A Body Is a Body Is a Body ... ?

Kathleen Parker is my new favorite op-ed columnist. Today's column in The Baltimore Sun, "Today's youthful indiscretions can come back to haunt you," captures my sentiments exactly.

Ms. Parker's topic is how recent college grads are being turned away as job applicants because they have posted stuff about themselves — nude pictures, etc. — in the Internet's "high-tech, freewheeling, sexually explicit environment where porn is the new risque and everybody's gone wild."

One female student who is part of the freewheeling set says, "A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body?" This person is co-founder of a "user-friendly porn" magazine at Boston University. Thinks she, "It's not going to keep me from having a job."

To which Ms. Parker says, "Famous last words, perhaps."


Part of the deal at "gossip and graphics" websites like AutoAdmit.com where college types like this student might go to schmooze is, Ms. Parker says as well, that "postings can be anonymous. And vicious."

Vice and viciousness go hand in hand in "today's uncivil society [where] the stakes are high and the rules are low." About which climate Ms. Parker comments, "Invite anonymity into the mix and hostility finds release in the vacuum created when shame went missing."

Thus, the fate of "the generation that was serenaded by Madonna and marinated in sexual imagery." This generation may be so far gone that Ms. Parker's advice — "If you can't imagine your mother or father doing something, you probably shouldn't do it either" — will probably fall on deaf ears.


We are a long way from the 1950s through the early 1970s, a golden age in which a good moral rule of thumb was, "If Ben Cartwright wouldn't do it, you shouldn't either." The patriarch of Bonanza's Ponderosa Ranch and the widower father of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, if he were real and alive today, would gasp with incomprehension at clueless pronouncements such as "a body is a body is a body." Not even the loutish rabble that weekly threatened order and civility in the Cartwrights' vicinity would ever have mouthed such balderdash.

You know exactly what I'm talking about when you consider this classic exchange from the series:

Adam: Let's go back to the Ponderosa, Pa. This isn't any of our affair.
Ben: We can't ignore the rest of the world. We're the only stabilizing influence in the country.

Or this:

Ben: You and your education ...
Adam: Education is progress! Now what have you got against it?
Ben: I don't have anything against education — as long as it doesn't interfere with your thinking!

If education is naught but "progress," then maybe that fact explains why we find "user-friendly porn" magazines at Boston University and elsewhere in academe today.


And maybe it explains why we seem to be having such trouble today with thinking and common sense — see Robert Hardi's kvetch, "Gimme That Old Can-Do-Spirit," in last Sunday's Washington Post. Hardi feels we've replaced self-reliance based on common sense — the Ben Cartwright ethic — with self-protection based on bureaucratic rule following. Dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and no one can blame you if things go wrong.

On the one hand, we're without shame in the sense of being shameless. On the other hand, we're without shame in the sense of being blameless. It's a killer combination.

Bring Back Daddy

My original thought in this blog was to extol the entire value system represented on TV in the 1950s.

That quickly morphed into the realization that what we have lost since then has been, most of all, the father figure. In the 1950s, even TV comedies whose stars portrayed un-fatherly figures — such as the eponymous lead character of "The Jack Benny Program," played by Jack Benny, natch — were surrogate fathers to their retinues of satellite characters.

Imagine my surprise, then, at this synchronicity: today's column by Kathleen Parker in The Baltimore Sun is about daddies. (The column can be read online here.) Parker's topic is the recent finding by the American Psychological Association that girls in America are overly "sexualized," meaning that their self images depend too heavily on their self-perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex.

Parker writes, "We can now assert with confidence that most of the primarily girl pathologies — eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression — can be linked to an oversexualization that encourages girls to obsess about body image and objectify themselves."

Think of it. In the wake of feminist advances rooted in the notion that girls and women should never be taken as sex objects comes a culture in which girls and women objectify themselves.

What can have gone wrong? I blame, in part, feminism's deconstruction of male gender roles, particularly that of the father.

Parker notes that "missing from the report" issued by the APA is

... the single factor that seems most predictive of girls' self-objectification — the absence of a father in their lives. Although the task force urges "parents" to help their daughters interpret sexualizing cultural messages, there's little mention of the unique role fathers play in protecting their girls from a voracious, sexualized culture.

Fathers, after all, are the ones who tell their little girls that they're perfect just the way they are; that they don't need to be one bit thinner; and that under no circumstances are they going out of the house dressed that way.

It can't be coincidence that girls' self-objectification — has risen as father presence has declined. At last tally, 30 percent of fathers weren't sleeping in the same house as their biological children.

We have such a big problem here, in my humble opinion, that almost no one wants to talk about it as such — with rare exceptions such as Ms. Parker.


Part of the size-of-the-problem issue is that the humongous lump of the problem has metastasized into smaller tumors in a huge variety of our cultural organs and tissues. A lot of us have vested interests in various of the tumors. As Parker herself notes, for instance, oversexualization affects — hurts — not just girls but also boys, men, and even women ... but even so, "there seems to be an unspoken sense that males are getting what they want with 24/7 sex messaging." Well, I admit it: I am clearly one of those males.

Meanwhile, feminists have also been getting a lot of what they want in terms of women's liberation from traditional gender, marital, and childbearing roles. I admit I simply don't have a clue as to whether, or how, the father figure might be resuscitated without imperiling those advances.

And it scarcely needs to be said that money interests are getting what they want, selling expensive attire and unnecessary cosmetics to underage "tartlets" and purveying "bling" to slightly older female victims of oversexualization. The ridiculous extent to which sexualization affects the world of grownups, meanwhile, is manifest during every television commercial break. The images of bodily allure used to sell everything from soap to bras to exercise equipment would never have been allowed on '50s TV, when brassieres could not be shown on live models unless there was another article of clothing between the bra and the skin!

How things have changed, and how all of them form a constellation around the black hole of the erstwhile father figure, would seem to be Topic #1 of this blog.


It doesn't seem to me to be a stretch to identify the cultural cancer of the demoted, debunked, and deconstructed father figure with societal problems such as the number of abortions performed annually. Reports have it that unmarried women facing unwanted pregnancies are being pressured by their boyfriends and families — yes, including their fathers, when not absent — to opt for surgical termination. It's my belief that these women have been placed in double jeopardy.

First, their sexualization by the prevailing culture has led them to express their erroneous self-image too often and too inappropriately, engaging in the wrong acts at the wrong times for the wrong reasons with the wrong "significant others."

Then, when nature takes its course and they wind up "in the family way," they face the ignominy of being disowned by the people they are closest to, unless they fulfill their own objectification by remedying the one condition that can put the lie to being naught but sex objects: expectant motherhood.

How grisly is that double whammy?

I bring this up not because I think abortions ought to be made illegal again — I'm presently in the midst of reevaluating my stance on legal abortion — but because I believe wholly discretionary abortions ought to be rare, even if they are legal.

If we in our culture were somehow able to resuscitate Daddy — the father-ideal of so recent fond memory — I believe the tumor of the voracious sexualization of girls would shrink and disappear, and with it the commonness of discretionary abortion.

Demise of the '50s-TV Father Figure

I guess the most profound change in our cultural values since the 1950s has been the demise of the father figure. How, exactly, was that late lamented father figure represented on '50s TV?

Anyone remember the Sunday night schedule on CBS in the mid-'50s? A half-hour time slot was shared on an every-other-week basis by "The Jack Benny Program" and "Private Secretary," starring Ann Sothern.

Both were comedies. Jack Benny was one of the most popular comedians in America, having been a mainstay in vaudeville and radio before moving to TV. On his show he played ... wait for it ... "Jack Benny," a professional comedian who was famously a tightwad, self-styled ladies man, perennial 39-year-old, and the world's lousiest violin player. Each show depicted a day in the life of "Jack," along with his coterie of regular supporting characters. They included his sometime girlfriend and foil, Mary, played by Mr. Benny's real-life wife, Mary Livingstone; his valet-chauffeur, Rochester, played by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, and a host of others.

"Jack Benny" on CBS was, like the real Jack Benny, a performer on radio and TV, so the plot of each TV show revolved around his life in the on-the-air and Hollywood set. He had his announcer, Don Wilson, over to his house regularly, and also his show's singer, Dennis Day. Though "Jack Benny" was a bachelor who was always wooing famous actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, his coterie was nonetheless much like a regular family, with him as the father.

It didn't matter that "Jack" was a vain, silly guy, forever being taken down a notch by those who knew his foibles all too well, forever living down his own foolishness. Rochester, his manservant, who was impersonated by one of the few black actors with a regular gig on '50s TV, clearly had more sense than his employer, but from him it was always "Yes, Mr. Benny" and "No, Mr. Benny." Always droll, never disrespectful, Rochester's wide-eyed deportment toward his boss was a highlight of the show.

The same was true of the character of Mary, who was officially something like a script girl in the Benny on-the-air "family." Mary was frequently snide to "Jack" ... but never outright snarly.

The lesson to this roughly 8-year-old viewer was this: "Jack Benny" may not always have known best, but, as the family's father, he still warranted deference and respect.


Ann Sothern had been a well-known star in B-movies in the 1940s, known best for her recurring role as the brassy Brooklyn burlesque dancer Maisie O'Connor at MGM. I, of course, was unaware of that when I watched her as Susie McNamara on TV's "Private Secretary" in the middle '50s. Susie was aide and general factotum to the head of a talent agency, Peter Sands. Her mission in life was to make things go smoothly for Mr. Sands, her father figure. Instead, her initiatives on his behalf usually just managed to skirt disaster. Good fortune always came along to rescue her by the final fadeout, or it would surely have been curtains for her and her TV pseudo-family.

Mr. Sands was the image of probity and respectability, which meant he would never sully his hands with the rough-and-tumble of the theatrical business or stoop to deceiving his agency's prime competitor, Cagey Calhoun, who ceaselessly tried to steal Mr. Sands' clients. Not so, Susie. Susie would resort to any sort of chicanery to keep International Artists flush and its clients happy. Susie, I'd say today, was the image of the Irish brawler, female-style.

Again, to the child that was me back then in the good old days, it didn't really matter if the Mr.-Sands-qua-Mr.-Sands character was something of an ineffectual cipher. Mr.-Sands-qua-father-figure clearly merited Susie's unstinting loyalty and support.


Fast forward to the early 1970s and "The Mary Tyler Moore" show. The show's perky star played Mary Richards, working girl. Mary worked as assistant producer in the newsroom of a Minneapolis TV station. Her "Mr. Sands" was the program-within-a-program's producer, Lou Grant. But in her case, this boss was no father-ideal.

Lou was surly, short-sighted, sexist, and occasionally downright mean. Most of his bad qualities were presented as the necessary evils of being an aggressive newsman in a cutthroat business. In other words, what made him a good news hound was precisely what made it impossible for him to act as Mary's surrogate father.

Then there were the other men on the staff: on-air personality Ted Baxter, too stupid, too vain, and too self-obsessed to be Mary's surrogate father; and head writer Murray, too much of a milquetoast.

Seen in this light, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was all about debunking — nay, deconstructing — the '50s-TV father figure!


Look, too, at "M*A*S*H," a program contemporary with "MTM," and like "MTM" vastly popular in the 1970s. "M*A*S*H" narrated the exploits of "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Alan Alda, a draftee surgeon in the Korean War who with his fellow medicos patched up the wounded as they poured into the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

The comedy was about as dark as was permissible on network TV in the '70s. As the show evolved, it got darker and darker. In its original conception, many of the gags centered around the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Henry Blake. Colonel Blake was the epitome of self-seekingness, if there be such a word. He knew he was in over his head, and his main goal in life was to prevent anyone else from finding that out. Not much in the way of a father-ideal there.

None of the other male characters in the original television cast lineup even came close to serving as the ersatz "father" of the 4077th. "Trapper John" McIntyre, Hawkeye's best buddy, was if anything more cynical than Hawkeye, and cynicism is not a fatherly trait. Major Frank Burns was a crybaby, a sneak, and a snitch. Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly was an overgrown child in an adult uniform.

Interestingly, the "M*A*S*H" creators were forced by the departures of the actors playing Col. Blake and Capt. McIntyre to recast several of its principal roles over the course of two successive seasons early in the show's long run. Enter Hawkeye's new best buddy, B.J. Hunnicutt. B.J. was conspicuously an uprooted family man, one of whose primary agonies was not being able to be present for the birth of his child. Enter, also, the new C.O., Colonel Sherman T. Potter, who for once gave the warped denizens of the 4077th M*A*S*H a paternal figure to watch over them.

By the way, one of the other regulars was a father, in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. Fr. John Patrick Francis Mulcahy, the unit's chaplain, was presented as a sympathetic character whose simple faith usually did not jibe with the sardonic, blood-soaked consciousness of the hospital mainstays. "M*A*S*H" presented old-style religion as quaint and out-of-date, and Fr. Mulcahy was portrayed as (sadly) disqualified, by his personal naiveté as much as by his Roman collar and priestly vestments, from acting as true father figure to the 4077th.

So "M*A*S*H," taken all in all, was ambivalent about father figures. The most you could hope for was this: that very, very occasionally, there may come along a man like Col. Potter who, by dint of his steel and personal integrity, deserves the respect once accorded automatically to any man who was, actually or symbolically, the "father" in a "family."


You can accordingly see, in retrospect, what a beating the father figure on TV took in a matter of two short but eventful decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. It's my belief that we are all worse off because of it.