What happened to my culture while I was at the library?

Most of you probably know about this already.  Those of you with daughters between the ages of ten and fifteen surely already know.  I was the one who missed it.  I had my nose in a book about classical Greece, in a commentary on Pauline letters to the Corinthians.  I turned my back for a minute, and look what happened!

..For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?  — 2 Corinthians 6:14

Paris Hilton got a show on MTV.  It’s not like the show on Fox that blatantly made fun of her, showing her to comic, if nauseating, effect as a spoiled, vapid, bulimic, pill-addled, too-slutty-to-be-a-real-debutante, rich girl.  She and Nicole Ritchie were objects of derision on the show where they attempted half-heartedly to adapt to farm life.  Whatever one thinks of shows that make fun of the retarded or the terminally fashionable, this show did not celebrate Paris Hilton’s system of values or  her lifestyle.  I admit the once or twice I tuned in, seeing Paris covered in manure, forced to get up before dawn to feed livestock, it made me feel hope that Fox might give her some comeuppance in the name of viewers born without trust funds.  It also gave me some vague hope for Ms. Hilton’s personal growth, as most of us have gained moral fiber by confronting challenges. Americans are schooled in anti-urban bias, and like many, I hoped the smell of cut wheat stalks might provide this morally challenged young woman with a sense of wholesome connection to others unlike her.

Of course, since then, Ms. Hilton has not grown morally.  She has played some associative role in the drug addictions of former friends and celebrity addicts –Nicole Ritchie, then Lindsay Lohan, and Brittney Spears.  After some false dismay about a private sex video “leaking” into the mediosphere, she has consensually flashed her genitalia like a shaved baboon to the paparazzi, and she has tried to get out of jail by using bribery and false medical reports after being convicted of driving while intoxicated.

Worse, she is, I believe, singlehandedly responsible for the epidemic we recently saw among young women of trucker caps and of sweatpants with “juicy” written across the backside.  She has popularized clothes previously worn exclusively by Hollywood Boulevard sex workers.  I’m for the unionization of prostitutes, but I don’t believe Ms. Hilton’s intentions were to spread awareness of their struggles, particularly since she appears so willing to cross their picket lines without pay.

I don’t mention at length Paris’ foray into pop music – - yes, while I was at the library, she recorded an album that seems to help bulimics by inducing vomiting without the need to stick the flat edge of a butter knife down one’s throat.  Unlike some of her former friends who went to rehab, Ms. Hilton does not have  even a thin, glossy veneer of musical talent.

All this would put her into a lamentable but imaginable category of phenomena — think of Geri Hall, former companion to Mick Jagger, whom no one took seriously, think of Charro, the blonde latina variety show guest star of the seventies who shook and started every word with the letter “j.”  Think of meringue cookies  eaten after full meals of healthy food.  These phenomena really caused no harm to the culture at large, evne though they were not a sign of  our culture’s health or sanity.

However, Paris Hilton has transcended the meringue category with her own television show on MTV — Paris Hilton’s My New BFF – and thus she is now the main course, a sign of America’s moral diabetes.  MTV has found a way to institutionalize Ms. Hilton’s system of values and ethics into a contest, and they have made her its judge.  The reality TV show takes in other vulnerable, bulimia-prone, stardom-seeking, psycho fans and determines through a series of formalized tortures which one  of these girls will be Paris’ new BFF — more like BFTS — best friend for the season.  The episodes play out like every woman’s worst memories of junior high school and of trying to gain popularity with the meanest girls by subjecting themselves to progressive humiliations (remember playing truth or dare with them?).  It is the young women kicked out of the inner circle first who appear the least pitiable.  Those who get closest in orbit to the sun that is Paris Hilton seem happy to be there, but they increasingly need to sabotage each other to move closer to the dark star.

In the last episode of the season, Paris takes one of the two surviving contestants to a spa, where they wear matching red bikinis in a scene fraught with that latent and vaguely lesbian tension that occurs between women who disdainfully compare every inch o f their own bodies to the bodies of others.  They also go to the Hamptons for lunch, where they declare to one another, “I love you, bitch.”  It isn’t supposed to be sad or funny.  How long was I in that library?  Paris, of course, drop-kicks this contestant two days later, proving that the words “love” and “bitch” really don’t belong together.

With the winner, if one can call a close relationship with Ms. Hilton a winning proposition, Paris goes shopping, and afterward, the pair of BFFs eat a sundae costing $1,000.  They decide not to order two but to split one, not because the price is absurd but because the calories might add grams of fat to their emaciated bodies.  Neither of them enjoy it, finding the edible gold and the caviar/ice cream combination distasteful.  Neither asks, in this time of economic crisis, if it might not have been better to donate the price of the sundae to a soup kitchen.  It is clear that the winner of the BFF battle is shallow and ambitious like Iago, that Paris is prepared to buy friendship from her, or at least the appearance of it.  After all, Paris has been unable to hang onto friends who do not share drugs or need money.

What does Paris Hilton understand of friendship, anyway?  Her non-contest-appointed friendships are always rivalries, it seems.  She exudes neither warmth nor wit.  She has a soulless beauty to her, empty but unblemished, as if she were poured into a mold at the Mattel factory in Japan and given Malibu beach-blonde  acrylic hair.  To play Barbies at this level is a form of annihilation.  It drove Lindsay into rehab and the bed of Samantha.  After too much Paris, Brittney shaved her head and beat a truck with a broken umbrella.

Paris was nowhere in sight, of course.  However, most of us are not as distilled or frozen in our plasticity, and even those of us who would go so Hollywood cannot withstand such an ice storm.  To be friends with a vampire is to become undead or its dinner, for what fellowship has light with darkness?

Again, I ask, brethren, what happened while my nose was in the books?  What happened to girlfriends?  It happens often that older women wag their fingers at younger ones.  This is not new, the lamentation of the state of younger people’s morality.  But I liken  this show to a form of friendship pornography, as it cheapens, commercializes, and distorts friendships, treating them as contests and acquisitions, rather than the development of solidarity, affection and trust.  Paris hugs these girls in the show (see the photo here) inexplicably clinging to a silver shaft that resembles nothing more than the ice pick of the movie Basic Instinct.  Don’t turn your back on her, girls.  She’s ready to stab.

I am beautiful — I am not skinny.

I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favor. — Song of Solomon 8:10

Let’s just say there was this woman. Let’s not say it was me. Let’s not even say it was anyone I know.

This woman lived in Manhattan. She went to an old neighborhood where she had not been in a long time. She laughed when she saw that the dive bar where she had gone before she got saved had become a pretentious hot spot — velvet rope-ringed, bouncer-guarded — when the cops were scared to go there before. She laughed to herself at the way the city changes overnight from one thing to another, ever new.

As the woman rounded a corner, a man her age locked eyes with her, almost sharing the existential joke she was laughing at. He gasped. He saw her, in a way that people rarely see each other in the city, whole, full of mirth, light shining from Heaven down on them to show them radiant. The man couldn’t help himself — it had been so long since he had seen a woman like this — confident, playful, and free. He let out of his throat before he could think about it a hoarse exclamation — “My God! You’re so beautiful!”

Like all men in the city, he was on his way somewhere else. She was on her way home. He phoned his appontment with a friend, canceled, said, “I’ve met a fantastic woman. See you another time.”

She broke the rules of the city, this laughing woman, perhaps out of sentimental feelings for her misspent youth. She agreed to have a cup of coffee with this man, let him talk her into getting to know him.

He was of a certain age. So was she. They both had places to go. They both had responsibilities, regrets, false starts, hopes for better things. They talked until it was dark. He held her hand. She let him hold her hand. Over and over again, he told her she was beautiful. She was beautiful. She had always known it, but sometimes, it felt hidden in this city, where there were people who made their livings at being beautiful — size zero models, whose hanger-bodies flaunted couture, actresses, women who make a living pretending to be something they are not, usually by pretending to be happy and sexy.

But this woman, this woman having coffee in the gentrified neighborhood, she was happy. She was happy to see things starting again, including this man moon-eyed across from her, sure he said over and over again that he must see her henceforth, over and over again. She was sexy, not sexy like the women who sell themselves to the camera, sexy like the Song of Solomon, a yet-unclaimed prize for a righteous groom, sexier and hotter than the sex for sale on the streets, the sex for free in the chat rooms.

The man said he was a Christian. He seemed moved by her talking about charity work. He worked in advertising, a place that sells everything to everyone, and everything is marketed with the cheapness of things that she didn’t even seem conscious of. He told her things he seemed to have never even thought before, but things he knew must be true — secrets about himself, his fears, his ambitions, his masculinity. She squeezed his hand tighter and encouraged him.

“God! You’re so beautiful!” He whispered again.

He got up to pay the check, and when he came back, he squeezed into the booth next to her and took her face in his hands. He kissed her passionately. She responded.

They kissed in the booth for a few minutes. In New York, this surprises no one — sudden passions, sudden trends, sudden gentrifications — this is a day in the city like any other day. No one even glanced at them.

By now it was dark. They walked through a block of brownstones, and again. he grabbed her and kissed her, tenderly leaning her against the wall. They kissed for three hours, four hours. The streets were busy, and people wandered by. But in his embrace, the woman felt alone with him, as if they were in a private corner.

“God, you’re so beautiful!” He repeated between long caresses and kisses.

He caressed her thigh, her collar bone, grabbed her close, the small of her back. He was a gentleman. They had just met. He promised to see her again. He meant it. He seemed afraid that at any moment she might evaporate, and he held tighter and kissed longer. They seemed alone. The air was heavy around them. There were other bodies under the street lamps, the sound of trailing and nearing footsteps, but none of this penetrated their space somehow, even though they were only feet away. Again, he swore he would see her again, this laughing woman, this intelligent beauty, this good, Christian woman, that he wanted to know everything about her. He caressed her thigh again and told her how sexy she was.

Because he was a gentleman, he pulled away. He was too tempted. This was a city street. He caught his breath. He took a full half hour to catch his breath. When he did, he took her hand and hailed a cab. He would see her home.

The next day, he called and text messaged her. She was still beautiful. He was still determined. She responded in kind. She sent him a picture on her cell phone of herself, one she captioned with the words, “Thinking of you.”

He disappeared. He never called again. He never returned voice mail messages. He never texted back. He was gone, back in the crowd of bobbing heads in mid-town, near that advertising agency where he worked. He never saw her again.

The photo she had sent him — it was a photo of that same woman, the one with the laughing eyes, the same body he caressed, that aroused him terribly — but her photo was not like the photos of women selling toothpaste, floor wax, the other photos in the agency. Her photo was not like the photos of the actresses who showed up for photo shoots. Her photo was nothing like the photos of models who sauntered into the perfume commercial auditions. In her photo, she was ample, full-hipped, fully there, a tummy without a tuck, a substantial thigh, a woman with breasts like towers, a towering woman, a woman who was not pretending not to be there, not even in her body, which could not lie.  In her photo, the man could see her, and she would not do. She simply would not do.

The city renewed itself daily. New meat arrived in the meat-packing district, only the old butchers were gone — now there were high-end fashion boutiques, and everyone was starving herself. The city gentrified, and it left the woman out on the street where she would not be noticed as she walked by again.

We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar. — The Song of Solomon 8:8-9

We live in a sick culture. Let’s not say it was me. Let’s not say it was anyone I knew. Let’s pretend, like skinny actresses, to be someone, something we are not. I am beautiful. Men find me beautiful. I am six feet tall, blonde, and voluptuous. That photo above is mine, the sideways one. I took it in the mirror sideways. However, I am not skinny. I am now who I am now. But we live in a society where some men out of vanity insist that women look a particular way, even while they are aroused by the women who are really in front of them.

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, who made us exactly as we are on purpose, who despises gluttony and sloth but not womanly curves, not manly substance, we thank you that we have been given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven with the knowledge that Jesus is the Messiah, your Holy One, and that which we bind in His name is bound also in Heaven, and that which we loose in His name is loosed also in Heaven.

Father, in that spirit, we rebuke the demon that plagues women in this culture, particularly in places like Manhattan. Let us name the spirit, for we have with Adam, the right to name lesser creatures, and the devils are under our feet and authority in Jesus’ name — let us name this spirit the fat demon. It is not that he is necessarily fat, but rather, he is a vain spirit who whispers in the ears of those who will listen that a gaunt femininity is the only beautiful one. Fat demon, we bind you in the name of Jesus. We loose you only away from us in hell. We bind you from speaking to any man or woman in this culture. You can deprive us no longer of even the slightest happiness.

We loose, in the name of Jesus, a Godly body consciousness, one that resembles you, where women have real bodies, men admire those bodies, and men and women both are free to live healthy lives in the bodies you have given them. Thank you, Father for backing us up in Heaven as we pray this prayer. Thank you for giving us through Jesus, more abundant lives. AMEN.