Dirty Princesses?

We should rethink the cleanliness goal:  recent research from Oregon State University reported on NPR suggests that the Western rise in autoimmune diseases such as asthma and allergies, that is associated with overly clean societies and identified as such by the term 'the hygiene hypothesis', and which disproportionately affects women, might be caused by the different standards to which we hold girls versus boys.  Girls are generally discouraged from getting dirty (these photos to the contrary) and wear more restrictive clothing which inhibits the tendency to run, jump, slip or fall.

In a related report, a new book by Peggy Orenstein titled "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture" documents the tide of messages little girls encounter, pointing them in the direction of 'princesshood.' An excerpt from the NPR interview transcript reads:

What was going on here? My fellow mothers, women who once swore they would never be dependent on a man, smiled indulgently at daughters who warbled "So This Is Love" or insisted on being addressed as Snow White. The supermarket checkout clerk invariably greeted Daisy with "Hi, Princess." The waitress at our local breakfast joint, a hipster with a pierced tongue and a skull tattooed on her neck, called Daisy's "funny-face pancakes" her "princess meal"; the nice lady at Longs Drugs offered us a free balloon, then said, "I bet I know your favorite color!" and handed Daisy a pink one rather than letting her choose for herself. Then, shortly after Daisy's third birthday, our high-priced pediatric dentist — the one whose practice was tricked out with comic books, DVDs, and arcade games — pointed to the exam chair and asked, "Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?" [http://www.npr.org/2011/02/05/133471639/saving-our-daughters-from-an-army-of-princesses]

In a quick search this morning to find an image of a little girl covered in dirt, I came across this on Amazon:

Yes, it's a Mud Pie Baby Princess utensil set.  The opposing images boggle my mind, but culturally, it all makes sense.

So the take home message, one which I emphasize in my physical anthropology class:  throw your children in the mud, get them dirty, let them play with pets, all in the name of health (but not the month old babies).  We have an immune system that will attack itself if not given appropriate targets.

And, the early training in a healthy habit such as exercise, will pay off over the course of a life.

We kill young men, don't we?

The following is taken from a longer piece on NPR's Homepage.  The link is at the end of the excerpt.

'The Truth About Homicide'

Now a senior reporter at the L.A. Times, Jill Leovy started The Homicide Report in 2007 after noticing the huge disparity in the way murders were covered by the news media. The sensational stories, mostly the outliers and anomalies, got the most attention. But the majority of homicides were largely ignored.

"The first year I was in the Watts homicide unit, that unit had 60 murders that year," she tells NPR's Guy Raz. "I was shadowing the detectives, and we were running on murders every other day. Every morning they had CNN on, or something on, and it would have the latest installment of the Laci Peterson murder." The sensational case of a pregnant wife murdered by her husband enthralled the nation for months.

"The detectives in that unit were fascinated with it. Every day, we would have a moment of discussing the newest development in that case, and then they'd go on to do the 60 other murders that year — and that is homicide in America.

"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America.

"The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right."

Nobody Deserves To Be Murdered

Leovy wants to give a name, an identity and a story to every person who was murdered in L.A. County. She wants society to get away from "medieval notions" of deserving or not deserving to be killed.

"I don't care if they're the worst thug in the world," she says, adding, "some of these guys are really, really deeply, criminally involved characters. Many of them have killed people."

"You don't have it coming in a gang shooting," she says, "you need to be arrested and prosecuted.

"A lot of the money we spend is based on the presumption that the victims are guilty in some ways," Leovy explains. She hears all the time how terrible it is that young men are killing each other, how they need to shape up. She argues the discussion needs to be reframed.

"When we talked about domestic violence, we never talked about how these women were so delinquent and terrible and they needed to get their heads together and be taught right. We talked about protecting them from people who are trying to hurt them. We don't talk about men that way."

I've thought about this problem frequently.  People love the sensational, the cultural violations - young pretty pregnant women, the Madonna and child figure - are not the sacrifice and when they are, the sacrifice is horrific.  Young men of color are the cannon fodder of our society.

from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126853039