c.1997, San Francisco Chronicle=@
The heroine of the upcoming film ``Kissed'' is a young woman who has such a thing for dead bodies that she likes to cuddle and snuggle and boogie with them all night long. She's a necrophiliac, and while her relationships are one-sided and not exactly consensual, she's happy, and the movie is happy for her.
``Kissed'' is just one sexually perverse film making its way into theaters in 1997. But wait, there's more. What's the sexiest film in theaters right now? The obvious answer is David Cronenberg's ``Crash,'' about a small group of oddballs who get off on car crashes, like to press themselves up against cold metal and are turned on by scars from accidents.
Then there's ``Bliss,'' the touching tale of a married woman (Sheryl Lee) who goes to an unconventional sex therapist (Terence Stamp), who turns out to be (set ital)very unconventional.
``There is certainly a lot of sex in movies today,'' says Dr. John De Cecco, director of human sexuality studies at San Francisco State University. ``In the process, there's obviously going to be a lot of interest in moving out to the margins of what is conventional.''
Perversion is so popular these days that there's a film in the works called ``Female Perversions,'' which is not even about perversion. And a documentary about a masochist, ``Sick,'' was considered a highlight of this year's Sundance Film Festival.
De Cecco points out that ``sexual perversion'' is a 19th century term. ``Perverse was meant in the sense of ... not taking the conventional route of marriage and procreation. So even homosexuality fell under that rubric.''
So did extramarital sex. Take a look at the treatment of illicit affairs in early feature films. Hollywood's first vamps, such as Theda Bara and Nita Naldi, weren't just naughty. They were virtually supernatural agents of destruction. In these early films, death was presented as the logical consequence of sexually daring behavior.
``People have been moving toward a view of sex in the more recreational sense; that includes all kinds of exploration beyond the conventional limits,'' says De Cecco. ``To present this kind of behavior as sick, to pathologize it, allows us to have our cake and eat it, too. We get to keep the subtext that kinky sex is bad and dangerous, while having whatever vicarious thrills it might provide.''
In '40s films, all a man and woman had to do was get sexually involved outside of marriage and, more often than not, one of them ended up dead. These days most people don't think of adultery or homosexuality as perverse. Drag queens and transvestites are often presented in film today as lovable eccentrics.
But though the definition of perversion may have changed, the price for what we (set ital)do(end ital)@ @consider perversion remains the same. In Hollywood films, perversion generally ends in death.
In ``Crash,'' eroticism and death are interchangeable. The characters pursue death as the ultimate turn-on, and eventually one of them gets what he wants. That has been the case in just about any film with a sexually perverse element.
Both the 1932 and 1983 versions of ``Scarface'' explored the title character's repressed longing for his sister. Brother and sister both died in those movies, as did the daughter involved in incest with her father in ``Chinatown'' (1976). ``The House of Yes,'' which opens in the fall, deals with brother-sister incest. Things end badly in that house, too.
A pivotal plot element of the Sean Connery thriller ``Rising Sun'' (1993) dealt with a woman who liked getting strangled at the point of orgasm. She wound up being suffocated. She wasn't presented as a particularly nice person, either.
``Sex in more and more people's lives today is play and adventure,'' De Cecco says. ``It's romance, and it's also theater. Yet movies about sex usually contain some evil and dangerous elements. Women who explore sex not tied to marriage are presented as whores, as dangerous, as subversive to morality.''
One movie that attempts to break that pattern is ``Kissed,'' a film about necrophilia that's not (set ital)really(end ital) about necrophilia, according to its director, Lynne Stopkewich.
``It freaks me out, totally,'' she says. ``But to me the film is about passion; it's about someone pursuing her desire. She knows who she is. She's a strong female protagonist, unashamed of her sexuality.''
In ``Kissed'' a little girl who starts off kissing dead animals and smearing their blood on her cheeks grows into a woman who sleeps with dead bodies. ``I'm not into what she does,'' says Stopkewich, ``but I like her.'' Stopkewich believes that making viewers feel the same way about the character puts them ``in a really interesting position.''
Yet even in ``Kissed,'' which takes a feminist approach, the woman's odd sexual behavior results in a death. That end seems logical in ``Kissed.'' It seems appropriate in other films, but why? Do we want retribution? A restoration of order? Are some forms of behavior so startling that we can't imagine a placid aftermath in which nothing much happens and life goes on?
It's difficult to say. But what's certain is that there is something within human beings that makes us want to watch and understand extreme sexual behavior. As audiences get more and more difficult to shock, film makers will go further and further. This year's crop of sexually perverse films might not be a coincidence or a one-year trend, but a portent of fine cinematic outrages to come.
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c.1997 The Boston Globe
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To some Roman Catholics, the annulment of a marriage is one of the few areas in which the church shows some flexibility in its doctrine. You can't use birth control, you can't have an abortion, you're not supposed to engage in premarital sex.
But if you find yourself in a bad marriage, the church will bend _ even though according to its theology marriage is a sacrament, blessed by God.
Yet to many others, the act of annulment remains a vexing contradiction, a process that often forces one or both of the partners in a marriage to lie, essentially, by declaring that they were too immature or irresponsible at the time they married to really know what they were doing—whether they believe that or not.
And the church compounds the unease, many say, by then declaring that the marriage never existed.
It is these declarations that have upset the former wives of two prominent Massachusetts politicians, US Senator John F. Kerry and US Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II. In the public protests of Julia Thorne, Kerry's former wife, and Sheila Rauch Kennedy lies the private anguish of many Catholics.
Until the late 1960s, the church rarely granted annulments, confining them to such circumstances as severe mental illness, failure to consummate the marriage or the refusal to have children.
But after the Second Vatican Council, in which the church modernized many of its practices, church officials decided that there could also be compelling psychological reasons for ending a marriage. Today, typical reasons for granting annulments include immaturity, lack of judgment, or unwillingness to assume the responsibilities of married life.
Since the Second Vatican Council, the number of annulments granted to American Catholics has leaped from 450 in 1968 to more than 50,000 today. Pope John Paul II and other Vatican officials have complained that the US Catholic Church is too lenient in granting them.
Catholic theologians interviewed say the granting of annulments is a sign of the progressiveness of the church.
Annulments exist because the church considers marriage not just a legal contract but a divine sacrament that cannot be ``undone'' by man.
The Catholic Church's refusal to recognize civil divorce is based on a Gospel passage; when Jesus was asked whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife, he replied: ``What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.''
An annulment means that at the time of their wedding, one or both partners was prevented from forming a ``sacramental bond.'' Only with an annulment can divorced Catholics who remarry receive Holy Communion, the central ritual of the church. Indeed, until 1977 Roman Catholics who entered into a second marriage without an annulment were automatically excommunicated.
Contrary to what some Catholics believe, an annulment does not mean a true marriage never took place. Technically, church officials say, it is the sacrament, not the marriage relationship, that is declared null.
Church officials say this is an example of the church's commitment to minister to divorced Catholics who want to remain faithful members of a church that does not recognize divorce.
``What would be the alternative?'' said the Rev. Thomas Rausch, chairman of the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. ``Without the possibility of annulments, divorced Catholics would still be made to feel like they are no longer welcome in the church.''
For many faithful Catholics an annulment can heal the guilt they feel over having divorced, said Sister Christine Schenk, coordinator of FutureChurch, a national church organization based in Cleveland. ``It's a way to put closure on something that was very painful,'' Schenk said.^
@ Rauch Kennedy and Thorne have said they view annulments as violating the church's own position on the sanctity of marriage and as casting aspersions on their children.
``I could not understand how anyone could claim that our marriage had never been valid,'' Kennedy wrote in her just-published book, ``Shattered Faith,'' which chronicles her efforts to contest her husband's annulment.
Thorne told the Globe that the church's approach to her annulment was ``disrespectful to me, ... aloof to any emotional issues and devoid of any sense of the humanity of what this means to me and my children.''
Church officials say the children of annulled marriages are still considered legitimate in the eyes of the church. Annulments also can contain decrees prohibiting spouses from remarrying in the church unless they fulfill financial, emotional and other obligations to their children.
In cases of physical or emotional abuse, some annulments prohibit abusive spouses from marrying in a Catholic church until they can prove they have sought therapy.
To those who say the procedure is coldhearted—one of Thorne's criticisms was the impersonal tone of the letter from the church she received in the mail announcing the annulment was being sought _ theologians say the language befits the seriousness of the proceedings.
Thorne's and Rausch's criticisms do resonate among some American Catholics. Nationwide, polls show that many Catholics are troubled by the annulment procedure.
Gallup polls in the past two years showed that about 40 percent Catholics believe they should be able to remarry without an annulment, and 70 percent said they could still be good Catholics without obeying church teachings on divorce and remarriage.
``I believe annulments are a good thing, but we have a long ways to go in educating people about what they mean,'' said Brian Smith, professor of religion at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisc.
c.1997 Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON—When Ann Taylor and Layton Payne eloped to Sedona, Ariz., six years ago, they promised to remain together ``till death do us part.''
As with a lot of married couples, divorce got there first.
But nearly four years after splitting up, the Houston couple decided to try again.
They were remarried recently in a traditional ceremony before family and friends at the chapel of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Houston.
Their reception included wedding cake and champagne.
The bride even wore white, ``as inappropriate as that might be,'' she joked. But the couple is serious about making this marriage last.
``We tried divorce. It didn't work for us,'' says Taylor, who owns a public relations and marketing communications firm. ``This time around, we really want to do it right.''
More than half of all marriages in the Houston area end in divorce. And when they do, the majority of ex-spouses run as far away from each other as they can get.
Yet amid all the divorce chaos, it seems that a growing number of ex-spouses are seeking to re-establish a relationship that might work better the second time around.
While no statistics are kept on the number of remarriages between former spouses, getting together with an ex is the focus of a new Bette Midler movie, ``That Old Feeling,'' and happens often enough to turn up as a topic of conversation.
``Most people have sort of a fatal fascination with the idea,'' says psychologist Sally Porter-Ross.
Attorney Earle Lilly handles some of Houston's nastiest and most high-profile divorces. But even he is seeing couples who reunite after fighting it out in divorce court.
``People think the grass is always greener in the next yard,'' Lilly says.
But after they get divorced, he says, they find out the grass isn't that green after all. ``They really realize what they had, and in some cases, it's not too late.''
It wasn't too late for plastic surgeon Franklin Rose and silhouette artist Cindi Harwood. The couple, who regularly appeared in social columns during their nine-year marriage, were divorced for six years before recently rekindling their romance.
``As you get older, what you really want is companionship,'' Rose says.
The couple had remained friends after their divorce in 1991, largely because both are devoted to their two children. They had active dating lives but found they kept comparing their dates to their former spouses.
``I had fun at first, but we both had our fill (of single life),'' says Harwood.
Her feelings for her ex came to the surface last December when she went out with an attractive single man. Her date kept talking about his ex-wife's bad habits, and Harwood found herself listing her ex-husband's good habits.
``Here I was on a date with someone who I thought was really nice, and I'm praising my ex-husband. That's a crazy thing to do,'' she recalls.
When she got home around midnight, the telephone rang. She knew it was Rose. ``No one else would call me at that hour,'' she says.
He was calling from a hospital emergency room. He had fallen on a sidewalk in front of her house, dislocating his shoulder, after returning their two children home from a basketball game. ``There's no one to pick me up,'' he wailed.
She went to the hospital to fetch him. Since doctors couldn't operate on him for two weeks, Rose, Harwood and their children went to his parents' home in Aspen, Colo.
``Cindi nursed me back to health,'' Rose says. ``I felt like my family life had been given back to me. It seemed very cosmic, like what God intended.''
``I realized no one else seemed to compare to him in every single way,'' Harwood says. ``Sometimes you have to run away from home to realize there's no place like home.''
The couple are waiting to remarry until they find a new house, because they want a ``fresh start,'' Harwood says. Having had a large wedding the first time, they are planning a small ceremony with their children, their parents and their rabbi.
Rose is convinced that their marriage will work the second time. ``I'm older and wiser,'' he says. ``Besides, I can't afford another divorce.''
Rekindled love can be powerful, psychologists say. But there are pitfalls. Sometimes it feels so good to be back together that couples ignore problems that broke them up in the first place.
``When couples reconnect, it feels so good that they think surely it will work this time,'' says M. Dorsey Cartwright, a marriage and family therapist. ``But unless they've done something to mature themselves and learn more skills, that (romantic love) will wear off just like it did the first time, and those old issues will be there.''
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When best-selling novelist Catherine Lanigan, author of ``Romancing the Stone'' and ``Jewel of the Nile,'' remarried businessman J.R. Richard nearly eight years ago, they were convinced they would live happily ever after.
The romantic ceremony at the gazebo in their Houston back yard was attended by 100 friends and relatives from around the country who enjoyed a sit-down dinner and Jamaican music.
The couple blamed the breakup of their first marriage on the pressures of a two-career family and vowed to make it work the second time around.
But the marriage didn't end like one of Lanigan's novels. The couple divorced five years ago.
``It takes a lot of work. You really try hard, but the problem is once that trust is broken, it can't be regained,'' she says.
Psychologist Porter-Ross agrees that making a relationship work the second time around is difficult. ``I don't know a lot of successes when those old wounds get reopened,'' she says.
But couples who decide to make a go of it again have some powerful tools that first-timers lack, she says.
``The strongest is their history. Every couple's history has its joyous, erotic, romantic and funny moments. They should hold on to those and remind each other of those. I call it giving your marriage great psychological medicine.''
Since couples are aware of what went wrong the first time, it's possible to turn this knowledge into an advantage, Porter-Ross says.
``At least the old problems in the first marriage are familiar. The secret is being aware of them and coming up with new ways of dealing with these issues.''
~~
c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
OLYMPIA, Wash.—Nowhere else in American politics is there a sight quite like it.
When the Washington state Senate is gaveled to order here and members begin to quiet and take their seats, at first glance it seems that the gender gap, at least in the numerical sense, has finally been closed.
There are almost as many female legislators as male legislators _ 22 out of 49.
``Now that's progress!'' state Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, said as she entered the chamber one morning this week and swept her eyes over the almost even mix of legislators.
Though women are struggling mightily to increase their number and clout in the U.S. Congress, where they still hold only about 10 percent of the 535 seats, in the Legislature in this Northwest state capital, as in legislatures in many other state capitals, women are making some truly significant electoral and leadership gains.
They now hold four of every 10 seats in the Washington state Legislature, the most striking gain of all. And in a dozen or so other states, among them Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota and Vermont, women also are doing well, holding about three of every 10 seats. In New York, they hold 2-in-10, in New Jersey 1-in-7, but only one in the 40-member Senate.
Political experts say the gains at the legislative level represent a logical electoral acceptance of women, who have spent decades working their way up the political ladder, from neighborhood board to school board to county board. But the gains, impressive as they are, have not yet translated into passage of a big agenda for women, here or elsewhere.
Like virtually every other demographic group, women hold a wide range of views and thus do not always vote as a bloc. Still, as with any political interest group, women are using their power to tip voting balances and to nudge issues along. At a minimum, they are forcing debate on many concerns that, before their arrival, often received scant attention from men in legislatures, on such issues as maternity leave, domestic violence and divorce law.
Here in Olympia, passage of a welfare reform package was delayed for the better part of two years until women in the Legislature persuaded sponsors to back off on some proposed cuts in social services, especially on child care. The women in the Statehouse also used their votes to tip the balance in favor of a bill raising the minimum wage. And they used their votes to enact a law that requires life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, for anyone convicted of two violent sex crimes.
In Virginia, female legislators were able to force debate on, and passage of, a bill that requires the police to make an arrest when they arrive at the scene of a domestic dispute and discover that violence has occurred. In Connecticut, women were instrumental in persuading their male colleagues to mandate a minimum 48-hour hospital stay for women after childbirth.
Female lawmakers' influence on legislation has been relatively modest so far, but their power is likely to grow as they assume more leadership posts at the state level and as Congress hands over more and more governmental responsibility to state governments, especially for welfare and other social service programs.
In Washington, the House majority leader is a woman, and in eight other states, from Arizona to Missouri to Connecticut, women are majority leaders in the Legislatures. Women also serve as House speaker in four states, as Senate president in three and as minority leaders in eight.
And in states everywhere, women are leading numerous committees, and not just those that deal with family issues, the traditional legislative parking place for women in earlier years. In Washington's Legislature, for example, while women lead committees on education and human services, they also run the law and justice committees, as well as committees on commerce and housing and financial institutions. In California, women lead 12 of the Assembly's 27 committees.
Overall, women occupy 1,593 of the nation's 7,424 state legislative seats, or 21.5 percent, and they hold 24 top legislative posts. Twenty years ago, women occupied fewer than 700 seats, or less than 10 percent of the national total, and they held only a handful of top legislative posts.
Since the early 1970s, each election has raised the percentage of female legislators by a point or two. At the same time, the party breakdown in female legislators has remained about 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican, reflecting a modern-day pattern among women to view the Democratic Party as more attuned to their concerns.
``But even when we're split, we're still close to being a critical mass of political power,'' said state Sen. Jeanne Kohl, D-Seattle, who also lectures on women and politics at the University of Washington.
``Our point of view from our life experiences as women is being heard now because we simply can no longer can be ignored. Even if we don't have the raw numbers yet to get our way outright, we're still strong enough to tip the balance on just about any issue, especially when we put aside Democratic and Republican differences and team up.''
The political progress made by women is not limited to legislative races. They are also beginning to make important gains in winning elections for governor and other statewide executive offices, and they are beginning to win more and more mayoral elections, as well as elections for seats on city councils and county boards.
Women hold one of every four state executive jobs that are filled by election, including the governorships of New Hampshire and New Jersey. As for mayors and city council and county board members, exact figures are hard to come by, but numbers compiled by the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University estimate that women run at least 15 percent of the nation's cities and make up perhaps 20 percent of elected councils and county boards.
What accounts for all this progress, at least below the congressional level?
``There's a new openness and inclusiveness about women and women's issues,'' said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Rutgers center.
She added: ``This is particularly true in Western states, like Washington, that have a long populist history and in New England states, like New Hampshire, that have a long history of citizen involvement in legislatures. The South still lags, what with its more closed ways, and there is a lag, too, in states that have political parties that are run by a tight-knit few, such as Pennsylvania. But generally speaking, women have at last begun to see acceptance and a payoff for all the networking and the struggling in the political trenches that they did over the years.''
The payoff for women has been greatest in Washington state. Women make up not only almost 40 percent of its Legislature, with one of them as the House majority leader, but also outnumber the men by 2-to-1 when the Washington Senate's 23 Democrats meet in caucus.
Never in American political history has any legislative house been controlled by women, but women may soon win majority control of the Washington Senate.
``The old-boy network is really running scared on this one,'' said state Sen. Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. ``I can't wait.''
She speaks from bitter memory.
In 1993 Ms. Brown made national headlines when, as a freshman state Representative, she brought her year-old son onto the House floor during a night session because his day care center had closed. A number of her male colleagues loudly objected, brushing off protestations that she was a single mother and had no other option.
``Today they wouldn't do that,'' Ms. Brown said. ``There's still a lot of things they don't get. But I have to say that there are now a lot of things that they do get because of the increased presence of women legislators, not the least being that now they understand the problems of a working single mother—or dad. We're truly getting there.''
On the other side of the Capitol dome, where 35 women and 63 men sit in the House chamber, state Rep. Barbara Lisk, R-Zillah, in the southern part of the state, is one of the nine women in the country who were elected this year to be majority leader.
``Busy, busy, busy,'' Ms. Lisk said the other day as she summoned a gaggle of legislative colleagues, mostly men, to her desk for a whispered strategy session.
Her agenda this session is as broad and long as the state of Washington—budgets, taxes, welfare, crime, the environment, agriculture policy, insurance regulation, banking laws.
State Sen. Sid Snyder, D-Long Beach, one of the state's most senior male legislators, is especially pleased by the eclectic legislative approach of female lawmakers and offers unstinting praise for those colleagues.
``The fact is, women can do the work,'' Snyder said, ``any and all of the work, and they're now involved in all of it. Man, woman _ it's all the same now. I fully accept it.''
In reality, though, it is not all the same now, not all the time, and it is not all fully accepted.
And for all her enthusiasm about the presence of more and more women under the Capitol dome here, Ms. Roach, the Republican from Auburn, on Seattle's southern outskirts, acknowledges that male chauvinism is not completely dead in Olympia.
``Every so often, one of us still gets called `Honey,' '' she lamented. ``And I'm not going to hold my breath until I get invited out to play a round of golf with `the boys.'
``Maybe worst of all, when it comes to raising campaign money or cracking the state's big business establishment, which is a real power center, you can still run into a solid, male-dominated stone wall. But we're going to keep on butting that wall—till we knock it down.''
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