Fem Speak

Free the Guppy

Dutch court should let 13-year-old set sail

Last week, busy-bodies in the Netherlands stepped in to prevent Dutch teen Laura Dekker from becoming the youngest person to sail around the world solo. The Utrecht District court ordered Dekker to undergo two months of psychiatric evaluation, calling the plan “undeniably daring and risky.”

Of course the trip is daring and risky. Isn’t that the point? If circumnavigating the globe in a 26-foot sailboat were a walk in the park, other teens would be doing it. Currently the title for youngest person to sail round the world belongs to 17-year-old Mike Perham of Britain.

The trip takes two years. The court-ordered guardianship and evaluation will, at least, delay Laura beyond her fourteenth birthday, pushing her ETA beyond age sixteen. If she is allowed to set sail at the end of the evaluation period, it will not be the same voyage. Not only will Laura be older, she will also be forced by the seasons to take a different route than the one she has been plotting for three years.

It is admirable that a sea-faring nation like the Netherlands is more concerned with child safety than having another of its citizens listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. The question, then, is whether the state’s meddling is justified.

Laura Dekker did not merely wake up one morning and decide to sail around the world. The girl was born on a boat, and spent four years sailing the world with her parents. She began sailing solo at age six. At the age of 11, she crossed the Atlantic solo, spending seven weeks alone.

Isolation is the primary concern touted by those who want to stop Laura Dekker. Professor Micha de Winter of Utrecht University (not directly involved with the case) touted the guardianship and psychological evaluation as a wise decision. “It’s a big risk and an experiment with a child in which you don’t know what the results could be.” Winter indicated two years alone at sea could damage her physical and emotional development.

Winter’s view presumes that Laura would have no contact with the outside world, as if she would sail for two years without ever seeing or speaking to another human. Actually Laura plotted the journey to stick with busy shipping lanes. The need to reprovision the ship will necessitate many stops over the two-year period, and we do live in the electronic age. One can easily imagine a media following, a blog, and a plethora of satellite calls and emails.

For a generation that worries incessantly about children’s text messages and peer relationships, we are quick to overlook the value of solitude and hard work. We enjoy adventure movies where a young person faces off nature with no real preparation, but when a well-trained young person wants to undertake an epic voyage she has spent three years planning, we cry “Parental neglect!” and try to ground the sailor.

Amazing teens can do amazing things. We cheer our young Olympians without asking too many questions about their education, because we realize that their experiences are a different kind of education. We listen to young music phenoms without worrying too much if they miss some of the ordinary experiences of youth, because we recognize that they are allowed to experience the extraordinary.

Laura Dekker is an amazing young woman with a very big dream. I applaud her parents for getting behind that dream, and I look forward to following her journey.

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Jeannie Babb

A Gentle Wake Up Poke in the Ribs for All Women

I'd like to riff on Stephanie's previous post, "The Harsh Wake-Up Ahead for Young Women."

Stephanie wrote, "....in dealing with some of these gorgeous, oblivious women recently, it started to hit me: Young women are absolutely unprepared to deal with the consequences of becoming an older woman."

Aging isn't what it used to be. In fact, it never was what it used to be. I know because I used to be in a position to observe what it was, and am in a place now to read the research. I'll not say how old that reveals me to be, because there are still mega amounts of ageists afoot, and I don't want to get stepped on.

I noticed the increase in likelihood for getting stepped on when I stopped coloring my hair. Suddenly people who had exclaimed, apparently seriously, that I was much too young for my grandson Paul to be other than my son, didn't exclaim anymore. Not only that, but I became rather invisible. I'm remembering my mother in law complaining when she was in her seventies that dress shop employees ignored her, didn't offer to help her, or ask what she was looking for. She said they lost sales that way, and that her money was as good as younger women's, which it certainly was. She would routinely change clothes in the middle of the day so she could wear more of her dresses.

I'd found my first gray hair when I was 22 years old, not even a year after getting married (did that have something to do with it?). Eventually, my dark locks became salt and pepper, and it didn't really look good on me, so I went for the henna. But, after awhile I got tired of pasting odiferous sludge on my hair every month or so, and experimented with going gray. I didn't like what happened, the sudden shift from person to not quite person, so I went back to the henna. Eventually, I let the whole thing go, as you can see from my photo on http://www.marketmaid.com's header.

But, it costs me. I know it does, and every woman who's let her gray or white hair show knows the same. Why?

Because the USA is an ageist society. It's so pervasive that even flaming feminists (and the merely smoldering ones too) do it without batting an eyelash, without a quiver of regret at what they've just said or done. I know that by now it shouldn't surprise or shock me, but it always does. And then I feel a gentle sadness at their not noticing. It's particularly evident online where readers often don't know the writer's gender, build, ethnic origins, nor age. I'll read something ageist and think, "Do you have any inkling of who may be reading this?

We don't know what real aging actually is. Researchers are discovering that increasing amounts of what was commonly thought to be the result of aging is actually neglect and misuse of the body. You've probably heard the saying, "Sixty is the new forty." Well, by the time many of you reach eighty, it may be the new fifty. We just don't know. But we do know enough to prompt a shift away from thinking that being past a certain age creates certain disadvantages.

Knowing the reality of relative age can be freeing, as can be seeing examples of women who are "of a certain age" (meaning of an uncertain age) and who are gorgeous, smart, energetic, savvy, and comfortable being who they are.

Those women are all around us, we just don't know who they are because they aren't revealing their numerical age. They are smart enough to know that ageists will disadvantage them if they know. When Gloria Steinem announced that she was now fifty years old and was told she looked too young to be fifty, she said, "This is what fifty looks like."

From my vantage point as an observer, I'd encourage all women, not just lovely to look at, delightful to hold, and heaven to kiss women, to:

1. Be less time conscious. Time is relative, in so many ways. Don't be a slave to time whether it's how much you can get done in an hour or day or week, or where you may be next year, or in ten years. Let the use of time concepts be a mere convenience to help you have a birthday gift ready when the next one is needed or not make your dinner companions wait for you.

2. See yourself as a precious, valuable commodity. Invest in your life for the whole of it, without reservation.

3. Always be becoming more and more of who you are.

4. Do good to you because you love you, not in order to gain other people approval.

5. Always look as good as you can with reasonable effort and expense, not to impress others but to provide the best for yourself because you love you and because you're worth it.

6. The approval of men is nice, and yummy, but your own approval of you is more important. Make sure you have your approval hierarchy in proper order.

7. Men learn, the smart ones do anyway, that women become better over time, like a good wine. These are the men you want to invest your love and attention in.

8. Don't be ageist. Notice what you say, how you say it, body language, actions, and eliminate all ageist behavior. Subtle ageism is still ageism.

9. Work to get rid of age discriminatory practices, laws, restrictions, and cultural ways. Learn from cultures where age is respected and admired. Import the good that you learn from such cultures into your own personal and group culture.

10. Do not compliment people for their age. Compliment them for the specifics of what they do, how they think, what they say or write, and their own personal worth.

I am fortunate to have known several great women and men who were older and were not ageist with themselves or others. My father said, "Stay away from old people, they make you old." He meant, rather than making an ageist statement, be who you are, disregard the ageist stuff and don't hang out with people who have bought into it. At 89 plus years old women were getting into fights over him.

His mother, my grandma Dicy, was running races with me when she must have been in her seventies, and would take me exploring barefoot in the creeks that bounded the farm. She walked home after dark without a lantern saying she didn't need one because if anything caught her it would let her go when daylight came. She lived almost ninety seven years, making her garden, doing her own thing.

Mr. Frederick, our California landlord when we first married, was 80 at the time, or thereabout. His next door neighbor lady was obviously sweet on him, hanging on his every word over the fence. He drove his Volkswagen bus to visit us in Washington State years later, still lean and fit. He is the one who introduced me to nutrition, giving me the gift of an Adele Davis cookbook back when she was not well known and relatives made fun of me for putting wheat germ in my cookies. It took a broadside automobile accident to kill him. I have no idea how old he was at the time, at least ninety.

Reject ageism, invest in your future, enjoy the present, always, and notice the possibilities in knowing that by the time you get there, one hundred and twenty may be the new sixty.

Pat Gundry
http://www.pamperville.net