and physical abuse, fires, sharp toys and drinking cleaning products, but more often than not, we're spinning our wheels trying to "protect" children from things that aren't dangerous. Like pop music.

I was listening the song Run This Town on the radio last night, when I heard the word dick replaced with silence. It isn't news, of course, that the FCC refuses to let the more colorful bits of our language be used on radio and TV, but having Kanye make reference to getting a lot of attention ("...everybody on yo' dick...") is hardly something that children need to be protected from.

What's the fear, anyway? That a child might use the word dick? I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but my friends and I used the word in third grade. The assumption that having a 10-year old say, "He's a dick" will somehow corrupt her innocence is ridiculous and plays into the naïve fantasy that children need to be insulated from the world, anyway.

Do you have friends? Go online? Go out in public? Swearing isn't some activity reserved for prostitutes and drug dealers, it's part of our culture. Get over it.

And what of this desire to protect our children from the cruel world that "they'll discover soon enough?" News flash: we don't live in 1992-era Bosnia. Our children aren't about to enter a world of gun fire and genocide. It is not imperative that we let them live in a fairytale for 18 years because the harsh reality of the world is going to crush them. They're going to grow up and be adults in an advanced and developed nation with the largest economy and one of the highest standards of living on the planet.

Oh, protect them from the rest of the world, maybe? Pretend that there aren't regions of the globe where people are tortured, kidnapped, murdered? So that America's children can grow into adults who don't understand what life is like outside their own suburbs? So that we can continue to propagate the cultural maxim "out of sight, out of mind"?

Bleeping out Kanye West lyrics doesn't cause this cultural ignorance, of course, but it's an example of what America does to keep its people living in a more-perfect, albeit highly altered reality that permits our cheery optimism. And we start it at birth.

I'd like to see America use the word "shit" on TV, so we're not ashamed to be crude. I'd like to see us talk candidly about sex, so we can address the problems related to it. I'd like to see boobs on TV so that as a culture, we can stop exoticizing and eroticizing everything about women's bodies.

We're so entrenched in feeling dirty about swearing, feeling embarrassed talking about something that 99% of us do and looking at breasts that we've enacted agencies to make sure that people don't do it in public.

"We do it to protect the kids," we say.

But it's all bullshit. We do it to reinforce the American fantasy that life is beautiful and rosy because we're afraid of letting reality permeate our perfect world. But this tendency to live in a perfectly concocted fantasy instead of an imperfect reality makes problems for us. It keeps us reaching for shit-ain't-there: the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect mate. It prevents us from reading the real news; we have to read about reality stars with eight kids and former vice-presidential candidates' family drama. We just can't bear the prospect of reading about human rights abuses in Sub-Saharan Africa.

One could argue that American optimism is tied to this belief that things can be perfect and that that optimism has helped us immensely as a culture. And it probably has. We've pushed ahead, developed solutions for problems and developed a dynamic culture that has been exported to every nook and cranny of the planet.

But things are really perfect only in fairy tales. And we only tell these to children. So can we agree that, as a culture, the fairy tale is over? Can we grow up now? Can we stop this cultural game of "girls have cooties, keep your shirt on"? Or of "you said a bad word, I'm telling teacher on you"?

The sooner we stop using "protecting our children" as a euphemism for "preserving our fantasy," the sooner we can grow as a culture.

We've convinced ourselves that childhood fantasies are where it's at. "Be a kid at heart," we say.

Why? Growing up isn't a bad thing; how about being an adult at heart? Why do we resist growing up?

As adults, we have more responsibilities than we did as kids. But we also have more freedom. It can be nice to go home for a weekend and let Mom and Dad cook and clean for you, but would you ever really want to be a child again? Have a curfew? Let the comforts of childhood strip you of the liberation of adulthood? I certainly wouldn't.

And I don't think we should force our culture to live in infancy forever, either. We have a brilliant, educated and diverse culture, let's let it grow up.

City of Lights

There are precisely zero cities on the planet that I love more than Paris. Its architecture makes me wonder why anyone else even bothered architecting; its food is (mostly) incredible; the Eiffel Tower, as cliché as it is, is the Eiffel-fucking-Tower; same for the Louvre, the Arc de Trimphe, ad nauseum.

As evidenced by lesser cities everywhere who claim to be the Paris of ______, the City of Lights is rich in wonders that make it, well, a Paris.

With so many things that make this an amazing place, my favorite part of the city is Parisians. Most visitors to Paris will tell you how rude Parisians are; their icy stoicism can be enough to make babies cry; store clerks in Paris have one shared favorite expression (It's not possible) and will rarely rise from their chairs behind registers to offer help. People on the street won't stop to chat with strangers, and they have a cynicism that might only be rivaled by a manic-depressive on a bad day.

Ask Parisians about their politicians: "Assholes."

Ask Parisians about France: "Tumbling into hell."

Ask Parisians about Paris: "It's a rotten city."

And then ask them where else they'd rather live and they'll smirk and tell you: "Pfffff, nowhere."

Parisians epitomize the French paradox. Not that lame "they eat bread and cheese and never get fat" paradox, but the "everything is hideous and beautiful" paradox. Parisians don't love things until they've hated things, or maybe they won't love things without hating them.

What I admire about the French (or Parisians, I should say, since I haven't spent much time outside of Paris) is that they're realistic. To them, Paris is a cesspool of crime, an ornate vestige of a collapsed empire, a place whose moment of glory has long passed. And, by the way, it's also the best city on the planet.

It makes me wonder whether realism has continued to shape French culture since the 1850s or if realism was just an expression of the way the French have been all along.

Whatever the reasoning behind it (persistent skepticism after crooked governments? experiencing incredible power and glory and then losing it?), Paris is a good lesson in being realistic.

The first night I arrived in Paris, I arrived into a train station covered in graffiti. When I went out later to get dinner, I was heckled by a voice that came from underneath a cardboard box blanket. I had to elbow my way through a crowd of livid protesters to get into a store, I was cut off in line twice. On my way home, I walked down a street littered with trash, through an alley where a dozen hookers lined the walls and then finally, through the courtyard of an apartment building where I'm pretty sure crimes have recently occurred.

But I was elated to be in the real Paris. Never mind some idealized caricature of Paris where the Eiffel Tower casts its shadow across perfect lawns, where the river winds and splits to reveal Notre Dame, where people clutch baguettes as they scurry past the Louvre and take seats at cafés to people watch. That night, the ugliness of Paris was played out on the beauty of its stage.

I hope that one day I'll be able to live in Paris and be a part of the city. And I don't want to live in a dumpy, up-and-coming neighborhood; I want to live where Napoleon played out his complex and built big, impressive things. I'm from a place where 100-year old buildings are ancient and I don't want to witness gentrification in action; gentrification is pretty much all I've ever known.

If my wish comes true and I get to live in one of Paris' idyllic neighborhoods, I'll be surrounded by beauty, but I'll never forget that I'm just a few metro stops away from a shitty neighborhood. I won't remember this by choice, of course, but because I'll be surrounded by Parisians and they'll be happy to pop my fantasy bubble with their reality needles any day of the week.

Gender roles

Gender roles are bullshit. I've always hated them. As a kid, when people told me that boys weren't allowed to play house, I told them to shut up and pass me my springform pan. I loved baking. My rationale was always, if I had to be alone on an island with one other person, would I want to be with someone who cooks or someone who gets dirty and breaks shit? I think the choice is pretty clear.

There's no logic that justifies telling girls to behave differently from boys. There's also nothing damaging about little boys wearing girls' clothes, it just makes people uncomfortable- like the heels that fathers are afraid their sons might wear.

So I was pretty tickled today to see that slowly but surely, the gender gap is closing between men and women. At least in clothing choice in Southern France.

The guy on the left caught my eye because as I was trying to shove a Blackberry, a wallet, a train ticket, an iPod, a pack of cigarettes (oops), a lighter and a passport into my front pockets, he came waltzing by with a massive bag that would have accommodated all my things with enough spare room to carry a body.

He crossed the street, where he was greeted by a woman with open arms (on the right in the picture). As I watched them kiss, I was floored by how identically they were dressed. The scene reminded me of something my parents would have witnessed if they had come into my room as I made out with my mirror during high school.

I knew that I had to document this, so I hastily shoved everything into my pockets and, like a pervert, followed the couple through town.

I just wanted a clear shot to prove that they were, in fact, a couple, but since they kept a distance, presumably to spare each other from second hand smoke, I never got it.

Oh, well.

I was pleased to see that they could look pretty much the same while being in an ostensibly heterosexual relationship, which puts a massive hole in the theory that men will be gay if they dress like women or vice-versa. Of course, instead of flying across the Atlantic Ocean, I could have stalked a couple in a hipster neighborhood in LA, San Francisco, New York or pretty much any other place worth living in in America.

I'm pretty sure that by the time I'm old enough to have kids, gender roles will have loosened further and it will be okay for girls to break windows with baseballs. I really hope so, anyway, because I have big plans to make quiche lorraine with my son.