Pen-Elayne on the Web

Greetings from TMI-Ville

Well, you wouldn't know it to look at it, but today was Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. My thoughts on this can be found here - essentially, that I feel the Ms. Foundation people completely capitulated on this issue to anti-feminist corporate morons who whined, "well, what about the boyyyyys?" Instead of saying, "Hey men and boys, it's not always about you!" and re-emphasizing the original point of the day - "to introduce girls [my emphasis] ages 9 to 15 to the workplace, and to help them feel that their future participation in the labor force is both expected and welcome" - backed up by studies which have shown that girls' self-esteem plummets at that age, whereas boys' self-esteem is just fine and dandy, they just blanded the hell out of it. So not only don't I know any businesses commemmorating the day now that it's fairly pointless and toothless, but I don't care.

Something about which I do care is the separation of the public and private spheres, and the nonsense that always seems to happen when people confuse the two. Take Senator Sanctimonious Santorum - please. By now we all know what he said, and what he said he meant, and what a number of other bloggers have to say about it. To me the best analysis was from Brooke Biggs' friend Lee, who noted that Santorum was comparing apples and oranges by conflating things he found morally icky with things that are illegal. The former (for instance, gay sex) is a matter of the private sphere, whereas the latter (for instance, gay marriage) is a matter of the public sphere. Lots of consenting adults do stuff behind closed doors that bothers lots of others. I mean, I doubtless have some sort of mental list of all the human sexual permutations that make me squeamish.

But I learned awhile back, somewhere in my early 20's, that the stuff that constituted Too Much Information (TMI) was usually None of My Business as long as nobody involved was getting hurt (yeah yeah, but That's consensual so That's not what I'm talking about), and if I'm not directly asked my opinions about someone's sex life the best thing to do is just keep my mouth shut. (And that's not self-censorship, it's common sense and civility.) Heck, even when I am directly asked, I usually squirm out of it. It's just TMI, you know? What's with these people far older and presumably more experienced in matters of civility? Were they somehow not raised to understand the difference between stuff that's private to other people and therefore None of Their Business and stuff that actually affects other folks in the public sphere and therefore Merits Public Legislative Discussion? If Sanctum Santorum were actually queried on what he thought of gays he might've just said, "I think guy-on-guy is kinda icky and it makes me uncomfortable and I'm sorry that's just my personal opinion but it should have nothing to do with passing laws against it," but I get the feeling he volunteered to shoot his mouth off (why do fundies being somehow compelled to pontificate all the time?). The best course of action would of course have been to recognize that his personal views on private matters didn't belong in a public sphere because, well, those matters are basically None of His Business. Unlike statements he makes on the public record, which of course become totally our business.