WHO IS MOVING OUR LIPS, HIPS, AND FINGERTIPS IN THE DIGITAL AGE?

—Karen Voght, Wellness, Inc.

Good morning! Thank you inviting me to speak about The Body in Motion, and for this opportunity to share my passion for bringing wellness skills to children early on in their lives ...through their ABCs.
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I'd like to 1st introduce you to my esteemed colleagues. This is Adam and Eve, the first human bipeds who needed to adapt to earth's pull of gravity on their new 'upright posture' and freed-up hands and feet. And this is Valkyrie, a NASA Robot in training. When they heard I'd be speaking to Women Explore, about bodies in motion, they asked to form a panel. They'd been wanting to practice for CSPAN, so they gave me their script and assigned me the role of interviewer! (BTW, they apologize for their lack of attire, but we thought it best for you to see their body's inner support network of muscles, and why they need to keep them in balanced and in good working order for the inner and outer wellbeing of our species)
They understand that biped muscles are designed to behave like faithful soldiers who non-judgmentally 'repeat directions' sent to them by physical, imagined, and artificially generated stimulations. This includes encrypted language codes, which, as sensori-motor representations, get programmed into their body's automatic responses systems ...just at different levels of awareness. What originally conditions them will retrigger their memory recall.
TODAY WE WILL MOSTLY FOCUS ON the IMPACT OF ALPHABET ENCRYPTED LANGUAGE CODES ON THE WELLBEING OF OUR SPECIES, BEGINNING IN UTERO:
The process of language encryption begins in utero. This altered the way bi-pedal children began developing motor memory differently than when their parents communicated primarily through body language. With alphabetically linguistic mothers, children's muscles began to respond to the sounds of their mother's phonemes in the 7th month in utero. A different muscle responds to each phoneme (sort of like the keys on a piano). No two children will respond to the same phonemes with the same muscles, and each will have a slightly different time pace. It appears that children produce similar motor responses to similar human and simulated speech sounds: NOTE: Studies done on babies' mothers show that replacing a mute mother's lack of voice by a tape recording placed on her womb in the last trimester would enable the baby to incorporate those primary sounds of language (*Condon, W. )
This research made us wonder how today's world, increasingly filled with the artificial sounds of machine-produced languages, might possibly have the potential to alter the very 'nature' of a child's ability to RESPOND to the early sounds of his or her own 'mother'. As Natural language processing technology has become the holy grail of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc., we began to question how alphabet-related technologies might be increasingly influencing the wellbeing of a biped child's life as well. It is these questions, and our concern over the increased impact corporate profiteering is having on the wellbeing of our society, and the future of our children, that has the panel in a quandary, and what we would like to explore with you today:
ADAM would like to start by sharing his concern. ...A long time ago, he detected that the direction his and Eve's lives took 'seemed' to have been scripted by the very first copy of a Biblical Story, published by the new Guttenberg Printing Press, that allowed it to be 'economically marketed' to people worldwide ...the remote source of its words unknown and unverifiable (containing only 1st names and mostly unconfirmable dates). In that story we were driven out of Paradise for eating an APPLE, and cast into a frightening, yet fascinating world of wild UNKNOWNS, with the need to forage for food, and find protection as the first human 'bipeds' subject to earth's pull of gravity on our muscles. As facilitators and organizers of increasingly flexible body's movements, supporters of upright postures, and recorders of the impact our new heel-toe ergonomics would have on mapping the GPS of our brains, we learned ways to move, survive, and flourished in nature's environments as nomads, hunters, gatherers, and agriculturalists, through the cooperative power of our smart bodies, brains,& imaginations. Ubiquitous Alphabet writing and reading tools, however had begun to forever change the STORIES of our lives.
EVE ... lately we feel as though we are being rescripted into a more modern day STORY version of The Land Of Oz In The Age Of Digital Machines. Ironically, it is also a time where yet a bite of another APPLE again seems to be becoming a big source of societal change! We understand that the way the mobility of our bodies maps our immobile brains determines what type of a life we live. But these day's our muscles feel quite underappreciated, afraid they can't keep up with the pace of change, and concerned they may soon be unemployable!
You see, generations of over-dependency on fine-motor, audio-visually taught alphabet education for the masses slowly diminished our body's need to move to communicate ... displacing the rich information acquired by our other bodily senses (why Shakespeare may have become so famous); increasing toxic stress buildup; and altering our capacity to sense natural vs synthetic pheromones (the scent of a human, etc), to touch and comfort, perspire and inspire, to explore, invent, rest and emote, and even the way we reproduce. Increased lack of our X-lateral, bipedal body movements led to progressively sedentary and domesticated lifestyles ... changing O2-CO2 ratios/heart strength, blood flows, unevenly balanced right - left brain mapping, foresight and ability to plan, to modulate our emotions, and to maintain the pull of gravity's force on the larger muscles of our hips, legs, pelvic and spinal regions. But most important has become the loss of our capacity to detect truth and generate predictability in an age where a universal communication tool for the masses can instantaneously edit and rescript a user's reality from a distance, along with their user's capacities for movement that is
fundamentally vital to maintaining body health and wellbeing on planet earth.
“Today’s brain is a consequence, not a precursor of symbolic language. Language can change our response
system faster than evolution changes our genes”. T. Deacon, Author, The Symbolic Species.
ADAM ALPHABET TOOLS EXPANDED into alphabet keyboard finger-typing tools; computers; internets; smart phones; chat rooms, emails, texts, blogs, touch screens, and software ...endless forms of upper body, fine-motor communication devices. Soon, it seemed that, with the right tools, anything or anyBODY could be photo shopped into or out of a story's appeal and intent. TV, Disney movies, and online games altered our brain's synaptic threshold levels with larger than life, colors, sounds and actions of fantastical characters to levels unable to have been previously perceive by our bodies.

Artificially enhanced levels of perception began to make mere mortals (earthlings) appear insignificant, especially as movies combined overloads of simulated auditory 'noises' which foster a state of disassociated hearing that weakens connections between words and pictures.
Eve & Adam requested to bring this to your attention as they now see a societal pattern that is increasingly impacting our youth, namely, the speeding up of fine-motor eye tracking movements while physically disconnecting the body's larger motor movements through the ubiquitous use of screen technologies. Reading and listening skills become disrupted as pop up adds, scrolling texts, dubbing, and digital news trackers on screens take our eyes and ears in different directions that do not always synchronize voice messaging with the images seen on the screen. The ubiquity of such devices increases peer pressure to fit in. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of industries are being spawned that market stories which capitalize on levels of societal anxieties, and then develop products to 'comfort and heal'.
FEAR SELLS:
EVE Today, governments, corporations and educational institutes increasingly employ DIGITALLY ALPHABETIZED STORY TELLING to market their products. We live in an increasingly convoluted world where fear sells. Their stories incorporate language elements of fear and comfort to capture their buying audience's attention. Incorporating our muscularized bodies into their storylines has even led to corporations now being legitimized as real people by the supreme court.
ADAM & EVE SAMPLES of this duplicitous marketing strategy abound:
Where would cosmetic companies, Insurance companies, and Legal systems be if we were not increasingly bombarded by constant advertising stories preying on our vulnerable natures?
Facebook's thumbs-up logo now connects all our bodies with only one digit on our hand. (Facebook dependency)Their bodiless Emoji are increasingly replacing language as part of our younger culture's internet communications. Even China markets are now looking into creating a common bodiless language of emoji with Facebook. Do they ever wonder how a child in utero will learn the phonemes of that language?
GOOGLE rebranded to ALPHABET (a brand word every child world wide will readily recognize!) Yet warns those that use AdBlockers will not be allowed to use their Search engine.
APPLE claims to protect privacy while it tracks and records each stroke we TYPE with, and designs Siri, their natural language processing assistant, to be a universal voice that also tracks our locations and inquiries ... all while inserting terms of service that overwhelm any mere mortals capacity to read or interpret.
Political campaigns create stories/ Big tech investing creates stories
Media chooses which stories to air that will constrict our muscles and hype up our adrenaline. Military/Wars/gun manufacturers all have a story: ISIS vs over-domesticated, sedentarily bred and educated citizenry. One and all is able to advertise their wares on Facebook as the number of internet searches (clicks) and purchases generate markets and income for their cause.
Surveillance technologies abound: ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/spies-in-the- skies?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003 ) What if there is a typo error or a similar address spelling!
BIG PHARM repeatedly speed product side-effect warnings across their TV screen commercials: Do they miss any part of our bodies that can't get diseased?
Health ethics cannot keep up with the speed of changes to our bodies and brains from precision medicine, neuro technologies, and computerization of medicine.
Spam and bots provide huge numbers of CLICKS that help prioritize Social Media marketing messages.

Space stories help our bodies escape to the moon and other planets only suitable for robots, while we watch real children & their families on planet EARTH experience the largest migration since World war ll. Religions have always communicated through the power of stories _____________________________________________________________________________________ VALKYRIE HOW WILL OUR CHILDREN LEARN TO MOVE? Babies muscles are magical as gravity has not yet taken over. But commercial enterprises take over earlier and earlier as they learn the value of entraining kids' muscles to use fake money charge cards ... turning them into trained consumers as soon as their little digits and eye muscles adapt to fine-motor accuracy tracking skills. Earth parents and educators can't compete with digital fantasticality and its impact on youths' addiction to fiction. Fantasticality has replaced humanitality. Who among us is safe from being written into a STORY and STORED at some unknown Corporate data bank in the cloud. And now, they've learned that Neuro tissue has the ability, if you punch/type in information to it, it will take you to your goal! Heaven help us if there is a neuro-typo Spellchecker doesn't catch!!
Yes we are well on the way to becoming a new hybrid earth species. But, as an astronaut robot, I do wonder how future earth children will learn to move as space stories increasingly excite and incite their muscles and their minds for life in space only suitable for a robot (0 gravity in Space alters emotional capacities), especially now that Astronaut Scott Kelly, upon return from one year in space, lets us know about the eye, bone density, emotionalities, and muscle atrophy risks of space ..AND that his feet don't get to touch ground and foster the benefits of X-laterality in micro gravity environments.
EVE, ADAM, AND VALKYRIE ASK
JUST WHO is MOVING OUR LIPS, HIPS, AND FINGERTIPS IN THE DIGITAL AGE?!
1. It looks like we may have been seduced again by an APPLE to put too much trust into an increasingly universal alphabet writing tool held in the palm of our hands!
2. OR, is it that original sense of warmth, comfort, nurturance, and freedom from gravity in the mother's womb that causes us muscles to seek gravity-free space adventures?
3. OR, or is it the calm feeling Alpha Waves trigger when our eyes look up toward the heavens that frees us from the constant Beta Wave activity of our eyes darting from left to right to read all of those alphabetically encrypted stories!
Thank you for exploring this quandary with us today.

1. As stories can fake-out our interior motor responses and feelings that exhaust and damage, as
   well as enhance our immune systems, ask yourselves 'Whose lips, hips, and fingertips your own words are moving when YOU speak/read/write/teach/learn/self-talk/imagine/dream/and tell secrets or tall tales!
   
2. Be sure to ALPHABETIZE lots of kindness and caring into your words.
   
3. OR, at the minimum, GET THEE TO AN ALPHABET PT !(http://www.alphabetfitness.org)
   
   ©2016. Wellness, Inc.
   *http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/whatresearchCondon.asp 

Misconstrued Once Again

Since my blog post of November 10, 2009, I’ve been pondering feminism. Even today some young women, when they hear the term “feminist” think: hairy, bra-burning, man-hating, fat, radical, and lesbian.

I know this because these words came up in a recent workshop held at Lesley University right here in liberal Cambridge, MA. The young women involved weren’t even born when such terms were first applied to the Second Wave of feminists, yet these misperceptions live on.

Personally, I’d like to be a bra-burner. I enjoyed the freedom of going to school and work without a bra in the 70s, a freedom that doesn’t seem to exist today.

Two Myths

But there actually were no bra-burners back in the day. You may have read the article by Ariel Levy in the November 16, New Yorker and learned to your surprise, as I did, that no bras were ever burned at the famous protest against the Miss America pageant in the summer of 1968. Not a single one.

Corsets and girdles, along with copies of Playboy and high-heeled shoes, says Levy, were tossed into a trash can. A reporter at the time likened the act to burning draft cards and voila, the two actions were conflated to become, in the media and then the public mind, “bra-burning”, a scary attack on . . . well, something.

Gail Collins, in her book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, writes that, despite popular belief, “by 1960 there were as many women working as there had been at the peak of WWII, and the vast majority of them were married.”

Huh? Wait a minute. What happened to the Doris Day mother who dressed herself up impeccably as she stayed home tending to the kiddies and the hubby whilst singing in the kitchen? If feminists didn’t burn bra’s and many married women, not just feminists, worked outside the home for the last 50 years, what else have we been led astray on?

The Definition of Feminism

You guessed it: the meaning of feminism. The media can’t seem to think past myth and menace, but the American Heritage Dictionary, that radical tome, has managed to get it right: Feminism: Belief in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. A “feminist,” according to the Dictionary, is one who believes in feminism.

How could any fair-minded person not subscribe to feminism? How could any fair-minded person, therefore, not, be a feminist?

If you still don’t believe me, here’s another dictionary for you. Cheris Kramerae, author of A Feminist Dictionary, writes: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”

Enough said. Now, will someone please alert the media?

—Cheryl Suchors

Who's A Feminist Today?

In her response to the topic “What Is The Evolving Meaning of Feminism?” Jaclyn Friedman told us that she—at 38—bridges the gap between older feminists who say, “Where are the young women? Why aren’t they feminists?” and younger feminists who say, “Why don’t the older women support us?”

There are young feminists out there I’m not supporting? Please tell me where. Many other Second Wavers and I are eager to join forces with them. Friedman said because younger women don’t do feminism the way we of the Second Wave do, we tend not to find them. They’re on the Internet.

So I went to the Internet. I checked out Feministing.com, a place Friedman recommended and that must get a lot of traffic. First thing I looked at was their mission:

Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, influence and connect.

I’m down with that. Sounds a lot like TOP. Except we meet face-to-face on Thursdays rather than connecting mostly on line. Is that the only difference between young feminists and me?

Approach and Images Differ

The first thing I noticed on the website was the logo: black cutouts of women with simplified outlines accentuating breasts, hips and hair that made me think of the trailers for the Charlie’s Angels movie popular with middle-schoolers at the turn of the millennium. The logo also looked like some of the figures cavorting through the title sequence of old James Bond movies. (That’s the second time I’ve referred to Bond in two blogs; is it me or something in the air when the subject of feminism comes up?)

Feministing creators call their logo “the mud-flap girl” and it’s meant to be ironic because she’s raising her middle finger (oops— I interpreted that as an adamant index finger) and they’re taking the image back. I’m more open to this kind of tactic than I once was (see earlier November blog Virgin or What?)

Language Differs

The Feministing site uses contemporary terms—“you guys” and “girls”— referring to women that feel like a poke in the eye to this Second Waver. Along with others, I spent years training colleagues in the business world, friends, relatives and lovers to say and write the radical word “woman” when referring to a female human older than your average high school graduate.

But I also learned a term—cis-gendered—that refers to a group I didn’t know I was in! Cis-gendered people are comfortable in the sexual identity they were born with, unlike trans-gendered folks. (Cis is a Latin prefix used in chemistry for “on the same side” vs. trans which means “on the other side.”)

I applaud this term, despite its initial awkwardness on the tongue. It follows the principle of naming the majority (instead of leaving it as the unspoken norm) as well as the minority, much like “straight” and “gay.”

Evolution Includes Differences and Similarities

Maybe these differences are what my 20 year-old daughter means when, if asked if she's a feminist, she responds, “Yeah, but not like she is,” pointing at her mother. There seem to be looser parameters around language and imagery for younger feminists than the ones we set up for ourselves in the 1960s and 1970s.

It will take more exploring online and more conversations with younger women for me to come to a deeper understanding than this brief reaction to Jaclyn Friedman’s comment about bridging a divide on my behalf. I have some homework to do, and I’m looking forward to it.

I feel great hope for Second Wavers’ ability to work with today’s generation of feminists when I see things like Sarah Jayne’s blog on Feministing. She quotes her friend’s perfect description of feminism:

“…feminism is about waking up and finding yourself in a community, its about having wicked empowered sex, feeling like you can take on any challenge, build real love, and stop feeling like you are the only person who ever thought.... damn, this world needs to change...”

What feminist in her right mind wouldn’t be delighted to subscribe to that world view?

—Cheryl Suchors

Virgin or What?

When you have a lecture program entitled “Throughout History, Stereotyping Women as Virgin, Witch or Whore” and the TOP Coordinator introduces it by saying today’s version of witch is actually bitch, and whore has become ’ho, you know it’s going to be a no-holds-barred kind of day.

Therese Greenfield, our first speaker, chanted in chilling tones the litany she learned as a child to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary, the primary female role model in the Catholic Church: “Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled.”

Virginity is made paramount here, a standard that pits women against their own normal, natural sexuality. Yet no one, at least in the parochial schools I attended, ever asked why virginity was so all-fired important. Of all the characteristics that make for a wonderful friend, daughter, mother, sister, partner, leader, colleague, airplane pilot it certainly wouldn’t appear in my top 1000.

And what about men’s virginity? There’s no chant that encourages boys to be chaste and undefiled. In fact, the very term virgin refers to a female unless somebody’s making a joke, as in the recent movie “Forty Year Old Virgin.” Our culture suggests that male virginity actually has negative value; it’s something boys need to lose to be considered manly. Just the opposite of girls. When girls are no longer virgins, do we appreciate them as more womanly?

“Virgin or what?” Young Therese, like many girls raised in traditional religions, wondered what the alternative was. A girl was presented with an all-or-nothing proposition, as if she were a coin with two opposing sides and no choices in between.

Whores and ’Ho’s

The other side of the coin being something very bad, the Bible’s other Mary, the Magdalene instead of the Virgin Mother.

“It’s the oldest profession,” people say with a smile. Personally, I’ve never understood this. Wouldn’t hunting or fishing have come earlier? I mean, really. How about farmer or fruit picker? Maybe when people talk about the oldest profession, they only mean for women.

Okay, I can go with that. I repeat, shepherd, farmer, fruit picker.

Or how about mother? Wouldn’t that have to be the absolutely oldest profession? Or doesn’t child rearing count as a job?

But back to whores. Or ’ho’s, as so many girls and women are called in rap music and high schools and, probably by now, middle schools too. A girl seems to be a ‘ho if she talks too much to your boyfriend, or even a boy who isn’t your boyfriend but you have your eye on. So if she’s a whore with your guy but no money has changed hands, does that mean any girl with a boy is a ’ho —even, perhaps, you?

No, that can’t be right. Let’s try that again.

She’s a ‘ho because she’s stealing something, a boy, that belongs to you. You don’t call her a thief because sex is involved somehow and besides, you really want to disparage her because she’s got or might get your guy. (Apparently, this boy is stupid and powerless enough he can be taken. Otherwise we’d blame him. Wouldn’t we?)

’Ho is, admittedly, much more insulting than thief. A thief, after all, could be a boy, or even a man.

From the male perspective, a female is a ’ho if she rejects his advances, prefers another guy, or whenever she leaves him or does anything else he doesn’t like. Almost as if someone must have paid her not to want him or to obey his wishes. Is that where the prostitute part comes in?

W.I.T.C.H.E.S.

Kate Clifford Larsen, our second speaker and author of Bound For The Promised Land, made it clear that throughout history, women who rebelled or couldn’t be suppressed—or who inspired jealousy for whatever reason—were labeled witches. They were brought to trial and, often, murdered.

When I got home after the lectures, I went straight to one of the most rebellious texts I know, Mary Daly’s Wickedary, a send-up of Webster’s written with Jane Caputi. The book defines words from a female-centered perspective, reclaiming labels meant to dishonor and put down. Witch reverts to it’s original meaning of a strong, knowledgeable woman, to which the authors add: “an Elemental Soothsayer; one who is in harmony with the rhythms of the universe: Wise Woman, Healer,” and more.

In the 1970s and 1980s some feminists even adopted the acronym “W.I.T.C.H” for their organizations. One group called themselves Wild Independent Thinking Crones and Hags. Now there’s a group I’d like to be part of!

Hold up.

I already am part of a group like that.

According to Wickedary, a hag is a woman who sees through the oppressions of patriarchy, exposes fools and calls women into the wild, bountiful land outside patriarchal thinking. Crones are those who have survived the “perpetual witchcraze of patriarchy”, women who’ve discovered their own depths of courage, strength and wisdom, the highest order of hags.

If that isn’t TOP all over.

From Rogue to Bond

When Kate announced we women collude in stereotyping other women, I felt the tension rise in the room. What woman here, she asked, had never called another female a bitch, for example?

Men don’t seem to do this to each other. She took us back to colonial times when men who had sex outside of marriage were labeled rogues, a term of scorn and dishonor. But the label didn’t stick.

My guess is men didn’t use the term on each other enough. As early as 1750, it was no longer such a bad thing for men to enjoy sex outside of marriage, though of course it remained so for women. Today, though a whore is still a whore, a rogue may be kind of an interesting guy, even a sexy-looking, all-powerful James Bond.

How does this happen throughout history, with words and values and stereotypes? I think derisive labels and attitudes stick to women more than men because:

· People in power do the naming

· Naming adds to power

· People who feel powerful refuse to be shamed

· People without power get named, blamed and shamed

Will Women Choose to Name Themselves?

How can women grasp the power to name themselves? Wickedary offers us one way to take back old, venerable terms that have been co-opted. The authors create empowering new meanings for modern-day insults.

Is that the way to go?

My friend Lyn claims the label bitch proudly. “It stands for Beautiful, Intelligent, Talented, Creative Human,” she says. Maybe she is right. Maybe that’s how demeaning terms slide off men like so many raindrops; they refuse to be made to feel less-than. Fine, they say, call me a rogue. I’ll go you one better: I’ll be a rogue.

Hmm. Maybe the next time I’m called a bitch, I’ll thank the person and tell him/her why. Dare I pass the compliment on to other women after so many years of refusing to say the b-word? But imagine if we women called ourselves—laughingly, lovingly, proudly—bitches and witches, whores and ’ho’s and whatever other derogatory terms have been invented for us. Wouldn’t we defuse any attempts to demean, shame and control us?

Or, if that approach doesn’t appeal, what if we created positive terms for strong women and sexy women, smart women and courageous women—and never used those names for men, but just flooded the language with wonderful words for everyday women?

Whatever women choose to do to slough off denigrating labels and the attitudes behind them that hurt real women, whether we laugh at insulting terms or invent words that affirm women or use both approaches at once—let’s do it together.

—Cheryl Suchors