OK, so everybody can relax now, Poison Control tells me that compact fluorescent light bulbs do not contain toxic levels of mercury. And how might I have come into this information, you may well ask? Sit down, this is going to take a little while.

It’s July, in Oklahoma, and it is hot. The kind of hot I call “Killing Hot,” really too hot to take the kiddos to the playground very often. Unless we could manage to get out there by 8 am, but we can’t. Because this is me we’re talking about, here. The unrepentant night owl, the irascible morning grouch. So, the entire House has become a playground.

Last week Monkey’s bestest friend from school, Z., came over so his mama could go on a job interview. The kids needed perfectly clean, organized and clutter-free play-spaces, because half the fun of playing is making a mess. And we all know that the cleaner the room before, the more fun it is to mess it up!

But I digress. The day before Z. came over, I had my mother-in-law come over to watch the kids while I cleaned (mostly Pumpkin’s room, she’s destructo-girl!). Monkey is 5, Pumpkin is 3, I should be able to just go off into another part of the House and clean, without adult back-up, right? HA!!!! You don’t know my kids. I don’t dare leave these two unsupervised for longer than the time it takes to start a load of laundry or dishes. My daughter eats crayons, for Pete’s sake! And my son can field-strip every stick of furniture in the House (including the wall-mounted bookcases) in under ten minutes!

My request was simple: keep the kids in the living room while I pick up the bedrooms. Simple, yes. Easy, not by a long shot. My daughter is a world-class escape artist; she has defeated every single child-proofing product I have ever tried. She can even worm her way out of a snug five-point harness. She’s Houdini-toddler. So, yes it is disappointing that she managed to give Nana the slip, but it’s not surprising.

About 20 minutes into my cleaning, I walked out into the hall to see my pants-free toddler throwing her poopy diaper into my kitchen! It was like one of those slow-motion movie moments: I yelled, “Nooooooo!” while diving head-first, like some bizarro-world baseball player, for the noxious missile. I missed. It landed with a disheartening “splat!”, it was the sound of my failure as a parent. Please, somebody, anybody, tell me how to keep a diaper on a potty-training toddler.

After cleaning up that little unpleasantness, I had to sit down for a minute. Seemed like a good time to check my email, so I sat down with my laptop. And that’s as far as I got with that idea. I glanced over at my side table and saw the light bulb from my lamp, on the table.

We have had lamp troubles for years, 5 years to be exact. We used to have the cutest wooden-based lamps from IKEA. They lasted until my son started pulling himself up on the furniture. It never occurred to us that wooden lamps would be breakable, but he quickly showed us the error of our ways. Bye-bye cute table-top lamps!

What to do, what to do? Should we take the chance and get more table lamps? No way! We’re way too smart for that! Yeah right. So we did the most logical thing, we bought wall-mounted lamps. They are cute and simple and silvery. And no where near as child-resistant as I had hoped. My daredevil daughter just climbs the table or stands on the back of the couch to reach them. And she takes out the light bulbs. Every. Time.

With a roll of the eyes and a frustrated-mom huff, I dragged my tired self up to put that light bulb right back from whence it came. Until I touched a sharp edge. The tube was broken, it looked like a little slice had been removed. I knew exactly where to lay the blame–on my diaper-throwing daughter. Imagining glass shards embedded in tiny fingers, I checked and cleaned her hands. Then I looked for any stray bulb pieces on the table, couch, and carpet. Satisfied that bare hands or feet would be safe for the immediate future, I tried to pry some information out of Nana. She still swears that Pumpkin was with her the entire time.

I replaced the bulb and didn’t think a thing about it, until the next time she removed my light bulb. Then, on Sunday evening Nana called just to tell me about the scary-light-bulb story in the paper. I read the article when things finally settled down, the next day.

When a light bulb breaks, and this wasn’t the first one, I pick up the pieces and just put them in the trash. Silly me. According to the rather alarmist newspaper article, a broken CF light bulb is an environmental catastrophe second only to the Exxon Valdez. When that light bulb (often pronounced “light bub” here) broke, I should have evacuated the House, turned off the A/C, and called out the Hazmat squad.

Understandably concerned about the massive amount of mercury and who-knows-what-else Pumpkin may have come in contact with, I called the doctor’s office. The nurse suggested I call Poison Control, and maybe the EPA! Poison Control and I are old friends, I’m that mom who calls them when she gives the baby a tenth of a mil too much baby Tylenol. Then there was the time Monkey tasted diaper rash cream, they actually giggled about that one, where I could hear them. And once I called because Monkey found a stray carpet cleaning granule and put it in his mouth. The Poison Control Guy said, “Ma’am, that stuff is made of cellulose.” Yep, I called Poison Control because the baby ate paper.

Anyway, the long-suffering Poison Control man reassured me that the amount of mercury in a CF bulb is less than is found in a thermometer. He said that the minuscule amount of mercury is nowhere near enough to be toxic to her, “no matter what the internet says.” He was more concerned about cuts from the broken glass.

One lesson I took away from all this: if a toddler wants your light bulbs, she’s gonna get them. So to reduce the risk of injury, and to keep from having to replace ridiculously expensive CF bulbs all the time, I now remove the bulbs from the fixtures in the morning, before Pumpkin gets out of bed. So nobody needs to panic, everything’s under control.

I am currently watching Ni Hao, Kai-lan, even when the kids aren’t in the room. Right now, we are having a TV problem–it’s 10 years old, takes about an hour to warm up and until then the picture flips and distorts. So once the TV is on, it is on for the day, whether anybody is watching it or not. When the kids leave, I just mute the sound.

Anyway, Kai-lan is a nice show, Pumpkin likes it more than Monkey does, and even repeats the Mandarin words. The visual style is very simple and colorful. The characters remind me of a cross between Hello Kitty and an Avon “It’s a Small World” perfume bottle I had when I was a little girl. The only problem I have is not with the show itself, it’s with Nick, Jr. Love the shows, hate hate hate the commercials. I would pay cash money if my oldest didn’t have the Chuck E Cheese theme song memorized now.

The next show, Pokemon DP, is definitely a favorite of Monkey’s. He plays Pokemon something-or-other every night with his daddy, he’s got a bunch of the cards, and he adores the show. I’ve always liked anime, Robotech was one of my favorites in high school. The show is as intricate as the video games. Last week, Monkey found one of my pens and wrote a little “R” on the pocket of his grey t-shirt. He told me it’s because he’s a member of Team Rocket. Pumpkin hates the show and screams, “That’s not my favorite!” whenever Monkey watches it.

One show they both agree upon is a classic: Popeye. They love it! And they take turns pretending to be Popeye and Bluto. I hear a lot of talk about spinach, but it’s just the pretend kind. Actually offer them real live spinach and they act like you just served up a poop sandwich. One interesting thing–while they like to run around and make straws into corn cob pipes, they don’t hit each other! So that’s good. Another interesting little tidbit, it’s always Popeye and Bluto, Olive Oyl never figures into it. I don’t mind that at all. Olive Oyl makes the rest of us dames look bad! Seriously, that character plays into so many negative stereotypes of women that I’m glad she’s not included. She’s fickle, she’s irrational, she’s ditzy, she’s a bad driver, and she’s only a prop to further the Popeye/Bluto rivalry dynamic.

I’d be really worried if either my son or my daughter wanted to identify with such a character. But I’d be pleased if either one pretended to be Dora or Kai-lan. But alas, strong, capable, identifiably-human girl characters are few and far between. Well, there’s always Velma.

Every single one of my teenage years took place in the 80’s. I know this is the time about which I am supposed to wax nostalgic. But I won’t. I’m absolutely sure that there are some pathetic souls who look longingly back on their high school years as the their peak years, their best years, after which all else is downhill. That is so sad. When I left my high school, and the little town it was in, I shook its dust from my tiny shoes and never looked back. I even refused to attend my 10-year class reunion, thinking that a mere decade was not enough time in which real change can occur. In me or others.

This year I turned 40, officially entering middle-age and marking my 20th anniversary of not being a teenager anymore. In that 20 years I: have been married for 17 of them, had two beautiful, infuriating children, started writing again, swallowed the bitter pill and attended my 20-year class reunion, but I still don’t think I’ve reached my peak. I feel that I still have way more to accomplish, more to offer the world.

So I’m not one of those crotchety, stuck-in-the-past, “you kids get off my lawn!” types. The world of the 80’s was no utopia: cold war, the constant threat of nuclear war, apartheid, famine, AIDS, Ronald Reagan. But there were certain elements of the 80’s that I miss. The wildness and experimentation in fashion–clothes, hair, make-up, anything and everything goes. The music, oh the music. My iPod is just stuffed with music from the Eighties or with artists that got their starts in the 80’s. And not Top 40 stuff either, it’s New Wave, punk, or electronica. Artists that changed the aural landscape of music.

Something else I miss–the movies about teenagers. I was thankfully too young to be subjected to the “Porky’s” franchise but I was of an age to truly enjoy and relate to all the John Hughes movies. If you couldn’t relate exactly to one of his characters, at least you could relate to all the free-floating angst. Some movies were about the brand-new feelings and experiences that all teenagers have to go through, but which they all feel are unique unto themselves. “No one has ever felt this way before!” On a side note, I will have to try very hard not to laugh when I hear this kind of drama from my kids. It’s not the raw and new feelings that are so amusing, it is the absolute certainty that no one else in the history of humanity has ever felt thusly. Sixteen Candles springs to mind.

Some movies were subversive fun, all about refusing to submit and conform yourself to someone else’s goals and expectations. Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are both lovely examples.

We have bought a lot of these movies on DVD, and they hold up very well. Some of the movies I liked back then, seen first through naive and uncritical eyes, haven’t retained their charm. Dirty Dancing, oh the shame. I loved that movie so much that I cut off a pair of Levi’s just like Baby’s and wore them with white Keds. I think I watched it with my mom. And Footloose. I went to see this little gem with my friend Sheila and we loved it!!! Unalloyed adoration! We saw it at the dinky little one-screen movie theater that was then tucked into a corner at Ne-Mar Shopping Center in Claremore. Afterwards, we danced around like mad idiots, probably causing many shoppers to laugh their asses off at us. Did I mention that we were dancing on the covered sidewalks of Ne-Mar Shopping Center in Claremore, Oklahoma? Just want you to get the full effect.

And I won’t even go into Red Dawn.

We had our share of gross-out or overtly sexual or slasher movies. The aforementioned Porky’s is one such sterling example. Not to mention Nightmare on Elm Street. I actually lost sleep over that one. Curses on you, Wes Craven! So I’m not saying that all the teenage movies from the Eighties were more culturally worthy than the ones made in the 90’s or this decade.

And I’m not some conservative anti-everything curmudgeon who bemoans the coarsening of our culture. I just don’t think that recycling the same movie plots over and over is very fun. One plot I find particularly annoying is the ugly/nerdy/smart unpopular/miserably unhappy girl is magically transformed through the power of fashion and lipgloss into the prom queen. Along the way she has a magical awakening to the awesomeness of the high school Big Man on Campus, the one she either previously dismissed or secretly desired.

Over and over again we are presented with the smart but somehow socially unacceptable, unworthy of love girl who only becomes a fully realized, completely worthy person when she is turned into a beautiful, sexy girl. The nerd-girl, smart-girl cannot be celebrated for her brain power alone. Her talents are secondary or worthless in the face of her non-adherence to accepted beauty norms. She cannot be celebrated for her independence of spirit, she can only be feted when she conforms and sublimates herself to love! Only in the connection to a sought-after male is she deemed worthy.

There are three movies which point out the problem from different perspectives. There is one scene in The Breakfast Club which I find problematic. Ally Sheedy’s interesting, wholly subversive character is transformed with a headband and an eye pencil into a completely ordinary, socially-acceptable girl, whereupon she catches the fancy of the Big Man on Campus-in-residence. I always identified with Ally-before, not Ally-after.

Never Been Kissed is, of course, a more recent movie in the magic-makeover vein. While I generally enjoy this movie, I find the end to be both edifying and frustrating. At the prom scene, Drew Barrymore’s character, Josie Grossy, who is no longer gross, finds that she cannot make herself conform to the expectations of the popular crowd and forcefully rejects the kind of kids who used to reject her. The frustrating part is that when she finally receives her “first real kiss” from Sam, she is the transformed Josie still. She is no longer the slightly frumpy, mousy grown-up Josie from the beginning.

And finally, the Revenge of the Nerds movies. The nerds triumph over their rivals in all their nerdy glory! The nerds do not need to conform to societal norms to achieve success. My big problem is not the dearth of similarly triumphant lady nerds, but the fact that the nerds still crave and “win” hot girls. We see that the nerdy girls are no prize.

Why can’t the nerdy/smart girls triumph in all their nerdy, brainy, awkward glory? I am, and always have been, a nerdy girl. I didn’t have to transform myself into a living Barbie doll to find love, or success. Somebody, somewhere give us a Revenge of the Nerd-Girls movie!

Addendum: The movies listed are by no means all of my most favorites or my most hateds. Feel free to use the comments as an open forum. Tell us what you did and/or did not like about the 80’s or its pop culture. And share with us your most favorite and most hated movies from the Eighties!

Yesterday evening we drove over to Quiktrip to get a bag of ice and some desperately needed (by Monkey) bubble gum. While I was waiting in line, rather impatiently I might add as the bag of ice was dripping on my toes, I heard a very interesting exchange.

There was a very cute goth/punk/pagan girl standing in line in front of me. Her goth/punk/pagan boyfriend was talking to her very loudly. He said (and I paraphrase) “Now, you are next in line! Don’t let any of these other people push in front of you again. This always happens to you! You’re next! Only that guy was here before you were, all these other people walked up after you did!”

It may have sounded to an untrained ear as if he were yelling at her, berating her in public. But he wasn’t. He was addressing other people’s behavior problems in the most diplomatic means possible. He was putting everyone else on notice that his girlfriend was being treated rudely and he was not about to stand for it. I felt an immediate connection to this girl, to this couple. You may remember, from my last post, the man and his eight family members who tried to line-jump me at the food court. Well, this seriously happens to me all the time! Unless Hubby is with me. Nobody ignores Hubby. He is a big, tall, imposing guy and strangers don’t know he’s just a really nice man. The boyfriend probably sees that all the time, too.

The boyfriend was no where near as big as Hubby, but as he is goth/punk/pagan he probably scares the bejeebers out of people. I don’t say pagan lightly, they were both wearing/tattooed with pentagrams. I have never been scared of goth/punk/pagan people, why would I be? I used to dress like that. In fact, I still have an affinity for black clothing, kind of like Johnny Cash. Just call me The Mom in Black.

Anyway, not only was this girl dressed the way I used to dress, she was wearing nerd glasses much like mine. I looked at her and thought, OMG! This is me twenty years ago! Since she’s probably used to being treated like she’s a scary weirdo, (gasps, hushed and hidden whispers, mothers pulling their children away in fear that the weird may be contagious) I knew I had to say something nice and positive to her. Just to let her know that there is somebody out there who gets it.

I could’ve commiserated with her over the line-jumping thing, but it may be as sensitive a subject for her as it is for me. So I decided to compliment her appearance in some way. I liked her glasses and the very impressive spiked collar she was wearing, but I chose to say her wallet was cute. She was holding it quite prominently on the counter in front of her, almost brandishing it, but more closely, putting it on display. And I don’t blame her, it was a truly interesting wallet. It looked just like this one.

I absolutely love things that are dark and kind of creepy. Halloween is vying with Christmas for favorite holiday status. My favorite tales are supernatural ones: ghosts, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, vampires, ghost-lights, UFO’s. I don’t care for the gory stuff though.

So I said, “I love your wallet. That is so cute!” She answered, “Thanks! I got it on E-bay!” You can never go wrong complimenting a lady’s handbag.

Fortunate. Unfortunate. The Prairie Family has terrible luck or incredibly good luck, depending on how you look at it.

The air conditioner at the House started malfunctioning on Saturday. This is July. In Oklahoma. Absolutely, positively the month that no one wants the air conditioning to go on the blink. It’s something to do with the condenser pump, I think. Before the repairman showed up Saturday morning, we were able to get the pump to work and the air conditioner to run. So we cancelled. Then we did our shopping (local produce and meats) and dropped by the Apple Store to check on iPhones. No dice.

So we went home to a cool House and planned a day trip to Oklahoma City for the next day. By Sunday morning the air conditioning was malfunctioning again. The repairman never returned our call so we turned it off, closed up the House, and headed out. This past weekend was the mildest July weekend I have ever experienced in Oklahoma, so we figured that things wouldn’t get too unbearable in the House. We’d be back just about the time when day was fading into night and the temperature falling.

Things didn’t go according to plan. The drive up on I44 was uneventful, minus the occasional backseat outburst. Things didn’t start to go awry until we got to the Apple Store. Last year, when the first iPhone was released, Hubby walked into the store on the Sunday following and walked out with an iPhone not ten minutes later. This year was a bit different. There was no way I was taking Monkey and Pumpkin into the Apple Store, so we did a little shopping in Pottery Barn Kids. Then we went to the Food Court to eat lunch. Big mistake.

When I saw that line at the one and only fast food joint the kids were willing to entertain, my heart sank. I just knew that waiting in that line with those kids was destined to end in sorrow. I was right. Maybe the children were really as awful as they seemed to be, or maybe I was just magnifying normal but rowdy behaviors into monstrosity because of the stress of waiting with two hungry kids in the longest lunch line ever. When the end was in sight, after about a jillion years, some dude decided he was going to take advantage of my seeming distraction and line-jump me. With all eight of his family members in tow.

He picked the wrong mean mama to mess with, at the wrongest possible time! This happens to me a lot. I’m short, I’m a mom, I’m not hot, so therefore, I am invisible. But something in me snapped. “Sir!” I said to him. Nothing. Louder, “Sir!” still nothing. Finally, in my best drill-sergeant-mama voice, I yelled, “SIR! I WAS NEXT!” I can’t make my son stand still and quiet in public, but I can make a grown man tuck tail and slink away! I do not believe that is a mistake he will ever make again.

I was too shaken to eat, but I got food into the kids. By the time they were finished and cleaned up, Hubby had his new phone and we left to go procure lunch for ourselves.

We’ve been to OKC many, many times, and I even have family there, so we are fairly familiar with the general lay-out. I wanted us to take Route 66 home, all the way from Edmond, so I could take pictures of the Round Barn in Arcadia, but alas it was not to be. At least not yet. Since we had to go through Edmond anyway, we pulled into a Sonic there to eat. We ordered, our food arrived, and Hubby turned off the car. And immediately turned it back on for the air conditioning. It was our undoing.

Now, I have never heard automatic weapons fire in real life, only in the movies or on TV, but something began making a loud, repetitive noise, “BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!” We thought somebody was shooting at us until I noticed red-brown “smoke” kicking up from under our car. Hubby turned off the car and made me get out to see what made the racket. I ask you, why am I always the one who has to look under the car? I don’t know anything about cars! Oh yeah, I’m not the one with the hurt back. Anyway, I could see a black hose dangling loose off the underside and a piece of black hose that had apparently shot off as shrapnel lying on the ground next to the car. The poor people in the next car over were visibly shaken but pointing, and trying to help. There was a puddle of apple-green stuff under the dangling hose. This could not be good.

I borrowed a phone book, called a wrecker, and my uncle. He drove his SUV to the Sonic, helped us load the baby seats into it, and graciously took us into his home. The wrecker followed us there, where we parked our poor, sick car.

But while we were waiting for all these things to transpire, I had time to think about our predicament. O.K., bemoan our predicament. I kept wondering what somebody or something was trying to tell us, tell me. And what that information might be. Why would such a string of bad luck hit us? Just last week, I had to pay a ridiculous amount of money to get the front end of the car fixed like new. Then the House A.C. breaks, then the car breaks down, while we’re out of town! Woe is me! Woe is us!

I am a big believer in the power of the mind and the power of the spirit. We shape our own reality through our thoughts. If you look for bad things to happen, you’ll find them. And not to sound like a Pollyanna, if you expect good things to happen, then good things will happen. To a degree. No amount of positive thinking was going to keep the car from breaking down; all the negative thoughts in the world can’t make an air conditioner break down. I have seen the power of prayer, but prayer is not some incantation that will magically fix broken machinery.

After much thought, it occurred to me that we didn’t suffer a run of bad luck, we benefited from an extraordinary concatenation of positive events that ameliorated the negative effects of bad stuff that was going to happen anyway. Our car broke down while we were away from the House, but just a handful of miles from my aunt and uncle. A week from now, they won’t be there, so how incredible to find them at home. We passed a decent repair shop on our way to their house. The repair shop was able to fix our car early Monday morning, so we were able to leave for Tulsa just after noon.

And about our House air conditioning? After sitting dormant for almost two days, it came back on and worked well enough to keep us and the kids comfortable until the repairman arrived this morning. Only a new air filter and some cleaning and servicing had to be done, no major repairs.

During what promised to be the hottest part of the day, we were stranded in Edmond, in my aunt and uncle’s air conditioned home. The babies got to sleep in cool comfort, not in a stuffy, hot House.

Oddly enough, it was a high-pressure air-conditioner hose that caused that BANG-BANG-BANG sound. And the red-brown smoke? Just some of central Oklahoma’s famous red dirt.

So, you see, it’s all in how you look at it.

So, I’ve been doing some research on women’s fashions in the Civil War-era, specifically the incidence of pants-wearing women, and have found some very funny stuff.

Here’s a big news flash for all my readers who may be unfamiliar with various lunacies of the fundie crowd: pants are sinful. At least on women. Here’s my favorite online resource about hell-bent ladies’ trousers– Jesus-is-savior.com. My most favorite part is how, in his fervor to denounce all of us panted hussies, he gives free advertising to rap artist, Chingy. Mr. Stewart, after not getting enough titillation-factor from the title alone, felt it necessary to include all of the lyrics, suitably sanitized for our virgin eyes of course. I find it very interesting that Mr. Stewart is apparently taking his cultural direction from Chingy. I mean, come on, he is totally ignoring the incredible artistic contribution of one Trace Adkins and his incomparable “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” Man, that’s just sloppy.

I won’t even go into the historical flap that women’s pants have caused; the modern stuff is too much fun! Whenever one of these discount-theologians wants to back up his (usually a man, sometimes a defeated woman) personal biases, he quotes Deuteronomy or Leviticus. Yeah, these guys always use the Old Testament when they feel the need to condemn others, but I just always wonder how many of them have eaten bacon or a cheeseburger recently. Oops.

But Deuteronomy says that women shouldn’t put on things that pertain to men! And that men shouldn’t dress like women! Oh noes! Interestingly enough, nobody wore pants in the Old Testament. Everybody wore some version of a robe-like garment. So even if one is given to a literal interpretation of the O.T., except for that whole bacon-thing of course, there is NO specific prohibition against women wearing pants! But God-fearin’ folk will work themselves up into knots fretting about, not poverty, not injustice, not genocide, not oppression, not violence, but pants. Pants. Let the absurdity sink in a bit. Let it roll around in your brain for a while, as you try to understand someone whose faith is so shaky, so tenuous that it can be destroyed by pants. O.K., by women in pants. The devil’s own pants.

If you would like to see the preponderance of this opinion for yourself, just google women wearing pants, you’ll see. Another common theme in the know-what’s-better-for-women-than-the-women-themselves crowd is bringing up dubious sociological studies that allegedly prove that the eyes of both women and men are drawn to a woman’s butt and crotch when she is clad in pants. As opposed to what happens when said woman is dressed in a shapeless, ankle-grazing calico bag of a dress, where people look only at the woman’s face. My opinion on that one is that people are desperately trying not to stare at the hideous dress, because staring is rude.

And you know what, people notice each other’s appearances. We all look at faces and hairstyles and clothing and even shoes. We notice if someone’s hair is unkempt, we notice if a woman’s slip is showing, we notice if a kid has on an emo belt, and yes, we notice if someone has a nice caboose. Sighted people always notice appearances first, so what. Women have shapes, curves, actual physical bodies, and if a man can’t handle that it’s his own fault, not the woman’s.

The anti-pant crowd wants women to believe that shapeless dresses are somehow freeing. Freeing us poor, helpless frails from the unwanted lustful stares of big, bad men who just can’t help themselves in the powerful presence of our awesome sexiness. And they say feminists hate men. But I’m not in charge of another person’s lustfulness, I’m only in charge of my own. And that’s another thing. Men wear pants, does that mean I’m supposed to stare at them and not be able to control myself?

I guess the assumption is that women don’t lust after men. Maybe we’re too busy tempting hordes of fine, upstanding christian gentlemen into sin with our devil-pants. So, on one hand, we are wicked temptresses, well-versed in the siren-call of trousers-wearing. And on the other hand, we are demure, innocent creatures, who never lust after anyone, suitable only for patronizing and protecting. The only reason that fundamentalist heads are not exploding over this dichotomy is because fundamentalists are given to living unexamined lives. But, guess what, women do lust, so what.

But, but, but. Lust is a sin! You say that like it’s a bad thing. Hate to tell these people, but lust is sort of the very thing that has kept the human race going during the worst of times. The Great Depression wasn’t the most stable time to have children, but humans just insisted on reproducing. Times of war, disease, and famine are terrible times to bring children into the world, but since one of those things is almost always happening, what are we to do? Let the human race die out because we think lust is icky? But I digress.

For centuries, women were hobbled by their clothing. Corsets made it difficult to breath and impossible to move freely. Hoop skirts made the mere act of sitting down an exercise in embarrassment. Long skirts and multiple petticoats had to be held aloft as women walked around, effectively tying their hands. And those long skirts and petticoats often cost women their lives, by catching fire or becoming heavy with water and drowning them, or by catching in machinery. Long sleeves could also be caught in household or farm or factory machinery, causing injury or death. Yards and yards of heavy fabric were literally shackles around the ankles of the women who had to wear them.

And this pining for the modesty of an earlier time is misplaced at best. Corsets and bustles were designed to exaggerate the natural curves of a woman’s body. And we fetishize what we take pains to hide. There were times when the bodices of dresses were cut just barely high enough to cover the nipple, yet a stolen glimpse of black-stockinged ankle was scandalous! And trust me, people given to the practice of fetishisizing women are only going to be spurred on by the all-covering, ankle-grazing dress. Imagination is often more titillating than reality. “What’s under that dress!”

The issue here really is freedom, or rather, freedoms. Fundamentalist men, of all stripes, want the freedom that comes with not taking any responsibility for their own baser desires, and instead, off-loading all of society’s ills onto all women. I should actually say all females, because these men get started with the woman-blaming while the women are still little girls. Hello? Purity Balls?

And pants give freedom to women. The freedom to move without restriction, the freedom to do the hard work that our lives require, the freedom to run if we need to, and the freedom to fight if we must. The freedom to not worry about a stiff wind, the freedom to get dirty, and the freedom to have warm legs.

It is this feminine freedom that the fundamentalists fear. Before the freedom of pants and the throwing-off of the corsets, men could rest assured, basking in the certainty of their superiority over the “weaker sex.” But it was the clothes, the fabric shackles that kept women weak and helpless. The days of corsets and crinolines and fainting couches are over! Now we have the vote, our own jobs, and the devil’s own pants–the fabric shackles are off.