Girl Talk: Poor Women Have Breasts, Too

I am stunned, no, angry, at the decision of the Susan G.Komen organization not to award grants to Planned Parenthood anymore. Their reason is because they oppose abortion, and, despite Planned Parenthood’s assertion that no Komen funds are used for abortions, the Komen folks aren’t buying it.

The fallout is that poor women whose only way to get mammograms was through Planned Parenthood are out of luck.

Interestingly, this happened at the same time that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said he’s “not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net.” He mentioned the usual – food stamps, Medicaid…

He says they have a safety net even as his party is working to dismantle the same.

But…back to the decision by the Susan G. Komen organization…do they not know that poor women …have breasts, too, and that they, too, need to get screened for breast cancer?

Reports say that money from the Susan G. Komen Foundation provided enough money via their grants to Planned Parenthood over the past five years to pay for 170,000 clinical breast exams, which were particularly helpful for women in rural or in underserved areas.

The Komen grants were given specifically to pay for these breast exams. I know enough about grants that grant recipients are mandated to use the money for the purpose stated in the grant application.

Apparently, though, the Komen Foundation powers-that-be do not like the fact that Planned Parenthood clinics will do abortions. That makes them mad, so, what the heck? Who cares about poor women with breasts who need to be tested for breast cancer so they can perhaps get treated, too?

It is infuriating.

Many who in the past have walked in a Komen event, or who have supported Komen in its efforts, including myself, are going to stop. I suppose Komen’s donations could suffer, but they also could increase, because the topic of abortion and contraception are such hot-button issues for Americans.

But my concern is for the innocent women who depended on the work of Planned Parenthood to get these very important clinical breast exams. Where will they go? How will they get the care they need?

It feels more and more like we live in a “let them eat cake” society, with the rich not caring about the number of people who struggle to survive. It feels more and more not only like they are blamed for being poor, but are scorned because they depend on help in order to make it.

Something is wrong with this picture.

The Bible says that the love of money is the root of evil. I am supposing that some very wealthy political type said to the Komen folks that if they didn’t stop funding Planned Parenthood that a big chunk of money that they normally get might not be…available anymore.

So, as is usually the case, the poor get the boot in order to make a political point.

Poor women have breasts, too. Poor women count.

I guess the Komen folks forgot those facts…or worse, they don’t care about those facts.

A candid observation …

Girl Talk: “The Code”

Years ago, I made one of the worst mistakes of my life. I had a good friend who had a boyfriend, and when they broke up, he and I got together.

We had had nothing going on when they were together, but after they broke up, he would come talk to me and pour his heart out, and I would listen. After a while, he and I started going out, and it ruined my friendship with my friend.

Duh. I didn’t know “the code.”

My mother died when I was quite young, and so there are discussions she and I never had. Had she lived, I am sure that she would have laid “the code” out for me… and I am sure that one of the first things she would have taught me is “thou shalt not date thy friend’s former boyfriend, husband, or love interest.”

I didn’t know.

Thing is, this guy – the one I lost a friend over – was not even CLOSE to being someone I would have picked on my own. I cannot understand what I was thinking – or not thinking. I suppose loneliness might have played a part, but I understand that loneliness is no excuse for breaking “the code.”

As a pastor, and a single pastor at that, I have learned to apply the “girl code” in my work. If I need to talk to a male member of my congregation, I am careful to make sure that when I call, I first talk to the wife or girlfriend, ask how she is doing, tell her why I need to talk to her husband, and then ask if I might speak to him.

It not only is polite and professional to do it that way, it honors “the code.”

Recently, a friend of mine became furious at another friend of mine, because, it seemed, “friend A” was interested in the same guy as was “friend B.” It seems that “friend A” had begun conversations with the guy first, and then “friend B” began talking to him, too. He, of course, talked with and flirted with both, but the aftermath of this little scenario was that now, “friend A” and “friend B” are not talking.

Seriously?

I know …someone will say that unless he has a ring on his finger, its open season, but doesn’t friendship mean something? To me, there is nothing quite as special as a good female friend; good girlfriends are true gifts. It seems to me that way too many of us women lose friends because we violate “the code.”

All this makes me think of pieces of wisdom my mother shared with me while she was alive. One was that if a guy grew up in a home where he saw his father beat his mother, he’ll probably beat you. Another was that you could tell the relationship a guy had with his mother by the way he treats you. And yet another was, “if he played around on your girlfriend, he will play around on you.”

I listened to her, and have to say, her words of wisdom have saved me many a time.

Had she lived long enough to have had the conversation with me about “the code,” I’m sure she would have put it in language I would never have forgotten, and would not have lost my friend over this…guy. I don’t know where the guy is today, or what he’s doing. My former friend, I must say, is married, has children, and is doing wonderfully well professionally.

I don’t know if any of my female readers are in a situation where you are attracted to a guy that a friend of yours either wants to be in a relationship with or has had a relationship with, but stop before you move. Friends are rubies, precious gems, not easily replaced. Better that you sigh and set your sights elsewhere than to damage or kill a friendship that may never come again.

Thou shalt not destroy a friendship over a guy. A good friend is more than “just a friend.” She’s often a sister, the sister, perhaps, that you never had. A sister-friend tends to “be there” when a guy just cannot relate or understand. Sister-friends are the ones you can call at midnight and pour your heart out to, and they are just there. They tell you, in love, when you’re wrong, they support and celebrate you when you are right. They push for your success, and they carry your burdens when you are “there,” so you absolutely know you are not alone.

They are too precious to lose.

From experience…a candid observation.

Girl Talk – The Hot Flash

There is nothing quite so comical…and annoying …as “the hot flash.”

When I was a child, I would laugh at my older women friends who would be fine one moment and ready to strip the next.

More than once I was warned, “You just wait,” but being young and all, I couldn’t relate.

That has all changed now.

What in the world was God thinking? How can it be possible to be comfortable one second and ready to strip the next, no matter where you are?

What logic is there to having your window open when it’s 5 degrees outside, because even as you need the heat on in the house, the heat loses to “the hot flash” every time?

A hot flash has power. Were we to capture the hot flashes of, say, two or three women at one time, and bottle it, I wonder how much energy from that heat we would be able to measure?

Case in point: I was at an event, dressed quite nicely, thank you, getting ready to make a presentation, when, BOOM! All of a sudden, out of nowhere, came “the hot flash.” I felt my face grow warm and beads of sweat break out on my forehead. I did the proverbial “look around:” Was this just me or had the heat suddenly gone up in the room? But no, nobody else looked the slightest bit bothered. It was me.

I wanted to fan, not just my face, but under my arms, between my legs …and I wanted to fan with much energy! But because I was in public, I had to do the dainty fan thing.

Ugh.

Menopause is quite hilarious, actually. It is amazing, what hormones changing around in us women do to us. It messes with our bones, it makes mood swings really interesting…but the funniest part (although not funny when you’re having one) is…the hot flash.

Mine aren’t really bad, and not all that frequent, thank goodness. I try to watch what I eat and exercise; I have heard that doing that sort of thing is helpful. I do not take hormone therapy; I’d rather let nature take its course…but these hot flashes are rude! They intrude in places and at times when they are not appreciated and where I cannot strip in order to cool down!

Sometimes, when I am getting my hair dried at the beauty shop, “hot flash” comes and sits with me, so even as my beautician dries my hair, it is getting damp again because “the hot flash” is making its way from my feet to my head!

Ugh!

I always say that when I die, I hope I have an opportunity to have a conversation with God. One of the questions I’ll ask is why we women had to have the menstrual period experience. Why don’t men have a lovely, monthly visitor with whom to deal? It doesn’t seem quite fair…

But clearly, one other question I would like to ask God was why He/She felt it necessary to make us women go through menopause and experience “the hot flash?” Surely this isn’t all because Eve tempted Adam to eat the apple in the Garden of Eden, is it? If it is related to that, shouldn’t Adam have to bear some of this…experience, seeing as he had the power to say “no” to her but didn’t?

Something is wrong with this picture, I write, even as I need to stop to fan. Yep, you guessed it…I am having…a hot flash.

A candid (and hot) observation…

Girl Talk: “Being” vs.”Doing”

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said something to the effect that everybody wants to “be” somebody instead of wanting to “do” something that will change the world.

I would probably edit her observation to say that we want to “be” somebody who is physically beautiful, rather than be like an unattractive woman who actually changed the world.

I didn’t like Margaret Thatcher’s politics, but she was a woman who knew herself and who walked in her strengths. It seemed that she was not at all consumed with looking a certain way so that she could be labeled as an attractive woman. In spite of her skill as a leader of a major world power, one almost never hears little girls saying they would like to be like her, or like Hillary Clinton, or like Mary McLeod Bethune.

No, young girls, egged on by their mothers, would rather “be” the next Paris Hilton (for whatever reason, I do not understand), or like Marilyn Monroe or Beyonce Knowles. The desire to “be” is based much on how these women looked, not what they have done in or for the world.

If we complain that we considered to be sex objects rather than human beings, then we have ourselves to blame as much as the men about whom we complain. I have watched snippets of parents putting their very young daughters in beauty pageants, teaching them to capitalize on their looks, rather than learning their gifts and talents and building upon those things.

The tendency of white parents to push their daughters forward as sex objects is no less regrettable than black parents pushing their sons to aspire to be professional athletes. In both cases, the little girls and boys become objects that will be used to make someone else big bucks, even after their beauty or athletic ability has long gone.

The hardest part about watching us women trying to “be” somebody else rather than to “do” something of significance in and for the world is that it is always futile to try to be somebody else. No matter how hard one tries, all one can be is oneself. Yes, we can get tummy tucks and dye our hair and get breast implants and any number of other things to enhance or change what people see, but in the end, I find myself wondering if we do that at the expense of taking care of how we feel.

It is good that beauties are all around us. Halle Berry, Jennifer Hudson, Natalie Morales – there are so many beautiful women who are also doing things.

It would be a good thing if we began to teach our daughters that it is OK to look at someone and admire how they look, and even take tips on how we might fix our hair or makeup…but that it is never OK to lose ourselves in trying to be someone else.

At the end of the day, the beauty and sexiness for which we crave are so fleeting. Long after beauty fades and being “sexy” doesn’t work anymore, the world would be better if it had more women who decided that, just as they were, they were better than just “OK,” and who forged ahead to help pave the way for real change in a very troubled and complex world.

A candid observation …

Nothing New Under the Sun

It is the most sickening story.

A video, released by the British newspaper The Observer shows women from a protected tribe in India’s Andaman Islands dancing, some naked, in exchange for food.

The women belong to a primitive tribe named the Jarawa, which was thought to be one of the first tribes to successfully migrate from Africa to Asia. They are supposedly protected by Indian law from being bothered or traumatized, but tourists apparently bribed a police officer, who then led the tourists to them, and lured the women to dance for the tourists in exchange for food.

The video is thought to have been taken some years ago, but that does not take away the disgust that someone would treat human beings as though they were nothing for what feels like “30 pieces of silver.”

It is sad, but unfortunately not surprising that a colonial mindset exists that makes people think that it is all right to treat human beings as objects. Because a person is a darker hue or has less education does not make that person or, in this case, these women, of less value than a person who lives in a city, has money to travel, and has education.

The story made me wonder how these tourists would feel if the tables were reversed, if members of the Jarawa came to England or America and found American women in compromised situations, but desperate and unaware of how cruel the world can be, and willing to do almost anything-for food.

I remember the first time I went to Africa. Just out of college, the group of us traveling was reminded that the Africans were human beings with feelings, and that to go around just taking pictures of them would be offensive. “Think about how uncomfortable you would feel,” our teacher said, “if you were sitting on your porch and some foreigner came along and, without your permission, began taking pictures of you.”

Enough said. I understood.

The story about the Jarawa tribal women is bad in and of itself, but the fact that a police officer – someone who is supposed to be a protector of all people- took a bribe and then used his authority to participate or worse, initiate barbaric treatment of fellow human beings, is just plain sad and wrong.

V. Kishore Chandra Deo, who is India’s Minister of Tribal Affairs, voiced umbrage; “you cannot treat human beings like beasts for the sake of money,” he said.

In theory that is true, and it is morally correct, but it is a fact that humans have treated other humans like beasts for the sake of money from the beginning of time.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, “the preacher” bemoans that there is “nothing new under the sun.” How true, and how sad, that, even as civilization in terms of science and technology has taken societies higher and higher, there has been little progress in those same civilizations as pertains to the way people treat other people. I would bet that the police officer who took the bribe, and the tourists who squealed with delight as the Jarawa women danced for them while they threw bananas and biscuits at them, or on the side of the road that leads to their village, go to church every Sunday.

A candid observation …

(To read the story, visit this link: http://news.yahoo.com/outrage-over-human-zoo-indian-islands-114059047.html)