At this time of the year, we often feel tender: tender toward other people, tender toward the natural world and all its creatures, tender toward life itself, tender perhaps even toward ourselves. Images both sweet, like a dog and cat sleeping together, and horrifying, like the pain and suffering borne by innocent civilians on both sides of a war, elicit tender thoughts.
Read MoreThe headline for this soul-baring sounds faintly geopolitical and sinister. It’s as though Hercule Poirot stands on deck to solve a great mystery. This situation requires no famous investigator, however. What is unfolding is the normal flow of the sweet river of life and a happy, joyous bend in it. I can’t wait to tell you this long-held secret.
Read MoreThis thought plagues me in a time of impersonality. We sit in offices in our private homes, alone or on endless Zoom meetings that I overhear from my home’s lower level when my children or friends stay over. Oh, yes, they see faces. The sharing, though, is all business…
Read MoreWith Barbie, there emerged a more complicated relationship. She didn’t look like anything I witnessed in the strong flesh-and-blood women around me, and it’s only by some miracle that I didn’t start to body-shame myself. I know many others did in the years before we talked about concepts like the male gaze and how it distorts the way women view themselves. This sets impossible standards that maim and warp and cause real illnesses in both men and women and their relationships, however they come together. Especially in the first decade of Barbie’s existence, her white, white world left out everyone else, which matched reality, until the great movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused Mattel, Barbie’s corporate owner, to succumb to the pressure to “show dolls more like me and my daughter”. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
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