Young and prudish

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail ran a "Facts and Arguments" essay by journalist and j-school prof Linda Kay. It was called "The teacher has no clothes":

I was applying body lotion in the locker room at the local YMCA, having just enjoyed an invigorating swim and a leisurely shower.

Standing stark naked with my hair wrapped in a towel, I heard someone approach and loudly exclaim, "Is that Professor Kay?" 

Oh yes, it certainly was. In all my glory.

Some of the comments on the story are hilarious. People wondering why she was naked in the locker room, for instance. Why not be more discreet? 

There's also an age-related thread running through both the essay ("It never fazed me to stand naked before fellow swimmers in my club, maybe because most of us were middle-aged and sagging in similar places"), and it comes up in one of the comments too.

Tom R from Victoria, Canada writes: My question has a little different slant but nonetheless relevant. Why do the younger men in my local rec centre... way too often hide themselves away so as to seemingly protect themselves from being seen by anyone else ?? What's their problem ?? This doesn't seem to be an issue for us older males.

Reading the piece, I found myself thinking about a misconception that I think dates from the 60s: the idea that younger people are more likely to be relaxed and comfortable about nudity. I never saw it when I was younger, and I certainly don't see it now. As one of the commenters (in a comment now deleted) wrote: where's the evidence that we are at all enlightened in 2008?

Adolescence and young adulthood are so much more fraught with concerns about image, and the way our bodies appear is the most personal manifestation of that concern. I've been in locker rooms and seen exactly what Tom R is talking about. High school and slightly older guys wrapping themselves up in towels, going off to the toilet stalls to change (yuk) and going through contortions to get dressed without showing any skin. Meanwhile, their elders are just going about their business -- shower, shave, sauna, get changed -- with minimal fuss. Some of the time they're naked, some of the time they're not. Big deal. 

Somehow we've absorbed the idea that youth equates with casual attitudes towards sex and nudity (hence the perennial teen sex panics in the media). It's a holdover. A cliche. And like all cliches, it's time for it to go.

What's with the Globe and Mail's letters page?

This must be one of the most annoying pages on the Internet -- and, mysteriously, it has survived several redesigns.

It's the Globe and Mail's letters to the editor page. When I pick up the print edition, it's the first place I turn. I'm not sure why -- habit probably. The letters used to be witty and incisive. Sometimes they still are, though not often enough.

But online? The page is a mess. 

The letters are grouped by subject. Usually. (Yesterday, the letters in response to Margaret Wente's claim that Canada was, in fact, "un pays de sauvages" before Europeans arrived took up most of the page, but were not all grouped together.)

For each letter, we see the name of the writer, and some text. Like this:

Nameless white crosses 
Judith Tanguay

Your front-page photo depicting the nameless white crosses that mark final resting places at Alberta's Wabasca Cemetery (Hunt Begins For Long-Missing Students - Oct. 27) sadly perpetuates a belief that this was unique to native children who attended residential schools. I recently visited a small Protestant cemetery in Hearst, Ont., that was established in the early 1900s. Of the 505 graves, 114 are anonymous and countless others unmarked.

Click the name of the letter-writer, and the rest of the letter appears.

Then there are letters like this one:

Victim of eco-bullying? 
Karen Shein 

Re Don't Carry A Cloth Lunch Bag To Work? Tsk, Tsk (Life, Oct 27): If an employee is going to act like a whiny and egocentric preschooler who does not yet understand that we all need to do our part to take care of the environment we all share, then it necessitates their being treated as such.

Click the name of the letter-writer and you see... the same letter again. The site doesn't distinguish between which letters are shown in their entirety, and which represent only the first paragraph.

In order to ensure that you catch each and every bon mot from the Globe's letter-writers, you have to click each and every one of their names. Which is ridiculous, of course.

Career move hall of fame

Constable Shaylene Paul was all set to start her first job with the RCMP. She'd be working out of the small-town detachment in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia.

So what does she do, four days before starting? Gets behind the wheel with too much alcohol in her system. Now she's pleaded guilty to impaired driving, has been fined, and has lost her licence for a year -- which should make it kind of hard to drive the cruiser, if she does ever get to start that job.

Karen Walton profile

Karen Walton is the screenwriter behind the cult teen werewolf hit Ginger Snaps. She also has a whole lot of other writing credits.

Today, she divides her time between Montreal and Toronto, with the occasional jaunt to LA. She's wrapped up adapting Michael Turner's great novel The Pornographer's Poem, and is working on a new film with Jean-Marc Vallée of C.R.A.Z.Y. fame. 

I interviewed Karen for the Fall 2008 issue of Canadian Screenwriter. I generally find screenwriters fun to interview. Especially Canadian ones. They know how to tell a good story, and even the successful ones live a relatively marginalized existence -- so they tend to be down to earth and honest.

Within moments of my first approaching Karen, she was sending emails that sounded like they were meant for an old friend.

It was also refreshing to speak to someone who was unabashed in expressing her complete lack of interest in directing:

"I totally admired the directors, and totally understood the nature of the performance required from the actors. But what I really wanted to do was to able to continue working with lots of different kinds of directors on lots of different kinds of projects. If you become an auteur, if you become the director, that changes. Because you only ever get to be on your own set. You only get to have a converastion with who you invite to the party. And I fell in love with the idea that I didn't know yet what was possible. And what I really wanted to do was hang out and work with directors, not be one.”

You can read my story here.  Then drop by ink canada, the Facebook group she started to bring Canadian screenwriters together. 

The Secret Men Won't Admit -- more radio

If you live in Atlantic Canada, you can hear me with Tom Young on The Afternoon News, Friday, October 17 at 2:30. The show is on the Rogers stations in the region: News 91.9 (Moncton), News 88.9 (St. John) and News 95.7 (Halifax). 

Listen in if you can!

The Secret Men Won't Admit -- radio interviews on men and depression

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be doing a bunch of radio interviews to talk about men and depression -- the subject of an article I wrote for the October 2008 issue of the Canadian Reader's Digest.

Today, October 16, I'm on The Gary Doyle Show, on CKGL 570 News in Kitchener, from 1:30-1:45 Eastern Time.

Obviously this is a subject that people respond to, because it is talked about so little. I'm hoping to do my bit to change that.

Our week of stewardship on Micou's Island

For a week in August, my family served as stewards on Micou's Island. It's a 22-acre jewel in St. Margaret's Bay -- one of the few islands in the bay that's not in private hands.

Being stewards meant living in the 1850s house on the island (cold running water, composting toilet, wood-fired cook stove), greeting visitors, and making sure people respected the island environment.

I also brought along a broadcast-quality recorder and made a radio documentary about our experiences -- which turned out to be a lot more eventful than we ever would have expected.

The documentary aired in Nova Scotia on the CBC Radio One program Mainstreet. You can listen to it here in mp3 format.

Putting your money where your mouth is -- but not where your wheels are.

I was at a small-town farmer's market on a recent Saturday. It takes place in the local hockey rink, and features a mix of artisans with sea-glass jewellery, market gardeners with organic produce, fair trade coffee, and pleas for local causes. The crowd was mostly locals, with a sprinkling of tourists. Many of the tourists' cars sported Obama bumper stickers.

Near the entrance to the market, one bumper sticker caught my eye: "I buy local first."

The sticker was on a Japanese car.