Typical storm in Florida (filmed Aug. 20, 2011 on my back porch). (And if you watch ’til the end, or fast forward, typical Arleen in a storm.)
Actual song lyrics.
On my drives to and from work and school, I tend to scan Tampa’s radio stations, most of which play the kinds of songs I only started to like when — last year, at my cousin Frankie’s wedding — I realized how fun it is to dance. And almost a year later, I have to get the following of my chest: If I always tell my friends and family not to listen to the lyrics when they’re in my presence while I’m listening to music (and I do), I probably should find some new music. Just sayin’.
Anyway, as I’ve come to this conclusion over recent weeks, I realized how little I actually listen to the lyrics when I’m scanning for songs fun for dancing and/or driving. So, I started paying attention. Here is some of what I found:
1. “Girl, please excuse me if I’m coming too strong / But tonight is the night we can really let go / My girlfriend’s out of town and I’m all alone / your boyfriend’s on vacation and he doesn’t have to know.”
(“I Like It,” by Enrique Iglesias feat. Pitbull)
2. “He ain’t even gotta try to put the mack on / He just gotta give me that look / When he give me that look / Then the panties comin’ off.” (Superbass by Nicki Minaj)
3. Male voice: “Tell me what’s next, alien sex / I’ma disrobe you, then I’ma probe you / See I abducted you / so I tell ya what to do / I tell ya what to do, what to do, what to do.” Female voice: “Kiss me, ki-ki-kiss me / Infect me with your love and fill me with your poison / Take me, ta-ta-take me / Wanna be a victim / Ready for abduction.” (E.T. by Katy Perry, feat. Kanye West)
Know what those are? Actual song lyrics from songs that are actually popular on radio stations to which actual children listen. I don’t know what bothers me more: the songs, or the fact that hardly anybody ever bats an eye about them, like the anonymous commenter who responded last time I blogged about bad music:
“I think u guys are making this more than it has to be. It’s a song with a good dance beat!!!!N no disrespect, but if it is offensive or you don’t care for it just switch to another station. Stop takin things so serious!!! If I took things so serious I would never leave my house, watch television, or listen to music.”
I don’t disagree entirely. Take Enrique’s “I Like It.” It is, in fact, a song with a good dance beat. Just a song. But the anonymous commenter doesn’t realize his or her point proves mine: What has music become when it’s something we’d feel obligated to shun if we analyzed it? What have we become when we know that and choose not to analyze it anyway?
Well, I’ve analyzed. And one fun song with bad words — like “I Like It” — isn’t a very big deal. But it isn’t one song. It is most songs, and they send messages that call relationships dispensable, sex trivial and rape glamorous (Though these are just the aforementioned three. But if you don’t think there are more, turn on your radio.). And when most songs send messages like that, messages like that are normal. It’s just music. Just a song.
But is it?
This reminds me of the time a friend of mine expressed concern when I told her why I choose not to consume caffeine. Why don’t I drink coffee? Well, my body’s response to it is fun, but only until my friends start questioning my sobriety. And when the hyperactivity turns into anxiety, and my resting heart rate reaches 150, and my colleagues want to take me to the hospital (true story), the caffeine becomes completely not worth it.
“Um, that’s not normal,” my friend said. “Most people don’t have that reaction.”
True. But most people are desensitized to it. Immersed in it, if you will. It’s like horror movies. Some of us jump or scream at what we see on screen, and others sit silently with straight faces. How we react depends on how desensitized we are to it, or how immersed in it we’ve been. The more immersed we are, the less it bothers us. And maybe, in our culture, it isn’t normal to strike other people as drunk after you drink coffee. But look at what is normal:
Infidelity.
Sexually transmitted infections.
Sexual violence.
None of us like those things. We should be bothered by those things. But when our songs are about dispensable relationships, casual sex and encounters that sound a lot like rape, our songs are about those things.
Are they still just songs?
Or are they songs we hear so much they’re normal? Songs to which we don’t even react, we’re so desensitized. Songs that teach us to be less and less bothered by things that should never cease to bother us.
Beauty Standards.
My latest column — about beauty standards — is in print tomorrow and online now. Click here to read it.
Accidents.
A few months ago, I drove south on US 19 in Spring Hill, Fla. on my way to work. At the intersection at the county line, flashing lights from squad cars and fire trucks forced all southbound drivers to merge to the right. The traffic light turned red, so I had a minute to look for whatever it was on the left that required the presence of the emergency responders.
First, I saw the motorcycle. Then, I saw the body.
Upon my arrival at work, where my colleagues pursued the story, I learned a young woman in a red truck had run the light, killing the motorcyclist as he crossed the intersection. She did it after escaping arrest for driving while intoxicated and dragging a deputy (who’d jumped on to her truck to try to stop her) across 19’s northbound lanes as she sped away. The deputy survived. A mile or so north of the motorcycle crash scene, deputies caught the driver. She has been in jail ever since.
In a recorded jailhouse call between the driver and the father of her baby, she says some of the following, through tears:
“As far as the deputy, she jumped on the truck. It’s not like I hit her. She fell off. It was her decision to jump on the truck … what was I supposed to do?”
“I didn’t run (the motorcylist) over on purpose.”
“It was a car accident.”
Really? An accident?
Earlier this year, I interviewed Tom Vanderbilt — the brilliant author of the brilliant book Traffic — and in the essay about driving in which I quoted him, we came to the following conclusions:
Calling a crash an accident “implies there’s no way this could have been prevented, that it was unforeseeable,” Vanderbilt said. Phrases like “drunken-driving accident” are most egregious, he said.
The word “accident” enables negligent drivers. It lets a person create conditions in which vehicles are likely to collide and call it unpredictable after it happens.
The belief that it’s all right to call all car collisions “accidents” is not limited to the jailed driver from the crash scene I saw in May. Read a newspaper. Eavesdrop while you people watch. It comes up a lot. I am of the opinion that it has to stop.
When we call a crash an accident, we permit the person responsible for it to relinquish responsibility. We admit what happened is bad, but minimize the incident because — after all — the driver didn’t mean to.
What we don’t consider when we call crashes accidents is that premeditation is not a prerequisite for responsibility. You don’t have to plan out something for it to be your fault. But if we call crashes “accidents,” we perpetuate that belief, which lets a lot of bad decision makers off the hook. It becomes easy to live like “I didn’t mean to!” means “I’m not responsible!”
But when we call a crash what it is — a crash or a collision — it’s something worth dissecting. It’s something that, when dissected, is actually pretty predictable.
I am 100% certain the driver who ran the light that morning at County Line Road did not get in her truck that day with intentions to use it to kill someone. But she decided to use drugs. She decided to get in the car. She decided to escape police custody — after she was already in handcuffs — and flee in her truck. She decided to drive more than 70 miles per hour with a deputy hanging off her vehicle. She decided to blow a red light.
You can say the same about somebody who decides to text and drive. Somebody who decides to speed in the rain. To weave in and out of traffic. To dig through the console. To drive while you’re really, really tired.
When something happens while we do those things, it’s not an accident. It’s negligence.
– – – –
Click here to listen to listen to the driver’s jailhouse call and to read the story.
Human Sexuality
For anyone who stumbles upon this out o’ the blue, you may not know: I love grad school. I mean, I get sad at the end of every semester love it. I force my friends and family to listen to me talk about what I’m learning love it. I really love it.
And the short summer semester I just finished is no exception. One of two classes I took was in human sexuality, taught by Dr. Dae Sheridan, a sex therapist who practices in Tampa. As much as I’ve enjoyed most of my classes, this was by far one of the best. What working at Popeyes Chicken in high school did for me and the word breast, this class did for me and words like vulva. Ain’t no thang! But more than desensitizing us to words we once found awkward to say, the class got us to think, write and talk about topics that are imperative to consider, both as counselors and as humans. Here are the five I liked to discuss the most:
1. Sexually transmitted infections (a.k.a. STIs, f.k.a. STDs): One in two sexually active adults age 25 or older has or has had an STI. One in two. In case you’d like more emphasis, that’s every other. Add to that the one in four teenagers who has an STI. During class, Dr. Dae — my brilliant prof — made a really good point: Think about salmonella for a sec. According to my notes from class, every year, about 20,000 cases of it are reported to the CDC. And what happens when it’s reported? Food is recalled, we throw out all our spinach and it’s all over the news. In other words, WE FREAK OUT. Now, think about HPV — an STI also known as the human papillomavirus. How many new cases are reported to the CDC each year? A couple million. But when have we ever freaked out about that? Something to think about.
2. The origins of sexual orientation: When I was in high school, one of my teachers decided to start a class-wide conversation about the origins of homosexuality. “It’s a choice,” she said. “People choose to be gay.” For awhile, I let her have her say. When I interjected, I simply asked her a question: “So let me ask you,” I said. “When did you choose to be attracted to men?” The point — a point my prof also made in my class this summer — is that we live in a world where a lot of people are really ridiculously concerned about the origins of homosexuality (and for what?). There are brain scan studies, my prof said, to try to find out what makes gay people gay. “But where are the straight people brain scans?” she asked. Something else to think about.
3. Communication: I’ve quoted it before, but I’ll quote it again: “Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” (Courtesy of Henry Winkler [yes, the Fonz!]) This, as we discussed in class, is a truth that is easily applied to every facet of every relationship — even sex! Take the fake orgasm, for example. Let’s say sex is a pain (literally) for a wife, but she fakes it for the sake of her husband’s ego. Her response — which is a lie, as Dr. Dae pointed out in class — makes him think he’s doing it right. So time after time, he’s gonna keep doing it. Something to TALK about.
4. Intersex: In class, we watched a documentary on intersexual people — that is, people who are born with ambiguous genitals or reproductive organs. The film focused on several Americans who are intersexed as well as some in the Dominican Republic. Something that stuck out from the film is the fact that the Americans — whose parents often decided to pick boy or girl upon the child’s birth, permitting a doctor to surgically turn ambiguous genitals into the genitals of the parents’ choice — often end up with long term psychological stress, whereas the ones in the Dominican Republic — where people who are intersexed are accepted as they are — grow up with little or none of that. What does that say about our cultures? To watch the documentary, click here. (And when that video ends, look for parts 2 and 3 along the side.)
5. Abstinence only education v. comprehensive sex ed: As a proponent and practice-er of abstinence before marriage, I enjoyed our discussions about abstinence only education versus comprehensive sex education. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but it’s clear that abstinence only education doesn’t accomplish what its proponents wish it would. I haven’t seen stats on comprehensive sex ed, and until I do more of my own research, I can’t come to a definitive conclusion. I can, however, say this: learning about what actually goes on in bodies when a couple is getting it on didn’t make me want to forsake my pledge to save sex for marriage. Then again, I’m a 25-year-old and my brain is really close to fully developed, if not entirely fully developed. So I’m not sure if teens — whose brains still have some growing to do — would change their minds after comprehensive sex ed if before they learned a lot about sex, they’d planned to save it.