Troop Beverly Hills

Katie is now in kindergarten, and that means we get to enter the world of Girl Scouts. It's a different world than Boy Scouts! Not that the boys don't have their issues - for one, there's the bit about teaching scouts to be respectful to all people, religions and cultures, yet banning gays and lesbians. (What's more - since Unitarian Universalists refuse to discriminate on anyone based on sexual orientation, the Boy Scouts have removed the Religious Emblem for Unitarian Universalism from their lineup of Religious Emblems that can be earned. But I digress. Here's an interesting link if you want to read more: http://www.uuscouters.org/)

Anyways, I dutifully signed up to be a troop leader because, well, your child gets out of scouts what parents put into it. Drop-off parents lead to drop-out scouts. I am uneasy about leading groups of kids. Adults barely listen to me, muchless kids! But, parenthood is nothing if not a great adventure in stepping out of your comfort zone and doing things you didn't know you could do. Sometimes I think I learn as much as or more than my kids do from scouting.

So once I made the decision to volunteer, I signed up for the required volunteer courses. There are several different courses that new leaders must go through. They do a criminal background check, they call all 3 of your character references, they even wanted my resume of previous volunteer experience. Pretty serious stuff! At one of the training courses, I was advised that troops could use their cookie money to pay for stuff like the following examples:

Flying to Chicago to go to the American Girl Store
Going to Libby Lu's at the mall to get made over as rock stars

And that troop activities could include such educational opportunities as:

Putting on jewelry and makeup to learn about our appearance
Fashion design
Home economics (that's dandy....but I want to see the boys learning this too)

Then someone made the comment that planning a troop meeting was like planning a birthday party. I just about lost it.

I raised my hand to ask the trainer if she was serious. She was. She then sheepishly added that she herself had not done these things with her troop, but that others did. She added that "since not all girls like to camp or do ourdoorsy things, you have to do some activities to cater to their interests in order to keep them in the scouting program."

I have a couple of issues with that. One, I don't believe there's such a thing as girls or boys who don't like to camp or do outdoorsy things. Only parents who feel that way, probably raised by parents who raised them the same way, who put their irrational fears of dirt, bugs or whatever onto their offspring. Two, perhaps scouting isn't for everyone. When scouting has to become something other than scouting in order to keep kids in scouting, what have we really accomplished?

Also, what of teaching kids values? Scouting is supposed to teach kids to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, responsible, respectful and environmentally conscious. What are you teaching when you set kids up with the "I live to be entertained" mentality? Scouting was never meant to be entertainment. Scouting is meant to be character building.

I am starting off with 5-year-olds. But mark my words, if I ever find out that Katie's troop is going to the American Girl store as a troop activity, we'll be looking for the nearest 4-H chapter.

Tiny Diamonditis and Now It's Much More Fun to go Shopping

My friend (who shall remain nameless) called me from the highway the other day where, as she drove to East Texas to drop her son off for a camping weekend, she saw a billboard. In East Texas. It said this:

"Gentlemen, does your lady suffer from Tinydiamonditis? Is she embarrassed to wear her diamond in Public? Is her daughter or Daughter in laws diamond bigger than hers? We can help your cure this terrible complex..." (You get the idea)

My friend was pretty appalled at this. Was it the notion that men actually think that women feel this way about their status and their jewelry? Or the accusation that this mentality may be true? Of all the places for this kind of thinking to be pervasive, I would not have suspected rural East Texas. But I didn't make too much of it. Maybe they're not serious....maybe it's just an advertising gimmick to get your attention by offending your sense of priorities. Maybe.

Well then today I opened my mailbox and found my "Living" magazine, you know, one of those local publications filled with ads for granite countertops, teeth whitening, overpriced baby furniture and the like, with perhaps a one-page article on fitness thrown in so that they can call it a magazine instead of junk mail. The back cover is this ad for a local plastic surgeon. According to his ad he specializes in botox, body contouring, tummy tuck, liposuction, face lift, brow lift, eye lift, lip enhancement, breast augmentation, reduction and lift. Yes, he has built a career capitalizing on women's insecurities and vanity. The picture is of a sexy Jessica Rabbit type woman (read: not proportional) with shopping bags in both hands, proclaiming "Now it's much more fun to go shopping!"

Okaaaaay...where to begin on this? Are women seriously so shallow that (a) appearance is valued above other traits, and (b) shopping is an actual life calling to which one can more thoroughly enjoy when one is more beautiful?

Ok I must admit that not being beautiful is not hard if you have never been beautiful to begin with. Aging isn't nearly so painful when you realize that beauty lies within before you reach adulthood; somewhere between the hormone storm of puberty and college graduation is when I believe that "healthy" women get their priorities straight. These people who are having a hard time not being depressed as they get older are having these problems because their values are so skewed that they never actually found something to be happy about other than their looks, and then when the body ages, they have nothing left to be happy about - no higher calling, no purpose for living, no life's ambition, no joyeux de vivre. Just living from shopping trip to shopping trip. (Isn't there some kind of psychiatric diagnosis for women who become sad and depressed if they do not get a shopping "fix" every so often?)

At any rate, as a mostly-intelligent and average-at-best looking person, I am embarrassed to be a part of a population, time and place that actually has these kind of warped values. What will future generations look back and think about us as a society?

Now another whole bend on this is that, out of all those surgeries that this guy performs, the breast reduction is actually meaningful and warranted. As a consumer of said surgery (although not with this surgeon) I really despise being lumped into this category of women. Especially by my insurance company. "Yes we cover that surgery under your plan - if your pre-operative photos show your nipples hanging down to the leve of your navel." Well I could wait a few decades to get to that point, but frankly there are some actual physical consequences to not having that surgery when you need it, not just cosmetic consequences. If other women weren't so vain, perhaps my insurance company would not have been so quick to lump me into that category and deny my claim. Thanks, ladies.