Raven in Green again..

nothings changed the senates still corrupt & the emporer remains insane, and every day, is a new strain of slaughter, supply lines are less protected, evil on all sides, eye can smell the death on your flesh--creeping in, trapped within the twisting fingers of fear, and all eye see is ewe, that face, those eyes, burning like leprosy, eye can see u there poisoning the air, prostituing Nationalism, and eye want to attack, to rip out your heart and lay you flat on your back, and vomit a world of agony and truth into your throbbing illness of memory...and hate guides our way, eye long for the icy slap of a belt across my back, for the acceptance of death and blind cave war, the giving sleep of depression, the sweet elucidation of savage meaningless agression, chiseled in the meaty forearms of Mother Jupiter and his slave disciples, in the harem tents--outside, just beyond the edges--eye ride, a cycoptic mare in the fires of imagination. feeding my disease, a river of plagues, eye need something to remind me I'm still sinning that pain is important, that wurdz matter, that healing is possible, that eye am not alone ...in this --guard the houses--triple the watch,--Maidens, dig up your sorcery --sirens, sharpen your rocks..ewe will eat my pain again. whatever you need unite messiah ME

--Wurdz by Otep Shamaya

What I really learned from Barbie.
November 08, 2001 10:45 a.m.

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I read this article for English and agreed alot with it. Decided to post it. Maybe I was a messed up kid but this article leads me to believe otherwise. My Barbies had lots of sex. Of course she was always in a monogamous relationship.

What Barbie Really Taught Me.
Lessons from the Playroom, Both Naughty and Nice.
By Yona Zeldis McDonough

Now that my son is 6 and inxeticably linked to the grade-school social circuit, he gets invited to birthday parties. Whenever I telephone to say he's coming, I ask about gifts. And whenever the child is a girl, I secretly hope the answer will be the dirty little word I am longing to hear. The word is Barbie.

No such luck. In our Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood, there is a bias against the doll. "My daughter loves her, but I can't stand her." laments one mother. "I won't have her in the house," answers another. "Oh, please!" Sniffs a third.

But I love Barbie. I loved her in 1963, when she made her entrance into my live. She has a Jackie Kennedy bouffant hairdo. Her pouty muth gave her a look both of knowing and sullen. She belonged to a grown-up world of cocktail dresses, cigarette smoke and perfume. I loved her in the years that followed too, when she developed bendable joints, a twist-'n'-turn waist, long, ash-blond hair and life like lashes.

I've heard all the arguments against Barbie: She's an airhead, she's an insatiable consumer--of tarty clothes, a dream house filled with pink furniture, a Barbie-mobile--who teaches girls there's nothing in live quite so exciting as shopping. Her body, with it's no-way-in-the-world breasts, wasp waist and endless legs, defies all human proportio. But at 6, I inchoately understood Barbie's appeal: pure sex. My other dolls were either barbies or little girls, with flat chests and chubby legs. Even the other so-called fasion dolls--Tammy, in her aqua and white playsuit and Tressy, with that useless hank of hair--couldn't compete. Barbie was clearly a woman, and a woman was what I longed to be.

When I was 8 and had just learned about menstruation, I fashioned a small sanitary napkin for Barbi out of neatly folded tissues. Rubberbands heled it in place. "Look," said my bemused mother, "Barbie's got her little period. Now she can have a baby." I was disappointed, but my girlfriends snickered in a way that satisfied me. You see, we all wanted Barbie to be, well, dirty.

Our Barbies had sex, at least our childish version of it. They hugged and kissed the few available boy dolls we had--clean-cut and oh-so-square Ken., the more relazed and sexy Allan. Our Barbies also danced, pranced and strutted, but mostly they stripped. An adult friend tells me how she used to put her Barbie's low back bathing suit on backwardsso the doll's breast were exposed. I dressed mine in a candy-striped baby-sitter's apron--and nothing else. Girls respond intuitively to the doll's sexuality and it's lets them play out those roles in an endlessly compelling and yet ultimately safe manner.

I've also heard that Barbie is a poor role model. Is there such wide spread contempt for the intelligence of children that we really imagine they are stupid enough to be shaped by a doll? Girls learn how to be woman from the women around them. Most often theis means Mom. Mine eschewed beauty parlors. She was a painter who wore her long, black hair loose, her earrings big and dangling and her lipstick dark. She made me a Paris bisto birthday party, with candles stuck in old wine bottles. Instead of games, she read T.S. Eliot to the group of enchanted 10-year-olds. My mother, not an 11 1/2 ince doll, was the most powerful female role model in my life. What she thought of Barbie I really don't know, but she had the good sense to back off and let me use the dool my own way.

Barbie now exists in a variety of "serious" incarnations: teacher, Olymic athlete, dentist. And later this year we'll even get to see the Really Rad Barbie, a doll whose breast and hips will be smaller and whose waist will be thicker, thus reflecting a more real (as if children want their toys to be real) female body. I personally don't think any of this matters one iota. girls will still know the reason they love her, a reason that has nothing to do with t he new professions or a subtly amended figure.

Fortunately, my Barbie love will no longer have to content itself with buying gifts for my son's female friends. I have a daughter now, and although she is just 2, she already has a half-dozen Barbies. They are, along with various articles of clothing, furniture and other accounterments, packed away like so many sleeping princesses in translucent pink plastic boxes that line my basement shelves. The magic for which they wait is not the prince's gentle kiss. It is the heard and mind of my little girl as she picks them up and begins to play.

Side Note: My Mom caught my Ken and Barbie in the act once,....I was scolded. That might be one reason for my sexual repression. Ya think?

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