“I hope you realize, Jennifer”, Mom said to me later at home, “why it bothers me so much to see a magazine like ‘Playboy’ and I hope that you can make the distinction between our admiration for the nude human body and disgust with female exploitation. We want you to be able to recognize the difference between the human body as a beautiful work of nature, and the objectification of the female form for men’s delectation. What I mean more simply, is that human beings should be appreciated for what they represent internally far more than their external presence. We should not make a cult of the body beautiful as an ideal that feeds peoples’ egos and more specifically men’s erotic desires, to the exclusion of the recognition that women are thinking human beings no less than men." Another lecture, whoopee! I know enough that when Mom's started on one of these little lectures, nothing will stop her, until she's finished.
“The danger with nude pin-ups whose only function is to whet men’s desires, is that men tend to think of women as sex objects only, forgetting that we are intelligent, capable beings. In addition to that, women simply aren’t as perfectly formed as the male ideal would have us, so that there is pressure on women to look more like a male-conceived ideal. Whereas the emphasis on a human relationship should be mental attributes and personality affinities, not this preoccupation with an unrealistic body proportion." I hear you, I know, I know, I wanted to say, but I knew better.
"A shapely body and an empty head exists only in immature men’s fantasies. The men who want such a relationship aren’t capable themselves of too much heavy thinking or they wouldn’t be satisfied with a beautiful automaton that the pin-ups represent to them.” She's finished!
“I know Mom, I know, you don’t have to explain any more. Crap! As if you haven’t told us about stuff like that, before. How stupid do you think I am, anyway?” Actually, I’d agree to just about anything to get her to stop her indignant speechifying.
It turned cold again on Sunday, and then snowed a little, so me and Jennifer decided to go cross-country skiing. It would probably be our last chance. The snow wasn’t too good, but we had fun. Even if I did have the sniffles, and Mom thought I should stay home and nurse myself with lots to drink, and rest. If I listened to her, I’d never have any fun.
Jen came to call on me and we went through the park. When we got to where there weren’t any houses and then the park goes on into the green belt we went through a bunch of trees and where there was fresh snow we saw tracks we thought were squirrel, but then Jen said they were rabbits.
“How do you know?” I asked her. “I mean, what makes you think they’re from rabbits?”
“I can tell”, she laughed, “by the droppings”.
“Droppings? What’s that?”
“You know, when they go to the bathroom? See those little black things under the trees? Those’re rabbit droppings.”
“Gross!”
“Don’t be stupid, that’s nature.”
“Anyhow, how do you know?”
“ I used to have a pet rabbit a long time ago. And see the tracks are different than a squirrel’s.”
She’s smart and knows a lot of things like that. Like when we saw a bunch of birds in the trees she knew they were chickadees and she told me to listen for their call and it really did sound like their name.
We sat down for a while near a creek bed. We weren’t going to be able to ski out on the creek this time, because the ice was melting, so we decided not to go any further. Anyway, we were tired. I fell going down the slope to the creek, and we thought we’d sit around awhile to kind of rest up.
“Hey, remember I told you I was going over to meet some kid because her mother called on my mother?”
“Oh sure. What happened?”
“Her name was Barbra Kraft.”
“I don’t know her, do I?”
“You know, a girl with long blonde hair in KC-W? She wears show-off-fancy stuff all the time and hangs out with a bunch of guys who smoke and like that? She’s kind of got a reputation. Sally talks about her a lot, thinks she’s really smart.”
“I don’t know. Was that her?”
“Was it ever! You should’ve seen her. Makeup sloshed all over her face, and chewing gum like crazy, and dressed like she was twenty or something! Did she ever make an impression on my mother!”
“Oh yeah? It wasn’t so great, huh?”
“Well, her and her mother seemed kind of phony. Just the kind of people my mother never has anything to do with, and I just laughed inside, to see Mom squirm through it. Kind of mean of me, but then I didn’t want to go in the first place. Barbra is very mature like, and here my mother is always babying me like I’m five years old or something. She’d have a fit if she ever saw me in makeup. I think she got kind of scared when she saw Barbra and then when she compared her to me she must’ve thought ‘my baby’ or something like, and she hasn’t complained about anything I’ve done, since. Though it’s only been a couple of days. She’ll forget about it soon enough, I guess, and start bugging me again.”
“Mothers are like that. Always comparing you to someone else. Lucky for you you were compared with someone your mother doesn’t like. If it was the other way around, like my mother comparing me to my cousin, she’d be after you all the time. Don‘t know why, but they‘re never satisfied with us, we‘re always doing things wrong, and other peoples‘ kids seem so great, compared to theirs.”
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