Very nicely said -- good to see some compassion left in the world.
I really agree. Britney's in a hard situation far beyond her coping skills, and I find her very sympathetic.
2. I think one of Dooce's better points is that Britney's situation is beyond anyone's coping skills. Postpartum depression is a motherfucker.
5 But I don't necessarily agree that this is postpartum depression. It *may* be.
But she is entirely evaluated by the world based on her ability to be a sex object, and I think the cognitive dissonance between those horrible expectations and her current situation could account for it as well.
This is based on my own experience and that of close friends' in our twenties: dealing with shaking off the "hot chick" value system that you are indoctrinated with in your teens. And her experience would obviously be exponentially escalated.
Ditto to hbgb. Do we even know that Brittney is suffering? I mean, shaving one's head and getting tatoos is only a cry for help to readers of Us Weekly, etc. And we all know that "rehab" for most celebrities has more to do with rehabilitating one's image than kicking habits. She may be just fucking with the media, for all we know.
I'd bet she's pretty depressed and suffering. I know K-fed is suing for custody of the kids. I agree with the article that she's self-medicating with all the partying, which implies real unhappiness underneath.
Do we even know that Brittney is suffering?
Whatever else is obscure about this situation, that one seems pretty straightforward.
she's just a spoiled celebrity who has more money than sense
Besides the possible medical problems, that's true too, but I'm pretty sure it's the fault of the alleged grown-ups around her. Agents, managers, publicists, producers, and publishers are in it for their percentage, that doesn't make them responsible parents or substitutes. She's a valuable but disposable commodity to those people, there's another one getting into town right now anyway.
She's a valuable but disposable commodity to those people
And she's been that since she was a kid.
Yeah, it's sad. I never really followed or understood the criticism of the that surrounded Princess Di's death. But Anna Nicole's death (and the inevitable re-summing of her life) and now the frenzy over Spears makes clear that there's something pretty troubling about at least some of the more outrageous aspects of celebrity-watch culture. Even if Anna Nicole and Spears willingly participated in it and encouraged it, it's very hard not to sympathize with them.
And all of this makes me love Jodi Foster, with her scrupulous efforts to maintain her privacy, all the more.
"suing for custody of the kids" s/b "trying to get whatever leverage he can in the dissolution battle."
And I'm not so sure anyting is straightforward, aside from the fact that the scrutiny on all aspects of her life is obnoxious. I'm sure she's fine with the out-of-control-partier image the press has been running with, she's always thought it was funny in the past. And if she is suffering from PPD, I doubt that she'd want that to be the new focus of press coverage of her life.
The Ferguson clip is cool.
(Although I do remember when he was known as Bing Hitler and somewhat less mature)
I'm sure she's fine with the out-of-cont
ol-partier image the press has been running with, she's always thought it was funny in the past
Rabid dogs probably think they're fine too.
You know, if you've seen the video of her attacking the paparazzi with the umbrella, I don't think this is any kind of publicity stunt. She can't even be in a car at a gas station without multiple people running up and taking a barrage of pictures of her through the windshield, while telling her they are "concerned" about her.
Eventually somebody is going to snap and shoot a paparazzi photographer in the face, and then we're going to have the biggest media circle jerk ever.
One good thing about being rich is that she can pay for a lot of nannys.
ttaM, how do you hear the accent on the Ferguson clip? It's perfectly clear but still quite broad to us here. Does it sound evolved and clarified to you? I've never heard him before he got the current show so I have no earlier form to compare this with.
I can't diagnose post-partum depression or anything else, even with better information than the Weekly World News has been giving us. But Britney's biggest problem is obviously love and marriage.
She may be a disposable commodity, but as I understand she's had good business management and is financially set for life. I deny that she's a victim that way. (Anyone who says that's nothing much can just go die. Don't even look in my direction.) She had a relatively short career, but she probably earned at least middle-class lifetime of income during almost every one of those years. As far as I know, she's capitalized her earnings.
I don't know anything about her artistic input, but regardless of that, she got her money by working very hard as a performer starting when she was about 3. Not necessarily voluntarily, but it's not easy money or a windfall.
She doesn't seem to have anyone she can trust in her life, which is the frightening part. It does sound like a million other stories (Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, etc. etc.) There should be a school to teach rich women that they don't need a man any more.
While I'm not generally sympathetic to the travails of celebrities the paparazzi could drive even the most sane and balanced person to violence.
I'll third the Ferguson clip. It's one of the better things I've seen on TV lately.
Apo, given the kind of money floating around the paparrazi targets, I'm mildly surprised there haven't been some midnight visits paid to the people who buy the pictures and publish them. There certainly are enough ex-spooks running celebrity security outfits out here to handle that.
re: 18
He has the accent of someone who's gotten used to toning it down a bit and who hasn't lived in Scotland for a while.
It's actually a lot like my own. We're from towns about 10 miles apart.
He used to do stand-up under the name Bing Hitler; which was a lot more splenetic and angry than the sort of thing he does now.
I heart Craig Ferguson's monologues.
I haven't really been following the Britney thing, but I'm really hoping that this is some sort of manufactured fall from grace and realizing that's increasingly less likely.
Just watched the Ferguson thing; sort of moving.
Ah, poor Britney. I hope she can stick it out with rehab, if only to get out of the public eye for a while.
There can be a bit of a tyranny of rehab -- it's the modern equivalent of being shriven.
However, getting out of the public eye can only be a good thing.
Y'know, this whole thing kinda makes me want to adopt Britney and send her back to high school, like Jerri Blank. The childhood she had probably lacked a ton of experiences we all had that moved us along toward adulthood. I get the feeling she's stuck at 15, which is too young for most people to handle just two babies, much less the entire rest of the circus that is her life.
That was a great monologue.
I'm always amazed at the way AA guys mix the language of disease and the language of responsibility. They don't create any sort of philosophically coherent package, but they create a package that works for them, which makes me think that I may be overvaluing philosophical coherence.
re: 29
I don't know. You can make a case for a coherent position in which disease isn't exculpatory. [Actually, *I'd* make that case].
Of course, that's not to say the AA guys make that coherent case.
I get the feeling she's stuck at 15, which is too young for most people to handle just two babies, much less the entire rest of the circus that is her life.
I think it's the circus, myself. As Dooce's story suggests, most people have bad times in there lives, and moments which they would give a lot to have undone. But those moments aren't frozen permanently and then shared with everyone on earth; they aren't inescapable, and most people have the space to push them away and become other people, whether they do it by denying those moments entirely, come to some sort of coherent peace with it, or just encapsulate it and leave it there, unattractive but separate from the rest of their lives.
30: Oh I agree. I think we need to find a way to mix medical and moral language so that people are still responsible for what they do while sick. My only point was the one you make in the last sentence: AA doesn't do this in a philosophically coherent way. Its more slight of hand, switching from one language to the other when needed.
frozen permanently and then shared with everyone on earth
Yeah, god, what a nightmare that would be. I often think about this with, for instance, Monica Lewinsky. The woman has a graduate degree from the London School of Economics and yet everybody she meets instantly thinks "blowjob". That can't be pleasant.
34: No matter what you think of what she did, she has to get credit for moving forward with some measure of dignity.
And all of this makes me love Jodi Foster, with her scrupulous efforts to maintain her privacy, all the more....
To say nothing of her zombie slave Hinckley's "nice try", for which we should be eternally grateful despite its failure.
I also do not understand the logic of mocking women who give blow jobs. What message are we sending????!!!!??!
I hadn't realized that Hinckley missed Reagan altogether. The bullet that hit his chest had bounced off the bulletproof glass of the limousine.
That women should walk a razor-thin line between being lusted-after and sexualized while simultaneously punished for their sluttiness.
Oh, you were being rhetorical. Huh.
It took courage from Dooce to share her experiences; it is an opportunity to learn and take a more charitable view to people like Britney who are obviously in very great pain. Thanks.
40: The problem is that for men in a secular consumerist society one of these desires--that women should be highly sexual--coheres well with their other desires. Hedonism makes sense to us. It is a part of ourselves that we recognize. The opposing desire that we inflict on women--that they should be punished for sluttiness--doesn't fit with the other desires we see ourselves has having. It is a desire we have inherited from the malingering puritan worldview.
It is easy to make jokes like Will's because we don't like to think of ourselves as having puritan ideas. If we joke that we men are just big horndogs, we are promoting an image we wish we had. It is easier than being big conflicted horndog puritans.
29.
It helps to have a connoisseurs' appreciation of contradiction and paradox. It makes the error of mystification more palpable. The disease model is a tool to aid diagnosis and treatment. It does not negate responsibility in legal and moral terms.
It is actually the patient's perspective where the disease and moral models are hardest to reconcile. It is easy enough to say that the doctor should use a disease model, and a judge should use a responsibility model (a legal framework being the weak sister of the moral framework). But the patient/wrongdoer must traverse all these worlds.
44: What I don't see is why it's so hard (if it is so) to jump from one world to another as needed. Is it really difficult or is that an artifact of people being sloppy in their language?
Assuming she makes it through this ok, though, she can tell an inspirational story about overcoming PPD on the cover of Vanity Fair and use this as the basis for her second, real career comeback. Celebrities get punished harder than the rest of us for their missteps but they also have a whole career refurbishing machine available to them when they want to try to win America's heart back.
Not to say that it's not really sad that she's probably emotionally stunted, can't trust anyone around her, is going through what has got to be a brutal and humiliating divorce and has been getting a ton of criticism for losing the looks that helped make her career -- and those are just the problems we know about.
Its not hard. Normal people do it easily. People in my line of work (academic philosophy), however, put an incredible premium on logic and consistency and therefore have an urge to demand more: an explanation of *how* you can be both sick and responsible. We say things like, "No, don't shift the topic from the drunken action to the decision to drink, or the failure to seek help."
Which returns me to my original point, that people like me may be overvaluing philosophical consistency.
We really should consider a privacy tort against unwanted publicity. A great many people, if granted this sort of attention for a long period of time, would go completely insane. And no, I don't think they ask for it just by getting into acting, singing, or whatever.
an explanation of *how* you can be both sick and responsible
Woo, watch me get analogy-banned again.
I've never been in an AA type program, so my knowledge comes from Infinite Jest and one recovering friend, but doesn't it basically work the same way you can be both sick and responsible when dealing with any other chronic disease, e.g. diabetes or high blood pressure?
You're sick, the sickness is not in itself your fault, but you're a fool and a burden to others if you don't take responsibility for doing the maintenance work.
I mean, all it takes is a bad day for me to consider shaving my head.
My guess is that Britney's old support group (family, etc.) is clueless about her present life, and in her new life in the big time, everyone's pretty predatory.
I don't like the line that she's emotionally 15. Lots of 15 year olds have raised kids. The PPD explanation makes sense, but who knows? I can't really see her as a victim of the music industry, except that now she's a rich woman stuck in a world she doesn't understand where everyone wants something from her, almost everyone is jealous of her, and no one cares for or about her.
I shaved my head once, only to find that I am not the sort of man who looks better with a shaved head. Nevertheless, it was a therapeutic experience.
"Nevertheless, it was a therapeutic experience."
I'm about half-way sold. Tell me more.
A girl I went to high school with had her head shaved after a car accident and kept it that way -- she had way, way more attention from guys afterwards. Before: pretty but not distinctive mousy blonde; After: suede headed fox.
Some people seem to suit it, some don't.
Rob Helpy-chalk: heebie-geebie nailed it. Society mocks women for blow-jobs.
Why is cock-sucker an insult? Oh wait, never mind, that is mocking gay men.
How about "That really blows!"?
Should it really be about power?
49: Fergeson used that analogy too in the monologue, and it was exactly the one I was thinking of when I mentioned changing the topic. The initial question is whether one is responsible for a particular action at a particular time, say, drinking and fighting. The topic is then switched to a different action, getting help. The contradiction is most clear I think when AA people have to both apologize for their actions and admit that they are powerless to control them.
Tell me more.
It was way back when I was in college and still doing the whole "trying to figure out who the hell I am" thing. (Which is not to imply that I'm not still doing that.) I felt I was in a rut, and I shaved my head in order to try to break out of that rut. And when I say that it was therapeutic I may be overstating things, but it was an interesting experiment.
The other motivation was that I was curious to find out what I would look like with a shaved head and wanted to find out before entering the real world of employment, when I figured doing things like shaving my head making similar radical changes to my appearance on a whim might be less practicable.
I didn't mean to disagree with Heebie-Jeebie in 40. I actually thought the comment was wizard cocksucker. I was just amplifying it.
s/b "or making similar radical changes"
text, you're a guy, which means that shaving your head probably removes only an inch or two of hair. Which means if you hate it, it'll grow back quickly enough. I don't know if it would be a problem professionally.
Shivbunny shaves his head in the summer. I'm not crazy about the look -- he looks a bit thuggish -- but you know what is fun? Using the electric razor like a lawn mower brrrrrrrrimmmm brririiimmm and shearing his hair. So if you have a girlfriend, let her shave your head.
Aren't you about to get married, text? Save it for the honeymoon.
It would be a bit of a problem professionally. Which I would weather, if I were certain that I could get all the blues into the hair before shaving it.
I've considered shaving my head just because I find dealing with hair annoying.
You could just stop dealing with it. Sometimes it looks better that way.
61: "honeymoon" s/b "bachelor party"
But how could she, seeing that I'd shaved all my blues away? Our lives thereafter would be freer, lighter, requiring even less grooming than before.
I shave my head whenever I feel like I'm in a rut. It's great.
Back when I was an undergraduate, I had really long hair (middle of my back). I would like to have hair like that again someday, but I keep finding myself in a rut, and shaving my head.
47, 49, 56
Apropos the disease model versus responsibility, I don't know if this clarifies the discussion but I'll give a try. The disease model provides a rationale for understanding and treatment, i.e., an explanation with a logical course of action based on reasearch. A problem arises when people confuse an "explanation" with an "excuse." The care-giver community operates in accordance with the disease model. The legal community requires accountability for behavior regardless of explanation. Thus, an explanation is not an excuse, and these need not be mutually exclusive or contradictory from a philosophical perspective.
62: "Blue, blue is not a good drug color; I suggest they try reds instead. (click) Rock-n-Roll Doctor, you're on the air!"
69: I'll stop trying to create problems where none exist.
Doing that is a good path to tenure. The creating, not the stopping.
I create trouble wherever I go. How come no one will give me tenure?
A friend of mine grows a beard just so he'll have something to shave when his life feels like he's not in control, and so he doesn't have to shave his head.
74: One could also shave one's pubic hair. Added benefit: no employment-related consequences.
Usually.
75: Interestingly, most jobs where they know whether you have pubic hair prefer you shave it, or at least trim it.
And thus does rob helpy-chalk reveal his secret double life as a porn star.
You just don't know what goes on in philosophy departments.
Apparently it's not as platonic as I had assumed.
48, etc.: Has anyone see the movie The Queen? I hadn't really read the reviews and was surprised at how compassionate it was, and how truly horrible the (fleeting) scenes of paparazzi were. I can't imagine preserving your sanity for 24 hours under that kind of spotlight.
Re: shaving heads. I'm at work and haven't time to search the archives, but I am reminded of our extensive discussion on the visceral appeal of watching one's significant other shave. If that many women love watching their boyfriends/husbands shave their beards, some must also love observing the head-shaving ritual.
My girlfriend in high school used to shave her head. It was hott.
But did it eliminate the blues? This is my present inquiry.
One of my two SOs shaves her head regularly. She grows it out to her shoulder blades or so, shaves, repeats. I helped last time, it was good times.
It got eaten by a seagull on the way to the server!
That video does pick me up a bit. It's nothing serious, just a series of unfortunate events. Only less microscopic lenses and Jim Carrey, more wallets being stolen and sisters dating alcoholic morons.
I've got nothing against alcoholics. The moron part is more troubling. And, you know, stuff.
Sorry to hear it, text. At least you've still got three cocks.
That was you, right?
I have not ever shaven my head; but I always find that cutting my hair cheers me up. And for some reason it is always an unexpected pick-me-up, I never go into the barber shop thinking "I will feel cheerful and light-hearted in half an hour".
When I was younger I grew my hair very long oblivious to the objective truth that it looked like shit; as I get older I have been wearing it shorter and shorter, and getting it cut more and more regularly. Who knows, perhaps one of these days will find me voluntarily bald. I suspect though that that would look like shit too. Me for a middle-of-the-road hair style.
Hey look, I got the hundred without even seeking it! A corollary to "cutting my hair cheers me up" and "as I get older I have been ... getting it cut more and more regularly" is that I am less depressed now than in my long-haired youth. I do not understand the causation though.
It's true, you can't be too sad when you've got extra sexual organs.
102 -- that is a popular state with me too.
Why so dour, Teo? How did the conversation in the library go?
Dour? I'm not dour. The conversation went well.
Oh good. I thought you might be dour.
108 s/b: Ach ye, I kin ye were dour, bairn.
101: I'm thinking depression gnomes that live in your hair.
The word is 'ken'. 'Ken'. And if it's past tense, 'kent'.
'Kin' refers to family members, ffs.
'Kin' refers to family members, ffs.
I knew that.
England forever! (Scotland a little bit longer!)
In the interests of full disclosure, I don't actually have more than one cock, and I don't believe to have made claim to extra ones here or anywhere else.
82: I'm kind of torn about this. I seriously like me some Helen Mirren and everything I've heard about the movie has been positive, but I can't work up any interest in the subject matter. I care about the royal family only slightly more than I care about Anna Nicole Smith, which is to say, very nearly not at all, and I don't know if even Helen could make that 2 hours worth while. I'm open to persuasion.
I've shaved my head for the last few summers, mostly because I was working at a marine biology lab and it seemed like the thing to do. I was working the full-on summer scientist drag -- shaved head, beard, and sandals -- but in the last couple years, the amount of grey showing up in my beard was too unnerving. The hair is still a nice seasonal ritual though, and as long as my hairline isn't retreating too quickly, makes me feel all young and summery when I do it.
If that many women love watching their boyfriends/husbands shave their beards, some must also love observing the head-shaving ritual.
Don't know if this is generally true of the ladies, but my wife who likes me clean shaven would be horrified if I shaved my head.
I don't have a strong feeling one way or another on watching him shave his beard, but shaving his head is just fascinating.
When I shaved my head in high school and college, I was surprised at how many girls that I didnt know would just touch my head as I walked by.
In grad school, I let my hair grow really long, which in my case means really big, and at the same time grew out some large, fluffy, muttonchop sideburns. I definitely achieved the pimporiffic look I was after, and I'm proud of my driver's license pic from that period, but I had to cut it all off when I realized that people I knew but didn't see often were failing to recognize me when I saw them on the street. When you see people you know and go to say hi, and they don't even make eye contact, it's disturbing. The first shower after the shave was pretty glorious.
My previous roommate was quite a bit younger than I, and tells me that shaving of the pubes is pretty common among the youf. (he also implied that he does it, which left me with a mental image I dearly wish I could purge). I don't like this trend, if trend is in fact what it is.
Belatedly, to this: I'm kind of torn about this. I seriously like me some Helen Mirren and everything I've heard about the movie has been positive, but I can't work up any interest in the subject matter.
It wasn't my choice to see the movie, but I found it surprisingly compassionate and generous, sometimes very funny, and bittersweet. Mirren is great, although though her walk struck me as really odd. Otherwise she seemed to inhabit Elizabeth rather as Anthony Hopkins did Nixon (which is to say, astonishingly well, for a short Welshman playing a California Quaker).
It was odd to see it from the perspective of the hubbub surrounding Diana's death -- that didn't make such a big impression on me at the time and I had more or less forgotten the details. I don't know whether the actress playing Cherie Blair was over the top or the part was overwritten, but that was the main thing that I found distracting. Also, there seemed to be a number of shots of her bosom. In the eye of some, I'm sure this would be a feature.
tells me that shaving of the pubes is pretty common among the youf. (he also implied that he does it, which left me with a mental image I dearly wish I could purge). I don't like this trend, if trend is in fact what it is.
Really? What's the big deal?
oh god it must be so bad to only be sporadically thought of as a sex object. fuck off.
i mean, that term but spelleed correctly, however that is doen.
we're all commentign on the belligernets.
except me. i'm commenting on the happinets.
Drunk people are funny.
I, however, am hungover. So I am commenting from the future ...
obviously she's in a world she's not got enough understanding or intelligience of or whatever to win at. HWatever. this is whate losing looks like; mostly people lose about half the time.
"Shivbunny shaves his head in the summer. I'm not crazy about the look -- he looks a bit thuggish -- but you know what is fun? Using the electric razor like a lawn mower brrrrrrrrimmmm brririiimmm and shearing his hair. So if you have a girlfriend, let her shave your head."
i'm always getting naked to shave my head. i shoudl keep this under consideration. i thought i looked way to non-contrlling to be sexy when i haircut tho.
I've been shaving my head for about 8 months now, but only down to about 3/4"-1". I think it looks pretty good, and it's completely easy. Very spare.
I actually have to deal with the whateveritis dichotomy that rob and ppl wz talking about up there, maybe to a greater extent than even alcoholics. (Though I wouldn't say my overall problems are worse than theirs.) For me, it's an inability to motivate myself to do things, to focus on things, to keep my life together. I tried taking a personal responsibility type approach for a long time, but that never seem to get anywhere, and it generated a lot of guilt. So I finally stopped looking at it that way, and became completely detached from the problems, and looked at them from a disease model viewpoint, and some would say that's helping.
I'm not drunk, I'm just extremely tired and too jumpy to go to bed.
Sigh. I'm the most unplugged in person in the world. I had no idea about any of this. I didn't even know about Anna Nicole Smith still being all the buzz until a colleague mentioned that her TV appearance had been cancelled b/c of it. It's all very sad.
It's all very sad
On the contrary -- seems to me like grounds for rejoycing.
My understanding from talking with friends who've found AA helpful and reflecting on my own experience with behavior-affecting disabilities is that apologizing for stuff you couldn't control carries a message sort of like this: I'm sorry I let things drift past the point I could still control them, and I'm aiming to take action now when it's useful and keep me out of that uncontrolled zone in the future. It's a way of saying that you absolutely are not rummaging for excuses, and that you don't think what you did and allowed to happen was okay. When it's productive, it usually comes paired with a new willingness to listen to others about how they see what you've done, even when it's going to be very uncomfortable to say and/or hear, as part of a general commitment to being responsible and in tune with reality rather than fleeing to comfortable fantasies again.
There are, of course, circumstances in which you never have enough lucid moments in which responsible behavior is possible, and in those it doesn't make any sense to talk about responsibility. We don't (at least I hope we don't) blame comatose people for any injury someone might suffer while tending their spasms, for instance. But problems like alcholism are seldom so total. There is, so to speak, room for a yummy filling of responsibility in the "got a big problem" sandwich in between the dry crust of uncontrollable underlying condition and acute crisis in which control is hard or irresponsible. It's the middle ground of momentsw here one's choices genuinely do matter that AA-style language looks at, and that such programs hope to widen through cultivated habit plus treatment.
