Pretty Little Liars (Log of Basic Parenting Functions)

Many condescending, path-of-least-resistance experts agree that shows about teenage girls are silly and shallow and frivolous and that their only purpose is to show off unreasonable fashions and make real girls hate their bodies/parents/common sense. What should be obvious to the entire universe is that, at the present time, we are making shows about teenage girls because it is the only format to showcase scorched-earth warfare amongst rooms upon rooms full of sociopaths that can be broadcast anywhere except for HBO or, like, the History Channel. Shows about teenage girls are often rife with social commentary, wit (ranging from dark to high), and a jarring combination of wrath and vulnerability - some of the most important parts of the spectrum of human people feelings - that is allowable because that's what little girls are made of, especially the ones trapped in the land between autonomy and tyranny: the development stage of the superpowers of sexuality and adulthood. Now if you know me (and you do, dear reader), you know that I have crowned Gossip Girl (especially season one Gossip Girl) the prince of all teen girl shows of this type. But you may not know that I've recently started watching Pretty Little Liars, which is like... a duke or something.

Now I have like a billion things I could say about PLL, and I probably will eventually, but the thing I'm going to talk about today is the awesome knack the show has for targeting basic parenting functions and describing them via negative space, rather than touching on them directly. If you've ever been a teenager, you know that the world at that point is defined by blanks, and you spend all your time trying to fill them in or not being aware that they exist or some horror-story combination of those things. PLL knows this too. The show is clearly written by grownups who know the importance of basic parenting, but also know the power of tangents and of source material (PLL was once books).

So you have all these amazingly terrible parenting calls that are never called out. Like OK you know in most shows where parenting exists, and a parent does something fail-based, there's a Special Full House Moment where the parent realizes effing up has occurred and Makes It Right/Resolves to Never Again Fail. Now, I'm not saying PLL is entirely devoid of those moments, but for the most part, the realization never happens. Nor does any other plot device make it clear to Girl X that her parental unit has effed up but hardcore. They just let it sit there, this terrible parenting choice that caused 30% of the show's creepy plot, skating tangent to a huge black hole.

I love it. The part of the show that actually hooked me was this scene where Former Fat Girl/Current Beauty Queen Hanna is sitting in her kitchen, being miserable because she is having issues with her boyfriend and some thin girl has been driving him to school (since our girl Hanna fully wrecked his car on purpose). The mom comes home from fancy dinner, bearing lamb chops. Hanna explains the situation, the terrible shame of having allowed skinny girl to drive boyfriend to school. Mom gives Hanna the lamb chops. Hanna is fully like, "Why are you feeding me when I allowed this to happen?!"

In any other show, this is where we would address Hanna's eating disorder. The mom would make a concerned face, realizing that she, in her obsession with beauty and being taken care of by men, has effed up her daughter to the point that a) food is only allowed on good behavior days, b) one should feel personally ashamed if one's man-property is allowed in the vicinity of c) girls who are thin and therefore irresistibly superior to girls who are less thin, and d) one should feel more ashamed of this than, say, the actual act of destroying the property of a significant other. Or, it's possible that she wouldn't, but somebody else towards the end of the episode would address all this stuff, possibly to Hanna or possibly to Hanna's mom. But on PLL, this realization never happens, and you learn more about good parenting by the scary vacuum made by bad parenting.

So, OK, here's my list of Basic Parenting Shit, per the black holes in Pretty Little Liars:

1. It is not OK to force your child to be in the same living situation as someone who frightens her/him. This is never ever cool. Your whole basic job as a parent is to keep your kid from getting murdered. If your kid is convinced that she is about to be murdered, her word is law, whether you believe her or not. I mean, barring a history of psychological illness that manifests as paranoid delusions. Because like best case scenario, you're teaching your child that her fear instinct is to be ignored for the sake of courtesy, and later on in life she will ignore it right into a stranger's car and get assaulted. Plus, you give her the psychological damage of having an unsafe home environment. And, like, worst case, she is right and she gets murdered and you let that happen.
2. Don't over-respect your child's privacy. Your job, again, is to keep her from getting murdered. It's important to know about the people and things in her life, so you know about what might murder her. Or statutory rape her.
3. If you have decided to cheat on your spouse, besides the obvious stuff of just don't do that, you should also not draw your child into that shit. If she finds out about it, it's time to come clean, immediately, to the whole world, so that it stays your malfunction and doesn't become hers. Under no circumstances should you blackmail her, emotionally or otherwise, into a secret-keeper role. Under no circumstances should you pretend like you didn't do anything wrong, or that the wrongness is in the past so why is she holding onto this. Under no circumstances should you try to get her OK on your behavior, because her ethics are still under construction, and what you convince her to be OK with will be part of their foundation. Plus like generally you should not be treating your child as your partner over your spouse because that way lies creepiness and confusion.
4.  If you get weird about the basic stuff of your child's sexuality (i.e. she should have none, or her orientation is wrong, or stuff like that) you may well forfeit the parental right/obligation to talk about all other parts of the ongoing sex conversation, because she now recognizes instinctively that you are an unreliable governor of that stuff and every official statement on that front is called into question. Like, you can no longer say, "It is inappropriate to study up in your room on your bed with your significant other who has a drug problem," because this reasonable truth is now undercut by your weirdness about the significant other being a same-sex significant other.
5. Introduce change gradually. Teenagers are all born revolutionaries just waiting for the call to arms. If you pull a regime change (divorce, remarriage, sleeping with cops to get your child out of shoplifting fines, inviting murderers to live in the guest house) too suddenly, they will go super-crazy until they are like... twenty-five years old.

Next time, we talk about all the things wrong with statutory rape. Or possibly why teenage girls get so weird in their support of same-sex couples.

A Lady's Toilette (Babel)

It is widely regarded that women* are too devoted to their toilette. This is particularly true in conjunction with the related theory many experts have advanced, which suggests that the feminine grooming regimen is frequently both unnecessarily cumbersome and rife with frivolity.


It's a matter of even more debate than your average no-frills abstainer might believe -- a subject of both internal and external conflict. Women are given a thousand reasons to love and hate their style.** A thousand million jillion reasons to feel soft and weak or pert and sassy for embracing a regimen of attraction, for spending money on ornament, for devoting time and pain and frustration to a curl in the hair and a clean sweet brow. For their obsession with the waistline. But as one of the shackled, I propose that it doesn't insult anyone to recognize style for what it is - one of the more precious and ephemeral arts granted to those of us trying to become or express something beyond us. 

Dear reader, I imagine I'm not alone when I wonder why I care so much about the fussier aspects of personal presentation. I wasn't raised that way; my mom talked about makeup and clothes as though they were at best an illusion demanded by an unconscionable world that fails, constantly, to see the spirit in the eyes or the laughter in the mouth. I was raised to comb my hair and keep my clothes neat, but not to devote myself to them. Certainly I'm aware that all these extras aren't necessary to function in the world, that they at times hold a person back in certain aspects of her life. So when I get caught up in lipstick or shoes or any of that hellish paraphenelia, or when that sudden nauseating wave of perfectionism sweeps over me in the morning and I can't leave the room because of the failure to be what I imagine, I feel guilty. Sad, even. Because sometimes I've had trouble addressing the real issue at hand, the real question that validates any practice:

What do we hope to achieve?

Money/wealth/attention? Fame/desire? Is it really an anthropological condition? To make a display of our shall-we-call-them-virtues, of our wealth so that the universe knows that we're to be taken care of? I don't think that's the case anymore. For some, maybe - for people who don't understand what's best about themselves, or who adhere to an outdated blueprint of how to build oneself as a women. But for the most part, for most thoughtful people and for most thoughtless people too, I think that religion is old, done for, if we examine it. That god isn't real.

But on the other hand, neither is it vestigial. Instead, the art/religion*** has evolved. 


It's easy to understand style as an art form from the outside. For instance, in like every single makeover movie ever, there's a moment of presentation, where the new version of the heroine is presented. Say, descending a spiral staircase and a spiraling soundtrack. We understand this as a frame. What we tend not to acknowledge is what is being communicated within that frame. That a woman's careful choice of clothing and hair and all that is meant to say something more serious than we've given it credit for. Women, like all people, struggle with the constant awareness of something invisible and better, something that definitely needs to be explained beyond the limits of vocabulary. In this effort, we've been afforded -- maybe not kindly, but at least happily -- the exciting toolbox that is the human presentation. 


This is why I do what I do in the morning, or before I go out. This is the base level of why we do anything right now - it's not about survival or breeding. It's about trying to craft yourself into a discrete and temporary note that passes with and in the click of our own heels, meant not just to exist but also to communicate. Each of us is a tiny Babel, designed and erected, propped up even, home to the unified language of appearance.

Laughing at women's hourly struggle with this expression is cruel and far more frivolous than any shade of nail polish. Because of every medium, anywhere, there's no finer instrument of dreams than the human form. Maybe we should feel lucky instead of dismissive that there are a hundred artists passing each of us every day; it's not wrong, as a member of the transient audience, to feel vulnerable to them. 


*The author understands that men undergo varying amounts of personal prep-work, too. However, the demons that topic wrestles with are often otherwise focused, and are certainly divergent enough to require their own later review.


**Today we're dealing with style rather than beauty.


***A blurry line that probably won't be reviewed on account of where are the experts who agree on that?