Category Archives: Social Constructs

Most of us don’t have the luxury of watching other people perform their jobs, unless our job is sidewalk superintendent at a local building site.  We’re too busy trying to keep up with our own tasks that we cannot take the time to appreciate how others manage theirs.

However, on a recent mini-vacation to Toronto we did get to take the time and have the opportunity to very closely examine a well-tuned group of humans do something simple, but very, very well.  It was instructive, as well as reaffirming at the same time. 

Here’s the backstory:  The spousal unit and I postponed our birthday celebrations until the May long weekend from February and March respectively.  We simply didn’t have enough time to sit back and do it right.  We can bloody well do what the hell we want, when we want and if we wanted to move our birthdays around, then so be it:  The planet can adapt.  Adapt it did with a particular group insisting that The Rapture would end the Entire World on May 21st.  We shrugged and continued on our merry way, knowing our reservations were for the evening of May 21st.  If the World did End, we’d go out with a good meal. 

Take your home kitchen, when you’re preparing a big holiday meal with all the coordination, cooking, preparation, plating, serving and the other thousands of tasks that go into something like the full-pin Christmas Dinner.  You know how flogged you are at the end of it:  You feel like you’ve just spent five hours juggling a flaming Coleman stove, a bowling ball and a bunch of grapes, riding a unicycle, on a high wire over Niagara Falls, blindfolded, half-drunk, wearing a tutu two sizes too big.  Find the dial that controls the madness and twist it up to 11.  That’s a professional kitchen on a slow night. 

The majority of dining establishments hide the chaos of the line and the pass behind the swinging doors. As a guest, all that happens is you place your order and a few minutes later your meal glides out on the graceful shoes of the server. The other six thousand six hundred and sixty six discreet actions that go into your plate occur away from your sight, back “there”. “There” is where the real work and the real craftsmanship happens. 

In many ways, dining is like theatre. Seeing the mechanism work takes away the mystery and wonder, knowing the Swan has a scruffy, sweaty, stagehand named Gord crouched down inside it, pushing it along the lake on casters.  The suspension of disbelief is important.

We have a lot of respect for professional chefs, the brigade and the service staff as they take vaguely controllable pandemonium, make sense of it, coordinate, perform and deliver, repeatedly, every order, every change, every nuance, every time and get it right.  We got to watch a very good one on Saturday night while on our mini-vacation, up close, where they couldn’t hide.

Seated at the Chef’s table at Ruby Watch Co, you are at most ten feet from burning your forearm on the hot line.  The pass is barely a meter away.  You watch the chef do the last minute checks, seasoning and expediting of every dish.  At the same time, you see every server pick up and deliver their orders, all within easy earshot.  You get to see what kind of place it really is. 

Never once did we hear a raised voice or harsh comment.  Never once did something go wrong that we could determine.  Never once did anyone throw a hissy fit, gripe, or mutter under their breath.  Every step was collegial, gracious, respectful, professional and polite.  Not just to the guests, as that’s expected, we’re talking about the staff, with each other.  Everyone pitched in, doing the thousands of little things that make a dining room run, from the trivial to the critical, they all worked together, seamlessly, seemingly effortlessly making sure it all came together for the guest. 

As an example, no dining room has enough service pieces for the entire night:  It is financially foolish for a restaurateur to have 3000 small Le Creuset ramekins sitting around, gathering dust four nights out of seven.  As each table is cleared, the pieces go back, are washed and have to come back forward for use later.  It’s grunt-work, one of the thousands of little steps that have to happen, so the chef can plate up a later order, without a pause, reaching down and to the left knowing that there is a supply of said pieces exactly where they’re supposed to be.  A small thing, yes, but in the flow and pace of the kitchen, it is important, because if those pieces are missing an order is delayed, the asparagus is overcooked, the guest is unhappy and so on.  Small things can make a difference. 

Towards the end of the evening one of the service staff came forward with a stack of service pieces to the pass and the chef took a moment to thank them for their help.  It is also a small thing, a big name celebrity chef, taking the time to thank another for their help, but it speaks volumes about the people involved. 

The principals of the place were all there on a long-weekend when by all rights they could easily have taken the weekend off, gone to the cottage and been half in the bag at 10:30 on a Saturday night.  Nobody would have objected, but there they were, working the room like the professionals they obviously are.  We were made to feel welcome, as if we were the only folks in the joint and a hotshot gang of cuisine pros were there to cook just for us.  OK, there were a hundred other folks in the place, but you wouldn’t know it by the way we were greeted and treated.

About the food?  We talked about it later and yes, it was the best meal we’ve had, anywhere.  Ever.  Nothing less than simply perfect, flavorful and wonderful.  It was one of those times when all the moving parts worked exactly as they are supposed to work, from the service, to the food to the care and attention paid to how it all came together.  Sitting that close to the working mechanism of a dining room let us see exactly why it works. 

It comes down to respect.

The kitchen obviously respects the ingredients they use, the servers knowing where the stuff comes from show the same respect to the ingredients and the art of the kitchen in preparing the ingredients in a certain way.  Pairing the wine and the food, recommendations that were spot on, to complement what we were eating, enhancing the flavors the kitchen created.  The way the people interacted with each other, showing respect for each others’ role in the whole experience for the guest.  None of it needlessly fussy or frou-frou, just genuine, sincere and respectful. 

The interesting thing is this kind of atmosphere can rarely be created spontaneously.  Humans don’t work that way.  There is an old Yiddish saying that “Fish stink from the head” meaning leadership determines how successfully things work.  The corollary is that the right leadership can show others how to do it the right way, leading by example.  Leading by respect.

Which, at the end of the night, meant we had a wonderful meal, leaving full of belly and warmed of heart by being permitted to watch real culinary professionals do what they do best in the hopes that we would enjoy it.  We did. 

We’re going to open up a bag of trouble here, but it’s useful to look into a bag of trouble from time to time.  Some language may offend, so consider yourself duly cautioned.

In January of this year a Toronto cop, Const. Michael Sanguinetti was speaking at a York University safety forum.  Allegedly Sanguinetti commented that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”  Needless to say the manure hit the ventilator. 

After that comment and others from the Bench, Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis, two of the organizers of a Toronto protest decided to stick it to the Toronto cops and called their protest a SlutWalk.  On April 3rd, more than 3,000 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto and marched to Toronto Police HQ to protest the comments from the police.  Shortly thereafter several dozen more slutwalks appeared, across Canada, the US and now internationally.  The link above leads to their website and a couple of dozen more satellite SlutWalks that are in the works.

Generally the crowds are regular folks of all segments of the social-sexual-economic spectrum.  Some do dress in what might be called a flamboyant manner but the message is still the same:  No Means No.  That’s a simple, straightforward, easy to understand concept that even very stupid people understand.

The hard part is the term SlutWalk.  

Reclaiming words is a difficult thing to undertake.  Some words are simply too charged with underlying politics to ever be reclaimed or reformed.  Nigger is one term that is so powerful and charged that it has to be treated with a great deal of sensitivity.  We doubt that the N word can ever be fully reclaimed without hurting someone.

Slut, however, might actually be do-able.  The current use is very much a pejorative, heavily loaded with sex role stereotyping, excuse enabling and gender politics.  Men are very rarely called sluts and if they are, it can be perceived as a left-handed ironic compliment on their sexual prowess. 

Call a woman a slut and very, very few will consider it anything but vicious, hostile, degrading, marginalizing and disempowering.

Which is where we get confused, so a parallel is in order.  Here’s the challenge:  Define “pornographic”.

The moment you define porn as “I know it when I see it” you’ve lost.  You are applying a personal, politically and morally loaded, unfair, inaccurate definition to something.  Pornography, at one time defined as literature or visual representations designed to stimulate or titillate, could be as simple as a nude ankle to some groups, or a luscious colour picture of an all-you-can-eat buffet to someone slowly starving to death in the Third World.  What stimulates or titillates one person could be a complete yawn to another.  

The same holds true for a term like “provocative dress”.  Someone in a “I Have A Choice” T-shirt would be very provocative today on Parliament Hill, as a thousand pro-life protestors are on the Hill demonstrating for their particular cause.  Even if the “Choice” T-shirt wearing person meant I have choice between Coke and Pepsi, the term “Choice” has become loaded and not in a good way. 

The same is true with “gay” being rebranded as a sexual orientation short-form term.  However, even some in the male homosexual community consider “gay’” to be inappropriate.  Noted author and Savage Love columnist Dan Savage used to slug his letters with “Hey Faggot!” as an attempt to rip the moral loading out of the word faggot.  Eventually he gave it up in 1999, as people thought his column was called “Hey Faggot!” instead of Savage Love.

Which brings us back to slut and essential problems with language, especially language between the genders.  Our initial position is that language matters, if we want to be positive, inclusive, fair and accurate with the words we use.  That onus is especially on police, who represent all of us, therefore Constable Sanguinetti was out of line when he said: “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”.  If he insisted on continuing, something along the lines of “Be aware that how you dress can have others can make unfair assumptions about you.” might have squeaked by, but even that can be misconstrued.  A wiser choice would have been to shut his mouth.

So what’s a slut?  We can’t define a slut without being inaccurate, sexist, pejoratively judgmental and disempowering, so we’ll try to define what a slut isn’t.  A woman with several dozen ongoing sexual partners isn’t a slut:  Horny, yes, we can agree with that.  Enjoying a vigorous sex life, sure.  But even if she likes a dozen at a time, that doesn’t make her a slut.  Possibly facing issues with STD’s, muscle strain, exhaustion and dehydration would be accurate, but not a slut.

Is promiscuity slutty?  Some consider President Jimmy Carter to be a complete slut because he admitted to having sinned many times in his mind with women who weren’t his wife.  As to acting on what was going on in there is a different issue between Jimmy and Roz, not us. 

Is attire slutty?  Is a black bra slutty?  Not if one is wearing a black blouse, a black bra is actually trying not to call attention to ones undergarments, to be demure in a way.  Fishnet hose and garters?  Merely saucy thanks, even if that is the sole attire along with a nice pair of high heels, pearls, perfume and a glistening glow of perspiration.  OK, that was just for me.  I apologize. 

Attire can be inappropriate to an occasion:  Fishnets and a blouse open down to there is not right at a funeral or church services,  It’s a judgment call and sometimes one must adjust ones attire to conform to a situational ethic. 

Attire can also be perilously close to personally embarrassing, assuming one wishes to keep most of the primary sexual characteristics covered.  Which explains why “Tit Tape” is for sale at the neighborhood drugstore.  Some evening fashions for women seem to defy the laws of physics, gravity and common sense.  But it isn’t slutty.

Notice the underlying examples.  Slut almost always applies to women, their attire, their behavior and their actions.  Which means it is a term used to put women down, to disempower them and marginalize their opinions or commentary on events. 

The problem is how men are assumed to perceive women and notice that condition, assumed to perceive.  The social trope is that all men are nothing more than walking erections looking for any available orifice to park themselves for a few moments.  Some religious perspectives insist the tantalizing view of an undraped female ankle will cause all men to immediately fling the woman to the ground in a flurry of frantic fornication. 

In other words, all men are beasts and all women are begging for it, therefore we must control the women as men cannot be expected to exercise even the smallest amount of self restraint.  That is so wrong it makes our eyes hurt just writing it down. 

Believe it or not, not all men are simple beasts.  We might not be the brightest sparks in the fireplace, but we do have a basic understanding that No Means No.  We were taught it and learned it from the men and women in our lives.  That includes parents, peer groups, teachers, friends, lovers and even our media.  We are assuming that Const. Sanguinetti also received those lessons and we’re fairly certain he gets it now. 

There are of course thousands of exceptions to the rule.  The Democratic Republic of the Congo stands as the most heinous example, where according to a study released this week, that 48 women per hour are raped in the DRC.  That means in the five minutes it has taken you to read this far, four women have been forcibly violated in the most hideous way possible.  The reason?  Various militia groups are trying to clear out villages, so they can control the mineral and mining rights.  The rapes have nothing to do with uncontrolled sexual urges and everything to do with politics, power and money.

Which leaves us where with the term slut?  Recognize that the term has nothing to do with sexual behavior or attire and everything to do with politicizing, disempowering and marginalizing people.  If the SlutWalk organizers can reclaim slut then more power to them.  If nothing else, they can educate and reinforce the lessons that words matter.

It all comes back to teaching that No Means No.  The rest is commentary.

Some of our American readers don’t quite comprehend the curious relationship of the British Royal Family on many Canadians, so here’s an explainer.  Please forgive us for oversimplifying.

Canada is a different country than the US, therefore we have a different history.  We share the same pissed off Mongols who walked a land bridge across the Bering Straight, looked around and said “Eff that, we’re going home.  Where’s the bridge back?  Awww Shit!”  These would be our First Nations/Aboriginal peoples.  Those would be the folks who met the boat carrying our ancestors and kept them from starving to death.

For the longest time we were a French colony or a British colony, depending on where you lived.  After a couple of wars, the Brits won and around 1710, many of the French who lost were kicked out.  Parenthetically, Cajuns down Louisiana way?  They’re Canadians, more correctly Acadians, who left for the nearest French colony, which happened to be in Louisiana.

We had a British King, but since the King couldn’t really (or didn’t want to) come over to sign various laws, he would appoint a representative called a Governor-General every few years.  The G-G would ensure taxes got paid, laws were upheld and things more or less moved along. 

After your Revolutionary War, where you put the boots to the whole British King concept, a lot of the folks who didn’t buy into the Republic went North.  Up here, they were called Loyalists, while down your way, they were called ‘assholes’, followed by “Goode Friggin’ Riddances!”

We kept up the colony thing until 1867, when there were enough of us around to ask for our own country, technically a Dominion, called Canada.  Since Britain didn’t actually care about us, they went along with the joke.

We kept a lot of the mechanisms of the British Parliament, in that we have a Prime Minister who is a sitting, elected, Member of Parliament and our own version of the House of Lords from the UK, that we call a Senate.  Senators are not elected up here, in keeping with the House of Lords idea of the Chamber of Sober Second Thought being appointed by the Prime Minister in the name of the Crown.  Our Senators are as useless as tits on a brick, just like the House of Lords in Britain.

The Statute of Westminster in 1931 cut a lot of the colony ties, in that we could do more or less what we wanted, including fighting in wars.  It finished up with the Canada Act of 1982 when we got our own home-grown constitution.  Your Kennedy Family is absolutely nothing like the Royal Family:  Not even in the same time zone.

Our British traditions and history only partly explain the Royal Family ties with Canada.  Since 1952, when Queen Betty the Deuce took over the family business, either her, her sisters or her kids have been to Canada about nine hundred and fifty thousand times.  Canada, at least from the perspective of the Royal Family, is a safe gig; easy peasie time.  We don’t make them eat sheep’s eyeballs or sit through bum-numbing hours of “native” dancers in fur and feathers doing “traditional” dances celebrating harvesting the pilchards.  From a Royal perspective, a Canada trip is simple, the food is safe, the hotels are clean and the peasants are content to wave back with all five fingers.  Ask Dubya about our penchant to wave at certain foreign heads of state with only one finger.

Despite the affinity, Canadians don’t look to the Queen or to Britain for our politics or foreign policy.  We do share the concept of a parliamentary democracy, but Canada is nowhere  near the nanny state the UK currently is:  We’re a nice hybrid of the tradition of Peace, Order and Good Government and some of the worst excesses of our Republican neighbours to the south.

Which still doesn’t fully explain why Canada is smitten with the Royals and the upcoming nuptials of William and Kate.

Think of the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena.  There’s miles of chicken wire strung over trailers and tractors, marching bands, clowns and enough roses to make California smell like an Old Age Home.  Millions of people watch it with a fervor bordering on mania to see what?  Parade floats honouring the Philippine Pineapple Importer’s Association? Does the acronym WTF come to mind?

That’s what the Royal Family is to Canada.  It is a parade float, full of beauty, tradition and millenary arts signifying nothing but pleasant enough to watch for a day or two.  Will Canadians be setting their alarm clocks for 0200 on Friday, so they can dress up and watch Bill and Katy get hitched? 

And they’ll enjoy every minute. 

Occasionally emails forwarded from locations unknown that contain pearls of wisdom amongst the dross.  One of which was the “Adult Truths” from a correspondent.  We’ve rewritten it, sort of.

1:  When you die, the first duty of your best friend should be to clear your computer history.

2:  There is great need for a sarcasm font, especially in email to government departments.

3:  Were the years spent learning cursive writing really necessary?

4:  MapQuest can start their directions on #5.  I know how to get out of my neighbourhood. 

5:  Could we all please just agree to ignore whatever comes along after Blu-Ray?  I’m fed up with having to start my video collection…again.

6: Kay Jewellers is wrong:  Not every kiss begins with Kay.  Pick any Friday or Saturday night, and I’ll wager many start with a silo of MGD, or a fourth round of tequila shooters.

7:  To all the Nigerian/Togoan/Maldivian lawyers out there:  I don’t have wealthy relatives that suddenly died leaving me a fortune. No, you can’t help. 

9:  Can we have a sign in our cars that says:  Your $45,000 Lexus has a broken turn signal, or you’re an asshat.  Pick one.

10:  How are kids going to learn what clockwise is? 

11:  For that matter, how will kids ever know what REgent 5-1212 was?

12: 12:00…12:00…12:00  Is my technology mocking me?

13:  If the various national security agencies who are reading all our emails and texts would get together, I wouldn’t have to wade through mountainous piles of spam.  Just forward the important stuff please.  Oh, and send me a reminder of my anniversary as well.  Thanks.

14:  Note to parents:  Your kid will never make it to the NBA/NFL/MLB/NHL/Olympics.  Relax.

15:  How many times can one network run “Weekend At Bernie’s” without incurring the wrath of consumers? Or is this just a trick by televisions manufacturers to have us throw large objects at our TV’s, necessitating the purchase of a new one?

16:  There are some things that should never be shot in HD. 

18:  Mashups should die now.  Preferably in the same fatal crash that takes Autotune and ProTools.  Learn how to sing then learn how to edit and mix.  For the video monkeys, there’s nothing wrong with a cut; use a dissolve if you have to. 

19:  Ice Fishing.  Why fish for it, when you have a perfectly good freezer at home?  Make your own.

20:  There’s no such thing as “Authentic” any cuisine.  It’s always changing.  Beware of any joint that strives to serve authentic fusion cuisine when the place is named Ulmanis & Tomokiro and serves Latvian-Japanese fusion cuisine. 

21:  Why cut when you can untie?  Sorry, now that everything is in impervious plastic security blister-pack clamshell, you have to reach for the plasma cutter to get at the tube of wood filler.

22:  A little honesty from the liquor companies please.  The objective isn’t to relive that great time when we ran out of milk and loaded the coffee with Bailey’s.  The objective is to relive the Christmas party when Gretchen from Accounting got shitfaced and took her top off while dancing on the break room counter.

23:  Thong underwear is wrong, regardless of gender.

24:  Ads for prescription medicine should include a complete list of  all the side effects.  This will result in prescription medicine ads that are four minutes long or cover five pages of your magazine.  We need to know that your miracle cure has only been tested on four employees, two of whom spontaneously combusted when exposed to daylight.

25:  Lists like this.  It must be mid-winter.