Crotch District Attorney, and Reverend Haggard

Two related emails have arrived in my inbox. The first is spam, or at least I infer that it's spam from the fact that the sender is unknown to me and the subject line, in its entirety, is: "crotch district attorney." I mentioned this to my mom and asked if she thought I should open it--not because I want computer viruses, but just because I'm curious what text could possibly correspond to that title--and she said, "Not without a condom."

The second is a New York Times article headlined, "Haggard Pronounced 'Completely Heterosexual.'" This article contains an extremely interesting definition of "completely heterosexual," which boils down to something like "Reverend Haggard is completely heterosexual in the sense that, during the three years he spent having amphetamine-fueled sex-fests with a male prostitute, he was only acting out. And it won't happen again, we don't think." Aren't these the same people who mocked President Clinton for quibbling about what the definition of "is" was? Apparently rhetorical hair-splitting is only allowed if you're a Republican McEvangelist.

The Mama Manifesto

I just had a brilliant idea, I think. Here it is: if I have kids, then no one, but no one, is ever allowed to refer to me as "mom." They must use the word "mama" instead. Cool women of America, unite: we should all do this! I could go on and on about the reasons why, but here are the main ones:

• Reason #1: No one talks about "mom" and eroticism in the same breath. But people do say "she's one sexy mama," "one hot mama," etc. Okay, I gotta admit that no one I know says that, but still: it's in the lexicon.I don't know what's up with this weird Anglo-Saxon desexualization of mothers--remember how people flipped out when Demi Moore posed nude for a magazine cover when she was heavily pregnant? Notice how in this culture it's okay to display acres of cleavage in public, but much less okay to breastfeed in public? I don't know what's up with that and I'm not even going to go there, nor will I let anyone put me there by calling me "mom." Instead, muchas gracias, I'll stick with the hot and womanly Spanish/Italian/French word: mama/mamma/maman. As in, "That's one sexy mama over there by the cafe window, breastfeeding and reading a novel."
• Reason #2: When parents talk about each other with their children, they use titles instead of names ("Don't cry, mom's coming right back," etc.). I do not want the father of my children referring to me with the same word he uses to refer to his own mother. That's just too weird, not to mention unsexy.
• Reason #3: As evidenced by the fact that some black and Latino dudes standing on urban sidewalks in the summertime address every hot grown woman who walks past as "mama" (or little mama, pretty mama, mamita, whatever), a "mama" is a woman who may or may not also be a mother. A "mom" is a mother, first and foremost, period, case closed. Presumably she's female (though the movie Mr. Mom suggests she might not even be that), but the main point, the fulcrum of her identity, is that she's someone's mother. But I've been on this earth for over thirty years without being anyone's mother. I have an identity. I understand that having kids is a life-changing event, that it changes your sense of who you are, etc. etc. But it doesn't kill who you were and replace that with a whole new identity. Not unless you let it, that is.