boys will be boys

whether one looks at fighters or lovers, men engaged in the dramatic arts or simply men engaged in just about anything, one can clearly see that the image a man must show to the public depends largely on where he's from. this is the idea explored by jeffrey yang, of harvard.*

though the image of "he-man," in the west, seems ubiquitous, "Our findings suggest that Western men have a distorted view of what they ideally should look like, whereas men in Taiwan don't seem to have this problem," says Harrison Pope Jr., a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

"Disorders of body image, including a pathological preoccupation with muscularity, are growing increasingly common among Western males, notes Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, a Harvard senior. "By contrast, such male body-image problems appear to be rare in Asian societies."

A few years ago, [Pope] and several colleagues gave a computerized test to male college students in the United States, France, and Austria. The students could adjust images of male bodies through 10 layers of muscle and 10 levels of fat. Asked to build bodies they thought would attract women, the males consistently layered on a lot more muscle than females preferred when they looked at the images. The Leonardo DiCaprio types were judged more appealing than the Sylvester Stallones.

The tests revealed that Taiwanese men show less dissatisfaction with their bodies than Westerners. They did not add as much muscle to build an idealized body. And they added a scant five pounds to make a body they thought would be a woman's ideal.

To reach their ideal, more and more Western men are resorting to anabolic steroids. The Taiwanese men Yang talked with had heard of the drugs but did not know anyone who actually used them.

What accounts for the difference in body images and drug use between East and West? Yang, Pope, and Gray propose a combination of three possible answers in their report, which appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Chinese culture places less emphasis on muscle as a measure of masculinity. Also, Asian men are less exposed to the unending images of pecs, abs, biceps, and triceps common in Western media. Finally, Taiwanese men retain a tighter grip on the traditional roles of household and corporate masters than men in the United States and other Western countries.

Western societies have equated muscles with masculinity from Greek and Roman statuary to modern television and print ads. There has been no such emphasis in Asia.

Although a macho tradition exists in China, Yang notes, "a cerebral male tradition is dominant. In this tradition, masculinity is composed both of wen, having core meanings centering around literacy and cultural attainment, and wu, having core meanings of martial, military, force, and power. Wen is more highly regarded."

Yang, Gray, and Pope also call attention to other research showing that Asian cultures are being invaded by Western patterns of body dissatisfaction among women.

Two studies have shown that normal-weight women in Hong Kong and Polynesia want to be thinner. Another investigation in Fiji found striking increases in body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls in Fiji after television became widely available.

it's all cinderella

imagine, if you will, what these blended titles may be.
pick one from each list....

PROTAGONIST

• a stressed-out lawyer

• a busy fashion executive

• a determined bride-to-be

• a workaholic hollywood publicist

• a driven marketing executive

• a successful but overworked business woman

ACTION

• warily welcomes a stranger into her home

• ends up hitchhiking to her wedding

• meets a life coach and is granted 12 wishes

• is knocked unconscious in a car accident

• is visited by the ghost of her former client

• wishes to see what her life would be like if....

HAPPY ENDING

notice i didn't say 'happy endings.' they all, of course, end the same way. a good man will always be more satisfying than a life lived in the business world. nowadays, some women do hold on to their careers, but only once they have reinstated the man where he was meant to be.

her work will then be denigrated, the guy rescues her from some dastardly foe, she thanks (her lucky star, elf, santa, whatever), and they ride off into the future, with bells ringing.

these are all, as you've probably guessed, taken from plots of christmas movies (frequently on lifetime or the hallmark channel). but i ask you: how often must women be sacrificed upon the logs of christmas?

and so as to not come across as an miscreant fool, i will admit that sometimes the protagonist is a man (like nicholas cage or ebeneezer scrooge -- except for that time susan lucci played scrooge). but, i believe, my point is still well-taken. the warmth of christmas mainly serves to remind us that jesus has preferred roles for all of us, and if you choose to rebel against these values, they just may come and make a movie about you.

song of life

in a fact almost unbelievable to me, redon drew only in black and white until he was sixty. his turn to color, which no one explains, brought to him finally the recognition and wealth he'd always craved.

now we've looked at some ways in which his black and white work was influenced by the japanese work he'd appreciated. (here) in fact that work has been tributed with a poem, which in turn has been tributed with numerous videos.

we've also seen his own influence on the japanese from the impressionist phase that hit japan much like theirs did western artists. but nowhere do i find the recognition of the influence of the japanese on his color work.

He was 60 years old when he abandoned the black and white of his graphic work and turned instead to oils and pastels. He began expressing himself in radiant colours, in visionary subjects, flower paintings and mythological scenes (The Chariot of Apollo was one of his favourite themes). In particular, his flower paintings were well received by Matisse. The Surrealists found Redon's work fascinating, as they, too, took their inspiration from dream imaginary and the subconscious. Furthermore, he had a number of young artists that admired his work greatly, which made a significant impact on Redon.

Redon himself interpreted his later adoption of colour as follows: 'In ceaselessly making myself more objective,' he wrote in 1913, 'I have since learned, with my eyes more fully open on all things, that the life that we can unfold can also reveal joy. If the art of an artist is the song of his life, a grave or sad melody, I must have sounded the note of gaiety in colour.' Of his 'noirs' he wrote, 'They were executed in hours of sadness, of pain and ... for this reason, are probably more expressive. Sadness, when it is without a cause, is perhaps a secret fervour, a sort of oration, something vaguely like worship, in the unknown .' 1

whatever odilon (which has got to be the most beautiful first name ever) said, or what others interpreted as, for example, 'the quest for meaning in the slow and gradual process of seeking synthesis between the certain and the uncertain, between physics and metaphysics.' (redon, seurat, and the symbolists), another influence appears right before our eyes.

if redon's creative sources had begun to revolve around the communication between human and nature, namely flowers, if woman could become indistinguishable from flower or at least exquisitely in tune, there is no contradiction in the japanese work.

while the japanese may be more ecumenical, women, men, men playing women, etc., the result is quite similar. in portraying his subjects garbed in flowers, and surrounded by gigantic flowers, larger in the scheme of things than the humans themselves, the japanese artists are also revealing that space in which people are indistinguishable from nature rather than separate from it.

this perception has never been popular in the west; it still isn't. but then only the smallest minority of people in the west take lessons from the arts; most would rather find the artists the madmen and the fools than themselves.

fear

i was telling a friend who was having a job crisis about my entirely odd employment history. 'how brave you are,' she said, commenting on the fact that i had often jumped feet first into things about which i knew nothing. 'i am too afraid.'

when i got home i suddenly realized that she had made the assumption that i was not afraid. how could anything be further from the truth? i'm afraid of everything -- it's probably my most common emotion.

i'm not so much afraid of dying as i am afraid of running out of toilet paper before i do. when i got, back in my earlier, but not that much earlier, days, my fancy (to me) expensive new printer. it took months before i could bring myself to touch it; i had to give myself a deadline. same with my sewing machine. i just got a 'new' 50-year-old sewing machine (they're practically giving them away on ebay) -- the same model with which i had felt so comfortable and at home for all the years i used it until it just wore down for the last time. can't seem to bring myself to even unpack the one that just arrived. guess it's time for another deadline.

being slightly asbergic, i fear putting my foot in my mouth as i blithely say whatever comes to mind, and talk about scared of ghosts -- if my mother could see my kitchen floor!

every single time i do something new, i'm sure i'll never get it despite being proved wrong again and again. i got one of those butcher-block-topped stand-alone kitchen carts from a mail-order catalog. to anyone who had ever done anything like this before (or even, admittedly, someone who actually read the entire catalog copy), it might have come as no surprise to find delivered two huge boxes filled with loose parts! i was on the phone to the company (and this was when long distance was still long distance) at least a dozen times, certain every step of the way that i couldn't do this... until i was done.

and the million fears to accompany most waking moments: i lost my keys! i don't know what blue-ray is! is this torn nail going to get infected and eventually my whole arm have to be amputated? i mock myself, yes, but this is not the slightest bit exaggerated; in fact i can't even think of all the specific fears (which are of course more interesting than general fears) because they're so ubiquitous.

philosophically, it's my belief that i'm probably speaking for most of us, and that religion (including psychotherapy) has been created again and again to help us to behave in the world from the other part of our nature than fear: love. people have called me brave before and i have countered, with complete honesty, that rather i was ill-informed. but i have learned one thing about bravery -- that it doesn't exist without fear. if you're not afraid of it, why do you need to be brave?

for what is already lost

LETTER FROM CRANBERRY ISLAND

Today in a meadow beside the sea
I knelt among sea rocket
and lupine
as a deer I’d startled
flipped heels up

and bounded
into the spruce grove.
Prebbles cove,
the beach of stones
glistening and smooth from the pummel of waves.

And I, who understand pounding,
wanted to walk into the sea, to rock there.

At the far edge of my life
on an island four hundred miles
from home, I lean against
an uncurtained window,
and all my grief

for what is already lost,
for what it may get too late to find,
jostles up against how much
I continue anyway to love the world.

I am tired of wanting to sleep beyond waking —
tired of the numbing that is no better than death,

But here on the sill,
stones oval as eggs —

blue, gray, black,

a whole row of them —
glow in the afternoon light

and here, across the meadow,

light enfolds even the least

small running creature.

And here. And here. And here.

More light, great sheets of saving light

surge and flash — green, coral, cerulean —
off the turbulent
white-capped waters.

Patricia Fargnoli

from Necessary Light

a gift for issa

POEM
After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.

This moth saw brightness
in a woman’s chamber—
burned to a crisp.

Asked how old he was
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.

Blossoms at night,
like people
moved by music

Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!



Fiftieth birthday:

From now on,
It’s all clear profit,
every sky.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

These sea slugs,
they just don’t seem
Japanese.

Hell:

Bright autumn moon;
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.

Robert Hass

“After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa” from Field Guide.
Copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass.
costume museum @ the met
happy anniversary, issa and haiku guy