Everywhere metrics steal away the volume of our groceries and we go home with less food. Everywhere preservatives and artificial flavor steal the nutrition and the taste and we carry out bags of expensive cardboard in metric sized packages. Everywhere we are spending more time and money on groceries and yet we’re always hungry.
I hate the metric system. I know it’s supposed to be easy. Divide by ten – it’s simple. It’s so simple its complex. Which one is more a kilo or a keg? How much is a liter? Not quite enough to get drunk and two liters is leftover wine. Exactly how many kilotons of enriched uranium does it take to end the world? Is it bigger than a breadbox? I like the old numbers better. I understand them. I know what a cup is and how long a foot is and I know that a cubit is based on the length of a forearm. I know that the measure of a cubit now is longer now than it was when Noah measured the Ark. Proof I suppose, that forearms have evolved even if evangelicals don’t believe in it.
The cooking numbers change too. I have an old Watkins cookbook that has the world’s best recipe for Peach Cobbler. Inside the front cover is a chart of measurements with descriptions like “pinch” and a “scant”. All the recipes are baked by either a “quick” or a “slow oven” and the approximate temperatures are listed. In the Watkins Cookbook even the timing is more direct, more observable. Phrases like “till it reaches a rolling boil, till water drops dance on the skillet or till the fork comes out clean” make cooking more intimate. No sensor reheat. Not a popcorn button listed anywhere in the Watkins Cookbook. So I wonder, is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Or is it in the measuring cup of the beholder? Is it the person who controls the metrics who actually determines the beauty quotient? Would a rose smell as sweet? Would a cake taste as sweet? Or can advertising and the new metrics change our values? I think they already have.
When I was eleven, my big brother explained measurements to me as we ate pudding. He said that if I ate my pudding, I would get fat. He said he wouldn’t get fat from pudding because he’s a boy and only girls get fat if they eat desert. Boys need more energy so they need to eat desert. He said even if I lost my fat weight, I’d still have stretch marks from where the fat parts were. He said that no one loves fat girls. He said fat girls never get married. He said he wouldn’t love me if I got fat. Then he said, as he raised one eyebrow and looked at my fanny, “Hand me your pudding.” I pulled my tee-shirt down over my knees and gave him my pudding. I still don’t know if he loved me. I still pull my tee-shirt down over my knees.
My big brother was using the Hugh Hefner measurement of a woman’s worth. It’s based on small waists and big breasts. It’s based on women who are never older than 22, surgically enhanced to perfection and when that fails, they are airbrushed. When Hefner came along, he changed the way men look at women. I’d don’t mean he put naked women in magazines, that was nothing new. Naked women have been used in advertising since the first cave drawing. Hefner made magazine flesh and recreational sex the norm. He made having a committed sexual relationship obsolete. He made intimacy obsolete. His new masculinity dovetailed with the birth control pill and started the war between the sexes. Till Hef, it wasn’t a war, it was a prenuptial skirmish. It was foreplay.
In my Midwestern hippie phase, I was living in a house with six other people. Of the six two were girls. We were the dishwashers, cookers and cleaners. The men folk, who considered themselves evolved, sat on water-beds, played the Beatles backwards, recited the words to Dylan songs and even knew which fist to raise when they said “Right On!” But when it came to “Chicks” they were cave men, charming, funny, mostly loveable, cave men.
Along with the pudding measure and the Hefner measure there was the local folklore that sounded like old wives tales but were really Old Womanizer Tales. Beliefs like “if you don’t have an orgasm you won’t get pregnant” or “if a man cheats it’s because his wife is frigid, fat or both” were accepted as gospel by most of the women in my home town. Guys told us that “It’s the woman’s fault the marriage fails” or “it’s harder for a man to be faithful” and we believed them. We saw other women as competition. We didn’t trust each other and didn’t talk to each other. Men had buddies and teammates but the women had only their man. This was my view of the world until some strange woman with hairy armpits come along and gave me a whole new set of measurements.
She arrived one day looking just like the cover of a Rita Coolidge album. She was long and lean with jet black hair down to her waist, wore ass-kicker boots and turquoise jewelry. She was not the sweet flower child woman all the boys idolized. She was a pool shooting, NASCAR loving, wise cracking smart ass feminist with hairy armpits and sharp opinions. To this day she is the woman I admire most in the world and if I could have become a lesbian I would have married her the day I met her.
I knew right off that she was something special. In her first sentence she used the word “unctuous.” As I listened to her speak, my eyes glazed over and I started to drool. She had words, great wonderful words. I had a third grade vocabulary and I constantly struggled to explain what I meant with limited words. I think I became a poet because I didn’t have a vocabulary. I couldn’t just say unctuous, I had to say that she was so sweet she made your teeth hurt. But Rita could say unctuous and make my teeth hurt. Rita could say “cacophony” and I heard train whistles, cathedral bells, fog horns and wind chimes all at once. I was mystified by the power of her words and I listened closely to each and every one.
Years later, when we were roommates, I came home from a date bewildered and ran to ask for Rita’s expertise. My date said that I was “empathetic” and I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it was “apathetic” or “pathetic” or something worse. After he said it, I smiled at him politely and announced that I needed to go home. Rita was taking one of her famous bubble baths and studying Latin verbs taped to the wall. She grinned and said, “It’s a compliment not an insult.” Those were some of my favorite years. A group of twenty something women living in an upper flat on Detroit’s eastside during the early seventies. I can almost hear Helen Reddy.
Rita taught me that words have power. They can open doors or they can imprison you. Rita also taught me a new math. She taught me how to measure myself. She taught me that a woman could choose what math to use. That she could change the arithmetic of genetics and hometown with a decent GPA and a degree. She showed me that a woman could determine all those other numbers too, whether it’s annual income, zip code or square feet or even miles traveled and souls saved – there are as many ways to measure a woman as there are women to measure. Today, when teenage girls are getting breast enhancements, it seems that we have all forgotten that.
As I finished writing this, I Goggled “New Metrics” and was inundated with listings. The new metrics of business is profit per employee. There’s a new metrics of scholarly authority, blog mining and corporate performance just to name a few. Maybe we don’t need new metrics. Maybe we don’t need to rebrand. Maybe we need to remember the old measurements. Or maybe we just need a Rita to teach us how to measure a woman properly.
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