Raising WEG

When did Attachment Parenting go mainstream and why was I not told?

I should not be reading mainstream media during the last week of the semester (my only excuse: the silly-season makes a nice break from what actually matters in this world) but too late now. I just read something truly, mind-bendingly stupid in the Wall Street Journal's review of The Conflict (a book about how attachment parenting destroys women):

It is also worth highlighting France's grown-up attitude to sex. Co-sleeping and militant breast-feeding are aggressively antisexual; the mother is a mammal, nothing more. "A mother cannot be consumed by her baby to the point of destroying her desires as a woman," Ms. Badinter writes. "The devotees of extreme mothering have nothing to say on this score." Where French doctors ask, "Is Monsieur happy?" to check whether new mothers are exercising their pelvic floor muscles, American child-rearing specialists recommend that the baby establish dominion over the marital bed. Aficionados of progressive motherhood seem to view recreational sex within a marriage as essentially frivolous—a childish thing to be put away when the baby is born. This attitude is, rightly, met with incomprehension and slight disgust in France.

So, this will read as a rational rebuttal, but please know that my head just exploded.

(1) Asking a post-partum woman if monsieur is happy is not actually feminist.

(2) Something like two American child-rearing specialists recommend co-sleeping. Everyone else, including your child's actual pediatrician, urges parents not to do it.

So how many American parents are deliberately practicing co-sleeping? With their infants, and not their wakeful preschoolers at 3am? I don't know, but it's less than 13 percent.

Alert the feminists. Get those formula factories churning. We have a serious problem to solve.

[April has turned into the month when everything stupid pisses me off.]

Why I have a hard time worrying about New York publishers

Look at the numbers on the Y axis there. Then tell me why I care if the big New York publishers live or die.

The Hunger Games Reviewed

We went to see the Hunger Games on (multiplex) Imax this evening. I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie on opening day -- the energy of the crowd alone was worth the extra charge to order tickets in advance. A group of women ahead of us in the line asked Calder to take their photo. Two different groups of people made conversation with us, in the line and then waiting for the movie to start. There was this collective "shush" when the Lionsgate production card unfolded on the screen.

I really, really love stadium seating in movies -- it's hard to remember now how important it was not to sit behind grown-ups when I was a kid. What do you mean, you bought a ticket without a guarantee that you'd see the whole screen? Gemma, Elba, and Wilder were not the youngest people in the theater. The big screen was definitely big.

The previews for Prometheus, Spider Man, and the Avengers were just Too Loud. The kids were cringing in their seats and covering their eyes. There must be such a desensitization process there, because I know that lots and lots of their friends are going to those cartoony action movies now (maybe not Prometheus?) but they are Not Ready. Then again, I don't know if there's much of a curve. It seems as if, one day you see that gateway movie, and then you're off and running.

I don't think The Hunger Games was their gateway movie. We were all pretty worried about Glimmer and Cato's deaths, but they were pretty abstact in their gruesomeness. I think the super-fast scene-cutting during every one of the battle sequences made it almost impossible to tell that anything was happening. There was a lot of super-fast scene-cutting right from the beginning, actually. I'm too old for that crap: please hold the camera in place and let me see what you're showing me, thanks.

I have a soft-spot for Stanley Tucci going back to Big Night, and he didn't let me down; Woody Harrelson was also extremely satisfying (although not as drunk and disheveled as in the books). I was disturbed to realize that Wes Bentley made me sympathize with Seneca Crane. Lenny Kravitz was just ... perfect. SWOON.

Amandla Stenberg did a fantastic job as Rue. How we define our families and our communities affects our lives, so it matters that the audience joins Katniss in seeing Rue as the beautiful sister that she couldn't protect. It seems to me that writers don't give African-American girls the chance to play the angel very often.

Jennifer Lawrence was great. I still wish they'd cast a mixed-race girl, as the book implies Katniss was, but Lawrence does such a great job. A great job. I've read a lot of complaints about Josh Hutcherson's portrayal of Peeta but I thought he did good, believable work.

The kids had a lot of quibbles with the movie (they didn't think Donald Sutherland was scary enough as Snow), but they were generally satisfied. They really enjoyed the behind-the-scenes views of the game-makers. They all three agree that the books are better. Calder, who's the only person in the family not to have read the books (they weren't read-alouds: Elba brought them home from our church library and read them on her own before evangelizing the family) -- Calder was not particularly impressed. He thought the major plot point (the rule changes in the arena) was "goofy." He thought the love triangle was unconvincing. I told him to blame the book.

When we came home, we found newborn gerbils in Elba's room. I count six, I think. They can't be more than a couple of hours old.